African American Studies

Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations challenges the static figuring of feminist generations that positions the second wave of feminist scholars against a homogeneous third wave. Based on life stories from contemporary feminist scholars, this volume emphasizes how feminism develops unevenly over time and across institutions and, ultimately, offers a new paradigm for theorizing the intersections between generations and feminist waves of thought.   Contributors: Sam Bullington, U of Missouri; Susan Cahn, SUNY Buffalo; Dawn Rae Davis, U of Minnesota; Lisa J. Disch, U of Minnesota; Sara Evans, U of Minnesota; Elizabeth Faue, Wayne State U; Roderick A. Ferguson, U of Minnesota; Peter Hennen, Ohio State U at Newark; Wendy Leo Moore, Texas A&M U; Toni McNaron, U of Minnesota; Jean M. O'Brien, U of Minnesota; Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel, U of California, Santa Cruz; Anne Firor Scott, Duke U; Janet D. Spector, U of Minnesota; Amanda Lock Swarr, U of Washington, Seatt≤ Miglena Todorova, U of Minnesota.   Hokulani K. Aikau is assistant professor of indigenous politics in the department of political science at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Karla A. Erickson is assistant professor of sociology at Grinnell College. Jennifer L. Pierce is associate professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.

Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their cultural and ethnic identities. A Chosen People, a Promised Land gets to the heart of this contradiction by exploring how Native Hawaiian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly known as Mormons) understand and negotiate their place in this quintessentially American religion. Mormon missionaries arrived in HawaiOCyi in 1850, a mere twenty years after Joseph Smith founded the church. Hokulani K. Aikau traces how Native Hawaiians became integrated into the religious doctrine of the church as a OC chosen peopleOCOOCoeven at a time when exclusionary racial policies regarding black members of the church were being codified. Aikau shows how Hawaiians and other Polynesian saints came to be considered chosen and how they were able to use their venerated status toward their own spiritual, cultural, and pragmatic ends. Using the words of Native Hawaiian Latter-Day Saints to illuminate the intersections of race, colonization, and religion, A Chosen People, a Promised Land examines Polynesian Mormon articulations of faith and identity within a larger political context of self-determination.

The history of Mexican Americans in Utah is complex, but it is also a history that is neither well represented in mainstream recounting nor well recognized in the mainstream understanding of Utah's past. Convoluted interactions among Native Americans, Spaniards, French, Mexicans, Anglos, and others shaped the story of Utah. Awareness of the long presence of Hispanics in Utah is essential to understanding the history of the state. This volume is an attempt to piece together that history through photos and oral histories.      As Armando Sol#65533;rzano and other researchers conducted oral history interviews with Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and other Latinos throughout the state, a number of participants began giving the team photographs, some dating back to 1895, which provided an opportunity to begin reconstructing a history through pictures, as a community project. Within two years, Sol#65533;rzano and his colleagues were able to create the pictorial history of Mexican-Americans and Latinos in Utah and launched their efforts as a photo-documentary exhibit. This book collects photographs to represent different historical periods and the manifold contributions of Latinos to the state of Utah.      Readers who delve into this book may see these photos as artistic expressions or artifacts of history and photographic technique. Some readers will see images of their relatives and precursors who labored to create a better life in Utah. The images evoke both nostalgia for a time gone by and the possibility of reconstructing history with a fairer premise. The book does not tell the full story of Latinos in Utah but should prove to be a catalyst, inspiring others to continue documenting and reconstructing the neglected threads of Utah's history, making it truly the history of all of us.  Recipient of the Meritorious Book Award from the Utah Division of State History.

In contemporary American political culture, claims of American exceptionalism and anxieties over its prospects have resurged as an overarching theme in national political discourse. Yet never very far from such debates lie animating fears associated with race. Fears about the loss of national unity and trust often draw attention to looming changes in the racial demographics of the body politic. Lost amid these debates are often the more complex legacies of racial hybridity. Anxieties over the disintegration of the fabric of American national identity likewise forget not just how they echo past fears of subversive racial and cultural difference, but also exorcise as well the changing nature of work and social interaction. Edmund Fong's book examines the rise and resurgence of contemporary forms of American exceptionalism as they have emerged out of contentious debates over cultural pluralism and multicultural diversity in the past two decades. For a brief time, serious considerations of the force of multiculturalism entered into a variety of philosophical and policy debates. But in the American context, these debates often led to a reaffirmation of some variant of American exceptionalism with the consequent exorcism of race within the avowed norms and policy goals of American politics. Fong explores how this "multicultural exorcism" revitalizing American exceptionalism is not simply a novel feature of our contemporary political moment, but is instead a recurrent dynamic across the history of American political discourse. By situating contemporary discourse on cultural pluralism within the larger frame of American history, this book yields insight into the production of hegemonic forms of American exceptionalism and how race continues to haunt the contours of American national identity.

Feminist Formations, 2016, Vol.28(1), pp.146-165

This essay examines transnational migration, in particular a popularized case referred to as the "ghost case" or the "blessing scam." The blessing scam is an internationally known case where Chinese migrants were "swindled" out of their money and jewelry. However, as a normative narrative of criminality circulated in popular media, another story coalesced surrounding a story of vulnerability and victimhood. Through an interdisciplinary and transnational feminist method, the author navigates a wide range of texts from legal documents to news media and Department of Justice archives, to examine how the ghost case was a human trafficking that never was. Through a theory of "unsettled witnessing," the author moves through the multiple contexts of migration, violence, labor, and informal economy to further unravel the dichotomies that are normalized in human right's rhetoric and practice: victim/ criminal, illegal/legal, and citizen/non-citizen. An unsettled witnessing is a commitment to witnessing without being settled as to what one is seeing. This requires raising questions about the normative aspects of events by examining the politics of representation around victimhood/criminality, citizenship, and legality, as infused with discourses of nationhood, race, gender, and colonial modernities.

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 1 January 2015, Vol.36(3), pp.160-192

In special issue: "Transnational Feminisms".

"Calling the Consumer Activist, Consuming the Trafficking Subject: Call and Response and the Terms of Legibility" by Fukushima, A.I. & Hua, J.

Documenting Gendered Violence explores the intersections of documentary and gendered violence. Several contributors investigate representations through grounded textual analyses of key films and videos, including Sex Crimes Unit (2011) and The Invisible War (2012),and other documentary texts including Youtube, photographs, and theater. Other chapters use analysis and interviews to explore how gender violence issues impact production and how these documentaries become part of collaborations and awareness movements.

The historic election of Barack Obama, the first African-American president is analyzed from the perspective of racial relations. To trace the effect of time, Liu links Obama's multiracial winning coalition to the two-party system and the profound impact of racial changes since 1965.

"Human Trafficking" chapter by Fukushima, A.I.

The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender series serves undergraduate college students who have had little or no exposure to Gender Studies, as well as the curious lay reader. Following the Primer, which introduces the field of study, as well as the topics of the remaining 9 volumes plus a selection of subjects that will not receive full volume treatment (e.g., new media, music, disability), each handbook ushers the reader into a subfield of Gender Studies (see the list of titles, below) and explores twenty to thirty topics in that subfield. Every chapter in each volume, all newly commissioned studies prepared by academic experts, offers an annotated bibliography/research guide to encourage students to explore the topics further, using vehicles such as film or the arts to facilitate understanding of issues at the heart of the discipline, for example, fashion, health, masculinities. Each chapter ends with a summary of the concepts discussed. Each volume is edited by an academic subject specialist.

"Beyond Supply & Demand: The Limitations of End Demand-Strategies" by Fukushima, A.I.

Human Trafficking Reconsidered is a unique collection of original essays that investigates the issue of sex and labor trafficking.

Race Rules examines electoral politics over forty years, up to the present day. Liu and Vanderleeuw show that an understanding of New Orleans politics must start with the city's racial composition and must be viewed in terms of racial conflict and accommodation reflected in the electoral arena during the last four decades.

Like quantitative analysis itself, the text Social Research begins with a question. Why do social scientists use numbers to talk about everything from the stock market to human emotions? Social Research provides an answer with its common sense approach to the quantitative scientific method. The book balances imagination and reason with theoretical and mathematical information processing to help students understand the important link between social research and foundational math skills. Initially, readers are asked to consider the type of tasks to which such analysis might be applied. They learn about conceptualization, units of analysis, and the quantitative mind. These can then be applied as students explore specific tools, including measurement, variables, hypothesis and experiment, and controlled comparison. It shows detailed examples of how to use both SPSS and R software programs for basic statistical operations and programming needs. The book also discusses random sampling, the central limit theorem, Type I and Type II errors and bivariate and multiple regression. Social Research is about why science works, and while it includes mathematics, it does so in an accessible way. The book is suitable for undergraduate methods courses that meet the requirement for quantitative sciences, and it can also be a supplemental text to first graduate-level quantitative method classes that require mathematical training. Baodong Liu has written an informative book that students and scholars can easily understand and apply when conducting research in the social sciences. It is also written in a way that makes the formulas and concepts understandable. It is an excellent book.Dr. Sharon D. Wright Austin, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of African American Studies, The University of Florida Baodong Liu holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of New Orleans. He is an associate professor of political science at the University of Utah, where his research and teaching interests include urban and racial politics, voting and elections, and quantitative research methods. Dr. Liu is the author of The Election of Barack Obama: How He Won and Race Rules: Electoral Politics in New Orleans, 1965-2006.