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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.

Black Chicago in the post–civil rights era was constantly refreshed by an influx of newcomers from the American South via the Great Migration. Chicago was a beacon, disseminating a fresh, powerful definition of Black identity primarily through music, art, and entrepreneurship and mass media. This book uses ruminations on oft-undervalued found ephemeral materials (like a fan club pamphlet or a creamy-white Curtis Mayfield record) and a variety of in-depth original and archival interviews to unearth tales of the aspiration, will, courage, and imagination born in Black Chicago. It also questions what vestiges of our past we choose to value in this digital age. These stories serve as homespun folktales of hope to counter darker popular narratives about the South and West Sides of the city. They also express the ongoing quest for identity and self-determination, a quest that fueled the earlier Black Arts Movement, and is again at the heart of the Black Arts renaissance currently blossoming in Black Chicago, from genre-spanning musicians like Chance the Rapper, Noname, the Juju Exchange, and Makaya McCraven, and from visual artists like Theaster Gates and Kerry James Marshall, and up-and-comers like Brandon Breaux. Meanwhile, many of the creative giants of previous generations are struggling (Ebony magazine and the groundbreaking DuSable Museum among them). But this text asserts that energy never dies, and creativity will live on beyond this juncture, regardless of the outcome.

Tracing the growth of creationism in America as a political movement, this book explains why the particularly American phenomenon of antievolution has succeeded as a popular belief. Conceptualizing the history of creationism as a strategic public relations campaign, the book examines why this movement has captured the imagination of the American public, from the explosive Scopes trial of 1925 to today's heated battles over public school curricula. The book shows how creationists have appealed to cultural values such as individual rights and admiration of the rebel spirit, thus spinning creationism as a viable, even preferable, alternative to evolution. In particular, the book argues that the current anti-evolution campaign follows a template created by Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the Scopes trial's primary combatants. Their celebrity status and dexterity with the press prefigured the Moral Majority's 1980s media blitz, more recent staunchly creationist politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and creationists' savvy use of the Internet and museums to publicize their cause. Drawing from trial transcripts, media sources, films, and archival documents, the book highlights the importance of historical myth in popular culture, religion, and politics and situates this nearly century-old debate in American cultural history.

Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, this book recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, the book argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. For generations of Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Calabrese immigrants in New York, Italian American cuisine was much more than a remnant of the home country; the book shows how the Italian American table we now celebrate emerged as the outcome of years of selective incorporations of cultural fragments, resources, and meanings available to the immigrant community. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, the book recasts Italian American food culture as an American “invention” resonant with traces of tradition.

This book utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to expand the parameters of satire to include the satirization found in twenty-first-century African American forms of expression crossing generic boundaries. While many of these texts and performances are satires or comedies in a traditional sense, some offer the satirization of race itself as a strategy to create space for possible satiric readings. The use of comedy, humor, and satire in these texts and performances incisively problematizes the existing social sphere by highlighting its absurdity in both the reality of racialization and the mythology of the “post-racial.” These texts reveal the irrationality of racialization and critique anxieties surrounding race and Blackness to demonstrate the usefulness of satire as a critical frame for articulating Black selfhood. Here the power of satire is found in “laughing to keep from dying,” a form of revolutionary laughter in two registers. The in-group laughter opens up Black interior space to make room for autonomous Black identity formation. Out-group laughter either indicts the listener or offers protective plausible deniability of “just jokes” in which comedy is feigned to lack sociopolitical meaning. This laughter opens up space for kaleidoscopic Blackness, where all autonomous performances of Black self-identity are valid.

When the United States acquired the Philippines and Puerto Rico, it reconciled its status as an empire with its anticolonial roots by claiming that it would altruistically establish democratic institutions in its new colonies. Ever since, Filipino and Puerto Rican artists have challenged promises of benevolent assimilation and portray U.S. imperialism as both self-interested and unexceptional among empires. This book interprets the pivotal engagement of novels, films, performance poetry, and other cultural productions as both symptoms of and resistance against American military, social, economic, and political incursions. Though the Philippines became an independent nation and Puerto Rico a U.S. commonwealth, both remain subordinate to the United States. The book's juxtaposition reveals two different yet simultaneous models of U.S. neocolonial power and contradicts American exceptionalism as a reluctant empire that only accepts colonies for the benefit of the colonized and global welfare. Its analysis, meanwhile, demonstrates how popular culture allows for alternative narratives of U.S. imperialism, but also functions to contain those alternatives.

This book theorizes and conceptualizes the Middle space musical theater maintains in America--between professional and amateur, urban and rural, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, truth and deception. It focuses on communities in the middle of America who, for various reasons, use homegrown musicals to distance themselves from truth. Musicals grant such communities space to engage belief and religion, to flex the tension musicals maintain between reality and unreality in order to imagine worlds unlike their own. This book makes the case that musicals are a particular form of lying. Building upon anthropologist Mary Douglas’s observation that dirt is simply “matter out of place,” this book promotes what might be called prosocial lies as no less than “stories out of place.” In this moment when truth and facts have lost currency, this book suggest lies have more to offer the world than is often admitted. Whereas musicals promote lying as a means of imagining worlds unlike our own, it concludes we must first fiercely embrace and commit to the Middle space of lying in order to jolt ourselves out of the current post-truth malaise and move toward building a world that is more in line with hopes of justice, reconciliation, and community. Whatever web of deception musicals spin for Americans, this book claims we desperately need more of it and now.

Significant historical, global, and political forces of the Soviet period undermined the performance practice of the Sakha olonkho epic in northeastern Siberia, impairing the potential for sustainability of this ancient song-story tradition. This book documents how the Sakha people have leveraged UNESCO’s 2005 proclamation of this genre as a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” in their attempts to revitalize its performance practice. Foregrounding Sakha narratives, this case study examines the forces leading to the decline of olonkho during the Soviet era and the factors currently playing a role in the genre’s revitalization. In addition, this volume explores the appropriation of the olonkho tradition to express Sakha cultural identity in an increasingly globalized post-Soviet Russia and describes the transformations of olonkho as it adapts to change. Despite vigorous promotion of the revitalization process by the Sakha Ministry of Culture and the academic community, current levels of transmission and creative innovation do not foster adequate resilience for the survival of traditional olonkho as improvisationally performed by master olonkhosuts. In contrast, related genres such as theatrical olonkho and other multi-person olonkho performances enjoy increasing popularity and demonstrate many of the needed resilience markers for a sustainable future.

Etiquette books insist that we never discuss politics during a meal. This book offers a polite rebuttal, presenting vivid firsthand accounts of people's lives at the table to show how mealtimes can teach us the conversational give-and-take foundational to democracy. Delving into the ground rules about listening, sharing, and respect that we obey when we break bread, the book shows how conversations and table activities represent occasions for developing our civil selves. If there are cultural differences over practices—who should speak, what behavior is acceptable, what topics are off limits, how to resolve conflict—our exposure to the making, enforcement, and breaking of these rules offers a daily dose of political awareness and growth. Political table talk provides a forum to practice the conversational skills upon which civil society depends. It also ignites the feelings of respect, trust, and empathy that undergird the idea of a common good that is fundamental to the democratic process.

During the Depression, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) dispatched scribes to sample the fare at group eating events like church dinners, political barbecues, and clambakes. Its America Eats project sought nothing less than to sample, and report upon, the tremendous range of foods eaten across the United States. This book shapes a cultural and sensory history of New Deal era eating from the FWP archives. From “ravioli, the diminutive derbies of pastries, the crowns stuffed with a well-seasoned paste” to barbeque seasoning that integrated “salt, black pepper, dried red chili powder, garlic, oregano, cumin seed, and cayenne pepper” while “tomatoes, green chili peppers, onions, and olive oil ma[de] up the sauce,” the book describes in mouth-watering detail how Americans tasted their food. They did so in ways that varied, and varied widely, depending on race, ethnicity, class, and region. The book explores how likes and dislikes, cravings, and disgust operated within local sensory economies that it culls from the FWP's vivid descriptions, visual cues, culinary expectations, recipes, and accounts of restaurant meals. The book illustrates how nostalgia, prescriptive gender ideals, and racial stereotypes shaped how the FWP was able to frame regional food cultures as American.