In this history of the black peasants of Amazonia, Oscar de la Torre focuses on the experience of African-descended people navigating the transition from slavery to freedom. He draws on social and environmental history to connect them intimately to the natural landscape and to Indigenous peoples. Relying on this world as a repository for traditions, discourses, and strategies that they retrieved especially in moments of conflict, Afro-Brazilians fought for autonomous communities and developed a vibrant ethnic identity that supported their struggles over labor, land, and citizenship. Prior to abolition, enslaved and escaped blacks found in the tropical forest a source for tools, weapons, and trade--but it was also a cultural storehouse within which they shaped their stories and records of confrontations with slaveowners and state authorities. After abolition, the black peasants' knowledge of local environments continued to be key to their aspirations, allowing them to maintain relationships with powerful patrons and to participate in the protest cycle that led Getulio Vargas to the presidency of Brazil in 1930. In commonly referring to themselves by such names as "sons of the river," black Amazonians melded their agro-ecological traditions with their emergent identity as political stakeholders.

“This is a daring book, thrillingly of our moment.” -- Emma Cline, author of The Girls A wildly irreverent take on the coming-of-age story that turns a search for belonging into a riotous satire of identity politics Starting at a prestigious private Australian girls’ school, fifteen-year-old Ziggy Klein is confronted with an alienating social hierarchy that hurls her into the arms of her grade’s most radical feminists. Tormented by a burgeoning collection of dark, sexual fantasies, and a biological essentialist mother, Ziggy sets off on a journey of self-discovery that moves from the Sydney drag scene to the extremist underbelly of the Internet. As PC culture collides with her friends’ morphing ideology and her parents’ kinky sex life, Ziggy’s understanding of gender, race, and class begins to warp. Ostracized at school, she seeks refuge in Donna Haraway’s seminal feminist text, A Cyborg Manifesto, and discovers an indisputable alternative identity. Or so she thinks. A controversial Indian guru, a transgender drag queen, and her own Holocaust-surviving grandmother propel Ziggy through a series of misidentifications, culminating in a date-rape revenge plot so confused, it just might work. Uproariously funny, but written with extraordinary acuity about the intersections of gender, sexual politics, race, and technology, Inappropriation is literary satire at its best. With a deft finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, Lexi Freiman debuts on the scene as a brilliant and fearless new talent.

Winner of the 2019 Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies. Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1991–2011 is the first study that looks at the literary process in post-independence Ukraine comprehensively and attempts to draw the connection between literary production and identity construction. In its quest for identity Ukraine has followed a path similar to other postcolonial societies, the main characteristics of which include a slow transition, hybridity, and identities negotiated on the center-periphery axis. This monograph concentrates on major works of literature produced during the first two decades of independence and places them against the background of clearly identifiable contexts such as regionalism, gender issues, language politics, social ills, and popular culture. It also shows that Ukrainian literary politics of that period privileges the plurality and hybridity of national and cultural identities. By engaging postcolonial discourse and insisting that literary production is socially instituted, Maria G. Rewakowicz explores the reasons behind the tendency toward cultural hybridity and plural identities in literary imagination. Ukraine’s Quest for Identity will appeal to all those keen to study cultural, social and political ramifications of the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and beyond.

What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How can miracles be unanticipated and yet worked for? And finally, what do miracles tell us about other kinds of Christianity and even the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with these questions in a detailed sociocultural ethnographic study of the Vineyard, an American Evangelical movement that originated in Southern California. The Vineyard is known worldwide for its intense musical forms of worship and for advocating the belief that all Christians can perform biblical-style miracles. Examining the miracle as both a strength and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, this book situates the miracle as a fundamentally social means of producing change—surprise and the unexpected used to reimagine and reconfigure the will. Jon Bialecki shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices as well as music, reading, economic choices, and conservative and progressive political imaginaries.

American higher education—historically and inherently—is a morally formative endeavor. Yet, in order to respond to America’s moral pluralism, higher education has increasingly taken a reductionistic approach to moral formation. Consequently, it abandoned the effort to supply students with moral expertise. Current approaches help students learn how to be excellent professionals and citizens, but they fail to provide the necessary tools for living the good life—in college and beyond. Identity Excellence: A Theory of Moral Expertise for Higher Education addresses this problem by setting forth a multi-disciplinary theory of moral expertise for fostering moral excellence in an array of important identities. To this end, it teases apart the essential elements of what it means to be excellent in an identity before discussing the philosophical, sociological, psychological, and educational processes necessary for students to internalize traditions of identity excellence as part of their own moral identities. Overall, the emergent theory exposes the shortcomings in contemporary general education, professional ethics, and co-curricular education. Finally, this book sets forth a bold but compelling vision for a more hopeful future for American higher education. As outlined within, such education involves teaching students’ excellence in the Great Identities, as well as how to prioritize and integrate their pursuit of identity excellence.

'Because the Sacred Liturgy is truly the font from which all the Church's power flows...we must do everything we can to put the Sacred Liturgy back at the very heart of the relationship between God and man... I ask you to continue to work towards achieving the liturgical aims of the Second Vatican Council...and to work to continue the liturgical renewal promoted by Pope Benedict XVI, especially through the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis...and the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum... I ask you to be wise, like the householder...who knows when to bring out of his treasure things both new and old (see: Mtt 13:52), so that the Sacred Liturgy as it is celebrated and lived today may lose nothing of the estimable riches of the Church's liturgical tradition, whilst always being open to legitimate development.' These words of Robert Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, underline the liturgy's fundamental role in every aspect of the life and mission of the Church. Liturgy in the Twenty-First Century makes available the different perspectives on this from leading figures such as Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, Abbot Philip Anderson, Father Thomas Kocik, Dom Alcuin Reid, and Dr Lauren Pristas. Considering questions of liturgical catechetics, music, preaching, how young people relate to the liturgy, matters of formation and reform, etc., Liturgy in the Twenty-First Century is an essential resource for all clergy and religious and laity involved in liturgical ministry and formation. Bringing forth 'new treasures as well as old,' its contributors identify and address contemporary challenges and issues facing the task of realising the vision of Cardinal Sarah, Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and the Second Vatican Council.

Explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society. Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact. From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.

White Identities provides a comprehensive overview of this debate, drawing together the various strands of recent research into an accessible but challenging introduction. The author argues that 'White Studies', as it is presently conceived, is an American project, reflecting American interpretations of race and history. However the book shows that the impact of white identities is international in scope and significance. Thus, only a thorough historical and international perspective on whiteness can provide a proper introduction to the subject, an introduction that has relevance to students worldwide.