Intimate Eating

In Intimate Eating Anita Mannur examines how notions of the culinary can create new forms of kinship, intimacy, and social and political belonging. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer studies, Mannur traces the ways in which people of color, queer people, and other marginalized subjects create and sustain this belonging through the formation of “intimate eating publics.” These spaces—whether established in online communities or through eating along in a restaurant—blur the line between public and private. In analyses of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, Nani Power’s Ginger and Ganesh, Ritesh Batra’s film The Lunchbox, Michael Rakowitz’s performance art installation Enemy Kitchen, and The Great British Bake Off, Mannur focuses on how racialized South Asian and Arab brown bodies become visible in various intimate eating publics. In this way, the culinary becomes central to discourses of race and other social categories of difference. By illuminating how cooking, eating, and distributing food shapes and sustains social worlds, Mannur reconfigures how we think about networks of intimacy beyond the family, heteronormativity, and nation.

The Foundational Lawlessness of the Law Itself: Racial Criminalization & the Punitive Roots of Punishment in America

Empirical researchers and criminal justice practitioners have generally set aside history in exchange for behavioral models and methodologies that focus primarily on crime itself as the most measurable and verifiable driver of American punitiveness. There are innumerable legal and political questions that have arisen out of these approaches. Everything from the social construction of illegality to the politicization of punishment to the stigmatization of physical identities and social statuses have long called into question the legal structures that underpin what counts as crime and how punishment is distributed. And yet, until quite recently, the question of what history has to offer has mostly been left to historians, historically minded social scientists, critical race and ethnic studies scholars, community and prison-based activists, investigative journalists, and rights advocates. What is at stake is precisely the foundational lawlessness of the law itself. At all times, a White outlaw culture that rewarded brute force and strength of arms against racialized others unsettles basic assumptions about how we are to understand criminalization and punitiveness over time: that is, who has counted as a criminal and to what end has the state used violence or punishment?

Foundations for an Arab/MENA Psychology

Arab/Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) American psychology is a field rooted in ethnic studies and multicultural psychology. Although its study is relatively nascent in U.S. psychology, it has slowly been growing since the 1990s. The events of 9/11 resulted in an increase in psychological research on the Arab/MENA population in the United States, providing empirical evidence to inform the historical and social foundations for an Arab/MENA psychology. This article seeks to identify key elements and factors present in an Arab/MENA psychology focusing on issues of identity and recognition, discrimination, cumulative racial-ethnic trauma, acculturation, and cultural values, such as hospitality and generosity, morality, family centricity, honor and shame, religiosity, and communication style.

Swahili version of the Dimensions of Mastery Questionnaire: Adaptation and Psychometric Properties

Introduction. The current focus of empirical studies demonstrates the significance of mastery motivation in child development, academic achievement and school success. Consequently, it is critical to have reliable and valid tools to measure this important variable accurately. The Preschool version of the Dimensions of Mastery Questionnaire (DMQ) 18 has been validated in English, Hungarian, and Chinesem and translated to many other languages. This has opened cross-cultural and cross-ethnic studies among these countries. Method. In this study, we evaluate the psychometric properties of the Swahili version of the DMQ 18. Teachers and parents evaluated 397 preschool children recruited using a stratified random sampling technique from Kenya's counties. Results. Reliability was established by good internal consistency, construct reliability, test-retest and parallel forms reliability values. Factorial validity was proven by confirmatory factor analysis and this fitted the theoretical model quite well. Discussion and Conclusion. The Swahili Preschool Dimensions of Mastery Questionnaire was valid and reliable for collecting data in the Kenyan context and that of East Africa. This version compared well with other versions such as Hungarian, Spanish, Turkish, Persian and Indonesian.

The crisis of Confederate memory in the interior of São Paulo, Brazil

The crisis over Confederate memory in the United States has dominated international headlines since the tragic events of racist violence associated with the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy. Yet the scale of debate and attention paid to this crisis has been mostly limited to the United States, despite the globalized nature of Confederate memory politics. Little known is the fact that after the US Civil War, several thousand ex-Confederates migrated to Brazil where descendants still celebrate their heritage with a festival that draws thousands to a rural area of São Paulo state. A descendant-curated museum also narrates the Confederate migration. Drawing on work in critical settler colonial and comparative racial and ethnic studies, the “transcultural turn” in memory studies, and a year of fieldwork, this article traces the crisis of Confederate memory to the interior of São Paulo, Brazil, and explores the global impact the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy has had on Confederate commemoration.

The Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez

García Márquez’s writing is a literary order that will continue to be read, studied, and learned so long as there are practitioners, students, and lovers of literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude, of course, is admired by millions across the world, from high school students to major novelists such as Salman Rushdie and the late Toni Morrison. The Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez takes a broad overview of the life and oeuvre of “Gabo” (as he is affectionately known throughout Latin America) and examines them thoroughly. The volume incorporates ongoing critical approaches such as feminism, ecocriticism, Marxism, and ethnic studies, as well as signaling such key aspects of García Márquez’s work as his Caribbean-Colombian background; his use of magical realism, myth, and folklore; and his left-wing political positions. Thirty-two wide-ranging chapters by a diverse and international group of experts deal with the bulk of the author’s writings—both major and minor, early and late, long and short—as well as his involvement with film. They also give due attention to the central roles played by romantic love, by his prose style, and by the various kinds of music in his literary art. Particularly worthy of mention are the contributors’ extensive discussions of the worldwide artistic impact of García Márquez—on established canons, on the Global South, on imaginative writing in South Asia, China, Japan, and throughout Africa and the Arab world. More than a Latin American author, he truly qualifies as a global phenomenon. This is the first book on García Márquez that places the Colombian within that wider context.

An Overview of Strategies for Detecting Genotype-Phenotype Associations Across Ancestrally Diverse Populations

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been very successful at identifying genetic variants influencing a large number of traits. Although the great majority of these studies have been performed in European-descent individuals, it has been recognised that including populations with differing ancestries enhances the potential for identifying causal SNPs due to their differing patterns of linkage disequilibrium. However, when individuals from distinct ethnicities are included in a GWAS, it is necessary to implement a number of control steps to ensure that the identified associations are real genotype-phenotype relationships. In this Review, we discuss the analyses that are required when performing multi-ethnic studies, including methods for determining ancestry at the global and local level for sample exclusion, controlling for ancestry in association testing, and post-GWAS interrogation methods such as genomic control and meta-analysis. We hope that this overview provides a primer for those researchers interested in including distinct populations in their studies.

Global Asias: Method, Architecture, Praxis

This essay draws on the philosophy, principles, and practices animating Global Asias scholarship to consider how this conceptual rubric shifts the ways in which we approach the subjects, objects, methods, and praxes of the academic study of Asia. Structurally dissonant as an epistemological project, Global Asias encourages scholars to acknowledge the institutional designs and disciplinary practices that currently organize and make legible work on Asia and its diasporas while simultaneously highlighting the limits of, and points of noncontact between, the broader infrastructures (including area studies, ethnic studies, diaspora studies, and the disciplines and interdisciplines) under which such work has traditionally been organized. In addition to offering a conceptual topography of Global Asias, this essay proposes three praxis-oriented concepts—relational nonalignment, structural dissonance, and imaginable ageography—that enable Global Asias as a tactical and evolving approach to the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas, one which actively resists the drive toward “critical consolidation” that often results from academic paradigm work.

Engagement and Attainment: The Longer-Run Effects of Ethnic Studies

Increased interest in anti-racist education has motivated the rapidly growing but politically contentious adoption of ethnic-studies (ES) courses in U.S. public schools. A long-standing rationale for ES courses is that their emphasis on culturally relevant and critically engaged content (e.g., social justice, anti-racism, stereotypes, contemporary social movements) has potent effects on student engagement and outcomes. However, the quantitative evidence supporting this claim is limited. In this pre- registered, regression-discontinuity study, we examine the longer-run impact of a grade-9 ES course offered in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). Our key confirmatory finding is that assignment to this course significantly increased the probability of high-school graduation among students near the grade-GPA threshold (i.e., 2.0 GPA in grade 8) used for assigning students to the course. Our exploratory analyses also indicate that this assignment increased measures of engagement throughout high school (e.g., attendance) as well as the probability of postsecondary matriculation.