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For over two decades, the media have chronicled escalating participation in family history prompted by, among other things, the aging of Baby Boomers and Generation Xers, the growing availability of digital genealogy sites and archives, and a burgeoning interest in racial and ethnic history and culture of the sort inspired by the airing of the historical drama miniseries Roots forty years ago. Alternate Roots is the first book to critically address a wide array of media-related institutions, texts, technologies, and practices of family history readily encountered in the new millennium, including genealogy-themed television series, books, documentaries, websites, family photos and civil records, social media interactions, genealogical institutions, “roots” tourism, and genetic ancestry testing services capitalizing on the 2003 mapping of the human genome. These objects of inquiry present unique and pressing issues for critical investigation in terms of economic and privacy concerns as well as ethnicity, race, and hybrid identities. Judiciously interweaving her own genealogical journey involving ethnic, racial, classed, and gendered identities pertinent to her southern Italian and Italian American family history throughout the multifaceted examination of critical objects, Christine Scodari unearths pivot points of thought and action in the performance and representation of family history that can be adapted by others and facilitated by digital media. This alternate roots strategy, an expansive approach to family history, enables practitioners to venture beyond genetic definitions of kinship, their own ancestral history, and the struggles of those sharing their affiliations, and to interrogate genealogical media and related commodities and activities accordingly.

When people cross the footbridge to Lewis Island in the Delaware River at Lambertville, NJ, they’re in a “whole ‘nother world”: wild and civilized, stable atop changing water and earth. Here lies the last commercial haul seine fishery on the non-tidal Delaware, where Lewis family members have netted since 1888 and have long monitored the fluctuating shad population. The island also serves as a spiritual, recreational, and community site for local and regional visitors, whom the Lewis family welcomes because of their forebear’s “mandate to share the island.” Visitors feel almost immediately that this place is special, but the why is elusive. Folklorist Charlie Groth explains Lewis Island’s unassuming cultural magic by developing the concept of “narrative stewardship,” a practice by which people take care of communal resources (in this case, river, shad, tradition, and community itself) through sharing stories. Anchored in over two decades of field research, this accessible ethnography interweaves the author’s observations as a crew member, stories from various tellers, interviews, history, and cultural theory. Beginning with thick description, the work explores four broad story types—Big Stories, character anecdotes, microlegends, and everyday storying. Groth traces how narratives intertwine with each other and with the physical environment to create sense of place, while participants in various roles navigate belonging. Ultimately, she posits the idea that in an era when telectronics have changed material conditions profoundly and quickly, echoing the way the industrial revolution led to anomie, narrative stewardship embedded in everyday life helps sustain culture and community.

This book examines the racialization of Blasians – mixed race people with Black and Asian ancestry – that neither sees them as new or unique, nor as a racial salve to move the United States past the problem of the colour line. The emergence of Blasian celebrities and the analyses of these stars acknowledges that to understand what and who is a Blasian means to first understand hegemonic notions of both Blacks and Asian/Americans. Contextualized against those dominant discourses Blasians explode the narrow boundaries of authenticity around racialized categories. Multiracial people are just as capable as monoracial people of upholding hierarchies of identity, as well as dismantling those hierarchies. Thus, in this book Blasians do not escape race, or erase race, but they do deconstruct normative instantiations of identity. The presence, mobility, and utility of these multiracial celebrities within both U.S. and global racial schemas simultaneously realize and complicate potential alternatives to racial and racist paradigms. These mixed race stars draw attention to how risible and absurd the biological and cultural premises for racialization truly are, and demonstrate potential alternatives for affiliation that do not rely on genetic material.

In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean under extreme oppression. This book concentrates on the Indian descendants' processes of mixing, assimilating, and adapting while trying desperately to hold on to that which marks a group of people as distinct. In some ways, the lived experience of the Indian community in Guyana and Trinidad represents a cultural contradiction of belonging and non-belonging. In other parts of the Caribbean, people of Indian descent seem so absorbed by the more dominant African culture and through intermarriage that Indo-Caribbean heritage seems less central. The book lays out a context within which to develop a broader view of Indians in Guyana and Trinidad, a numerical majority in both countries. They address issues of race and ethnicity but move beyond these familiar aspects to track such factors as ritual, gender, family, and daily life. The book gauges not only an unrelenting process of assimilative creolization on these descendants of India, but also the resilience of this culture in the face of modernization and globalization.

In City of Islands, Dr. Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as “windows” into the dynamic history of immigration in New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. This is an important book because it is the first interdisciplinary, book-length study of how specific Caribbean intellectuals—Ethelred Brown, Richard B. Moore, Pearl Primus, Shirley Chisholm, and Paule Marshall, used the written, spoken and performed word in the cause of racial equality in the United States and in the Caribbean throughout the entire twentieth century. In the discipline of History, Caribbean immigrants living in the United States is surprisingly understudied. We have only four book-length historical accounts, and they only cover Caribbean contributions to the tradition of black political radicalism during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast, City of Islands includes original analysis of sermons, speeches, poetry, short stories, novels, and choreography, to provide insights into each individual’s personality and intellectual style of self-presentation.

As a subject of study, “comfort food” is relevant to a number of scholarly disciplines, most obviously food studies, folkloristics, and anthropology, but also American culture studies, cultural studies, global and international studies, tourism, marketing, and public health. This volume explores the concept of “comfort food” primarily within a western context with examples from Atlantic Canada, Indonesia, England, and various ethnic, regional, and religious populations as well as rural and urban residents in the U.S. It includes studies of a wide range of dishes—bologna to chocolate, sweet and savory puddings, fried bread with an egg in the center, dairy products, fried rice, cafeteria fare, sugary fried dough, soul food, and others—exploring ways in which they comfort or in some instances cause discomfort and how they are connected to a sense of emotional well-being. Some essays analyze the phenomenon in daily life; others consider comfort food in the context of cookbooks, films, Internet blogs, literature, marketing, and tourism. Recognizing that what heartens one person might discomfort another, the collection is organized accordingly, from pleasant and comforting to unpleasant or discomforting food experiences. Those foods and food experiences are then related to concepts and issues such as identity, family, community, nationality, ethnicity, class, sense of place, tradition, stress, health, discomfort, guilt, betrayal, and loss, contributing to a deeper understanding of comfort food as a significant social category of human behavior.

The Construction of Whiteness is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that examines the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices (i.e. social, cultural, political, and economic) that underwrite its ideological influence in American society. In truth, whiteness has rarely been understood outside of academic circles as a problem to be examined, questioned, or interrogated. This is because the ubiquity of whiteness—its pervasive quality as an ideal that is at once omnipresent and invisible—makes it the very epitome of the social and cultural mainstream in America. Yet the undeniable relationship between whiteness and structures of inequality in this country necessitate a thorough interrogation of its formation, its representation, and its reproduction. The essays in this collection seek to do just that; that is, interrogate whiteness as a social construction, thereby revealing the underpinnings of narratives that fosters white skin as the ideal standard of beauty, intelligence, and power. The essays in this collection examine whiteness from several disciplinary perspectives, including history, communication, law, sociology, and literature. Its breadth and depth makes The Construction of Whiteness a standard anthology for introducing the critical study of race to a new generation of scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach of the collection will necessarily appeal to those with scholarly orientations in African and African American Studies, Ethnic Studies and Cultural Studies, Legal Studies, etc. This collection, therefore, makes an important contribution to the field of whiteness studies, broadly conceived, in its multifaceted connections to American history and culture.

This volume engages post-racial ideas in both their limitations and promise, while looking specifically at the extent to which contemporary church responses to race-consciousness and post-racial-consciousness enable churches to advance an accurate public accounting of the social implications of race. Contributors examine Christian institutional and intellectual frameworks within the U.S. and South Africa, focusing mainly on post-movement contexts within the two countries—meaning essentially since 1968 in the U.S. and since 1994 in South Africa. Central to the inquiry is whether churches operate from analytical frameworks, leadership approaches, and programmatic emphases that realistically and usefully grapple with race. Overall, the volume provides little support for the idea that a post-racial era has dawned, or soon will, within the U.S. and South Africa. The volume does lend support, however, to calls for liberating persons and institutions from imprisoning racial constructions, whether imposed from outside one’s group or from inside, while wrestling with the tensions between racially-grounded approaches that account for black suffering and racially-transcending approaches that point (theologically and anthropologically) beyond the socially-constructed self.

This book examines the public discourse surrounding Curt Flood (1938–1997), the star center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals throughout the 1960s. In 1969, Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. At the time, all Major League Baseball players were subject to the reserve clause, which essentially bound a player to work in perpetuity for his original team, unless traded for another player or sold for cash, in which case he worked under the same reserve conditions for the next team. Flood refused the trade on a matter of principle, arguing that Major League Baseball had violated both U.S. antitrust laws and the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude. In a defiant letter to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn asking for his contractual release, Flood infamously wrote, “after twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.” Most significantly, Flood appeared on national television with Howard Cosell and described himself as a “well-paid slave.” Explosive controversy ensued. The book examines the ways in which the media constructed the case and Flood’s persona. By examining the mainstream press, the black press, and primary sources, including Flood’s autobiography, it exposes the complexities of what it means to be a prominent black American athlete—in 1969 and today.

Delivering babies was merely one aspect of the broad role of African American midwives in the twentieth-century South. Yet little has been written about the type of care they provided, or how midwifery and maternity care evolved under the increasing presence of local and federal health care structures. Using evidence from nursing, medical, and public health journals of the era; primary sources from state and county departments of health; and personal accounts from varied practitioners, Delivered by Midwives: African American Midwifery in the Twentieth-Century South provides a new perspective on the childbirth experience of African American women and their maternity care providers during the twentieth century. Moving beyond the usual racial dichotomy, the monograph exposes a more complex shift in childbirth culture to reveal the changing expectations and agency of African American women in their rejection of a two-tier maternity care system, and their demands to be part of an inclusive, desegregated society. This book identifies valuable aspects of a maternity care model that were discarded in the name of progress. Today concern about maternal mortality and persistent racial disparities have forced a reassessment of maternity care and elements of the long-abandoned care model are being reincorporated into modern practice, answering current health care dilemmas by heeding lessons from the past.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell. We ARE Mardi Gras”. Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

This book provides an understanding of the inspiring, contradictory, hostile, resonant, and unarticulated ways in which Asian American and African American cultural formation occurs. Through the interpretation of labor department documents, popular journalism, and state discourses, the book historicizes the formation of both the construction of black “pathology” and the Asian “model minority.” Beginning with the Moynihan Report and journalistic reports about Asian Americans as “model minority,” black and Asian men were racialized together, as if “racially magnetized.” Through the concept of racial magnetism, the book examines both dominant and emergent representations of Asian and African American masculinities as mediating figures for the contradictions of race, class, and gender in post-civil rights U.S.A. The post-civil rights era names this specific race for U.S. citizenship and class advantage, when massive Asian technocratic immigration and decline of African American industrial labor helped usher in a new period of laissez faire class struggle and racial realignment. While the state abandoned social programs at home and expanded imperial projects overseas, state discourses posited that the post-civil rights moment was a period of imminent racial danger because Black Power and the Asian American Movement challenged the understanding that social equality through civil rights had been achieved. The book studies both the dominant discourses that “pair” African American and Asian American racialized masculinities together, and it examines the African American and Asian American counter-discourses—in literature, film, popular sport, hip-hop music, performance arts, and internet subcultures—that link social movements and cultural production as active critical responses to this dominant formation.

This book follows the paths of sports figures who were embraced by the general populace but who, through a variety of circumstances, real or imagined, found themselves falling out of favor. The chapters focus on the roles played by athletes, the media, and fans in describing how once-esteemed popular figures find themselves scorned by the same public that at one time viewed them as heroic, laudable, or otherwise respectable. The book examines a wide range of sports and eras, and includes chapters on Barry Bonds, Kirby Puckett, Mike Tyson, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, Branch Rickey, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jim Brown, as well as an afterword and introduction.

The complicated process of preparing the dead for burial is now the province of funeral industry professionals, but this is a recent development. Until the end of World War II, especially in rural parts of the South and documented here across the Arkansas Ozarks, members of the deceased’s community performed all of the jobs required for a burial. This was done to relieve the family but, in many places, taboos forbid their participation. This book documents death, burial and mourning customs in the Arkansas Ozarks for 1850 to 1950. It examines the traditions that governed sitting up with the sick and dying, laying out the body prior to viewing and burial, building the coffin and digging the grave. It also documents parallels between funerals and the Southern custom of Decoration Day. Preceding these subjects is an examination of the therapies, folk cures and superstitions believed to save or prolong life. Other subjects include maternal and infant mortality, obituaries, as well as the burial customs of African Americans, which generally paralleled those of whites. One chapter is devoted to disenfranchised death, deaths that could not be mourned according to tradition, such as ones occurring during epidemics and wartime. The book concludes with an examination of the ways in which, by the 1950s, the funeral industry had assumed all of the many labor-intensive jobs once performed within the community. The transition was a gradual one, but ultimately succeeded with offering of offering embalming, factory-made caskets, burial insurance and other goods and services.

At a Tex-Mex restaurant in a Minneapolis suburb, customers send Christmas and Hanukkah cards to the restaurant, bring in home-baked treats for the staff, and attend the annual employee party. One customer even posts in the entryway a sign commemorating the life of his dog. Diners and servers alike use the Hungry Cowboy as a place to gather, celebrate, relax, and even mourn. Moments such as these fascinate the author of this book, who worked for the restaurant. Weaving together narratives from servers, customers, and managers, the book explores a type of service work that is deeply embedded in personal relationships and community. Feelings, play, and emotions are inseparable from the market transactions within the restaurant. Based on extensive interviews and two years of working as a waitress, the book provides insights into the ways that people make contact in our society and how they build on the fleeting connections in the service exchange to form more intimate relationships.

Female athletes are too often perceived as interlopers in the historically male-dominated world of sports. Obstacles specific to women are of particular focus in this book. Race, sexual orientation, and the similar qualities ancillary to gender require special exploration of the way they impact an athlete’s story. Central to the book is the contention that women in their role as inherent outsiders are placed in a unique position even more complicated than the usual experiences of inequality and discord associated with race and sports. The contributors explore and critique the notion that in order to be considered among the pantheon of athletic heroes one cannot deviate from the traditional demographic profile, that of the white male. These essays look specifically and critically at the nature of gender and sexuality within the contested nexus of race, reputation, and sport. The collection explores the reputations of iconic and pioneering sports figures and the cultural and social forces that helped to forge their unique and often problematic legacies. Women athletes discussed in this volume include Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the women of the AAGPBL, Billie Jean King, Venus and Serena Williams, Marion Jones, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, Sheryl Swoopes, Florence Griffith Joyner, Roberta Gibb and Kathrine Switzer, and Danica Patrick.

In twenty-first century America, Home cooking has transformed from an overwhelming chore to a nearly avoidable pastime. This rapid disappearance of kitchen skills has led critics to lament the death of home cooking. “No one cooks anymore” is a rallying cry to get Americans back to cooking from scratch in order to improve health and increase happiness. However, this mourning for home cooking only serves to underscore its significance as a symbol of the importance of food to family, home, and community, which comes through in the rhetoric found in a variety of texts, including cookbooks, advertising, and YouTube videos. Analysis of these texts reveals that, far from dying, home cooking traditions continue as a powerful form of folklore that American fill with meaning as a representation of both the continuity of the past and the possibilities of the future.

The question of how relations between marginalized groups are impacted by their common and sometimes competing search for equal rights has become acutely important. Demographic projections make it easy now to imagine a future majority population of color in the United States. This book sets forth some of the issues involved in the interplay among members of various racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Robert S. Chang initiated the Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation Project and invited the book's author to collaborate. The two brought together scholars from different backgrounds and disciplines to engage a set of interrelated questions confronting groups generally considered minorities. This collection strives to stimulate further thinking and writing by social scientists, legal scholars, and policymakers on inter-minority connections. Particularly, scholars test the limits of intergroup cooperation and coalition building. For marginalized groups, coalition building seems to offer a pathway to addressing economic discrimination and reaching some measure of justice with regard to opportunities. The need for coalitions also acknowledges a democratic process in which racialized groups face significant difficulty gaining real political power, despite such legislation as the Voting Rights Act.

This collection takes a critical look at athletic celebrity on the part of athletes who enjoy worldwide reputations without necessarily breaking into the more narrowly defined North American sporting terrain. This volume, which chronicles the reputational arcs of athletes in such diverse sports as surfing, motocross, Grand Prix Racing, distance running, and even sumo wrestling, as well as more widespread competitions including tennis, cricket, and world football, to name but a few, are presented as a means to underscore the notion that sport, regardless of type and place, helps foster individual reputations that creates celebrities unique to those games.

Posthuman Folklore explores how our human condition is increasingly thought of, and performed, in posthuman terms. Insights from animal studies have triggered the “animal turn” in scholarship, while the increasing digitization of human culture and the newly emerging roles of androids and artificial intelligences provide yet another crux for reconsidering what it means to be a person. Taken together, such outlooks cast in doubt the previous assurances of human ontology which were lodged in Western discourse. This book explores not only the scholarship behind such moves, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the ways in which everyday people are increasingly enacting posthumanism in their everyday lives. The book follows a narrative thread of various case studies ranging from the pre-hominid to the cyborg, and ends with a futurist appraisal of current trajectories.