Explore the latest titles in JSTOR’s Path to Open program

A Violent History: Power and Conflict in the Congo Basin from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Author: Giacomo Macola
Author Affiliation: “La Sapienza” University of Rome; Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer
Discipline: African Studies

Description:
Since the nineteenth century, political and military violence has played an exceptionally important role in the territory corresponding to the present Democratic Republic of Congo. By emphasising the periodic reoccurrence of “warlordism” and the economy of plunder that characterises it, this book offers new analytical tools through which to interpret the history of the societies of the Congo Basin over the past two hundred years. In the concluding chapters, A Violent History dwells on more recent events, detailing the collapse of Mobutu’s Zaire, the “Great African War” and the reasons for the continuing armed instability in the east of the country.

Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Author: Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein
Author Affiliation: University of Oregon; Northeastern University; Boise State University; School of the Museum of Fine Arts
Discipline: Art & Art History

Description:
Animal Modernities challenges the traditional human-centered focus of art history and explores how modern art, visual culture, and modernity itself emerge from relationships between humans and animals. The essays in this volume reveal histories of exploitation and domination, as well as confusion and ambivalence, and occasional moments when affinities between humans and animals have been embraced, and animal agency asserted and acknowledged. The authors collectively point to the importance of thinking about animal–human relations for addressing today’s ecological challenges. Excerpt from the original book proposal: Animal Modernities advances a less hierarchical understanding of human-animal relations in order to challenge art history’s traditional view of animals as little more than symbolic and metaphoric material for art making. In dialogue with the “animal turn” in the humanities and theories of new materialism, this book is part of an effort in the discipline to clear space for thinking beyond the limits of esteemed human artists as the privileged center of art history’s preoccupations.

Cross-border intimacies: Affect and emotions in marriage migration
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Lara Momesso
Author Affiliation: University of Central Lancashire; University of London; University of Tuebingen, Germany; European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS)
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
Since the early 1990s, economic exchanges between China and Taiwan have paved the way to migration across a previously closed border and to social and cultural interactions between the two populations. Despite these broader changes, the unresolved issue of Taiwan sovereignty has tainted not only the relations between the two governments but also the everyday life of those who move across the Taiwan Strait. In this politicised environment, intimate and affective practices linked to cross-border marriage and family formation are never just private. Instead, they are deeply entangled with the emotional and affective processes generated at the macro and meso level of political and social life and revolving around national interests.

Exploring the Mesoamerican Subterranean Realm
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Editors: James E. Brady and Cristina Verdugo
Author Affiliation: California State University
Discipline: Archaeology

Description:
The Mesoamerican Subterranean Realm brings together the latest work and interpretations on the use of underground cavities by Mesoamerica’s Pre-Columbian cultures to argue for their invaluable cultural purpose. Case studies from across the region investigate the ways in which these subterranean spaces tended to be the focus of a host of political and religious activities, as they were highly charged points in the sacred landscape. The volume draws attention to the fact that underground chambers were often deliberately created through excavation by Indigenous peoples, thus furthering the definition of the word “cave” beyond natural formations. Divided into three sections, “Historical Perspectives of the Investigation of the Subterranean,” “The Mesoamerican Subterranean Realm,” and “Addressing Significant Issues,” the book deals equally with the archaeology of both natural and constructed subterranean spaces.

Frontier Justice: State, Law, and Society in Patagonia, 1880–1940
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Author: Javier Cikota
Discipline: Latin American Studies

Description:
Frontier Justice looks beyond the lawlessness and violence of frontiers to reveal instead the intricate tapestry of relationships that underpinned the development of civil society there. The book looks at northern Patagonia, which was military annexed to Argentina between 1878 and 1885. The Argentine government sought to develop in the region the kind of practices and institutions that would turn “barbarism” into “civilization.” Using court cases to reconstruct the partnerships between prominent neighbors and the police, amongst neighbors themselves, and between police, judges, and prosecutors, the book argues that settlers were active stakeholders in the establishment and continued functioning of the frontier state. The book centers an unusual cast of frontier denizens, tackling issues of gender, race, patronage, and colonialism to better understand the competing sources of legitimacy in a newly-incorporated area.

Good News of God’s Reign: An Introduction to the New Testament
Publisher: ACU Press
Author: Carl Toney
Discipline: Religion

Description:
Who is in charge?The New Testament gives a message of hope that Jesus is the King who established the reign of God through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Good News of God’s Reign explores how each New Testament author casts this vision for how early believers could live under God’s rule in their first-century contexts. In the process, readers will discover the diversity of the early church and its leading figures. They will learn about the major themes of each New Testament writing, which are clearly and thoughtfully presented to illuminate the Christian community’s struggles and successes.The Gospels recount stories from Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension as he inaugurated this kingdom. Acts relates the origin of the church as God’s kingdom expands from Jerusalem to Rome. Paul, an ambassador of God’s kingdom, writes thirteen letters that equip churches representing God’s rule. The remaining New Testament letters provide windows into the diversity of early Christian communities living in light of God’s rule. The book of Revelation wraps up the New Testament story with the promised final victory of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).

Indigenous Educational Leadership Through Community-Based Knowledge and Research
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Authors: Robin Minthorn, Shawn L. Secatero, Catherine N. Montoya, and Jodi L. Burshia
Discipline: American Indian Studies

Description:
Indigenous Educational Leadership Through Community-Based Knowledge and Research highlights the Native American Leadership in Education (NALE) heartwork. The edited collection illuminates the beauty and essence of NALE, which uniquely conceptualizes Indigenous leadership identity, philosophy, community leadership, and research in ways that have engendered students and graduates to conceptualize and live out their ancestors’ prayers and legacy. The editors provide samples of how they have achieved this through the sharing of some of the NALE graduates and current students’ heartwork. The book is organized into four sections: Indigenous leadership identities, Indigenous leadership philosophies in relation to the Corn Pollen model, Indigenous community leadership curriculum, and Indigenizing research through collective creations. These four sections make the NALE doctoral cohort curriculum and experience unique in that it centers Indigenous experiences, scholarship, community voice, and research approaches. All four NALE cohort doctoral students and alumni are included in these chapters to provide a lens through which we view and center Indigenous educational leadership.

Industrial memory in North East England: Negotiating northernness
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Victoria Allen
Author Affiliation: University of Kiel
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
Industrial memory in North East England examines how the region’s industrial myth and memory have been articulated in the renegotiation of northernness. The book offers a critical contextualisation of the concept of northernness and the English North, and an introduction to the concept of the PopCultural Portfolio, a mixed-methods approach to conjunctural analysis in cultural and memory studies. The book provides six richly illustrated case studies to demonstrate the practical application of cultural studies’ expansive and inclusive understanding of texts, bringing together materials from North East football, folk, indie and exhibition culture to establish how the North East’s industrial past continues to be remembered and functionalised as industrial memory. In turn, the conjunctural analysis demonstrates how industrial memory is articulated and mythologised as north(east)ernes in contemporary popular culture.

Land Hunger: Ohio and the Western Frontiers
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Author: Mansel Blackford
Author Affiliation: Ohio State University
Discipline: American Studies

Description:
Land Hunger narrates a history of frontiers in the Ohio Country, the Great Plains, and the Oregon Country. It examines how Native Americans, African Americans, and Euro Americans interacted on important US frontiers and viewed, used, and adapted to environments new to them, just as present-day Americans are having to adapt to climate change.

Life Undocumented: Latinx Youth Navigating Place and Belonging
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Author: Edelina M. Burciaga
Author Affiliation: University of Colorado
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
Life Undocumented captures the compelling stories of Latinx undocumented young adults growing up and living in two distinct sociopolitical contexts: California, which provides legal pathways into higher education for undocumented youth, and Georgia, which does not. It examines the intersection of federal, state, and local laws, revealing the emotional and social mobility challenges faced by these individuals in navigating adulthood.

Mad Fictions: Psychiatry, Disability and the Politics of Mental Distress in African Literature
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Author: Femi Eromosele
Author Affiliation: Utrecht University; University of the Witwatersrand; Free University of Berlin; Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen; Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
Mad Fictions brings African literature into dialogue with mad studies and disability studies, challenging readings that reduce madness to metaphor. Femi Eromosele explores how African writers navigate the intersections of madness, nationalism, and psychiatric power, advocating for a critical shift toward lived experiences of mental distress and the politics of exclusion.

Murder in Marseille: Right-wing terrorism in 1930s Europe
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Chris Millington
Author Affiliation: Manchester Metropolitan University
Discipline: History

Description:
On 9 October 1934, terrorists murdered King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in a Marseille street. The Croatian ultranationalist Ustashe was behind the attack. The Ustashe hoped that the king’s death would cause the collapse of Yugoslavia and the liberation of the Croat people. This book examines the circumstances, processes, and trajectories that shaped the Ustashe terrorists and their attack in Marseille. It brings questions about contemporary terrorism to bear on a historical attack: what prompts people to join terrorist organisations? How are these people ‘radicalised’ to commit violence? What roles do women play in terrorism? Murder in Marseille bridges the scholarly gap between historical and contemporary terrorism, paying attention to, and often guided by, current concerns, ideas, theories, and notions about terrorist violence.

Original Sin?: The Reproduction of Racism in a Multiracial Church
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Authors: Willie Barnes and J. Scott Carter
Author Affiliation: University of Central Florida
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
Original Sin? explores the ways that a multiracial church struggles with race, racism, and social activism during a turbulent time in U.S. history. In the shadow of the murder of George Floyd, the authors show how members and leaders of Without Walls Church, a multiracial church claiming over thirty-six thousand members, perpetuate a racial ideology based in color-blind theological teachings that minimizes teachings on racism in the church and social activism outside the church. Barnes and Carter also shed light on church practices and policies that reproduce racial inequality and shaped the church’s early response to the murder of George Floyd. Original Sin? shows us that despite being diverse places of worship and despite shifting demographics, churches like this one face challenges that lead to the reproduction of the racial status quo.

Resisting Reagan: Liberal Strategies in a Conservative Age
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Authors: Joe J. Ryan-Hume
Discipline: History

Description:
Ryan-Hume examines how Democrats and liberal organizations changed their strategies in the wake of the Reagan Revolution, arguing that they were more successful than is typically acknowledged.

Rhetoric and Resistance: The Literary Arts of Dissent in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Author: Maeve Adams
Author Affiliation: Lehman College
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
This book explores how nineteenth-century literature shaped modern democratic dissent through fiction, poetry, and journalism. It traces dissent’s literary history from Romantic and Victorian writers to modern movements like #MeToo. By linking literary forms with modern political theory, it offers insights into sustaining democracy today.

Satan and His Friends: A Minimalist Approach for Believers
Publisher: ACU Press
Author: Edmon L. Gallagher
Author Affiliation: Abilene Christian University
Discipline: Religion

Description:
Neither God nor his Word give place to the Devil. Western tradition has enshrined what Gallagher calls a “Satan maximalist” approach to the evil spiritual beings mentioned in the Bible, finding the devil and his army of fallen angels everywhere. But what does Scripture actually say about Satan and his wicked companions? Not much, it turns out. Gallagher calls readers to critically examine the traditional view of Satan and the demonic taking into account the full testimony of Scripture. What emerges is a vision of evil that includes a being known as Satan, but whose power and scope of influence are smaller than tradition usually suggests. The chief enemy of God is not nearly as powerful nor mentioned as frequently in the Bible as is often thought. The Bible does not center on a conflict between good and evil spiritual beings.

Scarred Landscapes: Place, Trauma, and Memory in Caribbean Latinx Art
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Author: Stephanie Lewthwaite
Author Affiliation: University of Nottingham
Discipline: Art & Art History

Description:
Scarred Landscapes is a groundbreaking exploration of the rich and complex works of Caribbean Latinx artists. This book documents the work of ten influential artists of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent, based in New York City from the 1970s to the present. Through their diverse practices, including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and performance art, these artists confront the legacies of colonial trauma and their own experiences of diasporic unbelonging and artworld marginality.

Seduction, Drive and Repetition: Freud’s Metaphysics of Trauma
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Authors: Herman Westerink and Philippe Van Haute
Author Affiliation: Radboud University; University of Pretoria
Discipline: Psychology

Description:
Seduction, Drive, and Repetition sheds new light on the thinking of Sigmund Freud: for him, drive and trauma are two sides of the same coin. In his earliest texts, Sigmund Freud defends the “seduction theory,” which holds that the origins of neurosis lie in childhood sexual traumas. It is often claimed that Freud later rejected the reality of such traumas, replacing them with Oedipal fantasies. In Seduction, Drive, and Repetition, Herman Westerink and Philippe Van Haute present a radically new reading of Freud. By closely tracing the development of his thought, they demonstrate that the reality of sexual trauma continued to shape Freud’s entire body of work. Their exploration of this issue in some of his key texts further reveals that the role of trauma extends far beyond a purely clinical concern. Freud develops a metaphysics of trauma that implies a tragic vision of human existence.

The American Open Road: Narrative and Popular Imagination
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Author: Jeffrey Alan Melton
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
Explores the roles of automobiles and mobility in American literature and film after World War II and how they have defined cultural expectations and beliefs tied to the idea of an “open road” in the United States.

The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture: Pedagogy and Practice
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Authors: Kathleen Kambic and Katya Crawford
Discipline: Garden & Landscape

Description:
Many internationally known landscape architecture / architecture firms including Snøhetta, BIG, Scape, and Weiss/Manfredi originate from design competition wins. The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture is the first book devoted to helping professional and academic design studios comprehensively plan for successful entries. Divided into five sections, The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture provides an overview of the history and development of modern design competitions; includes interviews with world-renown landscape architects and designers; offers a pedagogical approach to competition studios as part of a design curriculum; serves as a guide for entering design competitions; showcases award-winning designs from landscape architecture faculty and students and subsequent built projects from landscape architecture practitioners; reflects on future directions of landscape architecture design competitions; and provides resources for finding competitions.

The Good and the Right: A Christian Introduction to Moral Philosophy
Publisher: ACU Press
Authors: Caleb J. Clanton and Kraig Martin
Author Affiliation: Abilene Christian University
Discipline: Philosophy

Description:
Move beyond uncritical choices. The Good and the Right is a Christian introduction to the major theories of ethics in the history of philosophy, such as relativism, egoism, utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, social contract theory, natural law theory, virtue theory, and divine command theory. Philosophers J. Caleb Clanton and Kraig Martin offer a lucid survey of each ethical framework, and they carefully reconstruct and critically evaluate the case for and against each view. Along the way, the authors engage with the presuppositions, affirmations, and implications of the Christian faith in a way that takes the Christian tradition seriously. Ultimately, the authors rediscover and incrementally develop a unique but classically Christian framework for thinking about the moral life and making ethical decisions.

The Legacy of Colonial Era Postcards from British Malaya to the Present: The Visuals of Empire
Publisher: Leiden University Press
Authors: Farish A. Noor
Discipline: Asian Studies

Description:
Empire was sustained by a host of discourses and language-games, that were often articulated and reproduced in the vast body of writings that emerged between the mid 18th to early 20th centuries. Apart from the large body of written works that were in circulation during this period, the idea of Empire – and the attendant myths and pseudo-scientific theories that sustained it, from the myth of the lazy native to the idea of native anarchy – was also sustained by the visuals that accompanied these writings. This work will focus on the images of Empire that were produced with the advent of the camera and the emergence of the colonial postcard as the latest innovation in the arsenal of imperial ideology and governmentality from the late 19th century to the first decades of the 20th, and will look at the photos and postcards that were produced in both British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.

“That Tongue Be Time”: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Author: Dale M. Smith
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
Originally from Canada, Norma Cole is a revered writer and visual artist who has authored and translated over thirty books and chapbooks. Though highly esteemed internationally in both visual art and poetry circles, Cole’s association with the New College of California and her influence on artists and poets has been overlooked by scholars. Dale M. Smith seeks to remedy this in “That Tongue Be Time” by bringing together sixteen noted scholars, editors, and poets who examine Cole’s poetry, translations, and visual art in order to place her within the larger scholarly conversation about contemporary poetry and poetics. The book also includes a number of black-and-white reproductions of Cole’s art and a contextual introduction by Smith. “That Tongue Be Time” provides a groundbreaking look at Norma Cole’s lasting influence on multiple generations of poets, visual artists, and scholars and should be on the shelf of anyone interested in contemporary poetry.

Truth Be Told: White Nostalgia and Antiracist Queer Resistance in “Post-Truth” America
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Author: Elliot Laura Tetreault
Discipline: Gender Studies

Description:
In Truth Be Told: White Nostalgia and Antiracist Queer Resistance in “Post-Truth” America, Elliot Laura Tetreault hones in on the “post-truth” moment, arguing that while it may seem to be one of the latest manifestations of white supremacist rhetoric, it is actually how white supremacy has always functioned—with effects that have always been especially dire for Black, POC, queer, and otherwise marginalized communities. Using this understanding of post-truth, Tetreault argues that contemporary American political strategies of both the right wing and the mainstream left operate by denying accountability, and that this denial of accountability underlies what is commonly represented as “post-truth.” Further, they theorize that activists working from a Black queer feminist stance have been especially effective in developing creative rhetorical strategies for countering disinformation, grounded in calls for restoring this dodged accountability.

Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Author: Jess Libow
Author Affiliation: Haverford College
Discipline: Gender Studies

Description:
Nineteenth-century America saw profound changes in the ways people viewed their bodies, their health, and their corporeal connection to their environments. Though much of the writing about bodies was produced by men, Vigorous Reforms focuses on the understudied literary history of how women came to understand physicality and its connection to their everyday lives. The introduction of physical education allowed women to conceive their own and others’ bodies not as static entities, but as adaptable to their own needs, goals, and labor. Jess Libow also shows the limits of the science of the era—since bodily differences were often understood as biologically determined, theories of health defined womanhood in terms of racialized bodily abilities. For example, settler colonial ideology coded Native women as deteriorating due to their “uncivilized” ways of life, and proponents of slavery insisted that Black women’s inherent strength made them suitable for enslavement.

“We Are All Chile”: Representations of Difference in Contemporary Chilean Historical Fiction
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Author: Katherine Karr-Cornejo
Discipline: Latin American Studies

Description:
A study of the relationship between literature and the current conditions of national life, We Are All Chile explores how artistic expression reflects lived experience. The book travels through figures, symbols and events in Chilean history from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries as represented through historical fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, an oeuvre that uses historical stories to reflect upon the challenges of Chilean society post-dictatorship. Contrasting the use of these stories with previous understanding highlights the power of legacies of the dictatorial authoritarian state, particularly as they shape possibilities for the full flourishing of people without regard for their minoritized or disadvantaged identities, such as their sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or race. This treatment of Chilean history and culture brings together literature and historiography to offer powerful interpretations of cultural narratives.

Visible strangers: Early modern urban identities, social visibility, and the Mediterranean paradigm
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Filomena Viviana Tagliaferri
Author Affiliation: University of Modena; Institute of Mediterranean Europe History of the Italian Research Council (ISEM-CNR)
Discipline: History

Description:
Visible strangers is a collection of essays on the nature of cultural pluralism in the Mediterranean and the different ways in which this was managed in various cities during the early modern period. The book’s nine chapters considers new case studies, where authors offer a diachronic view of the nature of the co-presence of minorities in different urban spaces, investigated through the lens of the fascinating relationship between visibility and identity. The considered case studies cover different areas of the Mediterranean space: the Adriatic, the Ottoman empire between Asia and Africa, the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, the island of Malta, at the centre of the Mare Nostrum and host to many of its influences. The analysis of the way cultural pluralism expressed itself wishes to overcome the bias induced by ‘Mediterraneanism’, that has led to the Mediterranean as an area of study hardening into a conceptual category.

Writing power: Intellectuals, legitimacy, and the making of knowledge
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Saorfhlaith Victoria Alexandra Burton
Author Affiliation: Robert Gordon University
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
Writing power radically rethinks the place of the canon and canonicity as objects and concepts in contemporary academia and the everyday intellectual practices of academics. It is distinctive in its demonstration of how academics’ engagements with canons shape their writing practices but also how scholars’ writing practices, spaces, proclivities, and desires shape the canon and changing ideas of value in canonicity. The book thinks through frequently discussed problems of legitimacy and knowledge production from fresh perspectives of lived experience and the everyday to offer new insights into the politics of knowledge in contemporary social sciences.

Yorùbá Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Author: Toyin Falola
Author Affiliation: University of Texas
Discipline: Religion

Description:
Offering a fresh perspective on Yorùbá metaphysics and spirituality—and the roles these elements play in African communities—this comprehensive study contributes to the fields of philosophy, religious studies, and African studies by highlighting how indigenous epistemologies can inform broader discussions of ethics and societal development.