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Now synonymous with Sixties counterculture, LSD actually entered the American consciousness via the mainstream. Time and Life, messengers of American respectability, trumpeted its grand arrival in a postwar landscape scoured of alluring descriptions of drug use while lesser outlets piggybacked on their coverage with stories by turns sensationalized and glowing. This book offers the untold tale of LSD's wild journey from Brylcreem and Ivory soap to incense and peppermints. As the book shows, the early attention lavished on the drug by the news media glorified its use in treatments for mental illness but also its status as a mystical—yet legitimate—gateway to exploring the unconscious mind. The book's history takes readers to the center of how popular media hyped psychedelic drugs in a constantly shifting legal and social environment, producing an intricate relationship between drugs and media experience that came to define contemporary pop culture. It also traces how the breathless coverage of LSD gave way to a textbook moral panic, transforming yesterday's refined seeker of truths into an acid casualty splayed out beyond the fringe of polite society.

This book is a history of U.S.–French radio broadcasting in the twentieth century. Decades before satellite TV and the Internet, America and France interconnected regularly and instantaneously on a mass scale across the Atlantic. The book investigates how transatlantic radio developed into a dynamic field of cross-border circulation, cultural exchange, and geopolitics. Between 1931, when live broadcasts first linked U.S.–French listeners, and 1974, when France dissolved its public media monopoly, international broadcasting developed into a critical communication space that embodied turbulent interwar politics and the expansive tendencies of U.S. commercial networks; the cataclysmic events of World War II, including the German Occupation of France; contentious U.S.–French relations during the Cold War; French postwar international media expansion; and the effects of the 1960s on U.S.–French ties and media systems. The book examines the techno-aesthetics of radio as a technological medium linking two allied, but starkly different societies and cultures in new ways. The book complicates the paradigm of self-contained "radio nations" to demonstrate that throughout broadcast history, the challenges of developing and managing international interconnectivity required necessary partnerships that blurred lines of sovereignty, state control, and national cultural production. Radio’s development and usage prefigured the global, cross-border digital communication technologies, tools, infrastructure, and mediated geopolitics of today.

This book challenges the notion that advertising disappeared as a political issue in the United States in 1938 with the passage of the Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act, the result of more than a decade of campaigning to regulate the advertising industry. The book suggests that the war experience (World War II), even more than the legislative battles of the 1930s, defined the role of advertising in U.S. postwar political economy and the nation’s cultural firmament. Using archival sources, newspapers accounts, and trade publications, the book demonstrates that the postwar climate of political intolerance and reverence for free enterprise quashed critical investigations into the advertising industry. While advertising could be criticized or lampooned, the institution itself became inviolable. During the war, there were ongoing tensions between advertisers, regulators, and consumer activists. It was advertisers who turned a situation, that should have been disadvantageous to them, into an opportunity to cement their place in a postwar society defined by advertising and the consumer products it promoted. The book aims to uncover the significant political and economic forces that shaped the industry and the use of advertising to bolster the corporate system behind the products.

This book expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation diaspora framework that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. This book is arranged around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, the chapters offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America.

Tourists exult in Bahia, Brazil, as a tropical paradise infused with the black population's one-of-a-kind vitality. But the alluring images of smiling black faces and dancing black bodies masks an ugly reality of anti-black authoritarian violence. This book argues that the dialectic of glorified representations of black bodies and subsequent state repression reinforces Brazil's racially hierarchal society. Interpreting the violence as both institutional and performative, the book follows a grassroots movement and social protest theater troupe in their campaigns against racial violence. As the book reveals, economies of black pain and suffering form the backdrop for the staged, scripted, and choreographed afro-paradise that dazzles visitors. The work of grassroots organizers exposes this relationship, exploding illusions and asking unwelcome questions about the impact of state violence performed against the still-marginalized mass of Afro-Brazilians.

Numerous activists and scholars have appealed for rights, inclusion, and justice in the name of “citizenship.” This book shows that there is nothing redeemable about citizenship, nothing worth salvaging or sustaining in the name of “community” practice, or belonging. According to the book, citizenship is a violent dehumanizing mechanism that makes the comparative devaluing of human lives seem commonsensical, logical, and even necessary. The book argues that whenever we work on behalf of citizenship, whenever we work toward including more types of peoples under its reign, we inevitably reify the violence of citizenship against non-normative others. The book's focus on three legal case studies—same-sex marriage law, hate crime legislation, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty and racialization—exposes how citizenship confounds and obscures the mutual processes of settler colonialism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism. In this way, the book argues that citizenship requires anti-intersectionality, that is, strategies that deny the mutuality and contingency of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation—and how, oftentimes, progressive left activists and scholars follow suit.

This first scholarly biography of Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) sheds new light on an important woman suffrage leader who has too often been overlooked and misunderstood. An immigrant from a poor family, Shaw grew up in an economic reality that encouraged the adoption of non-traditional gender roles. Challenging traditional gender boundaries throughout her life, she put herself through college, worked as an ordained minister and a doctor, and built a tightly knit family with her secretary and longtime companion Lucy E. Anthony. Drawing on unprecedented research, the book shows how these circumstances and choices both impacted Shaw's role in the woman suffrage movement and set her apart from her native-born, middle- and upper-class colleagues. The book also rehabilitates Shaw's years as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), arguing that Shaw's much-belittled tenure actually marked a renaissance of both NAWSA and the suffrage movement as a whole.

The migrations of Manilamen, Bengali Muslim peddlers, and Chinese merchants and coolies extend the history of Asian Americans in the South into the early nineteenth and twentieth century. Between 1950 and 2000, the Asian American population in the American South increased more than one hundred times, much higher than the national average and the greatest increase among all regions of the United States. Extending the understanding of race and ethnicity in the South beyond the prism of black–white relations, this book explores the growth, impact, and significance of rapidly growing Asian American populations in the American South, and discusses the formation of past and emerging Asian American communities in the region. As the chapters illustrate, Asian Americans have remade the Southern landscape with a visible, vital presence in many towns, suburbs, and cities. Avoiding the usual focus on the East and West Coasts, the book examines the historical and contemporary significance of Asian American migration, religious identities, and racial formations in the South. several chapters attend to the nuanced ways in which Asian Americans negotiate the dominant black and white racial binary, while others provoke readers to reconsider the supposed cultural isolation of the region, reintroducing the South within a historical web of global networks across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic.

The reasons behind the increase in autism diagnoses have become hotly contested in the media as well as within the medical, scholarly, and autistic communities. This book suggests the proliferating number of discussions point to autism as a rhetorical phenomenon that engenders attempts to persuade through arguments, appeals to emotions, and representational strategies. The book focuses on the ways gender influences popular discussion and understanding of autism's causes and effects. It identifies gendered theories like the “refrigerator mother” theory, for example, which blames emotionally distant mothers for autism, and the “extreme male brain” theory, which links autism to the modes of systematic thinking found in male computer geeks. The book's analysis reveals how people employ such highly gendered theories to craft rhetorical narratives around stock characters—fix-it dads, heroic mother warriors rescuing children from autism—that advocate for ends beyond the story itself while also allowing the storyteller to gain authority, understand the disorder, and take part in debates. The book reveals the ways we build narratives around controversial topics while offering new insights into the ways rhetorical inquiry can and does contribute to conversations about gender and disability.

Over the past decade, the controversial issue of gay marriage has emerged as a primary battle in the culture wars and a definitive social issue of our time. The subject moved to the forefront of mainstream public debate in 2004, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom began authorizing same-sex marriage licenses, and it has remained in the forefront through three presidential campaigns and numerous state ballot initiatives. This book examines how prominent news outlets presented this issue from 2003 to 2012, a time when intense news coverage focused unprecedented attention on gay and lesbian life. During this time, gay rights leaders sought to harness the power of news media to advocate for marriage equality and to reform their community's public image. Building on in-depth interviews with gay rights activists and a comprehensive, longitudinal study of news stories, this book investigates these leaders' aims and how their frames, tactics, and messages evolved over time. In the end, media coverage of the gay marriage debate both aided and undermined the cause. Media exposure gave activists a platform to discuss gay and lesbian families. But it also triggered an upsurge in opposing responses and pressured activists to depict gay life in a way calculated to appeal to heterosexual audiences. Ultimately, this book reveals both the promises and the limitations of commercial media as a route to social change.

This pioneering social history of Little Saigon examines the institutionalization and preservation of a Southern California ethnic enclave and its people through the politics of rescue. It argues that Little Saigon’s emergence and growth was fuelled by American guilt over losing the war and Vietnamese gratitude for being rescued from communism. Thus the largest of diasporic Vietnamese communities, along with most of its counterparts nationwide, was framed as the least a guilt-ridden country could do to atone for its Cold War failures. The politics of rescue helps to explain why Little Saigon enjoyed a level of mainstream moral, economic, and political support historically unknown to most other Asian Americans. As for the Vietnamese exiles, the politics of rescue placed extreme pressure on them to act like model minorities in order to justify an unpopular war that killed 58,000 Americans and nearly invalidated American Exceptionalism. By becoming Refugee American, the losers of the Vietnam War could cast themselves as winners of the postwar, whereby Vietnamese and Americans, rather than forgetting, could mutually affirm a tragic past by rewriting it.

This book shows how 1947 marked the beginning of a history of politicized animosity associated with the differing ideas of “India” held by communities and in regions on one hand, and by the political–military Indian state on the other. Assembling literary, historiographic, performative, and visual representations of gendered violence against men and women, the book establishes that cultural expressions do not just follow violence but determine its very contours, and interrogates the gendered scripts underwriting the violence originating in the contested visions of what “India” means. Ambitious and ranging across disciplines, the book offers both an overview of and nuanced new perspectives on the ways caste, identity, and class complicate representations of violence, and how such representations shape our understandings of both violence and India.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of publicly active African American women emerged from the social and educational elite to assume racial leadership roles. Their work challenged thinking on racial issues as well as questions about gender, sexuality, and class. Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

Long portrayed as a masculine endeavor, the African American struggle for progress often found expression through an unlikely literary figure: the black girl. Drawing on heavy archival research on a wide range of texts about African American girls, this book explores the phenomenon of black girlhood. It shows that the figure of the black girl in African American literature provided a powerful avenue for exploring issues like domesticity, femininity, and proper conduct. The characters' actions, however fictional, became a rubric for African American citizenship and racial progress. At the same time, their seeming dependence and insignificance allegorized the unjust treatment of African Americans. The book reveals fascinating black girls who, possessed of a premature knowing and wisdom beyond their years, projected a courage and resiliency that made them exemplary representations of the project of racial advance and citizenship. The book asks why black writers of the period conveyed racial inequality, poverty, and discrimination through the lens of black girlhood; why black writers and activists emphasized certain types of girls; what tropes can be identified in the early literature of black girlhood; and where these girlhood tropes originated. It examines how black girls were represented in the earliest extant examples of the black press and it examines the first writings of black women about girlhood during the antebellum era. In doing this and more, the book documents a literary genealogy of the cultural attitudes toward black girls in the United States.

Drawing on both the author's personal experience and critical theory, this book illuminates the dynamic complexity of Caribbean culture and traces its migratory patterns throughout the Americas. Both a memoir and a scholarly study, the book explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. From the author's childhood in Trinidad and Tobago to life and work in communities and universities in Nigeria, Brazil, England, and the United States, the author portrays a rich and fluid set of personal experiences. The book reflects on these movements to understand the interrelated dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality embedded in Caribbean spaces, as well as many Caribbean people's traumatic and transformative stories of displacement, migration, exile, and sometimes return. Ultimately, the book re-establishes the connections between theory and practice, intellectual work and activism, and personal and private space.

This book explores the complex history of the decades-long ASNE (American Society of News Editors) diversity initiative, which culminated in the failed Goal 2000 effort to match newsroom demographics with those of the U.S. population. Drawing upon exhaustive reviews of ASNE archival materials, the book examines the democratic paradox through the lens of the ASNE, an elite organization that arguably did more than any other during the twentieth century to institutionalize professional standards in journalism and expand the concepts of government accountability and the free press. The ASNE would emerge in the 1970s as the leader in the newsroom integration movement, but its effort would be frustrated by structures of exclusion that the organization had embedded into its own professional standards. Explaining why a project so promising failed so profoundly, the book expands our understanding of the intransigence of institutional racism, gender discrimination, and homophobia within democracy.

This book tells the history of anti-Chinese politics in Mexican culture. It reveals the hidden influence that anti-Chinese racism, or antichinismo, has had on the formation of the revolutionary government and mestizo national identity. The imagined racial figure of Chinese men created a profound impact in Mexican society. The book employs an Asian Americanist critique to evaluate Mexico as a racial state to discuss the political function of antichinismo at various points of national crisis. After the revolution, the social rights mandate of the 1917 constitution created a new rationality for the legitimacy and authority of the national state – to care for the good of the indigenous population. This book shows how Mexican politics relied upon racism against Chinese people to create polemical notions of the public good that helped generate new relationships between the government and the governed. The book is divided chronologically to attend to three major phases of antichinismo: the disposable worker, the killable subject, and the pernicious defiler. Through discourses of Chinese racial difference, diverse Mexican actors created alternative visions of the nation and helped rework the relationships of rule and consent. A regional approach to telling this national story illustrates that people took up antichinismo for different reasons but coalesced through the state ideology of revolutionary government’s mestizo nationalism.

To attract readers, journalists have long trafficked in the causes of trauma—crime, violence, warfare—as well as psychological profiling of deviance and aberrational personalities. Novelists, in turn, have explored these same subjects in developing their characters and by borrowing from their own traumatic life stories to shape the themes and psychological terrain of their fiction. This book offers a conceptual and historical framework for comprehending the impact of trauma and violence in the careers and the writings of important journalist–literary figures in the United States and British Isles from the early 1700s to today. Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, the book draws upon the lively accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. The book notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work. The book discusses more than a hundred writers whose works have won them fame, even at the price of their health, their families, and their lives.

Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. examines the expressive culture of African American women in Washington, D.C. during the early twentieth century. Honing in on the intellectual and cultural strivings of African American women communities in New Negro era Washington, I unveil a city in which African American women sought to configure themselves as authorial subjects. Between 1860 and 1930, the population of black women in Washington increased from 8.402 to 69,843. Over the course of seventy years of African American women’s migration to the nation’s capital, numerous institutions, organizations, and political, social, and cultural arenas emerged in Washington that catered to the specific needs, desires, and interests of a rapidly growing population of black women. African American women established spaces for contesting political, social and cultural currents and conventions that limited black women’s participation in the public sphere. Many of these women defiantly entered into public cultures such as higher education, literary activism, and local and interstate commerce. New Negro women challenged racial, gender, and sexual ideologies and norms that often relegated African American women to subordinate political, social, and cultural statuses. Colored No More reveals the significance of Washington, D.C. as a New Negro city. The African American women who inhabited the nation’s capital were integral to African American freedom and equality struggles of the early twentieth century.

Telling the affecting stories of eighty gay, bisexual, and transgender (GBT) Latino activists and volunteers living in Chicago and San Francisco, this book closely details how these individuals have been touched or transformed by the AIDS epidemic. Weaving together activists' responses to oppression and stigma, their encounters with AIDS, and their experiences as GBTs and Latinos in North America and Latin America, the book explores the intersection of civic involvement with ethnic and sexual identity. Even as activists battle multiple sources of oppression, they are able to restore their sense of family connection and self-esteem through the creation of an alternative space in which community members find value in their relationships with one another. In demonstrating the transformative effects of a nurturing community environment for GBT Latinos affected by the AIDS epidemic, the book illustrates that members find support in one another, as compañeros, in their struggles with homophobia, gender discrimination, racism, poverty, and forced migration.