American Studies

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The Serpent's Plumes

Draws on Nahua concepts to explore Nahua literary production and contributions to cultural activism from the 1980s to the present.

The Algonquin Round Table

The facts and legends of New York's famed artistic hub told by one of its key participants.

Hopelessly Alien

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.

The Recursive Frontier

Shows how the myth of the American frontier persists as an ever-present, oppressive set of ideas about space, mobility, and race in the mid-twentieth-century literature of Los Angeles.

Utopian Imaginings

Challenges readers to use utopian thinking and practice to counter the conditions of the present and create an alternative future.

The Biggest Thing in Show Business

A freewheeling, nonlinear exploration of the performing duo and their decade-long collaboration from 1946 to 1956.

Reclaiming Time

Offers an interdisciplinary feminist framework for conceptualizing time and temporal justice as a form of reparation.

Land of the Oneidas

Presents the history of central New York State from the Ice Age to the present day.

Italian Trans Geographies

Provides a remapping of Italian and Italian American culture by retracing trans and gender-variant experiences within Italy and along diasporic routes.

Pepper Adams

A compelling biography of virtuoso, baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams and how his life intersected with some of the greatest poets, writers, painters, and musicians of his time.

Transforming One's Self

A fresh and rigorous interpretation of William James's ethical theory, showing how experimenting with life's opportunities can transform one's self and life.

Ch’ayemal nich’nabiletik / Los hijos errantes / The Errant Children

A bold and unflinching portrayal of contemporary Maya life in Chiapas, Mexico.

Casseroles, Can Openers, and Jell-O

An “all-you-can-eat” tour of American life in the postwar period, told through the foods we loved.

Bronx Epitaph

The first book to comprehensively examine Lou Gehrig's famous "Luckiest Man" speech.

Blues on Stage

Tells the story of classic blues singers from Ma Rainey to Bessie Smith.

Stories, Streets, and Saints

A time capsule of a classic Italian American neighborhood, told in the voices of its inhabitants.

New York's Great Lost Ballparks

Tells the story of New York's playing grounds, teams, and ballparks of yesteryear.

The Hard Sell of Paradise

Traces the complex and contradictory representations of Hawai’i in popular film and television programs from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Replanting Cultures

Provides a theoretical and practical guide to community-engaged scholarship with Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada.

Nietzsche in Hollywood

Argues that Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch was a central concern of filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Split Time

Aims to construct an economic philosophy from indigenous African thought.

Thinking Ecologically, Thinking Responsibly

Engages and extends the feminist philosopher Lorraine Code’s groundbreaking work on epistemology and ethics.

Christianity and Politics in Tribal India

Chronicles the astonishing and counterintuitive spread of Christianity among a group of previously isolated tribes in a remote and hilly part of Northeastern India.

Mayalogue

Offers a strong critique of traditional anthropological studies from an Indigenous and postcolonial perspective.

A Postcolonial Relationship

Offers an Asian immigrant perspective on US racial relations and explores the unique situations and challenges facing Asian immigrants in the United States.

No Jurisdiction

A deeply personal study of post-9/11 film that exposes how genre can frame the shifting meanings of the War on Terror and its impact on American law and culture.

Drops of Inclusivity

A critical view of race relations on the island of Puerto Rico from 1898 to 1965.

Signs of Distinction

Fifty-one unique New York towns with great stories to tell, from L. Frank Baum's and Jello's hometowns to the birthplace of the Women's Rights Movement.

Whiteness at the End of the World

Examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic films express white racial anxiety.

Through the Periscope

Offers a wider approach to Italian American culture, one that stresses both its material, urban components and the creativity of its formal literary codes.

Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America

Examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have drawn on and debated the validity of Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.

Sharkey

The incredible, true story of the twentieth century's greatest performing sea lion and the man who trained him.

Engaging Italy

By Etta M. Madden
Subjects: Literature

Traces literary and social connections among three American women navigating the changing political landscape of 1860s and '70s Italy.

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema

Examines the filmic representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity and its role in mediating racial politics in Mexico.

More Than Our Pain

Covering rage and grief, as well as joy and fatigue, examines how Black Lives Matter activists, and the artists inspired by them, have mobilized for social justice.

Nos/Otras

Offers a timely reconsideration of the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, treating issues of multiplicitous agency, identarian politics, and the stakes of coalition building as core themes in the author's work.

Sensitive Negotiations

Examines how Indigenous figures used British Romantic poetry in their interactions with settler governments and publics.

Race and the Suburbs in American Film

Explores how suburban space and the body are racialized in American film.

America in Denial

Examines how race-neutral programs and policies harm, rather than improve, the lives of blacks in the United States.

Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth-Century Northeastern North America

Edited by Lucianne Lavin
Subjects: American Studies

Examines the significant impact of Dutch traders and settlers on the early history of Northeastern North America, and their relationships with its Indigenous peoples.

The Godfather and Sicily

Offers a distinctive interpretation of The Godfather as a novel and film sequence.

"Our Relations…the Mixed Bloods"

Articulates the relationships between kinship, racial ideology, mixed blood treaty provisions, and landscape transformation in the Great Lakes region.

Antigone in the Americas

Argues for a decolonial reinterpretation of Sophocles’ classical tragedy, Antigone, that can help us to rethink the anti-colonial politics of militant mourning in the Americas.

This Bridge Called My Back, Fortieth Anniversary Edition

Fortieth anniversary edition of the foundational text of women of color feminism.

Meander

Draws on the author's own experiences as a watershed planner, teacher, and activist to tell the story of the Great Lakes region's experiment in restoring a complicated natural system of flowing water.

Open Borders

Offers a dialogue about the future of the nature of the human, technology, metaphysical foundations, globalization, and social and political oppression.

Sense of Origins

Studies the relationship between young Italian Americans and their Italian cultural and historical heritage.

Native Foodways

Explores the interplay of religion and food in Native American cultures.

Intersecting Diasporas

Examines literary expressions of allyship between Italian America and other diasporic communities in modern and contemporary US fiction.

Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism

Unique empirically grounded analysis of how audiences negotiate sexism and feminism across media, from popular television shows to dating apps.

The World of Agha Shahid Ali

Critical essays on the transnational Kashmiri-American poet.

Enduring Critical Poses

A celebration of Anishinaabe intellectual tradition.

Changed Forever, Volume II

The second volume of the first in-depth study of a range of literature written by Native Americans who attended government-run boarding schools.

Higher Education for Democracy

Uses a cross-national comparison of Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Hong Kong to develop strategies universities should employ to strengthen democracy and resist fascism.

Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty

Evocative, innovative ethnography of spiritual practices and forms of queer, black, and indigenous life in the Dominican Republic.

Ceremony Men

Rethinks the role of Indigenous and non-Indigenous interactions in the production of ethnographic museum collections.

DIY on the Lower East Side

Engaging look at Lower East Side writers and artists in the wake of the 1975 New York fiscal crisis.

Freedom in Laughter

Analyzes the dynamic period in which Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby moved African American professional stand-up comedy from the chitlin’ circuit to the mainstream.

A Postcolonial Leadership

Explores the possibilities and challenges of Asian immigrant Christian leadership in the United States.

Funny How?

Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.

Varieties of American Sufism

Participant-observation-based studies that explore a range of Sufi movements operating across the contemporary American religious landscape.

Letters from Hollywood

Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created.

The Autobiography of a Language

Explores the links between language, cultural identity, and creativity through the works of Emanuel Carnevali, one of the first Italian American authors to attain literary recognition.

The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1918-1939

Assesses how America's film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period.

The State of Race

An innovative comparative study of the role of racial stereotypes in expressing state power under globalization.

Reconciling Nature

Reveals how classic American novels embodied the tensions embedded in American views of the natural world from the Centennial until the end of the Second World War.

Authorized Agents

Examines the relation between Indian diplomacy and nineteenth-century Native American literature.

Fearless

Biography of the early years of A. Bartlett Giamatti, who would become Yale University’s first non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant president and commissioner of Major League Baseball.

Restless Spirits

A collection of plays by American Indian playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr.

Rumble and Crash

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism’s precarious state in the early twenty-first century.

From El Dorado to Lost Horizons

Investigates how musicals, war films, sex comedies, and Westerns dealt with contentious issues during a time of change in Hollywood.

Facing toward the Dawn

Examines the history of the Italian anarchist movement in New London, Connecticut.

When I Am Italian

Can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian?

Recovering Lost Footprints, Volume 2

By Arturo Arias
Subjects: Literature

Analyzes contemporary Yucatecan and Chiapanecan Maya narratives.

Affectual Erasure

Comprehensive examination of how Indigenous peoples have been represented in Argentine film.

Congress and Diaspora Politics

Studies the impact of lobbying efforts by domestic ethnic groups and foreign governments on US policymaking.

You Who Enter Here

A beautifully rendered, brutally realistic Native American gang novel.

Our War Paint Is Writers' Ink

Explores a little-known history of exchange between Anishinaabe and American writers, showing how literature has long been an important venue for debates over settler colonial policy and indigenous rights.

Multicultural Poetics

Argues that multiculturalism and hybridity are key components of the nation’s poetry and its culture.

Changed Forever, Volume I

The first in-depth study of a range of literature written by Native Americans who attended government-run boarding schools.

The Trade in the Living

Macro-level study of the South Atlantic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrating how Brazil’s emergence was built on the longest and most intense slave trade of the modern era.

Angry Rain

By Maurice Kenny
Edited by Derek C. Maus
Introduction by Derek C. Maus
Subjects: General Interest
Series: Excelsior Editions

Reveals the development of Maurice Kenny’s growing artistic consciousness, while attesting to both the beauty and brutality of the world in which he lived.

College Bound

Argues that first- and second-generation Jewish American writers had an ambivalent relationship with educational success.

Race, Nation, and Refuge

By Doug Coulson
Subjects: History

Explores the role of rhetoric and the racial classification of Asian American immigrants in the early twentieth century.

The Specter of the Indian

Explores the significance of Indian control spirits as a dominating force in nineteenth-century American Spiritualism.

Recovering Lost Footprints, Volume 1

By Arturo Arias
Subjects: Literature

Analyzes contemporary Maya narratives.

Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes

Argues that Indigenous hip hop is the latest and newest assertion of Indigenous sovereignty throughout Indigenous North America.

We Have Not Stopped Trembling Yet

A father’s personal and intimate account of his Filipino and Alaska Native family’s experiences, and his search for how to help his children overcome the effects of historical and contemporary oppression.

A Clan Mother's Call

Addresses the importance of Haudenosaunee women in the rebuilding of the Iroquois nation.

Passionate Detachments

Investigates the cultural value of film violence.

The World, the Text, and the Indian

Advances critical conversations in Native American literary studies by situating its subject in global, transnational, and modernizing contexts.

Over a Barrel

How a small family company in the Finger Lakes became one of the most important wine producers in the United States, only to be taken down by corporate greed and mismanagement.

México's Nobodies

Analyzes cultural materials that grapple with gender and blackness to revise traditional interpretations of Mexicanness.

Gestures of Love

Examines movie romance in light of our emotional bond to the actors and characters on screen.

Reluctant Reformer

Tells the untold story of the life and career of Nathan Sanford, a New York State lawyer-politician who capitalized on opportunities created by the new politics of the early Republic to achieve social mobility.

Trendy Fascism

Explores how white supremacist groups use popular music and culture to teach hate and promote violence.

Race Still Matters

Essays debunking the notion that contemporary America is a colorblind society.

Historicizing Post-Discourses

Examines how postfeminism and postracialism intersect to perpetuate systemic injustice in the United States.

Beyond Memory

Uncovers an overlooked aspect of the Italian American experience.

From Italy to the North End

Documents the arc of the Italian American immigrant experience on both sides of the Atlantic.