Winner of the 2013 John Hope Franklin Book Prize presented by the American Studies Association Social Death tackles one of the core paradoxes of social justice struggles and scholarship—that the battle to end oppression shares the moral grammar that structures exploitation and sanctions state violence. Lisa Marie Cacho forcefully argues that the demands for personhood for those who, in the eyes of society, have little value, depend on capitalist and heteropatriarchal measures of...
A new understanding of the culturally rich and historic relationship between Hollywood and Bollywood. With American cinema facing intense technological and financial challenges both at home and abroad, and with Indian media looking to globalize, there have been numerous high-profile institutional connections between Hollywood and Bombay cinema in the past few years. Many accounts have proclaimed India’s transformation in a relatively short period from a Hollywood outpost to a...
During the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf appeared in the United States for the first time. These schools were committed to the use of the sign language to educate deaf students. Manual education made the growth of the deaf community possible, for it gathered deaf people together in sizable numbers for the first time in American history. It also fueled the emergence of Deaf culture, as the schools became agents of cultural transformations. Just as the Deaf community began to be...
In low-income U.S. cities, street fights between teenage girls are common. These fights take place at school, on street corners, or in parks, when one girl provokes another to the point that she must either “step up” or be labeled a “punk.” Typically, when girls engage in violence that is not strictly self-defense, they are labeled “delinquent,” their actions taken as a sign of emotional pathology. However, in Why Girls Fight , Cindy...
Despite claims frompundits and politicians that we now live in a post-racial America, people seemto keep finding ways to talk about race—from celebrations of the inaugurationof the first Black president to resurgent debates about policeprofiling, race and racism remain salient features of our world. When facedwith fervent anti-immigration sentiments, record incarceration rates of Blacks andLatinos, and deepening socio-economic disparities, a new question has eruptedin the last decade:...