UBC Press

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A Place at the Multicultural Table

A Place at the Multicultural Table

The Development of an American Hinduism

By Prema Kurien

Rutgers University Press

In A Place at the Multicultural Table, Prema A. Kurien shows how various Hindu American organizations--religious, cultural, and political--are attempting to answer the puzzling questions of identity outside their homeland. Drawing on the experiences of both immigrant and American-born Hindu Americans, Kurien demonstrates how religious ideas and practices are being imported, exported, and reshaped in the process. The result of this transnational movement is an American Hinduism--an organized, politicized, and standardized version of that which is found in India.

Transcultural Bodies

Transcultural Bodies

Female Genital Cutting in Global Context

Edited by Ylva K Hernlund and Bettina K Shell-Duncan

Rutgers University Press

Bringing together thirteen essays, Transcultural Bodies provides an ethnographically rich exploration of FGC among African diasporas in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Contributors analyze changes in ideologies of gender and sexuality in immigrant communities, the frequent marginalization of African women's voices in debates over FGC, and controversies over legislation restricting the practice in immigrant populations.

Armed Forces

Armed Forces

Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film

By Robert Eberwein

Rutgers University Press

In war films, the portrayal of deep friendships between men is commonplace. Given the sexually anxious nature of the American imagination, such bonds are often interpreted as carrying a homoerotic subtext. In Armed Forces , Robert Eberwein argues that an expanded conception of masculinity and sexuality is necessary in order to understand more fully the intricacy of these intense and emotional human relationships.

Teenage Witches

Teenage Witches

Magical Youth and the Search for the Self

By Helen Berger and Douglas Ezzy

Rutgers University Press

A popular new image of Witches has arisen in recent years, due largely to movies like The Craft, Practical Magic, and Simply Irresistible and television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Charmed. Here, young sexy Witches use magic and Witchcraft to gain control over their lives and fight evil. Yet, as Helen A. Berger and Douglas Ezzy show in this in-depth look into the lives of teenage Witches, the reality of their practices, beliefs, values, and motivations is very different from the sensational depictions we see in popular culture.

The authors trace the development of Neo-Paganism (an umbrella term used to distinguish earth-based religions from the pagan religions of ancient cultures) from its start in England during the 1940s, through its growing popularity in the decades that followed, up through its contemporary presence on the Internet. Though dispersed and disorganized, Neo-Pagan communities, virtual and real, are shown to be an important part of religious identity particularly for those seeking affirmation during the difficult years between childhood and adulthood.

City That Never Sleeps

City That Never Sleeps

New York and the Filmic Imagination

Edited by Murray Pomerance

Rutgers University Press

New York, more than any other city, has held a special fascination for filmmakers and viewers. In every decade of Hollywood filmmaking, artists of the screen have fixated upon this fascinating place for its tensions and promises, dazzling illumination and fearsome darkness. From Street Scene and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Rosemary's Baby, The Warriors, and 25th Hour, the sixteen essays in this book explore the cinematic representation of New York as a city of experience, as a locus of ideographic characters and spaces, as a city of moves and traps, and as a site of allurement and danger.

Surgery Junkies

Surgery Junkies

Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture

By Victoria Pitts-Taylor

Rutgers University Press

Despite the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery, there are still those who identify individuals who opt for bodily modifications as dupes of beauty culture, as being in conflict with feminist ideals, or as having some form of psychological weakness. In this ground-breaking book, Victoria Pitts-Taylor examines why we consider some cosmetic surgeries to be acceptable or even beneficial and others to be unacceptable and possibly harmful.

American Cinema of the 1980s

American Cinema of the 1980s

Themes and Variations

Edited by Stephen Prince

Rutgers University Press

During the 1980s, American cinema underwent enormous transformations. Blockbusters like Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and The Empire Strikes Back grabbed huge revenues for the studios. At the same time, the growth of home video led to new and creative opportunities for independent film production, resulting in many of the decade's best films. Bringing together original essays by ten respected scholars in the field, American Cinema of the 1980s examines the films that marked the decade, including Ordinary People, Body Heat, Blade Runner, Zelig, Platoon, Top Gun, Aliens, Blue Velvet, Robocop, Fatal Attraction, Die Hard, Batman, and sex, lies & videotape .

This Was New Jersey As Seen by Photographer Harry C. Dorer

This Was New Jersey As Seen by Photographer Harry C. Dorer

Edited by John T. Cunningham

Rutgers University Press, Rivergate Books

Harry C. Dorer roamed New Jersey for four decades from 1920 until 1954 with his boxy Speed Graphic camera, capturing for a weekly newspaper the images of what is now a vanished landscape. From the state's cities and villages to its rural areas to the then-mysterious Pine Barrens and the fishing fleets at the Jersey Shore, Dorer amassed hundreds of images that revealed the region's rapidly changing countryside, customs, and social dynamics. Bringing together more than 300 of Dorer's photographs, this stunning collection is no ordinary look at New Jersey's past. Dorer's always incisive eye provides a visual record of the state's history that is unsettling, shocking, enchanting, and endearing.

A People's History of the European Court of Human Rights

A People's History of the European Court of Human Rights

By Michael Goldhaber

Rutgers University Press

Michael Goldhaber introduces American audiences to the judicial arm of the Council of Europe—a group distinct from the European Union, and much larger—whose mission is centered on interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council routinely confronts nations over their most culturally-sensitive, hot-button issues. It has stared down France on the issue of Muslim immigration; Ireland on abortion; Greece on Greek Orthodoxy; Turkey on Kurdish separatism; Austria on Nazism; and Britain on gay rights and corporal punishment. And what is most extraordinary is that nations commonly comply.

In the battle for the world’s conscience, Goldhaber shows how the court in Strasbourg may be pulling ahead.

Cottages and Mansions of the Jersey Shore

Cottages and Mansions of the Jersey Shore

By Caroline Seebohm and Peter Cook

Rutgers University Press, Rivergate Books

In this delightful collection of personal accounts, historical anecdotes, and gorgeous photographs, Caroline Seebohm and Peter C. Cook cast a fresh eye on the dazzling array of quaint cottages, quirky bungalows, and splendid mansions that generation after generation have chosen as their summer homes. They explore the grand nineteenth-century palaces of Spring Lake and Bay Head, the private mansions of Deal and Allenhurst, and the charming surprises of Cape May Point. Through the cooperation of local residents, they also provide a rare look into some of the most secret and elusive private homes.

Body Evidence

Body Evidence

Intimate Violence against South Asian Women in America

Edited by Shamita Das Dasgupta

Rutgers University Press

In Body Evidence, more than twenty scholars and public health professionals uncover the unique challenges faced by victims of violence in intimate spaces . . . within families, communities and trusted relationships in South Asian American communities. Topics include cultural obsession with women's chastity and virginity; the continued silence surrounding intimate violence among women who identify themselves as lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; the consequences of refusing marriage proposals or failing to meet dowry demands; and, ultimately, the ways in which the United States courts often confuse and exacerbate the plights of these women.

The Two Lives of Sally Miller

The Two Lives of Sally Miller

A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans

By Carol Wilson

Rutgers University Press

In The Two Lives of Sally Miller, Carol Wilson explores this fascinating legal case and its reflection on broader questions about race, society, and law in the antebellum South. Why did a court system known for its extreme bias against African Americans help to free a woman who was believed by many to be a black slave? Wilson explains that while the notion of white enslavement was shocking, it was easier for society to acknowledge that possibility than the alternative-an African slave who deceived whites and triumphed over the system.

Coming to Term

Coming to Term

Uncovering the Truth About Miscarriage

Rutgers University Press

After his wife lost four pregnancies, Jon Cohen set out to gather the most comprehensive and accurate information on miscarriage-a topic shrouded in myth, hype, and uncertainty. The result of his mission is a uniquely revealing and inspirational book for every woman who has lost at least one pregnancy-and for her partner, family, and close friends. Approaching the topic from a reporter's perspective, Cohen takes us on an intriguing journey into the laboratories and clinics of researchers at the front, weaving together their cutting-edge findings with intimate portraits of a dozen families who have had difficulty bringing a baby to term.

Haunted Life

Haunted Life

Visual Culture and Black Modernity

By David Marriott

Rutgers University Press

Drawing on a range of comparative readings by writers, theorists, and filmmakers, including John Edgar Wideman, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Issac Julien, Alain Locke, and Sidney Poitier, Haunted Life is a bold and original exploration of the legacies of black visual culture and the political, deeply sexualized violence that lies buried beneath it.

Interfaith Encounters in America

Interfaith Encounters in America

By Kate McCarthy

Rutgers University Press

From its most cosmopolitan urban centers to the rural Midwest, the United States is experiencing a rising tide of religious interest. While terrorist attacks keep Americans fixed on an abhorrent vision of militant Islam, popular films such as The Passion of the Christ and The Da Vinci Code make blockbuster material of the origins of Christianity. Beneath the superficial banter of the media and popular culture, however, are quieter conversations about what it means to be religious in America today—conversations among recent immigrants about how to adapt their practices to life in new land, conversations among young people who are finding new meaning in religions rejected by their parents, conversations among the religiously unaffiliated about eclectic new spiritualities encountered in magazines, book groups, or online. Interfaith Encounters in America takes a compelling look at these seldom acknowledged exchanges, showing how, despite their incompatibilities, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Hindu Americans, among others, are using their beliefs to commit to the values of a pluralistic society rather than to widen existing divisions.

A Land of Ghosts

A Land of Ghosts

The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia

By David G. Campbell

Rutgers University Press

For thirty years David G. Campbell has explored the Amazon, an enchanting terrain of forest and river that is home to the greatest diversity of plants and animals to have ever existed, anywhere at any time, during the four-billion-year history of life on Earth. With great artistic flair, Campbell describes a journey up the Rio Moa, a remote tributary of the Amazon River, 2,800 miles from its mouth. In elegant prose that enchants and entrances, Campbell has written an elegy for the Amazon forest and its peoples-for what has become a land of ghosts.

Being Jewish in the New Germany

Being Jewish in the New Germany

Being Jewish in the New Germany, First Paperback Edition

By Jeffrey M. Peck

Rutgers University Press

In Being Jewish in the New Germany, Peck explores the diversity of contemporary Jewish life and the complex struggles within the community-and among Germans in general-over history, responsibility, culture, and identity. He provides a glimpse of an emerging, if conflicted, multicultural country and examines how the development of the European Community, globalization, and the post-9/11 political climate play out in this context. With sensitive, yet critical, insight into the nation's political and social life, chapters explore issues such as the shifting ethnic/national makeup of the population, changes in political leadership, and the renaissance of Jewish art and literature.

The Japanese 'New Woman'

The Japanese 'New Woman'

Images of Gender and Modernity

Rutgers University Press

In The Japanese “New Woman,” Dina Lowy focuses on this new female image as it was revealed, discussed, and debated in popular newspapers and magazines in the 1910s, as well as on the lives of a specific group of women—members of the feminist literary organization known as the Seitosha.

New Jersey in the American Revolution

New Jersey in the American Revolution

Edited by Barbara J. Mitnick

Rutgers University Press, Rivergate Books

Barbara J. Mitnick has edited a remarkably comprehensive anthology, bringing new life to the rich and turbulent late eighteenth-century period in New Jersey. Originally conceived as a legacy of the state's 225th Anniversary of the Revolution Celebration Commission and sponsored by the Washington Association of New Jersey, the volume brings together contributions by twelve outstanding and recognized experts on New Jersey history.

Religion, Media, and the Marketplace

Religion, Media, and the Marketplace

Edited by Lynn Schofield Clark

Rutgers University Press

At a time when religious fundamentalism throughout the world is inseparable from political aims, this interdisciplinary look at the mutual influences between religion and the media is essential reading for scholars from a wide variety of disciplines.

American Cinema of the 1970s

American Cinema of the 1970s

Themes and Variations

Edited by Lester D. Friedman

Rutgers University Press

A smug glance at the seventies—the so-called "Me Decade"—unveils a kaleidoscope of big hair, blaring music, and broken politics—all easy targets for satire, cynicism, and ultimately even nostalgia. The contributors to this volume look beyond the strobe lights to reveal how profoundly the seventies have influenced American life and how the films of that decade represent a peak moment in cinema history. Bringing together ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1970s examines the range of films that marked the decade, including Jaws, Rocky, Love Story, Shaft, Dirty Harry,The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Apocalypse Now.

Making Democracy Matter

Making Democracy Matter

Identity and Activism in Los Angeles

By Karen Brodkin

Rutgers University Press

What makes a social movement a movement? Where do the contagious energy, vision, and sense of infinite possibility come from? And, what are the visions and practices of democracy that foster such transformations? This book seeks to answer these questions through conversations and interviews with a generation of activists who came of political age in Los Angeles during the 1990s. Combining analytical depth, engaging oral history, and rich description, this absorbing and accessible book will appeal to all those interested in social movements, racial justice, the political activism of women and men of color, and the labor movement today.

A Long Way From Home

A Long Way From Home

Edited by Gene Andrew Jarrett; By Claude McKay

Rutgers University Press

In his 1937 autobiography, A Long Way from Home, McKay explains what it means to be a black “rebel sojourner” and presents one of the first unflattering, yet informative, exposés of the Harlem Renaissance. Reprinted here with a critical introduction by Gene Andrew Jarrett, this book will challenge readers to rethink McKay’s articulation of identity, art, race, and politics and situate these topics in terms of his oeuvre and his literary contemporaries between the world wars.

Picking Up the Pieces

Picking Up the Pieces

Moving Forward after Surviving Cancer

By Sherri Magee and Kathy Scalzo

Rutgers University Press

Introduces an innovative four-phase program, complete with daily practices, designed to assist cancer survivors in picking up the pieces of their lives during the recovery process, combining the personal experiences of survivors with advice on how to develop a personalized Healing Plan, handle stress and physical side effects, and find essential resources and support services. Original.

Laughing Mad

Laughing Mad

The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America

By Bambi Haggins

Rutgers University Press

In Laughing Mad , Bambi Haggins looks at how this transition occurred in a variety of media and shows how this integration has paved the way for black comedians and their audiences to affect each other. Historically, African American performers have been able to use comedy as a pedagogic tool, interjecting astute observations about race relations while the audience is laughing. And yet, Haggins makes the convincing argument that the potential of African American comedy remains fundamentally unfulfilled as the performance of blackness continues to be made culturally digestible for mass consumption.

The Feminist Memoir Project

The Feminist Memoir Project

Voices from Women's Liberation

Edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow

Rutgers University Press

The women of The Feminist Memoir Project give voice to the spirit, the drive, and the claims of the Women's Liberation Movement they helped shape, beginning in the late 1960s. These thirty-two writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in the late twentieth century. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation.

Portraits of the New Negro Woman

Portraits of the New Negro Woman

Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance

By Cherene Sherrard-Johnson

Rutgers University Press

In this engaging narrative, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson uses the writings of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset as well as the work of artists like Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson to illuminate the centrality of the mulatta by examining a variety of competing arguments about race in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

A Misfit's Manifesto

A Misfit's Manifesto

The Sociological Memoir of a Rock & Roll Heart

By Donna Gaines

Rutgers University Press

Dubbed the Margaret Mead of heavy metal, Donna Gaines is a walking, talking oxymoron, a turnpike intellectual. A Misfit's Manifesto is the story of her wild-in-the-burbs odyssey-from overweight yeshiva girl to savvy street-punk sociologist. Isolated, angry, and depressed through most of her adolescence and early adulthood, she found truth and beauty in the least likely places. Wandering the craggy terrain of Rockaway Beach, Queens, Gaines embarked upon a path to enlightenment involving sex, drugs, rock & roll, sociology, cosmetology, True Love, the occult, tattoos, science fiction, pizza, guns, comic books, and surfing-by Web and by sea.

Community Health Centers

Community Health Centers

A Movement and the People Who Made It Happen

By Bonnie Lefkowitz

Rutgers University Press

This book tells the story of one groundbreaking approach to medicine that attacks the problem by focusing on the wellness of whole neighborhoods. Since their creation during the 1960s, community health centers have served the needs of the poor in the tenements of New York, the colonials of Texas, the working class neighborhoods of Boston, and the dirt farms of the South. As products of the civil rights movement, the early centers provided not only primary and preventive care, but also social and environmental services, economic development, and empowerment.

The New Durkheim

The New Durkheim

By Ivan Strenski

Rutgers University Press

Ivan Strenski, a leading figure in this reexamination, brings together a collection of his own essays to demonstrate the fruitful ways that Durkheimian perspectives can be applied to contemporary issues. Chapters focus on a wide range of topics, including sacrifice, religion, animal rights, and terrorism. Strenski concludes by linking the revitalization of Durkheimian social theory with an exciting new approach to teaching his texts and ideas. This book will be essential reading for scholars in religious studies, anthropology, and sociology.

Covenant of Care

Covenant of Care

Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America

By Alan M. Kraut and Deborah Kraut

Rutgers University Press

Where were you born? Were you born at the Beth? Many thousands of Americans-Jewish and non-Jewish-were born at a hospital bearing the Star of David and named Beth Israel, Mount Sinai, or Montefiore. In the United States, health care has been bound closely to the religious impulse. Newark Beth Israel Hospital is a distinguished modern medical institution in New Jersey whose history opens a window on American health care, the immigrant experience, and urban life. Alan M. and Deborah A. Kraut tell the story of this important institution, illuminating the broader history of voluntary nonprofit hospitals created under religious auspices initially to serve poor immigrant communities. Like so many Jewish hospitals in the early half of the twentieth century, "the Beth" cared not only for its own community's poor and underprivileged, a responsibility grounded in the Jewish traditions of tzedakah ("justice") and tikkun olam ("to heal the world"), but for all Newarkers.

Law and Order

Law and Order

Images, Meanings, Myths

By Mariana Valverde

Rutgers University Press

In Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths, Mariana Valverde draws on examples from film, television, and newspapers to examine these questions and to demonstrate how popular culture is creating an unrealistic view of crime and crime control. Valverde argues that understanding the impact of media representations of courtrooms, police departments, prisons, and the people who populate them is essential to comprehending the reality of criminal justice.

Negras in Brazil

Negras in Brazil

Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity

By Kia Lilly Caldwell

Rutgers University Press

In Negras in Brazil, Kia Lilly Caldwell examines the life experiences of Afro-Brazilian women whose stories have until now been largely untold. This pathbreaking study analyzes the links between race and gender and broader processes of social, economic, and political exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic research with social movement organizations and thirty-five life history interviews, Caldwell explores the everyday struggles Afro-Brazilian women face in their efforts to achieve equal rights and full citizenship.

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

A Los Angeles Illness Narrative

By Emily K. Abel

Rutgers University Press

The history of medicine is much more than the story of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Seeking to understand the patient’s perspective, historians scour the archives, searching for rare personal accounts. Bringing together a trove of more than 400 family letters by Charles Dwight Willard, Suffering in the Land of Sunshine provides a unique window into the experience of sickness.

The Dilemma of Federal Mental Health Policy

The Dilemma of Federal Mental Health Policy

Radical Reform or Incremental Change?

By Gerald N. Grob and Howard H Goldman

Rutgers University Press

Severe and persistent mental illnesses are among the most pressing health and social problems in contemporary America. Recent estimates suggest that more than three million people in the U.S. have disabling mental disorders. The direct and indirect costs of their care exceed 180 billion dollars nationwide each year. Effective treatments and services exist, but many such individuals do not have access to these services because of limitations in mental health and social policies.

Scapegoats of September 11th

Scapegoats of September 11th

Hate Crimes & State Crimes in the War on Terror

By Michael Welch

Rutgers University Press

From its largest cities to deep within its heartland, from its heavily trafficked airways to its meandering country byways, America has become a nation racked by anxiety about terrorism and national security. In response to the fears prompted by the tragedy of September 11th, the country has changed in countless ways. Drawing on topics such as ethnic profiling, the Abu Ghraib scandal, Guantanamo Bay, and the controversial Patriot Act, Welch looks at the significance of knowledge, language, and emotion in a post-9/11 world. In the face of popular and political cheerleading in the war on terror, this book presents a careful and sober assessment, reminding us that sound counterterrorism policies must rise above, rather than participate in, the propagation of bigotry and victimization.

Race, Gender, and Punishment

Race, Gender, and Punishment

From Colonialism to the War on Terror

Edited by Jeanne Flavin and Mary Bosworth

Rutgers University Press

In this book, Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin bring together twelve original essays by prominent scholars to examine not only the discrimination that is evident, but also the structural and cultural forces that have influenced and continue to perpetuate the current situation. Contributors point to four major factors that have impacted public sentiment and criminal justice policy: colonialism, slavery, immigration, and globalization. In doing so they reveal how practices of punishment not only need particular ideas about race to exist, but they also legitimate them.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen

A Companion

By Josephine Ross

Rutgers University Press

Josephine Ross explores the literary scene during the time Austen's works first appeared: the books considered classics then, the "horrid novels" and romances, and the grasping publishers. She looks at the architecture and dcor of Austen's era that made up "the profusion and elegance of modern taste": Regency houses for instance, Chippendale furniture, and "picturesque scenery." On a smaller scale she answers questions that may baffle modern readers. What, for example, was "hartshorn"? How did Lizzy Bennet "let down" her gown to hide her muddy petticoat? Ross shows us the fashions, and the subtle ways Jane Austen used clothes to express character. Courtship, marriage, adultery, class and "rank," mundane tasks of ordinary life, all appear, as does the wider political and military world.

City at the Water's Edge

City at the Water's Edge

A Natural History of New York

By Betsy McCully

Rutgers University Press, Rivergate Books

Concrete floors and concrete walls, buildings that pierce the sky, taxicabs and subway corridors, a steady din of noise. These things, along with a virtually unrivaled collection of museums, galleries, performance venues, media outlets, international corporations, and stock exchanges make New York City not only the cultural and financial capital of the United States, but one of the largest and most impressive urban conglomerations in the world. With distinctions like these, is it possible to imagine the city as any more than this? City at the Water's Edge invites readers to do just that. Betsy McCully, a long-time urban dweller, argues that this city of lights is much more than a human-made metropolis. It has a rich natural history that is every bit as fascinating as the glitzy veneer that has been built atop it.

State-Corporate Crime

State-Corporate Crime

Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government

Edited by Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer

Rutgers University Press

Brings together fifteen essays to show that those in positions of political and economic power frequently operate in collaboration, and are often all too willing to sacrifice the well-being of the many for the private profit and political advantage of the few.

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