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

African Women’s Histories in European Narratives. The Afropolitan Krio Fernandino Diaspora (1850-1996)
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Author: Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré
Discipline: History

Description:
Nothing is known of the African women who settled in Europe at the end of the 19th century, nor does anyone dare to imagine them as wealthy, elegantly dressed women with refined tastes, fluent in several languages. Who were these African women who transcended the barriers of race and gender in colonial Africa and the major European metropolis? How did they exercise power and authority? How were they received by Europeans? What kind of treatment awaited other Africans? The author addresses these questions by focusing on women’s perspectives in history, presenting a historical ethnography against a decolonial backdrop.The study highlights women from the Krio Fernandino community, most notably the figure of Amelia Barleycorn de Vivour (1860? Santa Isabel – 1920 Barcelona).

Another Magic Mountain: Kibong’oto Hospital and African Tuberculosis, 1920–2000
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Author: Christoph Gradmann
Author Affiliation: University of Oslo
Discipline: African Studies

Description:
Although one of the world’s deadliest diseases, tuberculosis today is confined to a small group of countries, including Tanzania. This book chronicles tuberculosis treatment at a specialized hospital from colonial to postcolonial times, and from the days when surgery and fresh air were common treatments to more recent times of chemotherapies and the HIV/tuberculosis coepidemic.

Children’s Health and Urban Ecology in England, 1885–1919
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Author: Jim Harris
Discipline: Public Health

Description:
Analyzes public health efforts to reduce infant mortality and improve children’s health in three large English cities: Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester.

Courage in the Sheer Silence: Challenging Racism in the 20th-Century Churches of Christ

Publisher: ACU Press
Author: Wes Crawford
Discipline: History
Author Affiliation: Abilene Christian University

Description:
After the fire came a sound of sheer silence. When the civil rights movement shook the United States, Churches of Christ largely remained silent. Only a few brave voices dared to speak out. Historian Wes Crawford, drawing inspiration from the prophet Elijah’s discovery of God’s presence in the “sheer silence,” invites readers to explore this era and the largely overlooked stories of a handful of ministers who risked everything to challenge racism within the church. Crawford’s groundbreaking work begins with twentieth-century church leaders who openly supported White supremacy or turned a blind eye. Under their watchful guidance, they carefully managed the cultural engagement of Churches of Christ through colleges, journals, and lectureship gatherings. He then highlights the lesser-known heroes, like Carl Spain, John Allen Chalk, Walter Burch, Dwain Evans, and Bud Stumbaugh, who spoke out against the establishment at high personal and professional costs. Their sacrifices and bravery offer lessons that resonate to this day.

Deliberating Ghana: Postcolonial Rhetorics, Culture, and Democracy
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Author: Stephen Kwame Dadugblor
Author Affiliation: University of British Columbia
Discipline: Communication Studies

Description:
Deliberating Ghana situates rhetorical studies of democracy within African epistemologies, calling attention to how centering postcolony can contribute to moving beyond well-worn binaries of West/non-West in studies of rhetoric, democracy, and deliberation, and toward decolonial possibilities.

In the Face of Diversity: A history of Chinese Australian community organisations 1970s–2020s
Publisher: Sydney University Press
Author: Nathan Gardner
Discipline: Asian Studies

Description:
The book is a history of more than a dozen Chinese Australian community organisations from across the country over five decades that draws on the English- and Chinese-language materials these organisations have produced over the years, as well as interviews with ten past and present leaders. Instead of a single community. The evidence demonstrates the existence of many diverse Chinese Australian communities. The result is a work that dismantles the prevailing myth of a single Chinese bloc to rebuild an appreciation of multiculturalism in Australia along with specific contributions made by Chinese Australian communities.

No Power Greater: The History of Union Action in Australia
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Author: Liam Byrne
Discipline: Political Science

Description:
Unions are making a comeback. Labour disputes around the world have hit the headlines as unions take action to challenge inequality. But while media coverage has increased, understanding of unions has not. In this lively history of Australian unionism Liam Byrne seeks to illuminate what unionism means, exploring why successive generations of working people organised unions and nurtured them for future generations. Foregrounding the pioneering efforts of women workers, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers, culturally and linguistically diverse workers, and LGBTIQA+ workers as central to the union story today, Byrne uses case studies of worker action and struggle to better understand the lived reality of unionism, its challenges, and its contribution to Australian life. No Power Greater is the compelling story of the acts of rebellion and solidarity that have shaped Australia’s past and shows that unions are far from history.

Out Doing Science: LGBTQ Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Authors: Tom Waidzunas; Ethan Czuy Levine; Brandon Fairchild
Discipline: Science & Technology Studies

Description:
Over the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer professionals have organized to achieve greater inclusion into the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This inclusion, however, has come at a cost. In the 1970s, these professionals sought to radically transform STEM fields by confronting the homophobia and sexism embedded within them. Instead, these fields became more corporatized and privatized, and STEM institutions and workspaces—particularly in the spheres of government and business—became dominated by a focus on individualism, self-improvement/advancement, and meritocracy, which are hallmarks of neoliberalism. For many LGBTQ STEM professionals, inclusion now required becoming more apolitical, pro-capital, and focused on professional development.

Pathos and Power: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Widowhood in Africa, Past and Present
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Author: Benjamin N. Lawrance; Joanna Davidson
Author Affiliation: University of Arizona; Boston University
Discipline: African Studies

Description:
This interdisciplinary volume on widowhood in Africa offers in-depth perspectives on a previously underexplored subject. Empirical case studies from across the continent make the book an excellent resource for teaching gender studies in African contexts.

Prince, Musical Genre, and the Construction of Racial Identity
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Author: Griffin Woodworth
Discipline: African American Studies

Description:
Throughout his career, the Minneapolis musician Prince was known for fusing different musical genres as well as moving between different identities—sexual lothario, devout man of God, androgynous sprite—qualities that fit the postmodernism of the 1980s. This volume takes a fresh look at Prince’s work, arguing that his music was deeply informed by the history and techniques of Black culture, and that his multigenre fluency and changeable image were weapons that he deployed in a career-long fight against the racially segregated structures of the American music industry. Using a methodology that mixes musicology with African American literary theory, queer theory, and gender studies, this book analyzes the ways that Prince mixed and manipulated musical genres that are indexed to racial identities—such as “White” rock or new-wave, and “Black” funk, gospel, or R&B—in order to construct pluralistic identities. Each chapter includes detailed musical analyses and transcriptions of Prince’s songs, focusing on his use of rock guitar, new-wave synthesizers, funk drumming, gospel singing, and R&B horns.

Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Author: Andrea R. Morrell
Author Affiliation: City University of New York; Guttman Community College
Discipline: Anthropology

Description:
In Prison Town, Andrea R. Morrell argues that despite the barriers aimed at separating incarcerated men and free Elmira, the prison extends far beyond its walls. The flow of ideas and money and a gamut of relationships intricately connect the two. Morrell shows how the state’s economic development agencies proposed, advertised, and supervised the construction of a new state prison in Elmira as a job creation program, or “carceral reindustrialization.” Morrell examines how the punitive functions of the state government have expanded in recent decades, and how expansion of the carceral state has cultivated racial differences. Examining the daily lives of prison guards, incarcerated men, and their families in the context of the political economy of New York State, Morrell argues that the prison system’s racialized, gendered, and classed exclusion and dispossession continues to leak into the city of Elmira and the region.

Reading the Bible with Brueggemann: Scriptures Power to Remake the World
Publisher: ACU Press
Author: Robert Williamson Jr.
Author Affiliation: Abilene Christian University
Discipline: Religion

Description:
Let the Word speak freely. Walter Brueggemann has been one of the most influential Old Testament theologians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With an almost relentless pace, Brueggemann has significantly shaped biblical theology in the modern era, publishing 150 books and numerous articles. In his faithful and provocative interpretation, Brueggemann insists that the Bible has the power to remake the world, wresting the church’s imagination away from the military consumerism of the dominant culture and toward a radical vision of God’s reign, characterized by love of God and justice for the neighbor. Reading the Bible with Brueggemann presents the development of Brueggemann’s thought through nine of his most significant works, from the foundational Prophetic Imagination to the magisterial Theology of the Old Testament and beyond. In a clear and readable style, Williamson allows scholars, pastors, and laypeople alike to read the Bible with Brueggemann and learn from and apply Brueggemann’s theological method.

Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Author: Kyle Boggs
Author Affiliation: Boise State University
Discipline: American Studies

Description:
Exploration, discovery, adventure! Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors confronts the ways that settler colonial experiences and expectations have been narrated through rhetorical practices on so-called “public lands.” Bringing together for the first time theories of rhetoric, environmental studies, and settler colonialism, Kyle Boggs examines some of the striking ways that settler imaginaries are accommodated, performed, and sustained in the everyday to reveal outdoor recreation as deeply entangled with the structures that sustain settler colonialism. Fusing journalism and personal narrative with scholarly research, this book is motivated through the author’s engagement with a controversy in northern Arizona involving development by a ski resort on a mountain held sacred by at least thirteen Indigenous tribes, and uses the backdrop of camping, hiking, rock climbing, bikepacking, ultrarunning and more to ask larger questions about what it means to be a setter on stolen Indigenous land and what it means to resist settler colonialism on the lands in which we engage.

Rhetorics of Refusal: Medical Dissent and the US-Somali Diaspora
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Author: Kari Campeau
Discipline: Communication Studies

Description:
Rhetorics of Refusal focuses on a recent public health crisis—Minnesota’s 2017 measles outbreak, which primarily affected unvaccinated Somali American children—not to tell a story about anti-vaxxers and misinformation but rather to shed a new light on the way we view vaccine refusals. In Rhetorics of Refusal, Kari Campeau reports on a year-long ethnographic study at a Somali health center, where she heard stories from Somali parents that offered a much different picture of vaccine refusal than the one painted by news media. While vaccine refusal was widely presented as a failure—as a symptom of poor health literacy, of virulent disinformation, of steep access barriers, of political divides, of the creeping power of science denialism—this book, by contrast, reads these acts as strategic, informed, and generative rhetorical refusals. Campeau’s study tracks refusals across four sites—a community-run health literacy class, non-vaccination during the 2017 measles outbreak, a failed state disability program, and experimental microbiome care—to argue for the importance of seeing rhetorical refusals not as signs of noncompliance and ignorance but as rhetorical and participatory strategies that hold institutions accountable, press for change, and carve out constrained ways to practice care within emergent biosocial communities. Moreover, she views refusal as especially necessary and potentially transformative in situations where refusers have little access to power, voice, and platform. By contextualizing refusals in longer cultural and political histories, Campeau’s book unsettles traditional narratives of medical dissent while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, care, disability, and public health.

Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity: The Comics Art of Frank Quitely
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Authors: David John Boyd; Julie Briand-Boyd
Discipline: Cultural Studies

Description:
Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity explores the life and career of Glasgow-born, Eisner Award-winning, and internationally acclaimed Marvel, DC, and Image Comics artist Frank Quitely. With a prolific career spanning more than three decades, Quitely played a pivotal role in the British superhero renaissance of the 1990s and 2000s and in the explosive emergence of the Scottish new wave of comics, a movement that included peers like Alan Grant, Mark Millar, and Grant Morrison, but has been underrepresented in both comics studies and Scottish studies. This work investigates questions of historical and contemporary expressions of Scottishness in transcultural comics genres such as superhero, science fiction, and fantasy. Framed through the lens of comics and literary genres, as well as their British and American editors, Quitely’s approach to Scottishness is oblique and self-reflexive; his expressions of Scottishness are tensely bound to current nuanced examinations of Scottish national, literary and historical subjectivity. His work oscillates between two axiomatic antipodes: the regional, provincial, and local versus the transnational, cosmopolitan, and global.

Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Authors: Valentina Vapnarsky; Dominique Michelet; Philippe Nondédéo; Aurore Monod Becquelin
Author Affiliation: Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Discipline: Archaeology

Description:
Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, Temporalities in Ritual Practices examines the temporal dimensions of ritual activities in past and present Mesoamerican societies, including prehispanic, colonial, and modern periods. The authors explore rituals around three principal categories of action—creating, transforming, and destroying—as significant cultural manifestations of the temporal dimension of transition processes, engaging empirically and theoretically with the multiple temporalities of ritual in relation both to the unfolding of ritual performance and to its external and symbolic anchors. Each chapter presents new analysis of fieldwork data relative to the meaning and pragmatics of artifactual, gestural, or discursive temporal patterns, and addresses comparative and theoretical proposals on the diverse facets of ritual temporalities.

The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Author: James Yeku
Author Affiliation: University of Kansas
Discipline: African Studies

Description:
This book challenges any lingering utopianism in the role of the digital media in African cultural productions by exploring how algorithms engender a culture of outrage, conflict, and personality-driven and ego battles that distract from aesthetic and ethical evaluations of literary texts.

Tongues of Settlement: Where the World Becomes Basque
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Author: Blake Allmendinger
Author Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania; UCLA
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
Tongues of Settlement traces the way in which Basque emigrants and their descendants have adapted to the Americas, interacting with the land and its people, while inscribing their presence and producing a body of literature distinct from the literature of Euskal herria, or the Basque Country. Blake Allmendinger explores the evolving relationship between language and place, analyzing forms of remembrance—toponyms, stone carvings, arborglyphs, symbols,and texts—used to signify the Basque presence in numerous countries throughout the hemisphere, especially in the western United States, where most immigrants settled and where their descendants currently reside.

Turning the Power: Indian Boarding Schools, Native American Anthropologists, and the Race to Preserve Indigenous Cultures
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Author: Nathan Sowry
Author Affiliation: American University; National Museum of the American Indian; Smithsonian Institution
Discipline: Anthropology

Description:
In Turning the Power, Nathan Sowry examines how Native American students from the boarding school system, after an assimilated education, became key cultural informants for anthropologists conducting field work during the Victorian and Progressive Eras. Salvage anthropologists of this period relied upon Native informants to accomplish their mission of “saving” Native American cultures, thus turning many informants into Native anthropologists in the process after years of fieldwork experiences.

Where Social Identities Converge: Latin American and Latinx Youth on Screen
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Author: Traci Roberts-Camps
Author Affiliation: University of the Pacific
Discipline: Film Studies

Description:
How Latin American and Latinx women directors use adolescent girlhood to explore issues of identity, including gender, sexuality, age, race, ethnicity, socio-economic class, and national and regional origin.