Toward Camden

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mercy Romero
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Vacant Lots ◽  
Award Recipient ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Duke University ◽  
The City

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Maroon Choreography

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
fahima ife
Keyword(s):  
Black Study ◽  
Award Recipient ◽  
Long Form ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Duke University

In Maroon Choreography fahima ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. As both poet and scholar, ife unsettles the history and idea of black fugitivity, troubling senses of historic knowing while moving inside the continuing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery. At the same time, they interrogate how writing itself can be a fugitive practice and a means to find a way out of ongoing containment, indebtedness, surveillance, and ecological ruin. Offering a philosophical performance in black study, ife prompts us to consider how we—in our study, in our mutual refusal, in our belatedness, in our habitual assemblage—linger beside the unknown. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Magical Habits

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Huerta
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Cook County ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Award Recipient ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Mexican Government ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Cristero Rebellion

In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Nature's Wild

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andil Gosine
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Award Recipient ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Duke University ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Gender Based

In Nature's Wild, Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide. Gosine refutes this presupposed binary and embraces animality through a series of case studies: a homoerotic game called puhngah, the institution of gender-based dress codes in Guyana, and efforts toward the decriminalization of sodomy in Trinidad and Tobago—including the work of famed activist Colin Robinson, paintings of human animality by Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Gosine's own artistic practice. In so doing, he troubles the ways in which individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped the existence of Caribbean people while calling for a reassessment of what political liberation might look like. >Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

The Lettered Barriada

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Award Recipient ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
Epistemic Violence ◽  
The World ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Duke University ◽  
And Gender

In The Lettered Barriada, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico's world of letters and navigated the colonial polity that emerged out of the 1898 US occupation. They did so by asserting themselves as citizens, producers of their own historical narratives, and learned minds. Disregarded by most of Puerto Rico's intellectual elite, these workers engaged in dialogue with international peers and imagined themselves as part of a global community. They also entered the world of politics through the creation of the Socialist Party, which became an electoral force in the first half of the twentieth century. Meléndez-Badillo shows how these workers produced, negotiated, and deployed powerful discourses that eventually shaped Puerto Rico's national mythology. By following these ragtag intellectuals as they became politicians and statesmen, Meléndez-Badillo also demonstrates how they engaged in racial and gender silencing, epistemic violence, and historical erasures in the fringes of society. Ultimately, The Lettered Barriada is about the politics of knowledge production and the tensions between working-class intellectuals and the state. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

In the Shadow of the Second Ghetto

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 500-504
Author(s):  
Lilia Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Urban Crisis ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
South Side ◽  
American Students ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This essay offers a personal reflection on the significance of Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto. Drawing on her personal experiences going to school with African American students and traveling through the black South Side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, the author argues that reading Hirsch’s work confirmed the segregation and economic inequality she witnessed as a child. She concludes that the story Hirsch narrated helped explain the origins of the urban crisis and inspired her own research on the history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican barrios in the city.

Suspicion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Charles
Keyword(s):  
Cervical Cancer ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Award Recipient ◽  
Vaccine Refusal ◽  
Entry Points ◽  
Gut Feelings ◽  
Duke University

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion, Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

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