Critical American Studies
This series examines recent trends in American studies. Fundamental questions about history, culture, social structure, race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship now challenge and motivate work in this discipline and also connect and integrate it with other areas of study. Books in the series analyze and critique the forces (including mass migration, global economy, apparent weaknesses of the nation-state, and ongoing ethnic antagonisms) that compel this field to reevaluate how culture produces individual and collective identities.
Books in this Series
Debating the End of History
The Marketplace, Utopia, and the Fragmentation of Intellectual Life
Why the global marketplace doesn’t—and can’t—provide the utopian world it promises
Samurai among Panthers
Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life
The first biography of Asian American activist and Black Panther Party member Richard Aoki
Triangulations
Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity
How Latino autobiographical texts reconfigure identity in opposition to familiar notions of self
American Pietàs
Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal
What visual tropes of race, death, and motherhood tell us about citizenship
Mythohistorical Interventions
The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies
The importance of myth, symbol, and image in the Chicano movement and beyond
Ends of Empire
Asian American Critique and the Cold War
A bold examination of how the U.S. Cold War in Asia impacted the formation of Asian America
The New American Exceptionalism
Exposes the fantasies that shaped U.S. identity between the end of the cold war and the global war on terror
Chains of Babylon
The Rise of Asian America
Traces for the first time the rise of the radically antiracist and antiwar Asian American movement
Cannibal Democracy
Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas
Cannibalism as a metaphor for racial assimilation in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil
Next to the Color Line
Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois
Interrogates Du Bois on questions of race, gender, and sex
American Tropics
Articulating Filipino America
How America’s image of the Philippines reflects the U.S. inability to see its own imperialism
Mestizaje
Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture
A major reassessment of how mixed-race identity affects Chicano culture and politics
Mangos, Chiles, and Truckers
The Business of Transnationalism
Examines the effects of global capital on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border
At Home in Diaspora
Black International Writing
Examines the work produced in exile by writers of African descent
Heartbeat of Struggle
The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
The first biography of a courageous and inspiring champion of freedom and equality
Singlejack Solidarity
The writings of the lifelong activist and worker’s advocate collected here for the first time
The Colonizing Trick
National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America
An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
Aberrations in Black
Toward a Queer of Color Critique
A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture
Death of a Nation
American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism
A trenchant examination of epic shifts in American thought by a major scholar in the field.
Not the Triumph but the Struggle
The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete
A sweeping look at black athletes through the lens of the black power protests at the Mexico City Olympics—now in paperback!
The Culture Concept
Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism
Examines the prehistory of the American struggle to address cultural difference.
The New American Studies
A clarion call for a more theoretically and politically informed approach to American Studies
American Studies in a Moment of Danger
A forthright look at the future of the discipline in the wake of immense social changes.
Those Without a Country
The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists
A groundbreaking study of this political movement.
Reinventing Citizenship
Black Los Angeles, Korean Kawasaki, and Community Participation
A study of race, welfare, and citizenship in the United States and Japan during the 1960s and 1970s
Urban Triage
Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism
Assesses fictional representations of racial conflict, cooperation, and complicity amid the urban crisis of the 1980s
Distant Wars Visible
The Ambivalence of Witnessing
Mapping the fraught space between empathy and spectacle in the witnessing of military conflict
Peace Corps Fantasies
How Development Shaped the Global Sixties
How the 1960s Peace Corps’ gendered modernization ideology shaped social movements across the Americas