bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Cult of Micky Ward in Massachusetts
Authors: Rotella Carlo
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the cult of Micky Ward, the boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts, whose story is told in the 2010 film The Fighter. The cult of Micky Ward, rooted in the Boston area, is one of many local or regional cults that spring up around a sports figure understood to embody virtues especially tied to a place. Thanks in large part to The Fighter, however, this particular cult has gone global. The chapter first provides an overview of Ward's boxing career before discussing The Fighter, which stars Mark Wahlberg. Offering a rich, historically inflected reading of Ward and The Fighter, the chapter traces “large-scale flows of resources, power, people, and meanings.” It explains: “To talk about Micky Ward is to talk not only about some really stirring ass whippings, but also about major historical transformations that extend far beyond eastern Massachusetts.” Among them are “tribal pride,” industrial urbanism, and a particular kind of manhood.
Introduction
Authors: Seymour Nicole
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter bridges the seeming theoretical disconnect between queer theory and ecocriticism. In doing so the chapter promotes a “queer ecology”—an emerging paradigm in which the ecological stances of the literary works treated in the following chapters are striking precisely because of the contexts from which they emerge—including postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the “post-identity” era—and precisely because they are so self-consciously queer. This chapter argues that these works manage to conceive of concrete, sincere environmental politics even while remaining, to varying degrees, skeptical, ironic, and self-reflexive. And they do so even while, as this chapter shows, queer fictions and theory are known for their cynicism, apoliticism, and negativity, such that “queer environmentalism” sounds like an oxymoron.
Attack of the Queer Atomic Mutants
Authors: Seymour Nicole
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the alternate reality of the 2006 novel Half Life, wherein the United States has implemented a program of self-bombing to atone for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This bombing gives rise to a politicized minority of conjoined twins—modeled satirically on, and overlapping with, queer communities—who then serve as emblems of peaceful, post-nuclear coexistence. In examining Half Life's revision of Atomic Age history, this chapter focuses on the queer ecological implications of its narrative form. This chapter studies the novel's so-called “ironic environmentalism”; in so doing, it builds on previous work in environmentalist rhetoric and establishes irony as a new topic of inquiry for queer ecology.
Artfulness, Solidarity, and Intimacy
Authors: Julier Alice P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter reviews some of the themes emergent from the analysis in this volume, including insights about non-kin relationships, the role of gender and gendered labor in creating events and relationships, how class resources remain a significant factor in defining people's social practices, and how domestic space is involved in structuring choice. It argues that people create bonds of intimacy with some degree of choice in non-kin relationships, using food and the household as material sites for its enactment. At the same time, the form of the event, the kind of food served, who prepares it, and how it is served indicate the nature of the relationships being created. While there appears to be a discourse of comfort and informality that governs contemporary sociability, it appears that people still use such occasions to draw boundaries around like others, a process that often mirrors geographic and social segregation by race.
Black Flag Boricuas
Authors: Shaffer Kirwin R.
Published: May 2017

This book examines the radical Left in Puerto Rico from the final years of Spanish colonial rule into the 1920s. Positioning Puerto Rico within the context of a regional anarchist network that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Tampa, Florida, and New York City, the book illustrates how anarchists linked their struggle to the broader international anarchist struggles against religion, governments, and industrial capitalism. Their groups, plays, fiction, speeches, and press accounts—as well as the newspapers that they published—were central in helping to develop an anarchist vision for Puerto Ricans at a time when the island was a political no-man's-land, neither an official U.S. colony or state nor an independent country. Anarchism in Puerto Rico was a unique entity in the movement's history. The 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 anticlericalism against the Roman Catholic Church.
Civically Engaged Youth
Authors: Torres Maria de los Angeles , Rizzini Irene , Del Río Norma
Published: May 2017

This book explores youth civic engagement in three global cities in the Americas: Chicago, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on interviews conducted by the authors in each of the three cities, the book examines the trajectories of youth activists: what influenced them to step out of their private lives and engage in public battles, how they engage to effectively influence institutions in urban spaces that affect their lives, and what kinds of activities they pursued. It also asks whether young people are given rights in the present, or whether they are only conceived as future citizens. This chapter discusses the changing place of youth in public discourse, along with changes in the nature of the public spaces in which young people engage. It also explains the book's definitions of youth and civic engagement, along with its methodology, and gives an overview of the three global cities.
Chicago Youth Activists
Authors: Torres Maria de los Angeles
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines youth civic engagement in Chicago, with particular emphasis on young people's attitudes regarding democracy. Drawing on interviews with directors and youth workers in a variety of organizations throughout the city, it looks at young people participating in empowerment projects and how they engage. The discussion focuses on youth activists' demographics and families as well as early influences on them, their self-perceptions, and their social awareness. It shows that awareness of shared characteristics was an important first step for these young people in becoming part of a social group. The prevalent social categories identified as important by the youths included age, race, ethnicity, and gender. The chapter also considers the impact of discrimination on youth activism, along with the issues important to Chicago's young people and the ways in which they engaged with such issues, including immigration and the electoral process, and their political ideas with respect to topics like democracy and the place of the United States in the world.
Affirming the Young Democracy
Authors: Rizzini Irene , Bush Malcolm
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines youth civic engagement in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region. It first considers the context of young people's civic engagement in Brazil, citing how a series of events in the country's recent history aroused unprecedented levels of political participation. It then considers the demographics of youth activists in Rio, the activities and organizations they are involved in, and their motivations for engagement. It also discusses issues important to youth activists, along with their responsibilities, social awareness, and political ideas; what they perceive as costs to civic engagement, including the fear of violence and the time that activism takes up; and their various other concerns such as the poor state of education in the country and the rights of political participation. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Rio youth's views on responsibility.
Latinos and the Churches in Idaho, 1950–2000
Authors: Jones Errol D.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the relationship between people of Mexican/Latin American descent and Idaho's established churches from the 1950s. A politically conservative state with an economy dominated by agriculture, mining, and forestry into the 1980s, Idaho attracted large numbers of Latino migrants who worked mainly in agriculture. Beginning in the 1950s, a progressive movement developed within the mainstream Protestant churches and the Catholic Diocese of Boise to reach out to migrants in an effort to mitigate their harsh conditions and welcome them into their churches. Supported by the National Council of Churches and the American Conference of Catholic Bishops, Idaho's religious leaders became catalysts of reform in the agricultural industry in the state and become brokers for the needs of migrants and those who sought to abandon migrant life and settle permanently in Idaho. With the growth of the mostly Catholic Latino population, the Boise diocese, despite some resistance, was compelled to change to accommodate their culture and to champion the need for social and economic reform.
Contesting Diversity and Community within Postville, Iowa
Authors: Reynolds Jennifer F. , Didier Caitlin
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers the following question: How do small-town middle Americans adapt to rapid cultural change that is more typical of big-city life? Postville, Iowa, was singled out for attention over all the other rural midwestern or southern towns that also house corporate beef, pork, or chicken food-processing plants. It had all the trappings of an “exotic” case study; the new owners of the meat-processing plant were city people, from Brooklyn, and they observed an orthodox form of Judaism, Hasidism. And despite the fact that the kosher meat-processing plant, Agriprocessors, was family owned and operated, it has been managed much like other notorious corporate firms that have relocated to rural places to cut costs related to unionized labor and the transportation of livestock. Management, moreover, recruited immigrant labor from the ex-Soviet republics, Asia, Israel, and Latin America. When Immigration officials raided Agriprocessors on May, 12, 2008, it was further revealed that the majority of the workers were undocumented. This chapter is based on ethnographic research, conducted at different points of time in the town's recent history. It draws upon a tradition of critical ethnographic inquiry into transnational circuits of migration and meat-processing communities to examine the particulars of how this place is a contested social field wherein different players struggle over macrosociological meanings of citizenship and belonging in locally specific ways.
Pearl, the Swift One, or the Extraordinary Adventures of Pearl White in France
Authors: Dall’Asta Monica
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Pearl White phenomenon on the French market, with particular emphasis on the French influence on Pathé Frère's American serial films and the obvious resemblance between the Pauline character and the French athlete, mountaineer, and aviator Marie Marvingt. Also known as “the fiancée of danger,” “the most important woman in France since Joan of Arc,” and “the universal sportswoman,” Marvingt was already familiar to the American audience by the time The Perils of Pauline was released in 1914. The parallels between the stories of White and Marvingt suggest that the former's popularity among French audiences was not simply due to some exotic fascination for the peerless modernity of the American New Woman, but was instead rooted in some very familiar experiences of feminine heroism. This chapter also explores White's forerunners as well as emulators in the French serial genre from Musidora to Protéa.
John Brown’s Friend
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at John Jones, a free man of color and an outstanding businessman who played an important role in the fight for freedom and equal rights for Negroes in Illinois. Chicago's reputation in the South as a “sink hole of abolitionism” may be credited to the activities of Jones, John Brown, and their abolitionist friends. Among the early abolitionists, Jones was friends with L. C. Paine Freer and Dr. C. V. Dyer. Together they created the Chicago atmosphere so abhorrent to slave-owners and their sympathizers. This chapter considers Jones's North Carolina background and how it may have contributed to the energetic action he took to secure his freedom. It also examines Jones's efforts in leading the Negro struggle against slavery, from making speeches and writing articles to lobbying and helping organize Negro and white groups in every part of the state. Jones lived to see the Negro raised to legal citizenship. He died on May 27, 1879, after a long illness.
Leave a Summer Land Behind
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the exodus of southern Negroes into Indiana and other states in the North. The Democrats charged that the Negroes' mass migration from the South was engineered by the Republicans in order to gain political control, and by the railroads in search of passenger business. Several prominent Negroes throughout the nation seriously and collectively considered the migration and its effects. While the Southern press and public officials professed to see in the exodus a temporary and not extremely significant phenomenon, planters and civic leaders held a convention of both white and Negro citizens which met in Vicksburg, Mississippi, May 6, 1879, to discuss means of regulating the migration. This chapter considers the dramatic increase in the Negro population of Illinois in the decade 1860–1970 and concludes with a discussion of the rioting and lynching sparked by the accusation of Mrs. Mabel Hallam, a white woman of Springfield, that she was raped by a Negro, George Richardson.
The Exodus Train
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Chicago Defender's role in sparking the Great Northern Drive mainly through advertisements that announced the many employment opportunities in the North for those willing to make the journey. The Great Migration reached epic proportions by 1917. The legend of the Great Northern Drive spread rapidly months before the appointed date, May 15, 1917. The exodus from the South was helped along by such poems as W. E. Dancer's “Farewell—We're Good and Gone” and William Crosse's “The Land of Hope.” This chapter considers the use of “Farewell—We're Good and Gone,” “Bound for the Promise Land,” and “bound to the land of Hope” as slogans often chalked on the sides of special trains carrying exodusters on their way to the North as well as the efforts of local authorities to divert or halt the Negro migrants.
Defender
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the role of the black press in the history of Negroes in Illinois in the early decades of the twentieth century, led by the Chicago Defender. The great majority of Illinois Negro newspapers have been published in Chicago, have been weeklies, and, with a few exceptions, have been short-lived. Of those operating in 1942, only the Chicago Defender and the Springfield Conservator were established prior to 1925. Outside of Chicago, a number of Negro newspapers have appeared from time to time. Aside from the Chicago papers, most of the Negro journals in 1942 were linked with political activity, stressed community news, and depended upon local advertising. This chapter first looks at the history of the Chicago Defender, founded by Robert S. Abbott, and its advocacy of the Negro exodus from the South before turning to other black newspapers and publications in Illinois during the period, including the Illinois Chronicle, the Springfield Conservator, the Chicago Enterprise, and Dynamite.
What Is Africa to Me?
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the rising tide of racial consciousness in Chicago during the early years of the twentieth century. It begins with a discussion of early efforts by Negroes to return to their ancestral homeland, some of them resorting to emigration outside the borders of the United States as a way out. In particular, it considers the influence of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association, which splintered into different organizations such as the Peace Movement of Ethiopia and the 49th State Movement in Chicago. The chapter also looks at Garvey's feud with Robert S. Abbott and his visit to the South Side in 1920 before concluding with an account of two organizations that strove to foster racial pride among Chicago Negroes: the Moorish American Science Temple and the Nation of Islam.
The Theater
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Negro theater in Illinois. In May 1877, a Negro troupe played Out of Bondage in Chicago, and the Daily Inter Ocean described the performance as “one of the very best representations of slave life as it existed before the war that has ever been presented to the public.” But it was the arrival of Sam T. Jacks and his Creole Show in Chicago in 1893 that ushered in a new phase of the Negro's evolution in the theater. The chapter first considers minstrelsy and minstrel shows featuring actors in blackface before turning to various comedians, vocalists, and dancers who performed in musicals and other shows during the period, including Bert Williams and George Walker. It also looks at Chicago's Pekin Theater, opened by Robert Motts, that showcased black performers such as Charles Gilpin, Bill Robinson, Abbie Mitchell, Lottie Grady, Nettie Lewis, and Elizabeth Hart Scott.
“People Like Us”
Authors: Novek Eleanor
Published: May 2017

This chapter addresses the question of how to move beyond our national addiction to racism, arguing that public attitudes can be changed from punitive to compassionate through closer knowledge of prisoners and their experiences. As evidence of this claim, the chapter chronicles the experiences of a longtime New Jersey-based workshop leader for the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), a volunteer network that offers conflict-transformation workshops in prisons and communities. The chapter examines public discourse on prisons and detailing the intersections of crime, fear, and social inequality that reinforce the racism of the prison-industrial complex. It also sketches the parameters of an inclusive vision of community safety based not on punishment, but on ethics of nonviolence, care, and compassionate love.
Conclusion
Authors: Keating Christine (Cricket)
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter explores the interplay between state homophobia and discourses and policies geared toward the protection of sexual minorities—which can be referred to as “homoprotectionism.” Like state homophobia, state homoprotectionism can also be instrumental and purposive, serving to legitimate political authority both on a national and on a transnational scale. Although seemingly opposed, the chapter suggests that these two approaches are closely linked and that political authorities rely on a complex interplay of both approaches in order to mobilize consent, or at least to minimize dissent. It also examines the ways in which activists might maneuver the interplay between state homophobia and state homoprotectionism in struggles for sexual justice.
Nazi Film Melodrama
Authors: Heins Laura
Published: May 2017

Focusing on German romance films, domestic melodramas, and home front films from 1933 to 1945, this book shows how melodramatic elements in Nazi cinema functioned as part of a project to move affect, body, and desire beyond the confines of bourgeois culture and participate in a curious modernization of sexuality engineered to advance the imperialist goals of the Third Reich. Rather than reinforcing traditional gender role divisions and the status quo of the nuclear family, these films were much more permissive about desire and sexuality than previously assumed. Offering a comparative analysis of Nazi productions with classical Hollywood films of the same era, the book argues that Nazi melodramas, film writing, and popular media appealed to viewers by promoting liberation from conventional sexual morality and familial structures, presenting the Nazi state and the individual as dynamic and revolutionary. Drawing on extensive archival research, this perceptive study highlights the seemingly contradictory aspects of gender representation and sexual morality in Nazi-era cinema.
In Defense of Justice
Authors: Tamura Eileen H.
Published: May 2017

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.
Growing Up American
Authors: Tamura Eileen H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces Kurihara's childhood in Hawaiʻi. Kurihara was born on January 1, 1895, two years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and three years before the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution that resulted in the occupation of the islands as an American territory. Kurihara first attended Kaiulani School in September 1903. Like his classmates, many of whom were also children of immigrants, Kurihara was a U.S. citizen because he was born in Hawaiʻi. According to the Organic Act, which created the Territory of Hawaii, all who had been citizens of the Republic of Hawaii—which meant those born or naturalized in the Hawaiian islands—were “declared to be citizens of the United States.” In race-conscious America in the early twentieth century, however, the meaning of citizenship for racial and ethnic minorities was amorphous. Thus, Kurihara and other Asian Americans were often treated as noncitizens or as “new” Americans.
Afterword
Authors: Tamura Eileen H.
Published: May 2017

This afterword discusses the three themes that coursed through Kurihara's life: high expectations, his distinctiveness, and a strong sense of justice. Throughout his life, Kurihara maintained high expectations of himself and his country. Meanwhile, the second theme in Kurihara's life was his distinctiveness. Several instances that set Kurihara apart from others of his generation include his conversion to Catholicism at a time when his family members and most Nikkei were Buddhists, while the relatively small numbers of Christians were primarily Protestants. The third theme of Kurihara's life, important because it explains his actions in the concentration camps and his refusal to attempt to regain his citizenship, was his strong sense of justice. He did what he believed was right and expected others, including the government, to do the same. Indeed, Kurihara's sense of justice caused him to protest vigorously and vociferously at Manzanar.
Making the March King
Authors: Warfield Patrick
Published: May 2017

John Philip Sousa's mature career as the indomitable leader of his own touring band is well known, but the years leading up to his emergence as a celebrity have escaped serious attention. This revealing biography explains how the March King came to be by documenting Sousa's early life and career. Covering the period 1854–1893, the book focuses on the community and training that created Sousa, exploring the musical life of late nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia as a context for Sousa's development. The book examines Sousa's wide-ranging experience composing, conducting, and performing in the theater, opera house, concert hall, and salons, as well as his leadership of the United States Marine Band and the later Sousa Band, early twentieth-century America's most famous and successful ensemble. Sousa composed not only marches during this period but also parlor, minstrel, and art songs; parade, concert, and medley marches; schottisches, waltzes, and polkas; and incidental music, operettas, and descriptive pieces. The book's examination of Sousa's output reveals a versatile composer much broader in stylistic range than the bandmaster extraordinaire remembered as the March King. It presents the story of Sousa as a self-made business success, a gifted performer and composer who deftly capitalized on his talents to create one of the most entertaining, enduring figures in American music.
A Bridge to the Present
Authors: Westfahl Gary
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines three William Gibson novels: Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties. Virtual Light confirms Gibson's desire to break with the past and move in new directions. More specifically, Gibson wanted readers to enter and appreciate a different sort of Gibsonian world. Accordingly, Virtual Light was set in 2005, only twelve years after its publication, and its imagined new technologies were not far removed from actual technologies of the early 1990s. While computer hackers eventually play a small role in the story, there is only one fleeting glimpse of a virtual realm recalling cyberspace, and the two protagonists have almost no interactions with computers. While Gibson remained interested in futuristic science, this novel devotes more attention to speculative sociology. Idoru examines the mechanisms that promote celebrities and keep them in the public eye. It seems to repudiate Virtual Light, whereas All Tomorrow's Parties seems to repudiate Idoru.
Standing Up and Speaking Out
Authors: Joshi Khyati Y.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the significance of race, ethnicity, and religion by discussing how and why a group of Hindus in Metro Atlanta came together to challenge Southern Christian normativity. As the development and growth of religious organizations helped Hindus develop a sense of their own potency in Metro Atlanta and elsewhere, the community has gone from a phase when merely being acknowledged felt like a victory to a phase of feeling, and ultimately expressing, anger and disappointment at inaccurate and disrespectful depictions of Hinduism. This trend can be expected to continue and grow as the community continues to expand and mature, and as new targets arise from the inevitable misunderstandings between the South's Hindu and mainstream communities.
“Like We Lost Our Citizenship”
Authors: Nguyen Marguerite
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter examines representations of Vietnamese Americans before and after Hurricane Katrina. The recuperation of American political and military might in the 1980s marked a transition in representations of Vietnamese Americans, as the New Orleans media began to focus on stories of Vietnamese American economic and educational “success.” Nevertheless, Vietnamese Americans lived more or less under the radar until about thirty years later, when they were once again thrust into the media limelight because of their quick return and recovery after Hurricane Katrina. Once potential objects of New Orleans exclusion, Vietnamese Americans now represented the city at its best, with national and international media outlets upholding the community's efforts as a story of hope and achievement in the aftermath of disaster.
From Self-Help to Womanist Self-Recovery
Authors: Keating AnaLouise
Published: May 2017

This chapter reads mainstream “New Age” self-help literature in dialogue with women-of-colors narratives and proposes a new genre called “womanist self-recovery.” Womanist self-recovery represents a contemporary transcultural project with several characteristics: the transgression of conventional literary genres, the visionary belief in language's performative power, and the use of non-western cultural traditions to develop inclusionary multicultural communities. The chapter develops this genre by retracing a troubled engagement with Paula Gunn Allen's Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook, and then redefining it as womanist self-recovery. It argues that womanist self-recovery creates communally based, multicultural transformation narratives—stories of self-empowerment that begin with the personal but move outward to encourage and facilitate collective change, stories that synthesize self-love and self-reflection with the quest for social justice.
Communism On the Shop Floor and Off
Authors: Lichtenstein Nelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how Communism continues to generate the same kind of debates that divided the left, and the left from the right, more than half a century ago. In some instances, documents flowing out of the Moscow archives have helped shed new light on the politics and affiliations of an Alger Hiss or a Harry Bridges. However, such revelations are hardly needed to keep this pot boiling, because the real issue involves the fate, character, and legitimacy of the American radical tradition, especially during that moment in the middle decades of the twentieth century when the Communists were at their influential apogee within a dynamic new trade union movement, as well as in almost every other area of progressive U.S. politics.
Opportunities Found and Lost
Authors: Korstad Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores two examples of the workplace-oriented civil rights militancy that arose in the 1940s—one in the South and one in the North. It analyzes the unionization of predominantly black tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the ferment in the United Auto Workers in Detroit, Michigan, that made that city a center of black working-class activism in the North. Similar movements took root among newly organized workers in the cotton compress mills of Memphis, the tobacco factories of Richmond and Charleston, the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Birmingham, the stockyards and farm equipment factories of Chicago and Louisville, and the shipyards of Baltimore and Oakland.
Harvey Swados
Authors: Lichtenstein Nelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a portrait of Harvey Swados, whose novels, stories, and spirited reportage in the last decade and a half of his life helped uncover the political and social drama that unfolds in the daily routine of every American workplace. Nothing he wrote accomplished this with more power and insight than the series of interconnected short stories called On the Line, which first appeared in the fall of 1957. This humane and sympathetic portrait of the psychological and social brutality inherent in midcentury factory work injected a moral urgency into the understanding of manual labor at a time, early in the postwar era, when most literary and political intellectuals were convinced that all meaning had been drained from the toil still required of so many millions.
B. J. Widick
Authors: Lichtenstein Nelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a portrait of Branko J. Widick, who died on June 28, 2008, at the age of ninety-seven. He was not a well-known figure in the annals of American labor and its committed partisans. However, he deserves much recognition and admiration because Widick was not only an activist at the very epicenter of the great strikes that launched the industrial unions in the 1930s, but he also remained a radical and an acutely honest observer throughout those postwar decades when the great organizations he had helped to build entered an era of stagnation and decline. Widick was among those men of the left, including the influential group who were influenced by Shachtman's “third camp” socialism, for whom the post-World War II United Auto Workers (UAW) became the institution into which they poured their passion, intellect, and organizational energies.
The AFL, International Labor Politics, and Labor Dissent in 1918
Authors: McKillen Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Wilson administration's reliance on the advice and diplomacy of American Federation of Labor (AFL) leaders and prowar Socialists in dealing with the European Left throughout 1918. It begins with a comparison of British and American labor diplomacy in 1918, paying particular attention to the AFL's wartime diplomacy and international labor politics led by Samuel Gompers. It then considers Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points program, along with the AFL's two labor missions to Europe. It also explores the Labour Party politics that gave British labor more bargaining power within government circles than their U.S. counterparts. Finally, it describes the spread of the Labor Party movement throughout the American Midwest. The chapter shows that, by conferring with the AFL leadership and prowar Socialists for diplomatic counsel and diplomatic service abroad and strongly opposing the Stockholm Conference, Wilson undercut the political strength of his strongest supporters in Europe while encouraging continued derision and ridicule within the American Left, helping to set the stage for further polarization at war's end.
Flute Origin Myths and Flute-Playing Heroes
Authors: Olsen Dale A.
Published: May 2017

Flutes get much of their power from the breath of their players, and that breath is transformed into whistle tones that are manipulated by the player's fingers or tongue to produce all sorts of patterns of sound, from bird imitations to beautiful melodies and more. In addition, flutes derive power from the “proper” culturally determined materials used in their construction, from animal bones or rustic bamboo to precious metals or stone, giving each instrument its desired tone quality or voice. Whether used for meditation, fertility, courting, protection, or just playing a melody, the sounds and music of flutes have the power to go beyond the mortal world into immortal realms. This spiritual nature of flutes is like a thread that weaves through the fabric of world flutelore and flute musical performance. This chapter explores more stories and narratives that bring out the spiritual connection of flutes and flute music, especially as it relates to origin myths and heroes.
Flutes and Unethical/Ethical Behavior
Authors: Olsen Dale A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses flutes and both unethical and ethical behavior. Many of the folktales presented in this book can be interpreted as pertaining to unethical or ethical human behavior, even when the main actors are animals. This is one of the main functions of folklore—to instruct humans in proper ethical behavior within its cultural boundaries. Many folktales could properly end, “The moral of this story is ...” However, their charm is often the aspect of leaving the interpretation of a moral up to the listener or reader of the story. The stories in this chapter deal with behaviors such as greed and honesty.
Peace Movements and the Demilitarization of German Political Culture, 1970s–1980s
Authors: Nehring Holger
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the relationship between peace movement activism and demilitarization in both East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the history of peace activism in the two parts of the divided Germany: the liberal-democratic West German Federal Republic (FRG) and the socialist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Such an approach reveals not only the common themes they addressed and the transfers of ideas across the Iron Curtain, but also the ways in which governments addressed them as mirror images in the Cold War for ideas. While the peace movements in the West could appear in the contemporary political-cultural mainstream as the results of communist infiltration, the GDR government regarded the independent peace movement in the East as the result of the infiltration of the GDR by dangerous bourgeois-capitalist pacifists.
Constrained Rearmament in Japan, 1945–1954
Authors: Sugita Yoneyuki
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes what made it possible for Japan to implement “constrained rearmament” despite strong pressure domestically and from the United States to carry out rapid rearmament. There are two important factors that led to Japan's establishing firm ground for constrained rearmament from the late 1950s onward. The first of these is the US strategic preference for securing military bases in Japan instead of Japan's rearmament. The second is the implementation of tight-money policies precipitated by the Dodge Line of 1949, which culminated in a one-trillion-yen budget for Japan in 1954. The level and scope of rearmament hinged upon the defense budget or, more generally, Japan's fiscal policy.
From Demilitarization to Remilitarization
Authors: Hook Glenn D.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the transition from demilitarization to remilitarization following Japan's defeat in war and foreign occupation from 1945 to 1952. It focuses on the external and internal pressures on security policy at crucial historical junctures in the process of remilitarization. By revisiting the early postwar period, the chapter looks at two contested views of security policy. These views revolved around the option of a security treaty with the United States, on the one hand, and unarmed neutrality, on the other. The chapter then addresses the external pressures on Japanese policy makers arising from the major historical juncture represented by the end of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the internal pressures involve the costs to Okinawans arising from the concrete manifestation of the alliance with the United States: the basing of US military facilities.
Japan’s Remilitarization and Constitutional Revision
Authors: Hughes Christopher W.
Published: May 2017

This chapter reevaluates the use of remilitarization in order to understand the contemporary trajectory of Japanese security policy and to demonstrate its strengths. The application of the term “remilitarization” can provide a powerful analytical and theoretical framework to discern the nature and significance of Japan's changing security policy. First, the concept of remilitarization assists in identifying those military components present in all societies, including Japan, that are subject to contestation and thus open the way to substantive change in military security policy. Second, the concept of remilitarization as a dynamic process over time is an important reminder to search for the possibilities of significant change in a society's military stance.
Demilitarization after Central American Civil Wars
Authors: Williams Philip J. , Ruhl J. Mark
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers how the armed forces declined in power throughout Latin America in the early 1990s, but the processes of demilitarization in El Salvador and Guatemala were unique. While demilitarization followed civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, these are the only two cases in Latin America in which the United Nations played a major role in brokering negotiated settlements to end the armed conflicts and in monitoring peace agreements that set in motion processes of demilitarization. In both countries political opposition to continued military domination, including armed insurgencies, was a constant feature from the 1960s onward. Moreover, economic elites who traditionally looked to the military to protect their business interests increasingly expressed concern about the liability of supporting a large, well-equipped military without a mission.
Coerced but Not Subdued
Authors: LaRoche Cheryl Janifer
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the gendered resistance of women's efforts to maintain family ties even as they aborted their pregnancies, resorted to infanticide, or abandoned children and family in their quest to escape captivity and to embrace the consequences of freedom. Enslaved women such as Margaret Garner were forced to confront their “incompatible roles as a slave and as a mother.” Ultimately, maternal rites were not theirs to enjoy. However, enslaved women undermined slavery by subverting reproduction in refusing to conceive children, aborting them, or resorting to infanticide. Indeed, enslaved black women used abortion and infanticide to sabotage the perpetuation of slavery through economic and sexual exploitation of their female reproductive potential, depriving future generations of an enslaved workforce composed of their children.
Can Quadroon Balls Represent Acquiescence or Resistance?
Authors: Williams Diana
Published: May 2017

This chapter seeks to reconcile the persistent myth of the self-directed quadroon—women possessing one fourth black and three fourths white “blood”—finding love and quasi-marriage at a glamorous and respectable quadroon ball with the known history of the sexual exploitation of black women, both slave and free. White men frequently engaged in sexual relationships with women of color, including free women of color, in pre-Civil War Louisiana, yet fictionalized representations of the balls distort and obscure important realities about race, sex, and power in the nineteenth century. White men exercised sexual access to women of color in a variety of blurred and overlapping forms, including slavery, domestic servitude, prostitution, and other relationships, all of which could be placed under the rubric of what Louisiana law termed concubinage.
“Freedom Just Might be Possible”
Authors: Smith Jolene
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Suraj Kali's story of liberation. Unlike in the past, there are now social movements of sufficient strength in at least some parts of the world that are making more and more liberation stories possible, encouraging more and more leaders of resistance like Suraj Kali to demand freedom for themselves and others, despite great risk. Thus, in stark contrast with Margaret Garner's, Suraj Kali's story best illustrates how similar acts of personal struggle can have strikingly different consequences, depending on whether they happen within the context of a wider movement that is demanding change and whether that movement is successful at a given time. This contrast illuminates additional reasons to stand in awe of the risks and sacrifices made by individuals who preceded or built the foundation for movements that followed them.
Marginality and Allegories of Gendered Resistance
Authors: Seif Huda
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that the deployment and circulation of narratives of (dis)possession by the devil, particularly among women, represent a gendered form of understanding marginality and of confronting exploitation, domination, and material adversity. The compelling presence of the devil and malevolent spirits called jinn in the Delta region of southern Yemen in the 1990s echo accounts of spirits, tricksters, or aye in West African and New World cultures. Moreover, Margaret Garner's life history as interpreted by Toni Morrison in Beloved connects readers with a spiritual world of memory and possession that mirrors the experience of women spiritual healers and their patients in Yemen's al-Wadi Delta. Ultimately, internal and external struggles for control dominate Morrison's narrative of enslaved American women and the lives of women agricultural workers in southern Yemen.
Scottsboro—and Collapse
Authors: Horne Gerald
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Scottsboro campaign. Buoyed by massive global support, the Scottsboro campaign took black America and then the nation by storm. Patterson asserted accurately in early 1934 that Scottsboro “has raised the question of international working class solidarity to its highest level.” Thus, he said beamingly, “Every Negro worker and toiling slave on the land breathes freer because of the activities of the ILD,” while the “southern landlord lynchers have learned to curse its name and to dread the presence of its organizations.” The main point, he stressed, was “a new understanding of the term—international working class solidarity.” Moreover, as a result of this case, “The world began to act on the [mal]treatment of [the] Negro.” This was particularly true in the aftermath of 1945, when the United States found it necessary to more effectively charge Moscow with human-rights violations—in part to counter Moscow's charges about Washington's deficiencies in this crucial realm.
Turning Point
Authors: Horne Gerald
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes Patterson's remark that “today the oppressed Negro people is seeking integration,” and that “the Negro people are an oppressed nation.” These remarks reflect a bitter internal party struggle that stretched from mid-1944 to mid-1945, leaving in its wake a momentous shift on the much discussed Negro Question, involving a retreat from the Black Belt line of self-determination, presumably since the Negroes were “seeking integration.” This complex and painful debate in mid-1945 was to result in the reinstatement of the old line—then another shift in 1956 in the aftermath of the conniptions caused by the invasion of Hungary and the revelations about Stalin's crimes. All the while, Patterson and his comrades continued grinding away against Jim Crow, though it was understandable that some thought their efforts had been sidetracked by abstruse polemics.
Patterson and Black Power
Authors: Horne Gerald
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the contradictory trends that buffeted black America in the 1960s. On the one hand, the edifice of Jim Crow had begun to crumble, a reality that received legislative sanction in 1964 and, notably, 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. On the other hand, this victory was attained while the most sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and battle-ready fighters—W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, Ben Davis, and William Patterson—were under attack, with courage required to associate with them. Among these were the spectacular rise of the group that came to be called the Nation of Islam, which had been founded decades earlier but only gained traction in the 1960s when the “other” radical alternative—represented by Patterson—was battered and bludgeoned.
Geographies of Blackness
Authors: Williams Erica Lorraine
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the connections between the cultural and sexual politics of the transnational tourism industry in Salvador. It first provides an overview of sex tourism zones as well as zones of class and race in Salvador before turning to the city's Afro-Brazilian cultural tourism. More specifically, it considers how Afro-Brazilian men, commonly referred to as caça-gringas, or pega-turistas, capitalize on their cultural expertise to attract female and male foreign tourists by teaching capoeira and Afro-Brazilian dance and percussion. The caça-gringas illustrate the key role played by Afro-Brazilian culture in the marketing of Bahia in the international tourism industry as the Black Mecca. The chapter also looks at Candomblé as a case study in Afro-Brazilian cultural appropriation. It shows that the spatial and racial dynamics of sex work in the tourist districts are bound up with processes of social exclusion.