Books in the Critical American Studies series

Focusing on the role race plays in expressions of Chicano culture, this work is a provocative exploration of the volatility and mutability of racial identities. Informed by theoretical investigation of identity politics and race and incorporating feminist and queer critiques, the author analyzes Chicano cultural production.

Bleu-collar intellectual and activist publisher, Stan Weir devoted his life to the advocacy of his fellow workers. Weir was both a thoughtful observer and an active participant in many of the key struggles that shaped the labor movement and the political left in postwar America.

How Latino autobiographical texts reconfigure identity in opposition to familiar notions of self

The importance of myth, symbol, and image in the Chicano movement and beyond.

Examines the ways in which economic and social changes in the twentieth century have affected the black community, and conveys the experiences that bind and divide its people. This book tells the story of urban America through the lives of individuals from diverse, overlapping, and vibrant communities.

The first biography of Asian American activist and Black Panther Party member Richard Aoki

Challenging both the uncritical celebration of abstract multiculturalism and its simpleminded vilification, Lee roots Urban Triage in specific instances of multiracial contact and deeply informed readings of works that have been canonized within ethnic studies and of those that either remain misunderstood or were.

In a provocative culturalhistory of the 1960s Peace Corps, Molly Geidel argues that the agency'srepresentative development ventures legitimated the violent exercise ofAmerican power around the world and the destruction of indigenous ways of life.

Although W. E. B. Du Bois did not often pursue the connections between the “Negro question” that defined so much of his intellectual life and the “woman question” that engaged writers and feminist activists around him, Next to the Color Line argues that within Du Bois’s work is a politics of juxtaposition that connects race, gender, sexuality, and justice.This provocative collection investigates a set of political formulations and rhetorical strategies by which Du Bois approached, used, and repressed issues of gender and sexuality. The essays in Next to the Color Line propose a return to Du Bois, not only to reassess his politics but also to demonstrate his relevance for today’s scholarly and political concerns.Contributors: Hazel V. Carby, Yale U; Vilashini Cooppan, U of California, Santa Cruz; Brent Hayes Edwards, Rutgers U; Michele Elam, Stanford U; Roderick A. Ferguson, U of Minnesota; Joy James, Williams College; Fred Moten, U of Southern California; Shawn Michelle Smith, St. Louis U; Mason Stokes, Skidmore College; Claudia Tate, Princeton U; Paul C. Taylor, Temple U.Susan Gillman is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alys Eve Weinbaum is associate professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

What visual tropes of race, death, and motherhood tell us about citizenship.

Examines the work produced in exile by writers of African descent. The author suggests that in the absence of a recoverable land of origin, the idea of diaspora comes to represent a home that is not singular or exclusionary. In this book, he investigates the work of Himes, Cliff, and three other twentieth-century black international writers.

Why do modern people assume that there will be perpetual economic growth? Because, David W. Noble tells us in this provocative study of cultural criticism, such a utopian conviction is the necessary foundation for bourgeois culture. One can imagine the existence of modern middle classes only as long as the capitalist marketplace is expanding.

Ends of Empire examines Asian American cultural production and its challenge to the dominant understanding of American imperialism, Cold War dynamics, and race and gender formation.

The sociology of race relations in America typically describes an intersection of poverty, race, and economic discrimination. But what is missing from the picture--sexual difference--can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology--Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson--has measured African Americans' unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans' culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology's regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories--the narrative of capital's emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture--works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story--one in which people who presumably manifest the dys-functions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery--a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way thatcomplicates and illuminates Ellison's project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson's work introduces a new mode of discourse--which Ferguson calls queer of colo

"In her excellent new book, Amy Bass uses the famous 'black power' podium salute by sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith as the centerpiece of her expansive examination of the black athlete in America." -Boston Globe