New This Month in American Studies and Gender And Sexuality Studies - May 2024
New this month in our Italian/American Culture series, comes Hopelessly Alien: The Italian Immigration Experience in Chicago Heights, by Louis Corsino, an in-depth sociological investigation of "hope" as it applies to the Italian immigrant experience in the blue-collar suburb of Chicago Heights between 1910 and 1950.
"This book upends the widely held belief that immigrants' decision to leave Italy was fueled solely by a hope for upward mobility and a greater social status than could be attained by remaining in Italy. While nominally a case study of Italian immigrants in Chicago, Corsino's findings will certainly spur researchers to examine not only the experiences and motivations of Italian immigrants elsewhere in the United States, but those of other ethnic groups as well, and have the potential to lead to a wholesale reexamination of immigration motivation en masse." — John R. Mitrano, Central Connecticut State University
New in our Trans-Indigenous Decolonial Critiques series is The Serpent's Plumes: Contemporary Nahua Flowered Words in Movement, by Adam W. Coon, drawing on Nahua concepts to explore Nahua literary production and contributions to cultural activism from the 1980s to the present.
"Written in a luminous and engaging style, The Serpent's Plumes provides an extraordinary survey of poetry and prose works by contemporary Nahua writers in Mexico and the United States. While many readers know Nahua poetry through colonial works (such as Cantares Mexicanos), this book reminds us of the relevance of works by contemporary Nahua authors not merely as heirs to an admired literary tradition but as highly accomplished artists who bravely confront racism, discrimination, historical oblivion, and patriarchal hegemony in their work." — David Tavárez, author of Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico
New in paperback, Reclaiming Time: The Transformative Politics of Feminist Temporalities, by Tanya Ann Kennedy, offers an interdisciplinary feminist framework for conceptualizing time and temporal justice as a form of reparation, and is in our Feminist Criticism and Theory series.
"Kennedy advances a robust feminist critical lens to interrogate crisis narratives that perpetuate white life and nation-time, while neglecting chronic harm to oppressed communities. As Kennedy shows, the temporal and spatial formations of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy often manifest where we might least expect them, even within the stories feminism tells about itself. Kennedy departs from conventional reparations frameworks, raising our collective consciousness about the significance of reparative praxis and aesthetics." — Regis M. Fox, author of Resistance Reimagined: Black Women's Critical Thought as Survival
"Reclaiming Time makes an original and important contribution to critical time studies, showing how reparation and repair will always get co-opted back into 'more of the same' if we fail to recognize how 'white time' structures ideas of past, present, and future." — Lisa Baraitser, author of Enduring Time
Happy reading and come back and see what's new next month!
