Rutgers University Press imprint: 413 books
Black Resonance
Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2013
Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright,...
Salvadoran Imaginaries
Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2014
Ravaged by civil war throughout the 1980s and 1990s, El Salvador has now emerged as a study in contradictions. It is a country where urban call centers and shopping malls exist alongside rural poverty. It is a land now at peace but still grappling with a legacy of violence. It is a place marked...
The Zoom
Drama at the Touch of a Lever
Language: English
Release Date: May 11, 2018
From the queasy zooms in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the avant-garde mystery of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, from the excitement of televised baseball to the drama of the political convention, the zoom shot is instantly recognizable and highly controversial. In The Zoom, Nick Hall traces the century-spanning...
Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination
From Patriots to Victims
Language: English
Release Date: October 12, 2015
When we hear the term “child soldiers,” most Americans imagine innocent victims roped into bloody conflicts in distant war-torn lands like Sudan and Sierra Leone. Yet our own history is filled with examples of children involved in warfare—from adolescent prisoner of war Andrew Jackson to Civil...
Youth in Postwar Guatemala
Education and Civic Identity in Transition
Language: English
Release Date: June 30, 2017
In the aftermath of armed conflict, how do new generations of young people learn about peace, justice, and democracy? Michelle J. Bellino describes how, following Guatemala’s civil war, adolescents at four schools in urban and rural communities learn about their country’s history of authoritarianism...
Life after Guns
Reciprocity and Respect among Young Men in Liberia
Language: English
Release Date: May 5, 2017
Life After Guns explores how ex-combatants and other post-war youth negotiated a depleted and difficult social and cultural landscape in the years following Liberia’s fourteen-year bloody civil war. Unlike others who study child soldiers, Abby Hardgrove’s ethnography looks at both former combatants...
Ambivalent Encounters
Childhood, Tourism, and Social Change in Banaras, India
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2012
Jenny Huberman provides an ethnographic study of encounters between western tourists and the children who work as unlicensed peddlers and guides along the riverfront city of Banaras, India. She examines how and why these children elicit such powerful reactions from western tourists and locals in their...
Narrating Love and Violence
Women Contesting Caste, Tribe, and State in Lahaul, India
Language: English
Release Date: December 28, 2017
Narrating Love and Violence is an ethnographic exploration of women’s stories from the Himalayan valley of Lahaul, in the region of Himachal Pradesh, India, focusing on how both, love and violence emerge (or function) at the intersection of gender, tribe, caste, and the state in India. Himika Bhattacharya...
by Joshua M. Price
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2015
The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson’s term for the utter isolation of slavery,...
Coming of Age in Jewish America
Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2016
The Jewish practice of bar mitzvah dates back to the twelfth century, but this ancient cultural ritual has changed radically since then, evolving with the times and adapting to local conditions. For many Jewish-American families, a child’s bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah is both a major social event...
It's Not Your Fault!
Strategies for Solving Toilet Training and Bedwetting Problems
Language: English
Release Date: February 3, 2015
Millions of children over the age of five wet their beds every night. Many parents think they must be doing something wrong when their five-year-old is still in diapers while their friends’ children are perfectly trained by eighteen months of age. This undoubtedly is a very embarrassing and frustrating...
by David Gillota
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2013
When wielded by the white majority, ethnic humor can be used to ridicule and demean marginalized groups. In the hands of ethnic minorities themselves, ethnic humor can work as a site of community building and resistance. In nearly all cases, however, ethnic humor can serve as a window through which...
Puerto Ricans in the Empire
Tobacco Growers and U.S. Colonialism
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2014
Most studies of Puerto Rico’s relations with the United States have focused on the sugar industry, recounting a tale of victimization and imperial abuse driven by the interests of U.S. sugar companies. But inPuerto Ricans in the Empire, Teresita A. Levy looks at a different agricultural sector,...
The Limits of Auteurism
Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2018
The New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and early 1970s has become one of the most romanticized periods in motion picture history, celebrated for its stylistic boldness, thematic complexity, and the unshackling of directorial ambition. The Limits of Auteurism aims to challenge many of these assumptions....