Oaxacan Woodcarvers in Global Economies of Culture
Unlike many other handicrafts in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, which have long cultural and historical trajectories, Oaxacan woodcarving began in the second half of the twentieth century and has always been done for the commercial market. In The Value of Aesthetics, Alanna Cant explores how one family's workshop in the village of San Martin ......
Unruly women have been making a spectacle of themselves in film and on television from Mae West to Roseanne Arnold. In this groundbreaking work, Kathleen Rowe explores how the unruly woman-often a voluptuous, noisy, joke-making rebel or "woman on top"-uses humor and excess to undermine patriarchal norms and authority. At the heart of the book ......
How building codes shaped material, social, and environmental landscapes in American cities. Almost every American city contains neighborhoods dominated by wood frame construction-light, cheap, combustible, and requiring the lowest upfront investment of labor and material in the building industry. Known as a Type V (five) construction in the ......
Texas civil rights icon Jim Harrington recounts his lifelong fight for equality, winning major reforms for farmworkers and disabled Texans and helping build a movement for social justice. Jim Harrington arrived in South Texas in 1973, ready to file class action lawsuits and "save the world." Over the following fifty years, he built one of ......
Travel Narratives in the Cinema of Alexander Payne
The first in-depth analysis of the films of Alexander Payne through the lenses of authorship, tourism, and leisure. With the films Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska, and The Holdovers, Alexander Payne has carved out an unusual role in American cinema as a bankable auteur. There is something about Payne's neurotics and searchers, his ......
How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics
In the 1960s and 1970s, America experienced a sports revolution. New professional sports franchises and leagues were established, new stadiums were built, football and basketball grew in popularity, and the proliferation of television enabled people across the country to support their favorite teams and athletes from the comfort of their homes. At ......
Politics and Indigeneity in Twenty-First-Century Bolivia
A sophisticated analysis of an influential Indigenous political ideology. When the political ideology known as "Indianism" developed in Bolivia in the 1960s, it was premised on a rejection of Bolivian nationalism. Over the ensuing decades, however, it underwent several mutations as it moved out of a close circle of intellectuals to grip the ......
Politics and Indigeneity in Twenty-First-Century Bolivia
A sophisticated analysis of an influential Indigenous political ideology. When the political ideology known as "Indianism" developed in Bolivia in the 1960s, it was premised on a rejection of Bolivian nationalism. Over the ensuing decades, however, it underwent several mutations as it moved out of a close circle of intellectuals to grip the ......