From Lake Coeur d�Alene to its confluence with the Columbia, the Spokane River travels 111 miles of varied and often spectacular terrain�rural, urban, in places wild. The river has been a trading and gathering place for Native peoples for thousands of years. With bountiful trout, accessible swimming holes, and challenging rapids it is a recreational mecca for residents and tourists alike. The Spokane also bears the legacy of industrial growth and remains caught amid interests competing over natural resources.The twenty-eight contributors to this collection�including activists, storytellers, and scientists�profile this living river through personal reflection, history, science, and poetry. They bring a keen environmental awareness of resource scarcity, climate change, and cultural survival tied to the river�s fate.
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.
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.
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.
This collection pulls together key documents from the scientific and political history of climate change, including congressional testimony, scientific papers, newspaper editorials, court cases, and international declarations. Far more than just a compendium of source materials, the book uses these documents as a way to think about history, while at the same time using history as a way to approach the politics of climate change from a new perspective. Making Climate Change History provides the necessary background to give readers the opportunity to pose critical questions and create plausible answers to help them understand climate change in its historical context; it also illustrates the relevance of history to building effective strategies for dealing with the climatic challenges of the future.
Queering Contemporary Asian American Art takes Asian American differences as its point of departure, and brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialisms, and methodologies within Asian American art and visual culture. Taken together, these nine original artist interviews, cutting-edge visual artworks, and seven critical essays explore contemporary currents and experiences within Asian American art, including the multiple axes of race and identity; queer bodies and forms; kinship and affect; and digital identities and performances.Using the verb and critical lens of �queering� to capture transgressive cultural, social, and political engagement and practice, the contributors to this volume explore the connection points in Asian American experience and cultural production of surveillance states, decolonization and diaspora, transnational adoption, and transgender bodies and forms, as well as heteronormative respectability, the military, and war. The interdisciplinary and theoretically informed frameworks in the volume engage readers to understand global and historical processes through contemporary Asian American artistic production.
This anthology presents substantial selections from the work of twenty Manchu women poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The poems, inspired by their daily life and reflections, provide fascinating insights into the experiences and emotions of these women, most of whom belonged to the elite families of Manchu society. Each selection is accompanied by biographical material that illuminates the life stories of the poets. The volume’s introduction describes the printing history of the collections from which these poems are drawn, the authors’ practice of poetry writing, ethnic and gender issues, and comparisons with the poetry of women in South China and of male authors of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).
Each successive wave of revolution to hit modern China�political, cultural, and economic�has radically reshaped Chinese society. Whereas patriarchy defined the familial social structure for thousands of years, changing realities in the last hundred years have altered and even reversed long-held expectations. Transforming Patriarchy explores the private and public dimensions of these changes in present-day China. Patriarchy is not dead, but it is no longer the default arrangement for Chinese families: Daughters-in-law openly berate their fathers-in-law. Companies sell filial-piety insurance. Many couples live together before marriage, and in some parts of rural China, almost all brides are pregnant.Drawing on a multitude of sources and perspectives, this volume turns to the intimate territory of the family to challenge prevailing scholarly assumptions about gender and generational hierarchies in Chinese society. Case studies examine factors such as social class, geography, and globalization as they relate to patriarchal practice and resistance to it. The contributors bring the concept of patriarchy back to the heart of China studies while rethinking its significance in dominant Western-centric theories of modernity.
This is the first book to focus explicitly on how China�s rise as a major economic and political actor has affected societies in Southeast Asia. It examines how Chinese investors, workers, tourists, bureaucrats, longtime residents, and adventurers interact throughout Southeast Asia. The contributors use case studies to show the scale of Chinese influence in the region and the ways in which various countries mitigate their unequal relationship with China by negotiating asymmetry, circumventing hegemony, and embracing, resisting, or manipulating the terms dictated by Chinese capital. ��
What do we learn about death from the Holocaust and how does it impact our responses to mortality today?Facing Death: Confronting Mortality in the Holocaust and Ourselves brings together the work of eleven Holocaust and genocide scholars who address these difficult questions, convinced of the urgency of further reflection on the Holocaust as the last survivors pass away. The volume is distinctive in its dialogical and introspective approach, where the contributors position themselves to confront their own impending death while listening to the voices of victims and learning from their life experiences. Broken into three parts, this collection engages with these voices in a way that is not only scholarly, but deeply personal.The first part of the book engages with Holocaust testimony by drawing on the writings of survivors and witnesses such as Elie Wiesel, Jean Am�ry, and Charlotte Delbo, including rare accounts from members of the Sonderkommando. Reflections of post-Holocaust generations�the children and grandchildren of survivors�are housed in the second part, addressing questions of remembrance and memorialization. The concluding essays offer intimate self-reflection about how engagement with the Holocaust impacts the contributors� lives, faiths, and ethics.In an age of continuing atrocities, this volume provides careful attention to the affective dimension of coping with death, in particular, how loss and grief are deferred or denied, narrated, and passed along.