Most of the roughly 140,000 Holocaust survivors who came to the United States in the first decade after World War II settled in big cities such as New York. But a few thousand chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this little-known chapter in American Jewish history when these mostly Eastern European refugees – including the author’s grandparents - found an unlikely refuge and gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms. They gravitated to a section of south Jersey anchored by Vineland, a small rural city where previous waves of Jewish immigrants had built a rich network of cultural and religious institutions. This book relies on interviews with dozens of these refugee farmers and their children, as well as oral histories and archival records to tell how they learned to farm while coping with unimaginable grief. This is their remarkable story of loss, renewal, and perseverance in the most unexpected of settings.
 

Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work is the first book-length study of Asian American reporters. It documents the frustrations, challenges, desires, and hopes they face in predominantly White newsrooms. In a time of racial awakening with Black Lives Matter and COVID-19, the book offers critical insights to the workings of American newsrooms.    

Drawing from literary critics like Georg Lukács and case studies from across the world of comics, Litcomix develops a theoretical approach for reading graphic novels as literature. Whether looking at Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s groundbreaking manga, graphic adaptations of Proust, or Jack Kirby’s Balzacian use of intertextuality, this book offers fresh perspectives on the graphic novel.  

By launching cutting-edge Internet radio stations and multimedia platforms and engaging as influencers, Zapotec and Ayuujk peoples paved their own paths to a transnational lifeway between Mexico and the United States during the Trump era. Their novel digital formats put into practice political visions concerning Indigenous communality across vast distances—in real time.
 

Fighting Invisibility examines how post-1950s Midwest Asian Americans navigate identity and belonging, racism, educational settings, resources within co-ethnic communities, and pan-ethnic cultural community. Through the lens of Midwest Asian America, this book aims to disrupt—and expand beyond—the existing privileged narratives in United States and Asian American history.
 

Rithy Panh survived the Cambodian genocide and found his life work. Aesthetics and ethics inform all he does, whether he is directing Isabel Huppert in The Sea Wall, following laborers digging trenches or interrogating the infamous director of S-21 prison. Written for film lovers as well as scholars, Ferryman of Memories introduces Panh and his incomparable cinema.      

Princesa of the Periphery explores Disney’s Elena of Avalor. Focusing on girlhood and Latinidad, Leon-Boys studies the complex relationship between the U.S.’s largest ethnic minority and Disney as a global media conglomerate. The analysis demonstrates that Elena’s existence within the Disney universe is indicative of the overall presence of Latinxs in popular culture, media, and the nation.
 

Arranged Marriage shows how arranged marriage practices have been undergoing transformation; how the gendered and intergenerational politics of agency, consent, and choice work in the contexts of partner choice and management of marriage; and how this type of marriage can be reshaped, reinvented, and reinterpreted flexibly in response to individual, family, religious, class, ethnic and other desires, needs, and constraints.  
 

“After twenty-eight years of desire and determination, I have visited Africa, the land of my forefathers.” So wrote Lida Clanton Broner (1895–1982), an African American housekeeper and hairstylist from Newark, New Jersey, upon her return from an extraordinary nine-month journey to South Africa in 1938. This epic trip was motivated not only by Broner’s sense of ancestral heritage, but also a grassroots resolve to connect the socio-political concerns of African Americans with those of Black South Africans under the segregationist policies of the time. During her travels, this woman of modest means circulated among South Africa’s Black intellectual elite, including many leaders of South Africa’s freedom struggle. Her lectures at Black schools on “race consciousness and race pride” had a decidedly political bent, even as she was presented as an “American beauty specialist.” 

Telling a queerer side of the #MeToo story, Unsafe Words brings together academics, activists, artists, and sex workers to tackle challenging questions about sex, power, consent, and harm. Resisting the heteronormative assumptions, class norms, and racial privilege underlying much #MeToo discourse, they explore how queer communities might better prevent and respond to sexual violence.