The Darién Gap has become a mass migrant graveyard, as hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers navigate its perils in the hopes of reaching the United States. In the very first book on migration through the Gap, Belén Fernández puts the trajectory in compelling context, combining history, on-the-ground reporting, travelogue, memoir, and searing politico-economic analysis of a crisis that is itself largely Made-in-USA.

In a city reeling from Bolshevik revolution, a group of Ukrainian transplants formed the Factory of the Eccentric Actor—a collective devoted to the revolutionary overhaul of stagnant cultural institutions. The story of these artists and their first steps in cinema is perhaps the best kept secret in early Soviet culture.
 

Jenny Banh examines the attempt to transplant Disney's "happiest place on earth" to Hong Kong, delving into the three-way dynamics of American culture-corporation intentions; Hong Kong, China government investment; and Hong Kong and Chinese audiences. The situation poses special challenges for Disney's efforts to manage space, labor, and consumption to achieve local adaptation and business success.

Undocumented in the U. S. South is a rare look into the everyday realities of undocumented youth in K-12 public schools. In an anti-immigrant policy context, youth and their families navigate historical and current legacies and realities of segregation, racial discrimination and inequality. With a deep three-year ethnographic study, hundreds of hours of observational research, interviews, and policy analysis, Rodriguez traces the lives of undocumented youth across multiple public school settings, calling for policies that are humanizing and rooted in youth experience.

Techno-Orientalism 2.0 addresses the impact of a volatile post-COVID present on speculative futures by and about Asians. The volume engages with techno-Orientalist inflections in recent high-profile and lesser-known Asian and Asian American speculative fiction, film, television, anime, art, music, journalism, architecture, state-sponsored policy and infrastructural projects, and the now-dominant China Panic.

Techno-Orientalism 2.0 addresses the impact of a volatile post-COVID present on speculative futures by and about Asians. The volume engages with techno-Orientalist inflections in recent high-profile and lesser-known Asian and Asian American speculative fiction, film, television, anime, art, music, journalism, architecture, state-sponsored policy and infrastructural projects, and the now-dominant China Panic.

Steven Spielberg’s Children is the first book to investigate children, childhood, and Spielberg’s employment of child actors together and in depth. Through lively readings of both the celebrated performances he elicits from his young stars as well as less discussed roles this book shows children to be key players in the director’s articulation of childhood since the 1970s.
 

Race and Place considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George’s County, Maryland from 1945 through 1973.

Decolonial Care examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism and shows how media and narratives help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.

An ethnography of factory accidents and their attendant reconstructive plastic surgeries in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Connective Tissue explores notions of risk, work and labor practices, and the way meaning is made from experiences of trauma, care, and recovery. The book charts a chronology of the accident and its future impacts.

The Negotiation of Urgency ethnographically explores the everyday life of an Italian ER, where aging, economic precarity, draconian migration policies, hospital overcrowding, life and death, intersect daily. The analysis of the different, shifting ways in which triage operates and attention circulates in the ER illuminates the practical effects of the changing nature of welfare state in Italy, as elsewhere.

Amidst escalating social tensions in the 1980s, five comedic pioneers—Eddie Murphy, Paul Mooney, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Robert Townsend, and Arsenio Hall—revolutionized American comedy joining forces as Hollywood’s “Black Pack.” In The Black Pack, Artel Great delivers a comprehensive analysis of their work, exploring their success, creative strategies, defiance of systemic barriers, and enduring cultural legacy.

This edited volume brings together an exciting cross-regional inter-disciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists and others. Each chapter focuses on a different form of “creative resistance” to the last two decades of social disconnection, increased income disparity and new burdens placed on reproductive labor and the environment taking place in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Each chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday--focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.

This edited volume brings together an exciting cross-regional inter-disciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists and others. Each chapter focuses on a different form of “creative resistance” to the last two decades of social disconnection, increased income disparity and new burdens placed on reproductive labor and the environment taking place in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Each chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday--focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.

Monsters vs. Patriarchy examines female monstrosity as it appears in horror films from around the world and considers specific political, scientific, and historical contexts to better understand how we construct and reconstruct monstrosity, using an intersectional approach to examine the imposition of gender and racial hierarchies that support national power structures and horrorize female and other subjects.

Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Media and Journalism analyzes what motivates and enables women to become media leaders, what obstacles they face, how they solve problems, and the intersecting impacts of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. In addition to looking at executive leadership, it considers moral leadership and willingness to innovate. Spanning the history of U.S. commercial, non-commercial, and alternative media, the book includes cases in print, broadcast, PR, film, and digital media.  

Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Media and Journalism analyzes what motivates and enables women to become media leaders, what obstacles they face, how they solve problems, and the intersecting impacts of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. In addition to looking at executive leadership, it considers moral leadership and willingness to innovate. Spanning the history of U.S. commercial, non-commercial, and alternative media, the book includes cases in print, broadcast, PR, film, and digital media.  

Insiders, Outliers showcases the educational histories and lifewide writing experiences of adult HBCU students to illuminate critical needs for more age-inclusive practices across academia. Their cases also show the centrality of writing in fueling changes for these students and the people and institutions that they care about—including higher education.
 

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is one of the most important figures in the history of the US left. Her participation in “the working-class movement,” as she called it, spanned nearly six decades, from 1906 to 1964. It is no exaggeration to claim that Flynn was involved in just about every major campaign of the left in the first two thirds of the twentieth century. It was her politics, not her commitment to the Constitution, which bothered her critics and relegated her to the margins of civil liberties history. The end of the Cold War has made it possible finally to write her into the center of civil liberties history where she belongs.

Climate Bridge compares New Jersey and the German Ruhr Region to build an international perspective on how to enact climate action at the government-public interface. The book grew from fifteen years of collaboration between scholars in New Jersey and Germany through summer programs, a landscape architecture design studio, internships for Rutgers students, and joint publications. Notably, settlement patterns and brownfield issues reveal similarities between the underserved in both regions. 

Emile Weaver seemed like the perfect college student—a studious, athletic, and popular sorority sister. So why did she kill her newborn baby? American Infanticide answers this question by situating Emile’s tragic crime in a long intellectual and social history that reveals why our legal responses to infanticide are so deeply misguided.
 

This book explains how, in less than 100 years, Queens transformed from an agricultural hinterland to a vital urban corridor. This richly illustrated, vital work of history charts the rapid transformation of the Queens landscape and identifies what drove the borough’s development.
 

Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers is the first book to explore in detail noir storytelling in cinema and on radio. Arguing that radio’s noir dramas were a counterpart to, influence on, or a spin-off from the noir films, this scrupulously researched yet accessible study challenges conventional understandings of noir as well as shedding new light on a medium that was cinema’s major rival.
 

The first intensive study of Mervyn LeRoy’s work, as varied in form as it is crucial to an understanding of American cinema and American culture.

The first intensive study of Mervyn LeRoy’s work, as varied in form as it is crucial to an understanding of American cinema and American culture.

The first biography of prolific modern American artist Leon Bibel, this book tells how a boy from a Jewish shtetl received support from New Deal agencies that recognized his talents. Reprinting over 240 of Bibel’s works, many in vivid color, it reveals how he depicted everything from the horrors of lynching to the pleasures of everyday life.  

Imagining the Tropics is a history of the development of tourism in the Caribbean across the twentieth century that focuses on the ways women’s labors of hospitality, writing, and advocacy built the industry and its ubiquitous imagery of tropical island relaxation, escape, and romance.

A new edition of 1897’s Citizen Bird, the first birding guide for children and a vital text in the history of American conservationism, updated with explanatory footnotes, supplemental historical material, and a new introduction that places the book in its cultural context.