Books published by University of Illinois Press

The story of the volatility of a marriage and the inelasticity of two personalities, set against the backdrop of the Second World War.

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. This book explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race - created to overcome US colonial power - simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.

Includes essays that use close readings of speeches, letters, historical archives, diaries, and memoirs of policymakers and newly available FBI files to confront much-neglected questions related to race and foreign relations in the United States.

Breaking new ground in the understanding of sexuality's complex relationship to colonialism, this book illuminates the attempts at regulating prostitution in colonial Nigeria. It shows, British colonizers saw prostitution as an African form of sexual primitivity and a problem to be solved as part of imperialism's "civilizing mission".

Starting in 2001, much of the world media used the image of Osama bin Laden as a shorthand for terrorism. Bin Laden himself considered media manipulation on a par with military, political, and ideological tools, and intentionally used interviews, taped speeches, and distributed statements to further al-Qaida's ends.

Shows how 1947 marked the beginning of a history of politicized animosity associated with the differing ideas of "India" held by communities and in regions on one hand, and by the political-military Indian state on the other.

Explores how the city's eight-hour movement intersected with a Protestant religious culture that supported long hours to keep workers from idleness, intemperance, and secular leisure activities.

Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic and archival research, the author delves into the ways Filipinos in Hawai'i have balanced their pursuit of upward mobility and mainstream acceptance with a desire to keep their Filipino identity.

Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, the author explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration.

Focuses on capitalism's crisis tendencies to confront the contradictory matrix of a technological revolution and economic stagnation making up the current political economy and demonstrates digital technology's central role in the global political economy.

Marvin Miller changed major league baseball and the business of sports. Drawing on research and interviews with Miller and others, this book offers the first biography covering the pivotal labor leader's entire life and career.

The field of disability history continues to evolve rapidly. This book presents nineteen essays that integrate critical analysis of gender, race, historical context, and other factors to enrich and challenge the traditional modes of interpretation still dominating the field.

What narrative of white femininity transformed Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular? What ideologies did the narrative tap into to transform her into an idealized woman of the millennium? This book deals with these questions.

Explores the crisis in contemporary Afghan women's lives by focusing on two remarkable Afghan professional women working on behalf of their Afghan sisters. This book also suggests how a new dialogue might be started - in which women from across geopolitical boundaries might find common cause for change and rewrite their collective stories.

Explores the emotional tenor of Terence Davies' work by focusing on four paradoxes within the director's oeuvre: films that are autobiographical yet fictional; melancholy yet elating; conservative in tone and theme yet radically constructed; and obsessed with the passing of time yet frozen in time and space.

Consider the usual view of film noir: endless rainy nights populated by down-at-the-heel boxers, writers, and private eyes stumbling toward inescapable doom while stalked by crooked cops and cheating wives in a neon-lit urban jungle. This book offers a collection of essays that reassesses the genre's iconic style, history, and themes.

In 1970, ABC, CBS, and NBC - the "Big Three" of the pre-cable television era - discovered the feminist movement. This book uses case studies of key media events to delve into the ways national TV news mediated the emergence of feminism's second wave.

Charts Lorado Taft's mentoring of women artists, including the so-called White Rabbits at the World's Fair, many of whom went on to achieve artistic success.

Employs twenty-five years' worth of interviews with black and white Virginians, Tennesseeans, and Kentuckians to explore the evolution and social uses of dance practices in each region. This book reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, and European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, added to local dance vocabularies.