The contributors to Feeling Democracy examine how both reactionary and progressive politics in the twenty-first century are driven largely by emotional appeals to the public. These essays cover everything from immigrants’ rights movements to white nationalist rallies to show how solidarities forged around gender, race, and sexuality become catalysts for a passionate democratic politics.

Cruel Destiny (Cruelle Destinée) and The White Negress (La Blanche Négresse) are the first and second novels published by a Haitian woman, Cléante Valcin. Translated to English now for the first time by Jeanne Jégousso, these novels offer an incisive perspective on the fate, romance, and reversals of characters in Haiti, the Pearl of the Antilles, during the 1920s and 1930s.

Criminalized Lives profiles people charged in Canada with the crime of not disclosing their HIV-positive status to sex partners. Examining how criminalization disproportionately punishes poor, Black and Indigenous people, gay men, and women in Canada, Alexander McClelland investigates the consequences of criminalizing illness, which results in people being subjected to state violence rather than treated with care.
 

In Brotherhood University, Brandon A. Jackson examines how a group of collegiate Black men form an emotion culture characterized by vulnerability, loyalty, and trust, which facilitated the creation of brotherhood. This enduring bond provided the men with the necessary social support to navigate the precarity of the transition to adulthood and gendered racism both during and after college.
 

Combining literary analysis with historical research, Thomas Gustafson examines how Philip Roth’s acclaimed 1997 novel American Pastoral draws upon the history of Brookside, New Jersey as its model for the fictional hamlet of Old Rimrock. American Anti-Pastoral peels back myths about the bucolic Garden State countryside to reveal deep fissures within the heart of American democracy.

The Specter and the Speculative examines how historical subjects and texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized. The essays, by emergent and established scholars, explore how “living” archives circulate and haunt the popular imagination, engendering afterlives and liberating prior narratives from their original context.

The Specter and the Speculative examines how historical subjects and texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized. The essays, by emergent and established scholars, explore how “living” archives circulate and haunt the popular imagination, engendering afterlives and liberating prior narratives from their original context.

Wake: Why the Battle Over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters tells the story of the aftermath of the 2009 Wake County school board election in favor of "neighborhood schools," including the fierce public debate that ensued during school board meetings and in the pages of the local newspaper, and the groundswell of community support that voted in a pro-diversity school board in 2011. What was at stake in those years was the fundamental direction of the largest school district in North Carolina and the 14th largest in the U.S. Would it maintain a commitment to diverse schools, and if so, how would it balance that commitment with various competing interests and demands? Through hundreds of published opinion articles and several in depth interviews with community leaders, Wake examines the substance of that debate and explores the community’s vision for public education.

This is the first book to examine how and why the United States refused to officially acknowledge the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide until the early 2020s. Drawing from congressional records, rare newspapers, and interviews with lobbyists and decision-makers, historian Julien Zarifian reveals how genocide recognition became such a complex, politically sensitive issue.

The Other Jersey Shore takes readers on a personal tour of the New Jersey portion of the Delaware River and its surroundings, from the archeological remnants of the former King of Spain’s mansion to waterfalls where bears and foxes frolic. Combining history and nature writing, it shares engrossing stories and surprising facts about a river that is both the backbone and lifeblood of the Garden State.