Untold Histories of San Francisco’s Restaurant Landscape 

The latest issue of California History, guest edited by Leonard Schmieding (Georgetown University) and Shana Klein (Georgetown University), explores the surprisingly untold histories of San Francisco’s restaurant landscape in the twentieth century. The following is an excerpt from the guest editors’ introduction, which is freely available at ch.ucpress.edu, along with the rest of the issue, until February 21.

“This is how watermelons grow in California.” Cover of California History Vol. 94, No. 4.

Since the Gold Rush, in 1849, San Francisco has always been known as a food city. In the beginning, San Franciscans imported canned goods from all over the globe in order to feed the population of gold miners, and soon after, local agriculture demonstrated that farmers could grow anything—bigger and better, as they were proud to brag, than anywhere else in the United States. With the completion of the transcontinental railway system, San Francisco could export its Northern Californian abundance to the rest of the country and established its great reputation as a culinary paradise. While San Francisco foodways reached the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast, its immigrant populations changed these foodways. For example, Italians, who controlled the city’s farmers markets and dominated the local agriculture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exposed San Franciscans to a great variety of produce. Chinese played an important role in distributing the produce by buying large quantities at the markets and then carrying them up the steep hills of the city to sell them to residents who did not go down to the markets. Furthermore, immigrant chefs in hotels and restaurants started using seasonal produce for their dishes and coined the term San Francisco cuisine—with Austrian immigrant Victor Hirtzler, chef at the St. Francis Hotel, becoming most famous for his cookbook of California cuisine. A number of dishes like Crab Louie, Cioppino, and also various versions of Pacific abalone were thus made into San Francisco signature dishes.

One major component of San Francisco’s culinary signature could be found in the city’s bohemian culture, which in turn consisted of the desire to eat both cosmopolitan and affordable meals. In their quest for exotic and filling meals, bohemians like Clarence Edwords scoured the local landscape of restaurants and found them in French, Japanese, Chinese, German, Italian, and other ethnic eateries. In view of San Francisco’s reputation as a food city, as a home for bohemians, and as a cosmopolitan metropolis on the Pacific coast, the lack of food historical studies of the city’s restaurant landscape is surprising. This special issue therefore intends to shed more light on San Francisco’s German, Chinese, and Indian restaurants in the course of the twentieth century.

Inside the issue

San Francisco Cuisines: Global Flows in the Food City of the West
Leonard Schmieding, Shana Klein

Johnny Kan: The Untold Story of Chinatown’s Greatest Culinary Ambassador
April Chan

Chinese and Indian Restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1960s
Laresh Jayasanker

German Restaurants in San Francisco in the Wake of World War I
Leonard Schmieding

Public History: Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA 
Stephanie Narrow

Book Review: Making Black Los Angeles: Class, Gender, and Community by Marne L. Campbell
Michael Slaughter

Book Review: Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom by Mireya Loza
Frank Barajas

CALL FOR PAPERS: California History, the premier journal of historical writing on California and the West, invites papers for review and possible publication. Click here for more information about submitting your article.

Dive Deep into the Story of Jane Goodall in The Ghosts of Gombe

“This brilliant narrative will haunt you. Dale Peterson has brought to life the Gombe of the late 1960’s, describing the entwined lives of the chimpanzees and the people studying them. It’s a true story of adventure, danger, and sudden death that makes compelling reading.”—Jane Goodall

Flying over the East African Rift and landing at the airstrip at Kigoma, Tanzania, you arrive in the thick of the Gombe forest. The forest has remained largely unaltered by human presence by its remoteness as well as its cutural traditions. The local people regard the forest as the “sacred lair of their formidable earth spirits.”

However, when Jane Goodall landed in the Gombe forest in 1960, the area was primarily labeled as a British mandate and Chimpanzee reserve. Over the next several decades, Goodall would establish her Gombe research camp and begin her groundbreaking chimpanzee research that would eventually win her numerous accolades and drastically alter the way that humans view the natural world.

The first decade was largely without incident until one day in July 1969. A week prior, Ruth Davis, a young American woman working as a volunteer at Goodall’s research site, wandered away from the camp to follow a chimpanzee and never returned. Several days later, her body was found in a pool at the base of a nearby high waterfall.

Rewinding several months, The Ghosts of Gombe follows the day-to-day experiences of those living in Goodall’s wilderness research camp in the months leading up to this tragic death. Dale Peterson explores the social dynamics and human-chimpanzee friendships and complex emotions flowing through the camp, while also posing questions about Ruth’s death. Was it an accident? Was she pushed, or did she fall to her death? Regardless of the specifics, it would go on to haunt two of the survivors for the rest of their lives.

Click through to the UC Press website to learn more about this unique glimpse into the everyday of the Gombe Stream National Park research camp, and save 30% on all pre-orders with promo code 17W7196.

Dale Peterson is the author or editor of twenty books, including Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (coauthored with Richard Wrangham), The Moral Lives of Animals, and Eating Apes. Learn more about Dale at his website.

Extraordinary Histories

An opportunity to reflect on the numerous events and figures in American history, Black History Month is more than a month; it is an expansive and growing history of America. The recommended books below highlight poignant historical moments and social movements and exemplary leaders at the front of societal change. Just a sample of the breadth of titles we publish in African American history, and on ethnic studies, more broadly, these titles foster greater understanding of national and world history.

Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
By Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the United States, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in sixty-eight U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world. The notions of self-reliance and self-determination were at the core of the Panther’s beliefs, but the Party’s legacy has been largely misunderstood.

With Black Against Empire, historian Waldo E. Martin and sociologist Joshua Bloom provide the most comprehensive, unvarnished examination of the Party and its place in the larger scope of revolutionary and political tides swirling in the tumultuous 1960s. A book Bobby Seale called “profoundly important,” this bold, engrossing, and richly detailed history cuts through the mythology to reveal the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement.

Selected as San Francisco’s 2017 One City One Book.

Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City
By Tyina L. Steptoe

Beginning after World War I, the city of Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Tyina L. Steptoe’s award-winning Houston Bound draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations—particularly those of Mexicans and Creoles—complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race. This migration history also examines these racial complexities through music and sound to trace the emergence of Houston’s blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics.

Winner of the Urban History Association’s 2016 Kenneth Jackson Award, the Western History Association’s 2017 W. Turrentine-Jackson Award, and the Friends of the Texas Room’s 2017 Julia Ideson Award.

Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life
By Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria Robinson

When you think of a map of the United States, what do you see? Now think of the Seattle that begot Jimi Hendrix. The Dallas that shaped Erykah Badu. The Holly Springs, Mississippi, that compelled Ida B. Wells to activism against lynching. The Birmingham where Martin Luther King, Jr., penned his most famous missive. Now how do you see the United States?

Chocolate Cities offers a new cartography of the United States—a “Black Map” that more accurately reflects the lived experiences and the future of Black life in America. Drawing on cultural sources such as film, music, fiction, and plays, and on traditional resources like Census data, oral histories, ethnographies, and health and wealth data, the book offers a new perspective for analyzing, mapping, and understanding the ebbs and flows of the Black American experience—all in the cities, towns, neighborhoods, and communities that Black Americans have created and defended. Black maps are consequentially different from our current geographical understanding of race and place in America. And as the United States moves toward a majority minority society, Chocolate Cities provides a broad and necessary assessment of how racial and ethnic minorities make and change America’s social, economic, and political landscape.

Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge
By James Naremore

Considered by the Chicago Tribune as “one of America’s very best filmmakers” and by The New York Times as “the nation’s least-known great filmmaker and most gifted black director,” Charles Burnett is a crucial figure in the history of American cinema and often regarded as the most influential member of the L.A. Rebellion group of African American filmmakers. The first book devoted to Burnett, James Naremore provides a close critical study of all Burnett’s major pictures for movies and television, including Killer of Sheep, To Sleep with Anger, The Glass Shield, Nightjohn, The Wedding, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, and Warming by the Devil’s Fire. Having accessed new information and rarely seen material, Naremore shows that Burnett’s career has developed against the odds and that his artistry, social criticism, humor, and commitment to what he calls “symbolic knowledge” have given his work enduring value for American culture.

Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels
By Christina Zanfagna

In the 1990s, Los Angeles was home to numerous radical social and environmental eruptions. In the face of several major earthquakes and floods, riots and economic insecurity, policebrutality and mass incarceration, some young black Angelenos turned to holy hip hop—a movement merging Christianity and hip hop culture—to “save” themselves and the city. Converting street corners to open-air churches and gangsta rap beats into anthems of praise, holy hip hoppers used gospel rap to navigate complicated social and spiritual realities and to transform the Southland’s fractured terrains into musical Zions. Armed with beats, rhymes, and bibles, they journeyed through black Lutheran congregations, prison ministries, African churches, reggae dancehalls, hip hop clubs, Nation of Islam meetings, and Black Lives Matter marches. Zanfagna’s fascinating ethnography provides a contemporary and unique view of black LA, offering a much-needed perspective on how music and religion intertwine in people’s everyday experiences.

The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption
By Nikki Jones 

In The Chosen Ones, sociologist and feminist scholar Nikki Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco’s historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them toward a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men’s ability to make good and forgive themselves—and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.

Forthcoming June 2018; preorder today.

Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century
By Barbara Ransby 

In the wake of the murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the exoneration of his killer, three black women activists launched a hashtag and social-media platform, Black Lives Matter, which would become the rubric for a larger movement. To many, especially those in the media, Black Lives Matter appeared to burst onto the national political landscape out of thin air.

But as historian and esteemed activist Barbara Ransby shows in her highly-anticipated Making All Black Lives Matter, the movement has roots in prison abolition, anti-police violence, black youth movements, and radical mobilizations across the country dating back at least a decade. Ransby interviewed more than a dozen of the movement’s principal organizers and activists, and she provides a detailed review of its extensive coverage in mainstream and social media. A critical history of the present, Making All Black Lives Matter offers one of the first overviews of Black Lives Matter and explores the challenges and possible future for this growing and influential movement.

Forthcoming September 2018; preorder today.

Attend Our Session at College Art Association

For the first time ever, conference exhibitors were invited to submit panel proposals for the 2018 College Art Association Annual Conference in Los Angeles.

The CAA Annual Conference is the largest gathering of professionals in the visual arts in the world, with over 300 panels and dozens of professional development workshops and events. The College Art Association encourages anyone who is interested in the arts, works in the arts, is looking for a job in the arts, or works in higher education to try to attend the conference.* The last time it was in Los Angeles was 2012. It’s not quite Halley’s Comet, but it’s not too far off either.

We are thrilled to have our session on the program for Friday morning, February 23rd—please plan your conference schedule so that you can join us!

CREATIVE ART BOOK PROMOTION AND HOW TO FIND AUDIENCES THAT MATTER

Friday, February 23rd

8:30AM–10:00AM

Room 511A

This moderator-led panel will bring together a variety of art world and publishing industry experts to discuss perspectives on promoting your book beyond the academy. Our team of panelists include:

Tyler Green is an historian and an award-winning critic who has produced and hosted The Modern Art Notes Podcast since 2011. The MAN Podcast is a weekly, hour-long interview program featuring artists, historians, authors, curators and conservators, that the BBC named one of the world’s top 25 cultural podcasts that would “blow your mind,” and “enrich your life”. His forthcoming book, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American, will be published by University of California Press in 2018.

Anastasia Aukeman is an art historian and curator who teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Her book Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association was published in 2016 (UC Press), coinciding with the BRUCE CONNER retrospective at MoMA and SFMOMA. Anastasia curated related exhibitions at the Landing Gallery in Los Angeles and the Susan Inglett Gallery in New York City.

Maureen Winter is Associate Publisher at Getty Publications and directs the Sales and Marketing department. This role gives her practical insight into what resonates in the market and how authors can successfully work with their publishers. Prior to joining the Getty Maureen spent 12 years in sales, marketing & rights at the illustrated trade publisher, Black Dog & Leventhal.

Kate Koza is Associate Publisher of Bookforum and the Director of Strategic Communication for Artforum. In these roles, Kate establishes and manages partnerships with cultural organizations and literary venues, facilitating a wide variety of private and public events, and oversees advertising opportunities for trade, university, and art-book publishers. She curates content for Bookforum’s digital channels, guides long-term planning and strategy, and generally helps support an ecosystem of engaged arts and culture enthusiasts.

Aimée Goggins, Senior Marketing Manager at University of California Press will chair the panel, and topics will include how to pitch your work to non-specialists, partnering with your publisher to ensure your success, positioning yourself for interviews and speaking engagements, tips for connecting your work to contemporary culture and dialogue, how and when to think about the different audiences for your book, supporting a book release outside the traditional author talk, and the panelists will share their own relevant experiences and stories.

Come ready to learn, to share your ideas and questions, and to expand your views on art publishing today.

*Advance registration for the conference ends on February 7. Review the full schedule.

Save 40% with UC Press at 2018 Western Society of Criminology Conference

The 2018 WSC Conference convenes February 1 – 3 in Long Beach, CA. Senior Editor Maura Roessner will be in attendance; email or contact her @Maura_R if you’d like to learn more about working with her to become a UC Press author or reviewer.  #missiondriven

See Maura with #WSC2018 President Hadar Aviram and author Valerie Jenness at 3:30pm today as they discuss “From Scholarship to Impact” at the presidential plenary.

And see Susan F. Turner on Saturday at 12:45pm as she discusses “Lifer Reentry and Community Reintegration: An Analysis of Paroled Lifers in Los Angeles.”

You can check out the following UC Press titles in Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Law and Society with books that focus on incarceration, corrections, policing, gender, immigration, school to prison pipeline, and much more. And read more from our authors such as WSC President Hadar Aviram, Nikki Jones, Patrick Lopez-Aguado, and much more.

Save 40% online with discount code 17E2829, or request an exam copy for consideration to use in your upcoming classes.

The Academy and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement

By Sunaina Maira, author of Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine

On December 6, 2017, Donald Trump shocked the international community by unilaterally declaring that the U.S. had anointed Jerusalem the capital of Israel, a city illegally occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. The status of Jerusalem has been pending in negotiations between Israel and Palestine, which are already compromised by the unequal power relations between the two entities, and the extremely partisan role of the U.S. as Israel’s unconditional ally and largest funder. The decree on Jerusalem ruptured the international consensus that Jerusalem’s fate must be resolved through peace talks, given its occupation is illegal and has been condemned by the UN, even if this consensus is quite limited given its inability to condemn the usurpation of Palestinian territories that began in 1948. But demonstrating the outrage of the majority of countries around the world, the UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 to condemn Trump’s declaration which provoked protest even from U.S. allies such as the UK, France, and Germany.

Using the bully logic of gangster extortionism, Trump threatened to punish countries that opposed his decision and decided to withhold tens of millions of dollars to UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency) that provides aid to Palestinian refugees, including in the blockaded Gaza Strip which has been enduring an acute humanitarian crisis for years as well as in refugee communities and camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The U.S. is the largest donor to UNRWA, appropriately so as the wealthiest country in the world, and so this massive cut would mean cutting off healthcare, education, and social services to Palestinian refugees that constitute significant segments of the population in Jordan and Lebanon. Some commentators argued that the strangling of UNRWA was an even bigger crisis for Palestine-Israel than the selling out of Jerusalem, given the heightened instability it would cause for the poorest and most insecure Palestinians in the region, and undercutting U.S.-Israeli security arrangements to police the Palestinians, including via cooperation with the barely sovereign Palestinian Authority (PA).

But the issue really is: how can Trump decide that Jerusalem should, or should not, be the capital of another nation-state? After the news broke, people who are not activists or leftists asked me how this was even possible, questioning the fundamental logic behind such a move. The logic, clearly, is a colonialist one and builds on a long history of imperial states intervening in and violating the national sovereignty of other peoples, going back to Lord Balfour’s role 100 years ago in the UK’s selling out of Palestine to Zionists and facilitating the establishment of a Jewish state on Palestinian land and the displacement and dispossession of indigenous Palestinians. The PA acknowledged and challenged this logic by a symbolic declaration that recognized Texas as part of Mexico, given its annexation by the U.S., announcing that it would move the Palestinian consulate from Mexico City to Houston. Intense protests erupted on Palestinian streets and Israeli soldiers continued their brutalization of Palestinian civilians, including children, with lethal weapons.

But really, what can the international community do to oppose this colonialist policy of giving away other people’s lands, and rights? How can we end the silence over Israel’s ongoing fragmentation and occupation of Palestinian territories and its creation of bantustans that would mean even an eventual Palestinian state would effectively not be viable? Illegal Jewish settlements inside Palestinian territory and the expanding Wall have led to the canonization of the West Bank and the encirclement and isolation of Jerusalem. In fact, right after the New Year, Israel announced it had approved the construction of over 1,000 new illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, a flagrant finger pointed at any future peace talks and an expansionism green-lighted, of course, by Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s stance on Palestine-Israel.

Palestinians have asked the international community, over and over again and especially in light of this latest blow for Palestine, to enact Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. This call comes from Palestinian civil society, not a particular political party, in order to apply international pressure to challenge Israel’s impunity and ongoing and systematic violations of international human rights. As U.S.-based scholars, we must respond to the call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel until it complies with international law and 1) ends its occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands and dismantles the Wall; 2) respects the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and 3) protects and promotes the right of Palestinian refugees to return as upheld by UN Resolution 194. So a boycott of Israeli academic institutions (not individuals) would remain in effect until Israel complies with these three principles. In fact, Palestinian activists have noted that now is also the time to call for sanctions against Israel and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel, given the threat it poses to regional and global peace. But what is immediately in our power as scholars and students is the decision to refuse complicity with Israeli institutions which have upheld Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies, directly or indirectly. We can refuse to participate in a conference at an Israeli university built on stolen Palestinian land or at an institute that develops lethal technologies for the Israeli military; we can stop participating in study abroad programs that whitewash the occupation and create false symmetries between colonizer and colonized; and we can reject awards or grants funded by the Israeli government. These are small, not radical, acts that require minimal sacrifice on the part of privileged U.S.-based scholars and students relative to our encaged Palestinian colleagues who cannot regularly get to campus, travel for research, freely engage in political activism, and in the West Bank, are tear-gassed more than any other population on earth. As I discuss in my new book, Boycott! The Academy and Justice in Palestine, the academic boycott movement draws attention to this systemic degradation of academic (and human) freedom in Palestine and has been an incredibly effective and growing campaign in the U.S. academy in recent years. It is also a movement that engages in joint struggles against xenophobia, militarization, border violence, police brutality, and carcerality and for justice, here and there.

Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis.

“In deftly demonstrating that Palestinian solidarity belongs at the center of all of our justice concerns, Boycott! both exemplifies the challenge of this moment and urges us to fearlessly rise up to it.”—Angela Y. Davis

 

Donald Trump’s Teachable Moments #1, 2, 3 … ∞

By Judith Byfield, co-editor of Global Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century 

A few weeks ago, we were subjected to yet another infamous statement by Donald Trump. His statements—Nigerians live in huts; all Haitians have AIDS; El Salvador, Haiti and African nations are s***hole countries—reflect a long pattern of racist assumptions that are embedded in American culture. While it may be reassuring to think that Donald Trump speaks only for himself, the reality is that he speaks for many people who think African societies lack great thinkers, ancient civilizations, history and religion. Africans somehow managed to exist outside of world history stuck in tradition until slavery and colonialism dragged them into the modern era. Moreover, the political and economic crises that exist in many African countries are the result of their inability to learn how to become Western democracies.

These ideas and assumptions have histories to them, and they continue to do important work. Notions of African racial and cultural inferiority, for example, helped bolster and sustain the institutions of racial slavery in the Americas. They helped slave owners and their descendants to cast themselves as benevolent masters instead of a class of people who crafted systems of sadistic violence in the pursuit of wealth. These assumptions also placed a cloak of invisibility around the human and ecological costs of producing gold and diamonds for fashion statements and ivory for leisure pursuits (piano keys, pool balls). Equally important, they enable Donald Trump and many others to believe that any positive developments in Africa are due to the influence of Euro-Americans and all negative developments are the result of African actions only. Finally, racist assumptions allow Trump & Co. to believe that African immigrants bring no value to the American project. In their calculation, human value correlates to race and only whites, i.e. Norwegians, bring value.

Those assumptions are challenges for those of us who teach about Africa for we have to help our students recognize racist assumptions and the multiple ways in which they are re-invented for successive generations while teaching them about a continent that is dynamic and central to world history. The volume, Global Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century, can be a very helpful tool in the struggle to combat racism and ignorance. The cover alone begins the task for it shows an image of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, at night. This image contrasts with the one in Donald Trump’s mind.

Contributions

The first piece, a profile of Ibn Khaldun and last selection, a photo-essay on a utopian village in Ethiopia, highlight intellectual contributions to the social sciences and the promise of gender equality (1.1 – “Ibn Khaldun: The Father of the Social Sciences” by Oludamini Ogunnaike ; 5.7 – “Awra Amba: A Model “Utopian” Community in Ethiopia” by Salem Mekuria). Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, as Chambi Chachage shows, was also an important thinker on the world stage (2.3 – “Mwalimu Nyerere as a Global Conscience”). Nyerere provided an important critique of the world economy, its interdependence, and the privileges some countries enjoyed at the expense of African nations among others. The economic crises affecting many African countries was not the result of their failure to learn or corruption, it also resulted from policies promoted by the West during the colonial and post-colonial periods.

Politics and Economics

Corruption is often offered as the only explanation for issues on the continent, however, most of us hold a simplistic view of how it works and the parties involved. Masimba Tafirenyika explores the significant role multinational corporations play in exporting US$50 billion every year from the continent to Europe and the US through illicit business transactions (2.6 – “Commerce, Crime, and Corruption: Illicit Financial Flows from Africa”). Africa also exports resources critical to the digital economy and James H. Smith sheds light on the human and ecological costs of acquiring these minerals (4.5 – “What’s in Your Cell Phone?”). The confluence of political and economic decisions in Africa and abroad have made it difficult for many people to create the future they desire for themselves and their children on the continent. Therefore, many leave their homes hoping to secure the future they desire abroad.

Migration

African migration has a long history. Men, women and children have left for many reasons and under different circumstances. Some left as part of forced migrations to the Americas and India as Frank Trey Proctor and Renu Modi demonstrate in their respective chapters (1.5 – “From the Land of Angola”: Slavery, Marriage, and African Diasporic Identities in Mexico city before 1650”; 1.7 “Africans in India, Past and Present”). Modi notes that many Africans also travelled to India as students or medical tourists. Religion informed migration as well. Heidi Haugen shares stories of Nigerians who travel to China to bring the Christian gospel while Cheikh Babou introduces us to Senegalese imams who ventured to the U.S. to share the teachings of Islam (3.3 – “Sending Forth the Best: African Missions in China”; 5.5 “Globalizing African Islam from Below: West African Sufi Masters in the United States”). Mukoma Wa Ngugi helps us understand the complexity of exile for Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Britain and the U.S. provided refuge to Ngũgĩ after he was arrested by the Kenya government for criticizing inequality and injustice in the country (3.5 – “The African Literary Tradition: Interview with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o”). A prolific writer and thinker, Ngũgĩ matches the educational profile of so many African migrants in the United States. The Migration Policy Institute found that sub-Saharan immigrants have a “higher educational attainment compared to the overall foreign-and native born populations.”

Racism

Donald Trump’s racism and the power he now holds to put it into policy threatens scholars and activists around the world who, like Ngũgĩ, speak truth to the powerful in their homelands. His racism hides the many ways in which the U.S. is implicated in the political and economic turmoil that feed migration from Africa, El Salvador and Haiti. It also masks the benefits the U.S. accrues from the capital exported from these countries as well as the educational attainment, skills and sheer determination of immigrants who now call America home. Saddest of all, the racism practiced and promoted by Donald Trump and the greed that accompanies it threatens America itself. Understanding Africa’s past and present may help Americans better grasp what is at stake under this president for the indices he uses to designate these countries s***holes are already in play here.

For further information, see the Census re: Foreign-Born Population from Africa and the Education of US-based African Immigrants. 

Judith A. Byfield is Associate Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Cornell University. She is the co-editor of Global Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century, along with Dorothy L. Hodgson, Professor of Anthropology and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Graduate School – New Brunswick at Rutgers University.

UC Press titles awarded CHOICE’s Outstanding Academic Title for 2017

We are pleased to announce that five of our titles have been awarded Outstanding Academic Title for 2017 by CHOICE!

This selective list, announced in every year’s January issue, consists of only about ten percent of the 6,000 works reviewed by CHOICE during the previous calendar year. It is a reflection of the best scholarly titles reviewed by CHOICE, chosen based upon the following criteria:

  • overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
  • importance relative to other literature in the field
  • distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
  • originality or uniqueness of treatment
  • value to undergraduate students
  • importance in building undergraduate library collections

We’re proudly displaying these winning titles in our Oakland offices. Check out our CHOICE shelf, and each individual title, below.

 

Hymns for the Fallen:
Combat Movie Music and Sound after Vietnam
by Todd Decker

“Marked on every page by clear logic, sensitive perception, and emotional commitment, this is a welcome and original study.”
—CHOICE

 

 

 

 

Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives:
The First 1,000 Years
by Chase F. Robinson

“Robinson delivers a fascinating snapshot of Islamic history through 30 brief biographies. By including a mixture of the usual suspects (Muhammad, Ali, Saladin) and the unexpected (Ibn Hazm, Ibn Muqla, Abu al-Qasim), the author offers readers a rich variety of lives in pre-Islamic history.”
—CHOICE

 

 

The Curious Humanist:
Siegfried Kracauer in America
by Johannes Von Moltke

“Clearly written, accessible to a wide readership, and including a comprehensive bibliography, this book provides an excellent overview of Kracauer’s thought and contributions to the development of humanistic inquiry.”
—CHOICE

 

 

 

The Real School Safety Problem:
The Long-Term Consequences of Harsh School Punishment
by Aaron Kupchik

A must-read book that focuses on the real problem in school safety–the over-reliance on punishment, and the under-reliance on problem-solving and caring.”
—Russell J. Skiba, Director, Equity Project, Indiana University Center for Evaluation and Education Policy

 

 

 

The Uses of Photography:
Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium
Edited by Jill Dawsey 

“This is a valuable introduction to the work of these individuals and, beyond that, a reasoned assessment of the nature and qualities of this aspect of an important art movement. . . Summing Up: Highly recommended.”
—CHOICE

 

A Q&A with Nina Lansbury Hall, winner of the 2017 Case Studies in the Environment Prize Competition

In this post, we speak with Dr. Nina Lansbury Hall. She and a team of researchers have been working with Australia’s Clean Energy Council—the renewable energy sector’s industry group—to investigate what can go wrong (and right) with wind farm development projects. Their article Evaluating Community Engagement and Benefit-Sharing Practices in Australian Wind Farm Development won First Prize in the 2017 Case Studies in the Environment Prize Competition.

Windy Hill Wind Farm, Queensland, Australia. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

UCP: Dr. Nina Hall, you worked with a research team evaluating wind farm development in Australia. Renewable energy sources are broadly popular with the public. Given this support, why have wind farm development initiatives sometimes gone wrong?

NH: We investigated the many ways that companies developing and operating wind farms in Australia engage with local communities. Certainly many factors can influence the way that a community responds to a wind-farm proposal. However, we did find that over the long term, face-to-face communication and relationship-building activities through trusted representatives have a huge impact on the support that communities voice for local projects.

UCP: What concerns do local communities express about wind-farm developments, and how can those concerns be addressed?

NH: We found that understanding each community—each of which is different—was really important. And then it’s important to respond to community concerns in a collaborative way. For example, wind-farm developers can provide the community with a say in how decisions are made, being clear about how the community can influence the design or operation of a development. Also if developers give communities a stake in a project or some kind of ownership—financial or otherwise—such actions are big influencers in resolving concerns about a project. I should note that we saw some fantastic examples where companies had success by being flexible in their approach, taking a big-picture approach, and trying new ways of doing things that were focused on face-to-face communication and relationship building.

UCP: Your research focuses on wind development, but I was struck by the contrast between your formula for successful renewable energy development (context/trust/people/face-to-face interactions/community influence) and the approach that the energy company Corridor Resources took with their secrecy and lack of engagement around an offshore exploration and development project in Canada’s Old Harry Prospect. Beyond renewables, do you think there are lessons for the broader energy-development sector?

NH: Sure. You are likely right in that many lessons from this research could be considered in other large infrastructure developments. In particular, one clear outcome from our research was that a large, visible project does not necessarily mean less community support. The way engagement is carried out and how you work with the local community can have a dramatic impact on local support and should not be overlooked. In our research projects, we saw that engagement that focused on openness, inclusivity, and less secrecy certainly yielded positive results.

The Australian research team included Dr. Nina Lansbury Hall (The University of Queensland), Jarra Hicks (University of New South Wales; Community Power Agency), Taryn Lane (Embark), and Emily Wood (an independent communications contractor). To read their related case-study article in UC Press’s journal Case Studies in the Environment, visit cse.ucpress.edu or click here: Evaluating Community Engagement and Benefit-Sharing Practices in Australian Wind Farm Development.

Case Studies in the Environment is a journal of peer-reviewed case-study articles, case-study pedagogy articles, and a repository for editor-reviewed case-study slides. The journal informs faculty, students, educators, professionals, and policymakers on case studies and best practices in the environmental sciences and studies.

Herstory: Women’s Studies

This weekend marks the one year anniversary of the largest single day protest in US history—the Women’s March—when on January 21, 2017, 4.2 million people marched across the US in more than 600 US cities, and from Antarctica to Zimbabwe, at least 261 more sister marches cropped up worldwide. To celebrate this pivotal protest, UC Press is highlighting titles across subjects as part of our Herstory series, with today’s focus on Women’s Studies titles that continue the discussions on feminism, past and present. While just a preview of our publishing “herstory,” these titles will engage your intellect and inspire your activism today, tomorrow, and for future tomorrows.

How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics:
From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump
By Laura Briggs

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families, leading to the rigorous demands of the American workplace. These demands are stressful for all women, but for women of color and their children, women with fewer resources and power, the ramifications could be deadly.

 

The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy
By Cynthia Enloe

The Big Push exposes how patriarchal ideas and relationships continue to be modernized to this day. Through contemporary cases and reports, renowned political scientist Cynthia Enloe exposes the workings of everyday patriarchy—in how Syrian women civil society activists have been excluded from international peace negotiations; how sexual harassment became institutionally accepted within major news organizations; or in how the UN Secretary General’s post has remained a masculine domain.
Timely, globally conscious, and ever-relevant in the wake of today’s #MeToo movement, The Big Push is a call for feminist self-reflection and strategic action with a belief that exposure complements resistance.

 

Smart Girls: Success, School, and the Myth of Post-Feminism
By Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby

Girls are said to outperform boys in high school exams, university entrance and graduation rates, and professional certification. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls no longer need support. But the reality is far more complicated. Smart Girls investigates how academically successful girls deal with stress, the “supergirl” drive for perfection, race and class issues, and the sexism that is still present in schools. Describing girls’ varied everyday experiences, including negotiations of traditional gender norms, Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby show how teachers, administrators, parents, and media commentators can help smart girls thrive while working toward straight As and a bright future.

 

The Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History
Edited By Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland 

Diva Nation explores the constructed nature of female iconicity in Japan. From ancient goddesses and queens to modern singers and writers, this edited volume critically reconsiders the female icon, tracing how she has been offered up for emulation, debate or censure. The research in this book culminates from curiosity over the insistent presence of Japanese female figures who have refused to sit quietly on the sidelines of history. The diva is ripe for expansion, fantasy, eroticization, and playful reinvention, while simultaneously presenting a challenge to patriarchal culture. Diva Nation asks how the diva disrupts or bolsters ideas about nationhood, morality, and aesthetics.

 

Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought
By Edited By Susan Bordo, M. Cristina Alcalde, and Ellen Rosenman

The first collection of its kind, Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought is historically organized and transnational in scope, highlighting key ideas, transformative moments, and feminist conversations across national and cultural borders. Emphasizing feminist cross-talk, transnational collaborations and influences, and cultural differences in context, this anthology heralds a new approach to studying feminist history.

 

Gender in the Twenty-First Century: The Stalled Revolution and the Road to Equality
Edited By Shannon N. Davis, Sarah Winslow, and David J. Maume

This engaging and accessible work, aimed at students studying gender and social inequality, provides new insight into the uneven and stalled nature of the gender revolution in the twenty-first century. Honing in on the family, higher education, the workplace, religion, the military, and sports, key scholars look at why gender inequality persists. The volume explores how to address current inequities through political action, research initiatives, social mobilization, and policy changes. Conceived of as a book for gender and society classes with a mix of exciting, accessible, pointed pieces, Gender in the Twenty-First Century is an ideal book for students and scholars alike.

 

Abusive Endings: Separation and Divorce Violence against Women
By Walter S. DeKeseredy, Molly Dragiewicz, and Martin D. Schwartz

Abusive Endings offers a thorough analysis of the social-science literature on one of the most significant threats to the health and well-being of women today—abuse at the hands of their male partners. The authors provide a moving description of why and how men abuse women in myriad ways during and after a separation or divorce. The material is punctuated with the stories and voices of both perpetrators and survivors of abuse, as told to the authors over many years of fieldwork. Written in a highly readable fashion, this book will be a useful resource for researchers, practitioners, activists, and policy makers.

The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development
By Kathryn Moeller

Drawing on more than a decade of research in the U.S. and Brazil, this book focuses on how the philanthropic, social responsibility, and business practices of various corporations use a logic of development that positions girls and women as instruments of poverty alleviation and new frontiers for capitalist accumulation. Using the Girl Effect, the philanthropic brand of Nike, Inc., as a central case study, the book examines how these corporations seek to address the problems of gendered poverty and inequality, yet do so using an instrumental logic that shifts the burden of development onto girls and women without transforming the structural conditions that produce poverty. With a keen eye towards justice, author Kathryn Moeller concludes that these corporatized development practices de-politicize girls’ and women’s demands for fair labor practices and a just global economy.

In the comments section, tell us your favorite herstory book from UC Press. Were there books in the Herstory Series that you would’ve included?