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  Culturing interface: Identity, communication, and Chinese transnationalism

  Hsin-I Cheng

  This book investigates the experiences of a Chinese and Taiwanese community on the U.S.-Mexico border from a critical communication perspective. Based on ethnographic material from El Paso/Juárez, the book critically explores the processes of identity-crafting in accordance with the global geopolitical landscape. By examining the everyday communications within a group of transnational travelers and dwellers in between boundaries, the book illustrates how cultural practices and identities are strategically accomplished through communication.
  In tracing the forces behind these transnational movements and understanding the multiple worlds of travelers and dwellers, Culturing Interface brings to light the previously unheard voices of the Chinese people on the U.S.-Mexico border.

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  Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research: An Introduction

  Laura L. Ellingson

  Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research, the first "how to" book to both explain and demonstrate crystallization methodology, offers a framework for blending grounded theory and other social scientific analyses with creative representations of data, such as narratives, poetry, and film. Author Laura L. Ellingson explores relevant epistemological questions that arise when crossing methodological boundaries, provides detailed steps for design and planning, offers guidelines for improving both social scientific and creative/artistic writing, and suggests strategies for targeting publication outlets for multigenre representations.

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  Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography

  Eileen Razzari Elrod

  For pious converts to Christianity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England, all reality was shaped by religious devotion and biblical text. It is therefore not surprising that earnest believers who found themselves marginalized by their race or sex relied on their faith to reconcile the tension between the spiritual experience of rebirth and the social ordeal of exclusion and injustice. In Piety and Dissent, Eileen Razzari Elrod examines the religious autobiographies of six early Americans who represented various sorts of marginality: John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and Jarena Lee, all of African or African American heritage; Samson Occom (Mohegan) and William Apess (Pequot); and Abigail Abbott Bailey, a white woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence. Through close readings of these personal narratives, Elrod uncovers the complex rhetorical strategies employed by pious outsiders to challenge the particular kinds of oppression each experienced. She identifies recurrent ideals and images drawn from Scripture and Protestant tradition—parables of liberation, rage, justice, and opposition to authority—that allowed them to see resistance as a religious act and, more than that, imbued them with a sense of agency. What the life stories of these six individuals reveal, according to Elrod, is that conventional Christianity in early America was not the hegemonic force that church leaders at the time imagined, and that many people since have believed it to be. Nor was there a clear distinction between personal piety and religious, social, and political resistance. To understand fully the role of religion in the early period of American letters, we must rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions about the function of Christian faith in the context of individual lives.

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  Horse Trading in the Era of Cars: Men in the Marketplace

  Steven M. Gelber

  The trading, selling, and buying of personal transport has changed little over the past one hundred years. Whether horse trading in the early twentieth century or car buying today, haggling over prices has been the common practice of buyers and sellers alike. Horse Trading in the Age of Cars offers a fascinating study of the process of buying an automobile in a historical and gendered context.

  Steven M. Gelber convincingly demonstrates that the combative and frequently dishonest culture of the showroom floor is a historical artifact whose origins lie in the history of horse trading. Bartering and bargaining were the norm in this predominantly male transaction, with both buyers and sellers staking their reputations and pride on their ability to negotiate the better deal. Gelber comments on this point-of-sale behavior and what it reveals about American men.

  Gelber's highly readable and lively prose makes clear how this unique economic ritual survived into the industrial twentieth century, in the process adding a colorful and interesting chapter to the history of the automobile.

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  India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms

  John C. Hawley

  India in Africa, Africa in India traces the longstanding interaction between these two regions, showing that the Indian Ocean world provides many examples of cultural flows that belie our understanding of globalization as a recent phenomenon. This region has had, and continues to have, an internal integrity that touches the lives of its citizens in their commerce, their cultural exchanges, and their concepts of each other and of themselves in the world. These connections have deep historical roots, and their dynamics are not attributable solely to the effects of European colonialism, modernity, or contemporary globalization―although these forces have left their mark. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume come from the fields of history, literature, dance, sociology, gender studies, and religion, making this collection unique in its recreation of an entire world too seldom considered as such.

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  LGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia

  John C. Hawley

  Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture is a vibrant and rapidly evolving segment of the American mosaic. This book gives students and general readers a current guide to the people and issues at the forefront of contemporary LGBTQ America. Included are more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries on literature and the arts, associations and organizations, individuals, law and public policy concerns, health and relationships, sexual issues, and numerous other topics. Entries are written by distinguished authorities and cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students in social studies, history, and literature classes will welcome this book's illumination of American cultural diversity.

  LGBTQ Americans have endured many struggles, and during the last decade in particular they have made tremendous contributions to our multicultural society. Drawing on the expertise of numerous expert contributors, this book gives students and general readers a current overview of contemporary LGBTQ American culture.

  Sweeping in scope, the encyclopedia looks at literature and the arts, associations and organizations, individuals, law and public policy concerns, health and relationships, sexual practices, and various other areas.

  Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. While extensive biographical entries give readers a sense of the lives of prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Americans, the many topical entries provide full coverage of the challenges and contributions for which these people are known. The encyclopedia supports the social studies curriculum by helping students learn about cultural diversity, and it supports the literature curriculum by helping students learn about LGBTQ writers and their works.

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  A Separate Star: Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson (California Legacy)

  Helen Hunt Jackson and Michelle Burnham

  The complex legacy of a pioneer woman writer and advocate for Native American justice

  Best known for A Century of Dishonor and Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson was a widely published writer in the mid-nineteenth century. Her work spanned two decades and ranged from many anonymous pieces of travel writing to poetry, romantic fiction, children's literature, and parenting advice. Along with popular literature, she was also writing and publishing tracts, novels, and articles on the conditions Native Americans were living under after a century of dealing with the U.S. government and American settlers. While the nonfiction A Century of Dishonor, written after extensive research and intrepid travel, brought attention to what was happening to Indians, it was Ramona that captured the public's imagination. In much the same way that Uncle Tom's Cabin exposed the cruelty of slavery, the love story Ramona depicted the plight of southern California's landless Indians and changed the perception of many about the laws and policies of the day.

  A Separate Star is shaped by the editor's interest in presenting, through selections not readily found in print today, a portrait of Jackson as a writer whose attitudes and beliefs on an array of subjects influenced her times. Were she around today, it would be easy to imagine Jackson as an activist at the center of domestic and cultural political issues. Her work is still compelling and clearly part of the long road to change that we are on today.

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  Mourning Religion (Studies in Religion and Culture)

  Diane Jonte-Pace

  Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists such as Freud, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx built their intellectual edifices on what they thought would be the remains or ruins of religion in the wake of modernization. But today the decline and disappearance of religion can no longer be simply assumed. In the face of contemporary entanglements of religion and violence, the establishment of meaning and morality remains troubling; the experience of loss and change remains, paradoxically, constant; and new theoretical perspectives--feminism, race studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, postmodernism--have emerged, challenging the works that mourned religion and created meaning in earlier periods. The effects of this ongoing experience of mourning and symbolic loss on culture, on subjectivity, and on the academic disciplines of religious studies, though immense, are poorly understood and underinterpreted.

  In order to correct this lacuna in scholarly thought, this volume brings together a notable group of scholars who examine the ways in which recent cultural transformations inform the place of religion in the modern world. Methodologically, they represent the intersection of religious studies and the social scientific study of religion, bringing the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology into this dialogue.

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  Asia's New Mothers: Crafting gender roles and childcare networks in East and Southeast Asian societies

  Barbara Molony and Emiko Ochiai

  Through a focus on childcare, this offers a comparative regional analysis unique in English-language sources of changing gender roles in Asia. Taking into consideration the historical and cultural differences and similarities among the societies in the region, the authors employ indepth researches of people’s everyday experiences., Through a focus on childcare, this offers a comparative regional analysis unique in English-language sources of changing gender roles in Asia. Taking into consideration the historical and cultural differences and similarities among the societies in the region, the authors employ indepth researches of people’s everyday experiences.

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  Gendering Modern Japanese History

  Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno

  In the past quarter-century, gender has emerged as a lively area of inquiry for historians and other scholars, and gender analysis has suggested important revisions of the “master narratives” of national histories—the dominant, often celebratory tales of the successes of a nation and its leaders. Although modern Japanese history has not yet been restructured by a foregrounding of gender, historians of Japan have begun to embrace gender as an analytic category.

  The sixteen chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations in the period from 1868 to the present. All of them take the position that history is gendered; that is, historians invariably, perhaps unconsciously, construct a gendered notion of past events, people, and ideas. Together, these essays construct a history informed by the idea that gender matters because it was part of the experience of people and because it often has been a central feature in the construction of modern ideologies, discourses, and institutions. Separately, each chapter examines how Japanese have (en)gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.

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  Hanging by a Thread: Cotton, Globalization and Poverty in Africa

  William G. Moseley and Leslie C. Gray

  The textile industry was one of the first manufacturing activities to become organized globally, as mechanized production in Europe used cotton from the various colonies. Africa, the least developed of the world’s major regions, is now increasingly engaged in the production of this crop for the global market, and debates about the pros and cons of this trend have intensified.

  Hanging by a Thread: Cotton, Globalization, and Poverty in Africa illuminates the connections between Africa and the global economy. The editors offer a compelling set of linked studies that detail one aspect of the globalization process in Africa, the cotton commodity chain.

  From global policy debates, to impacts on the natural environment, to the economic and social implications of this process, Hanging by a Thread explores cotton production in the postcolonial period from different disciplinary perspectives and in a range of national contexts. This approach makes the globalization process palpable by detailing how changes at the macroeconomic level play out on the ground in the world’s poorest region. Hanging by a Thread offers new insights on the region in a global context and provides a critical perspective on current and future development policy for Africa.

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  The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s (Consumption and Public Life)

  Amy E. Randall

  In the early 1930s Soviet authorities launched a campaign to create "socialist" retailing and also endorsed Soviet consumerism. How did the Stalinist regime reconcile retailing and consumption with socialism? This book examines the discourses that the Stalinist regime's new approach to retailing and consumption engendered.

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  Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer

  Nancy Unger

  Now in paperback with a new preface, this comprehensive biography weaves the triumph and the tragedy of the public and private lives of the most famous of Wisconsin leaders, Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette. As a U.S. representative, governor of Wisconsin, and U.S. Senator, La Follette's political legacies have been long lasting; among them are the election of senators by constituents, creation of the Department of Labor and the Federal Trade Commission, women's suffrage, and workers' compensation. Through the personal letters, diaries, and documents of the La Follette family, Unger uses the private life of La Follette as a means for understanding the public figure. Thoroughly researched and documented, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer is a testament to the progressive tradition in Wisconsin and its premier leader.