Books in the Research in International Studies, Global and Comparative Studies series

From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar's people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored.Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families-and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history.By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants-enslaved and free-have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.

For hundreds of years, military intervention in another country was considered taboo and prohibited by international law. Since 1992, intervention has often been described as an international responsibility, and efforts have been made to give it legal justification.

With Following the Ball, Todd Cleveland incorporates labor, sport, diasporic, and imperial history to examine the extraordinary experiences of African football players from Portugal's African colonies as they relocated to the metropole from 1949 until the conclusion of the colonial era in 1975.

The Turkic Muslims known as the Uighur have long faced social and economic disadvantages in China because of their minority status.

The connections among vagabondage and human labor, mobility, status, and behavior have placed vagrancy at the crossroads of a multitude of political, social, and economic processes. This book considers the shared global heritage of vagrancy laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied.

In a world desperate to comprehend and address what appears to be an ever-enlarging explosion of violence, this book provides important insights into crucial contemporary issues, with violence providing the lens. Violence: Analysis, Intervention, and Prevention provides a multidisciplinary approachto the analysis and resolution of violent conflicts. In particular, the book discusses ecologies of violence, and micro-macro linkages at the local, national, and international levels as well as intervention and prevention processes critical to constructive conflict transformation.The causes of violence are complex and demand a deep multidimensional analysis if we are to fully understand its driving forces. Yet in the aftermath of such destruction there is hope in the resiliency, knowledge, and creativity of communities, organizations, leaders, and international agencies to transform the conditions that lead to such violence.

Barack Obama's political ascendancy has focused worldwide attention on Kenya. Carotenuto and Luongo argue that efforts to cast Obama as a "son of the soil" of the Lake Victoria basin invite insights into the politicized uses of Kenya's past.

The outbreak of numerous and simultaneous violent conflicts around the globe in the past decade resulted in immense human suffering and countless lost lives. In part, both results were aided by inactivity or by belated and often misplaced responses by the international community to the embattled groups.

Offers essays that demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature reveals the nature of power. In this book, each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exotic nature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally "got their hands dirty" in the business of empire.

Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa's biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African realities. A tribute to a genre and its artists, Hip-Hop in Africa details the spread of hip-hop culture in Africa and pushes the study of music and diaspora in critical new directions.

Many challenges facing the African continent today are rooted in colonial practices, Cold War alliances, and outsiders' attempts to influence its political and economic systems. Interdisciplinary and intended for nonspecialists, this book provides a new framework for thinking about foreign political and military intervention in Africa.