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American Routes provides a comparative and historical analysis of the migration and integration of white and free black refugees from nineteenth-century St. Domingue/Haiti to Louisiana and follows their descendants over the course of two hundred years. The refugees reinforced Louisiana’s triracial system and pushed back Anglo-American racialization by several decades. But over the course of the nineteenth century, the ascendance of the Anglo-American racial system began to eclipse Louisiana’s triracial Latin/Caribbean system. The result was a racial palimpsest that transformed everyday life in southern Louisiana. White refugees and their descendants in Creole Louisiana succumbed to pressure to adopt a strict definition of whiteness as purity according to standards of the Anglo-American racial system. Those of color, however, held on to the logic of the triracial system, which allowed them to inhabit an intermediary racial group that provided a buffer against the worst effects of Jim Crow segregation. The St. Domingue/Haiti migration case foreshadows the experiences of present-day immigrants of color from Latin America and the Caribbean, many of whom chafe against the strictures of the binary US racial system and resist by refusing to be categorized as either black or white. The St. Domingue/Haiti case study is the first of its kind to compare the long-term integration experiences of white and black nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States. It fills a significant gap in studies of race and migration that have relied on the historical experience of European immigrants as the standard to which all other immigrants are compared.

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

Since 2002, Sunni jihadi groups have been active in Iranian Baluchistan without managing to plunge the region into chaos. This book suggests that a reason for this, besides Tehran’s military responses, has been the quality of Khomeini and Khamenei’s relationship with a network of South-Asia-educated Sunni ulama (mawlawis) originating from the Sarbaz oasis area, in the south of Baluchistan. Educated in the religiously reformist, socially conservative South Asian Deoband School, which puts the madrasa at the centre of social life, the Sarbazi ulama had taken advantage, in Iranian territory, of the eclipse of Baluch tribal might under the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-79). They emerged then as a bulwark against Soviet influence and progressive ideologies, before rallying to Khomeini in 1979. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, they have been playing the role of a rampart against Salafi propaganda and Saudi intrigues. The book shows that, through their alliance with an Iranian Kurdish-born Muslim-Brother movement and through the promotion of a distinct ‘Sunni vote’, they have since the early 2000s contributed towards – and benefitted from – the defence by the Reformist presidents Khatami (1997-2005) and Ruhani (since 2013) of local democracy and of the minorities’ rights. They endeavoured to help, at the same time, preventing the propagation of jihadism and Sunni radicalisation to Iran – at least until the ISIS/Daesh-claimed attacks of June 2017, in Tehran, shed light on the limits of the Islamic Republic’s strategy of reliance on Deobandi ulama and Muslim-Brother preachers in the country’s Sunni-peopled peripheries.

Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism tells the story of this century’s most powerful black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters, spurring a global debate on excessive police force, which disproportionately claimed the lives of African Americans. The book reveals how smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered black activists to create their own news outlets, continuing a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. It identifies three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people—slavery, lynching, and police brutality—and the journalism documenting their atrocities, generating a genealogy showing how slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the abolitionist movement; black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and civil rights movements; and smartphones of today powered the anti–police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, the book shows, is formidable and forever evolving. The text is informed by the author’s activism. Personal accounts of her teaching and her own experiences of police brutality are woven into the book to share how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices to speak up from the margins. Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.

This book examines interracial intimacy in the beginning of the twenty-first century, an era rife with racial contradictions in which interracial relationships are increasingly seen as forward-thinking symbols of racial progress, even as old stereotypes about illicit eroticism endure. With extensive qualitative research, this book examines the racial dynamics of everyday life for lesbian, gay, and heterosexual Black/White couples. It disputes the notion that interracial partners are enlightened subjects who have somehow managed to “get beyond” race. Instead, for many partners interracial intimacy represents not the end, but rather the beginning of a sustained process of negotiating racial differences. This research reveals the ordinary challenges that partners frequently face and the myriad ways in which race shapes partners’ interactions with each other, as well as with family members, neighbors, coworkers, and strangers.This book analyzes contemporary interracial lives through the lens of “racework”: the everyday actions and strategies by which individuals maintain close relationships in a society with deeply rooted racial inequalities. It explores how racework operates in three realms: public spaces, the internal dynamics of relationships, and in the construction of interracial identities. Comparing the experiences of gay and lesbian partners with heterosexual partners, it argues that sexuality and gender play a significant role in how partners use racework in negotiating public spaces and identities, but a minor role in how partners deal with inequalities inside their relationship. With a focus on racework, this book positions interracial intimacy as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular accomplishment.

Black Radio is a window into the most famous radio show you never heard of. The Tom Joyner Morning Show is a quarter-century-old syndicated black morning radio show reaching more than eight million adult, largely working-class listeners. It offers progressive political talk, soul music, humor, advice, philanthropy, and celebrity gossip. But the TJMS is not just an adult “old-school music” radio show: it is an on-air organizer, fusing progressive politics and aesthetics. It focuses on specific political issues affecting and enraging African Americans. Black Radio analyzes the TJMS’s rise in the Clinton era, and its coverage of key events—9/11, Hurricane Katrina, President Obama’s elections and terms, the murders of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the shocking 2016 Donald Trump electoral triumph. It showcases the varied, contentious, and blackly humorous voices of anchors, guests, and audience members. Finally, it investigates the new synergistic set of cross-medium ties and political connections now affecting print, broadcast, and online politics in anti-racist directions. Despite the dismal present, this new multiracial progressive public sphere has extraordinary potential for shaping future American politics. Black Radio, then, is more than the project of making the invisible visible, bringing to light a major counterpublic phenomenon unjustly ignored for reasons of color, class, generation, and medium. It tunes us in to an alternative understanding of the black public sphere in the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio is politically progressive, music-drenched, angry, and blisteringly funny.

Can small indigenous communities survive, as distinct cultural entities, in northeast India, an area of mind-boggling ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity? What are the choices such communities have, and what are some of the strategies such communities use to resist marginalization? In recent years, many such small groups are participating in large state-sponsored ethnic festivals, and organizing their own community festivals. But are these signs of their increasing agency or simply proof of their continued marginalization? How do state policies and political borders— inter-state as well as international—impact on a community’s need to perform their ethnicity? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this work, on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among the small Tangsa community living in Assam in northeast India. The study also reveals the asymmetry in the relations between the dominant power-wielding Assamese and the Tangsa. In summary, this is a study about marginality and its consequences, about performance of ethnicity at festivals as sites for both resistance and capitulation, and about the compulsions, imposed by the state and dominant neighbours, that can force small ethnic groups to contribute to their own marginalization.

Despite the common perception that most persons of Mexican origin in the United States are undocumented immigrants or the young children of immigrants, the majority are citizens and have been living in the United States for three or more generations. On many dimensions of integration, this group initially makes strides on education, English language use, socioeconomic status, intermarriage, residential segregation, and political participation, but progress on some dimensions halts at the second generation as poverty rates remain high and educational attainment declines for the third and fourth generations, although ethnic identity remains generally strong. In these ways, the experience of Mexican Americans differs considerably from that of previous waves of European immigrants who were incorporated and assimilated fully into the mainstream within two or three generations. This book examines what ethnicity means and how it is negotiated in the lives of multiple generations of Mexican Americans.

This book expands and updates the nuanced historical perspective used in the first edition to understand African American family patterns. The result is a narrative that challenges conventional understanding of the continuing plight of African American families. The book traces the evolution of the black family from slavery to the present, showing the cumulative effects of centuries of historical change. Beginning with a richly researched account of the impact of slavery on black families, the text points out that slavery not only caused extreme instability and suffering for families, but also established a lasting pattern of poverty that made the economic advantages of marriage unattainable for many. The book suggests a prominent role of such policy in constructing the circumstances of black family life. The revised edition updates the final chapters of this study by exploring changes in marriage patterns over time more specifically. In addition, the revised edition gives expanded consideration to the impact on the urban poor of the massive changes in the economy and of mass incarceration. The book demonstrates how each of these changes has operated to dramatically reduce the marriage options of men and women in urban communities.

The book introduces a new theory that overcomes essentializing approaches to ethnicity all the while avoiding the pitfalls of excessive constructivism. It suggests understanding ethnic/racial boundaries as the outcome of a negotiation process between actors who pursue different boundary making strategies, depending on institutional incentives, their position within power hierarchies, and their pre-existing networks of alliances. This theory contrast with mainstream approaches in the social sciences, where ethnic groups are often treated as self-evident units of observation and ethnic culture and solidarity as self-explanatory variables, thus overlooking the process through which certain ethnic cleavages but not others become culturally meaningful, politically salient, and associated with dense networks of solidarity. By paying systematic attention to variation in the nature of ethnic boundaries, the book also overcomes the exclusive focus on fluidity, malleability, and contextual instability that characterizes radically constructivist approaches. This book introduces a series of epistemological principles, theoretical stances, research designs, and modes of interpretation that allow to disentangle ethnic from other processes of group formation and to assess in how far ethnic boundaries structure the allocation of resources, invite political passion, and represent primary aspects of individual identity. Using a variety of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, several chapters exemplify how this agenda can be realized in concrete empirical research: on how local residents in immigrant neighborhoods draw symbolic boundaries against each other, on the ethnic and racial composition of friendship networks, and how ethnic closure influences the cultural values of Europeans.

This book uncovers the dynamic processes through which some white Americans become activists for racial justice, reporting accounts of the development of racial awareness drawn from in-depth interviews with fifty white activists in the fields of community organizing, education, and criminal justice reform. Drawing extensively on the interview material, the author shows how white Americans can develop a commitment to racial justice, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because they embrace the cause as their own. Contrary to much contemporary thinking on racial issues focused on altruism or interests, he finds that cognitive and rational processes alone do little to move whites to action. Rather, the motivation to take and sustain action for racial justice is profoundly moral and relational. The author shows how white activists come to find common cause with people of color when their core values are engaged, as they build relationships with people of color that lead to caring, and when they develop a vision of a racially just future which they understand to benefit everyone: themselves, other whites, and people of color. He also considers the complex dynamics and dilemmas white people face in working in multiracial organizations committed to systemic change in America's racial order, and provides a deeper understanding and appreciation of the role that white people can play in efforts to promote racial justice.

In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency is a fine-grained critique of the Naga struggle for political redemption, the state’s response to it, and the social corollaries and carry-overs of protracted political conflict on everyday life. Offering an ethnographic underview, Jelle Wouters illustrates an ‘insurgency complex’ that reveals how embodied experiences of resistance and state aggression, violence and volatility, and struggle and suffering link together to shape social norms, animate local agitations, and complicate interpersonal and intertribal relations in expected and unexpected ways. The book locates the historical experiences and agency of the Naga people and relates these to ordinary villagers’ perceptions, actions, and moral reasoning vis-à-vis both the Naga Movement and the state and its lucrative resources. It thus presses us to rethink our views on tribalism, conflict and ceasefire, development, corruption, and democratic politics.

Land of the Cosmic Race is a richly-detailed ethnographic account of the role that race and color play in organizing the lives and thoughts of mixed-race Mexicans. It presents a previously untold story of how individuals in contemporary urban Mexico construct their identities, attitudes, and practices in the context of a dominant national belief system.

This ethnography provides a theoretically informed account of the educational journeys of students in girls’ madrasas in India. It focuses on the unfolding of young women’s lives as they journey from home to madrasa and beyond. Using a series of ethnographic portraits and bringing together the analytical concepts of community, piety, and aspiration, it highlights the fluidity of the essences of the ideal pious Muslim woman. It illustrates how the madrasa becomes a site where the ideals of Islamic womanhood are negotiated in everyday life. At one level, girls value and adopt practices taught in the madrasa as essential to the practice of piety (amal). At another level, there is a more tactical aspect to cultivating one’s identity as a madrasa-educated Muslim girl. The girls invoke the virtues of safety, modesty, and piety learnt in the madrasa to reconfigure conventional social expectations around marriage, education, and employment. This becomes more apparent in the choices exercised by the girls after leaving the madrasa, highlighted in this book through narratives of madrasa alumni pursuing higher education at a central university in Delhi. The focus on journeys of girls over a period of time, in different contexts, complicates the idealized and coherent notions of piety presented by anthropological literature on women’s participation in Islamic piety projects. Further, the educational stories of girls challenge the media and public representations of madrasas in India, which tend to caricature them as outmoded religious institutions with little relevance to the educational needs of modernizing India. Mapping madrasa students’ personal journeys of becoming educated while leading pious lives allows us to see how these young women are reconfiguring notions of Islamic womanhood.

The era of official color-blindness in Latin America has come to an end. For the first time in decades, nearly every state in Latin America now asks their citizens to identify their race or ethnicity on the national census. Most observers highlight the historic novelty of these reforms, but National Colors shows that official racial classification of citizens has a long history in Latin America. Through an analysis of the politics and practice of official ethnoracial classification in the censuses of 19 Latin American states across nearly two centuries, this book explains why most Latin American states classified their citizens by race on early national censuses, why they stopped the practice of official racial classification around midcentury, and why they reintroduced ethnoracial classification on national censuses at the dawn of the 21st century. Beyond domestic political struggles, the analysis reveals that the ways that Latin American states classified their populations from the mid-nineteenth century onward responded to changes in international criteria for how to construct a modern nation and promote national “development.” As prevailing international understandings of what made a political and cultural community a modern nation changed, so too did the ways that Latin American census officials depicted diversity within national populations. The way census officials described populations in official statistics, in turn, shaped how policymakers “saw” national populations and informed their prescriptions for national development–with consequences that still reverberate in contemporary political struggles for recognition, rights, and redress for ethnoracially marginalized populations in today’s Latin America.

The Naxalite beginnings are by now history, and not a little nostalgia tinges the memory of these dreaded events. The leaders, the organizers, the spine, and the continuity of the movement are the revolutionary intellectuals. The Naxalite movement is not principally a rural, agrarian problem as the doctrine of the Naxalites argues, but is a problem of the leading edge of the urban intelligentsia. Though the Naxalites take their name from the incident at Naxalbari in 1967, the defining attributes of the Naxalite view of revolution emerged only later. From the beginning, it was not the labouring poor of the nation or Bengal that Charu Mazumdar addressed, but, first, the disaffected revolutionary activists within the communist movement and, later, the ‘student–youth’. This book discusses the ideologies of the Naxalite terrorists, the terrorist in the Bengali society, the Communist Party of India, and the Indian economy.

Every industrial nation in the world guarantees its citizens access to essential health care services—every country, that is, except the United States. In fact, one in eight Americans—43 million people—do not have any health care insurance at all. This book offers a history of America's failed efforts to address the health care needs of its citizens. Covering the entire twentieth century, it shows how each attempt to enact national health insurance was met with fierce attacks by powerful stakeholders, who mobilized their considerable resources to keep the financing of health care out of the government's hands. The author describes how, at first, physicians led the anti-reform coalition, fearful that government entry would mean government control of the lucrative private health care market. Doctors lobbied legislators, influenced elections by giving large campaign contributions to sympathetic candidates, and organized “grassroots” protests, conspiring with other like-minded groups to defeat reform efforts. As the success of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-century led physicians and the AMA to start scaling back their attacks, the insurance industry began assuming a leading role against reform that continues to this day.

Why do so many men in the United States refuse to dance? The answer reveals a great deal about masculinity, sexuality, and race. The book examines the past as well as the present. Drawing on research in sources ranging from military planning documents to boys’ fiction along with interviews, and participant observation, this book analyzes how dance became associated with women rather than men, youths but not adults, and people of color but not whites. The book traces the history of dancing men from1900 when white upper class men were expected to be good dancers, through dance crazes of the 1910s, U.S.O.-sponsored dances during World War II, the stifling climate of the Cold War period, the exuberant release of the 1960s, and the racial fracturing of music and dance cultures of the 1970s. Interviews with Asian, black, Latino, and white, men, aged eighteen to eight-six regarding their childhood, adolescence, and current experiences with dance, reveal how norms of sexuality, masculinity, and cultural assumptions regarding racial identities encourage some men to dance and discourage others. By focusing on dance, an activity that many current definitions of masculinity seem to exclude, the book provides a window on processes of masculine embodiment and racial formation.

This book details a sociological, comparative analysis of the institutional and group dynamics in eight schools located within four cities in the United States and South Africa. This book details how even as discussions and approaches to educational equality differ significantly in two nations rebounding from centuries of overt practices of racial and social inequality, many everyday school exchanges and practices parallel one another. Educators in the United States and South Africa are faced with the continual challenges of how to make schools work better for all students and of how to incorporate diverse groups of students better within these schools. This book argues chiefly that schools in these two societies, weakened historically by racial and ethnic discrimination, will greatly miss the benefits of a critical social policy for reducing inequality via education if they do not pay sufficient attention to the school's socio-cultural context. This book sheds insight into how to enable school-communities to better incorporate previously disadvantaged groups and to engender equity by promoting “cultural flexibility.” It also raises important and timely questions about the social, political, and philosophical purposes of schooling that have been greatly ignored by many and cautions against myopic approaches to education that merely focus on test-scores and attainment outcomes.

Despite recent progress against racial inequalities, American society continues to produce attitudes and outcomes that reinforce the racial divide. This book offers a fresh perspective on how to combat racial division. The chapters document the historical move from white supremacy to institutional racism, and then look at modern efforts to overcome the racialized nature of our society. They argue that both conservative and progressive approaches have failed, as they continually fall victim to forces of ethnocentrism and group interest. They then explore group interest and possible ways to account for the perspectives of both majority and minority group members. They also look to multiracial congregations, multiracial families, the military, and sports teams—all situations in which group interests have been overcome before. In each context they find the development of a core set of values that binds together different racial groups, along with the flexibility to express racially-based cultural uniqueness that does not conflict with this critical core. The book offers what is at once a balanced approach towards dealing with racial alienation and a bold step forward in the debate about the steps necessary to overcome present-day racism.