In the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence�but these developments came at the cost of a host of new environmental problems. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of them, such as pollution-emitting factories, waste-handling facilities, and big infrastructure projects, ended up in communities dominated by people of color. Constrained by long-standing practices of segregation that limited their housing and employment options, people of color bore an unequal share of postwar America�s environmental burdens.This reader collects a wide range of primary source documents on the rise and evolution of the environmental justice movement. The documents show how environmentalists in the 1970s recognized the unequal environmental burdens that people of color and low-income Americans had to bear, yet failed to take meaningful action to resolve them. Instead, activism by the affected communities themselves spurred the environmental justice movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, environmental justice had become increasingly mainstream, and issues like climate justice, food justice, and green-collar jobs had taken their places alongside the protection of wilderness as �environmental� issues.Environmental Justice in Postwar America is a powerful tool for introducing students to the US environmental justice movement and the sometimes tense relationship between environmentalism and social justice.
Arguing that our definition of Islamic journalism is too narrow, this study examines day-to-day journalism as practiced by Muslim professionals at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia.At Sabili, established as an underground publication, journalists are hired for their ability at dakwah, or Islamic propagation. At Tempo, a news magazine banned during the Soeharto regime, the journalists do not talk much about sharia law; although many are pious and see their work as a manifestation of worship, the Islam they practice is often viewed as progressive or even liberal. At Harakah reporters support an Islamic political party, while at Republika they practice a �journalism of the Prophet.� Secular news organizations, too, such as Malaysiakini, employ Muslim journalists. Janet Steele explores how these various publications observe universal principles of journalism and do so through an Islamic idiom.
One of the most important political transitions to occur in South Asia in recent decades was the ouster of Nepal�s monarchy in 2006 and the institution of a democratic secular republic in 2008. Based on extensive ethnographic research between 2003 and 2015,�Making New Nepal�provides a snapshot of an activist generation�s political coming-of-age during a decade of civil war and ongoing democratic street protests.Amanda Snellinger illustrates this generation�s entr�e into politics through the stories of five young revolutionary activists as they shift to working within the newly established party system. She explores youth in Nepali national politics as a social mechanism for political reproduction and change, demonstrating the dynamic nature of democracy as a radical ongoing process.
Shanghai, a dynamic world metropolis, is home to a multitude of religions, from Buddhism and Islam, to Christianity and Baha�ism, to Hinduism and Daoism, and many more. In this city of 24 million inhabitants, new religious groups and older faiths together claim and reclaim spiritual space.Shanghai Sacred�explores the spaces, rituals, and daily practices that make up the religious landscape of the city, offering a new paradigm for the study of Chinese spirituality that reflects the global trends shaping Chinese culture and civil society.Based on years of fieldwork, incorporating both comparative and methodological perspectives,�Shanghai Sacred�demonstrates how religions are lived, constructed, and thus inscribed into the social imaginary of the metropolis. Evocative photographs by Liz Hingley enrich and interact with the narrative, making the book an innovative contribution to religious visual ethnography.�
No-No Boy, John Okada�s only published novel, centers on a Japanese American who refuses to fight for the country that incarcerated him and his people in World War II and, upon release from federal prison after the war, is cast out by his divided community. In 1957, the novel faced a similar rejection until it was rediscovered and reissued in 1976 to become a celebrated classic of American literature. As a result of Okada�s untimely death at age forty-seven, the author�s life and other works have remained obscure.This compelling collection offers the first full-length examination of Okada�s development as an artist, placing recently discovered writing by Okada alongside essays that reassess his lasting legacy. Meticulously researched biographical details, insight from friends and relatives, and a trove of intimate photographs illuminate Okada�s early life in Seattle, military service, and careers as a public librarian and a technical writer in the aerospace industry. This volume is an essential companion to No-No Boy.
The earliest rock art�in the Americas as elsewhere�is geometric or abstract. Until�Early Rock Art in the American West,�however, no book-length study has been devoted to the deep antiquity and amazing range of geometrics and the fascinating questions that arise from their ubiquity and variety. Why did they precede representational marks? What is known about their origins and functions? Why and how did humans begin to make marks, and what does this practice tell us about the early human mind?With some two hundred�striking�color images and�discussions�of chronology, dating, sites, and styles, this pioneering investigation of abstract geometrics on stone (as well as�bone, ivory, and shell)�explores its wide-ranging subject from the perspectives of ethnology, evolutionary biology, cognitive archaeology, and the psychology of artmaking. The authors� unique approach instills a greater respect for a largely unknown and underappreciated form of paleoart, suggesting that before humans became�Homo symbolicus�or even�Homo religiosus, they were mark-makers�Homo aestheticus.
An analysis of historical, transcultural, and transmedia adaptation, Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic examines the ever-changing image of Sun Wukong (aka Monkey, or the Monkey King), in literature and popular culture both in China and the United States. A protean protagonist of the sixteenth century novel Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), the Monkey King�s image has been adapted in distinctive ways for the representation of various social entities, including China as a newly founded nation state, the younger generation of Chinese during the postsocialist period, and the representation of the Chinese and Chinese American as a social �other� in American popular culture. The juxtaposition of various manifestations of the same character in the book present the adaptation history of Monkey as a masquerade, enabling readers to observe not only the masks, but also the mask-wearers, as well as underlying factors such as literary and political history, state ideologies, market economies, issues of race and ethnicity, and politics of representation and cross-cultural translation Transforming Monkey demonstrates the social and political impact of adaptations through the hands of its users while charting the changes to the image of Sun Wukong in modern history and his participation in the construction and representation of Chinese identity. The first manuscript focusing on the transformations of the Monkey King image and the meanings this image carries, Transforming Monkey argues for the importance of adaptations as an indivisible part of the classical work, and as a revealing window to examine history, culture, and the world.
From the Flint water crisis to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy, environmental threats and degradation disproportionately affect communities of color, with often dire consequences for people�s lives and health. Racial Ecologies explores activist strategies and creative responses, such as those of Mexican migrant women, New Zealand Maori, and African American farmers in urban Detroit, demonstrating that people of color have always been and continue to be leaders in the fight for a more equitable and ecologically just world.Grounded in an ethnic-studies perspective, this interdisciplinary collection illustrates how race intersects with Indigeneity, colonialism, gender, nationality, and class to shape our understanding of both nature and environmental harm, showing how and why environmental issues are also racial issues. Indeed, Indigenous, critical race, and postcolonial frameworks are crucial for comprehending and addressing accelerating anthropogenic change, from the local to the global, and for imagining speculative futures. This forward-looking, critical intervention bridges environmental scholarship and ethnic studies and will prove indispensable to activists, scholars, and students alike.
�I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you.� So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy�s deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women�s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe�s Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the�tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum archives, anthropological records, and oral histories.Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed by�cultural�revitalization, including the accounts of young women who have participated in the Flower Dance. Using a framework of Native feminisms, she locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of�women�s coming-of-age�ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.
In the mid-1990s, the international community pronounced prenatal sex selection via abortion an �act of violence against women� and �unethical.� At the same time, new developments in reproductive technology in the United States led to a method of sex selection before conception; its US inventor marketed the practice as �family balancing� and defended it with the rhetoric of freedom of choice. In Gender before Birth, Rajani Bhatia takes on the hypocrisy of how similar practices in the first and third worlds are divergently named and framed.Bhatia�s extensive fieldwork includes interviews with clinicians, scientists, biomedical service providers, feminist activists, and international tech advocates, and her resulting analysis extends both feminist theory on reproduction and feminist science and technology studies. She argues that we are at the beginning of a changing transnational terrain that presents new challenges to theorized inequality in reproduction, demonstrating how the technosciences often get embroiled in colonial gender and racial politics.