Bøger udgivet af University of Nebraska Press

In recent years the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah has figured prominently in the long and ongoing struggle over the meaning and value of America's public lands. In 1996 President Bill Clinton used the Antiquities Act to create the monument, with the goal of protecting scientific and historic resources. His action incensed Utah elected officials and local residents who were neither informed nor consulted beforehand, and opposition to the monument has continued to make its day-to-day management problematic. In 2017 President Donald Trump reduced the monument's size, an action immediately challenged by multiple lawsuits; subsequently, President Joe Biden restored the monument in 2021. In Public Land and Democracy in America Julie Brugger brings into focus the perspectives of a variety of groups affected by conflict over the monument, including residents of adjacent communities, ranchers, federal land management agency employees, and environmentalists. In the process of following management disputes at the monument over the years, Brugger considers how conceptions of democracy have shaped and been shaped by the regional landscape and by these disputes. Through this ethnographic evidence, Brugger proposes a concept of democracy that encompasses disparate meanings and experiences, embraces conflict, and suggests a crucial role for public lands in transforming antagonism into agonism.

Swallowing a World offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it's typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meandering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir and that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection on the effects of globalization. Each chapter takes up a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization, such as the postcolonial culture industry (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children), the rebirth of fundamentalism (Zadie Smith's White Teeth), the transnational commodification of violence (Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings), the obstruction of knowledge by narrative (Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know), and globalization's gendered, asymmetrical growth (Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift). By reframing analysis of maximalism around globalization, Swallowing a World not only reimagines one of the most perplexing genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also sheds light on some of the most perplexing political problems of our precarious present.

In the 1940s as Mexican families trekked north to the United States in search of a better life, tens of millions also left their towns and villages for Mexico's major cities. In Mexico City migrant families excluded from new housing programs began to settle on a dried-out lakebed near the airport, eventually transforming its dusty plains into an informal city of more than one million people. In Informal Metropolis David Yee uncovers how this former lakebed grew into the world's largest shantytown--Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl--and rethinks the relationship between urban space and inequality in twentieth-century Mexico. By chronicling the residents' struggles to build their own homes and gain land rights in the face of extreme adversity, Yee presents a hidden history of land fraud, political corruption, and legal impunity underlying the rise of Mexico City's informal settlements. When urban social movements erupted across Mexico in the 1970s, Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl's residents organized to demand land, water, and humane living conditions. Though guided by demands for basic needs, these movements would ultimately achieve a more lasting significance as a precursor to a new urban citizenry in Mexico. This first comprehensive history of housing in Mexico City during the middle of the twentieth century brings the reader into one of the world's largest shantytowns, revealing the human cost of Mexico's rapid urbanization. Reframing the history of Mexico City from the perspective of the periphery, Yee challenges widely held assumptions about urban inequality and politics in modern Mexico.

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capital, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went "okay"). Grouped by types of riot--external riots, internal riots, and laugh riots--Thanks for This Riot is a poignant and mordantly funny collection with a distinctly feminist viewpoint.

Abortion in Mexico: A History concisely examines the long history of abortion from the early post-contact period through the present day in Mexico by studying the law, criminal and ecclesiastical trials, medical texts, newspapers, and other popular publications. Nora E. Jaffary draws on courts' and medical practitioners' handling of birth termination to advance two central arguments. First, Jaffary contends, the social, legal, and judicial condemnation of abortion should be understood more as an aberration than the norm in Mexico, as legal conditions and long periods of Mexican history indicate that the law, courts, the medical profession, and everyday Mexicans tolerated the practice. Second, the historical framework of abortion differed greatly from its present representation. The language of fetal personhood and the notion of the inherent value of human life were not central elements of the conceptualization of abortion until the late twentieth century. Until then, the regulation of abortion derived exclusively out of concerns for pregnant people themselves, and specifically about their embodiment of sexual honor. In Abortion in Mexico Jaffary presents the first longue durée examination of this history from a variety of locations in Mexico, providing a concise yet comprehensive overview of the practice of abortion and informing readers of just how much the debate has evolved.

Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist traces the creative coming of age of a mill-town feminist. Sherrie Flick, whose childhood spanned the 1970s rise and 1980s collapse of the steel industry, returned to Pittsburgh in the late 1990s, witnessing the region's before and its after. With essays braiding, unbraiding, and then tangling the story of the author's father with Andy Warhol, faith, dialect, labor, whiskey, Pittsburgh's South Side Slopes neighborhood, grief, gardening, the author's compulsion to travel, and her reluctance to return home, Flick examines how place shaped her experiences of sexism and feminism. She also looks at the changing food and art cultures and the unique geography that has historically kept this weird hilly place isolated from trendy change. Carefully researched, deeply personal, and politically grounded in place and identity, Homing is an explicitly feminist and anti-nostalgic intervention in writing about the Rustbelt.

The Aaniiih (Gros Ventre Language) is a tribally centered reference grammar of Aaniiih. A member of the Algonquian language family, Aaniiih is most closely related to the Arapaho language. Previously spoken in areas of central and southern Alberta and Saskatchewan and northern Montana, the language is now spoken on the Fort Belknap Reservation in north central Montana. Andrew Cowell and Terry Brockie worked with tribal members to retranscribe historical and archival documentation of the language in order to revitalize it. This grammar provides a comprehensive description of the language throughout all its stages, focusing on the phonology and morphology of new word formation; on levels of politeness in the language and strategies for indirectness; and on salient cultural topics such as place-names, personal names, prayer, and traditional narrative, as well as greetings, departures, and a rich variety of exclamations and interjections. The grammar describes both classical (pre-reservation) and modern Aaniiih, allowing contemporary revivers of the language to fully understand both and to choose which to focus on for teaching and learning. The Aaniiih (Gros Ventre Language) is an essential guide to assisting with the Gros Ventre nation's efforts to teach and revitalize its language in the twenty-first century.

Disintegrating Empire examines the entangled histories of three threads of decolonization: the French welfare state, family migration from Algeria, and the French social workers who mediated between the state and their Algerian clients. After World War II, social work teams, midlevel bureaucrats, and government ministries stitched specialized social services for Algerians into the structure of the midcentury welfare state. Once the Algerian Revolution began in 1954, many successive administrations and eventually two independent states--France and Algeria--continuously tailored welfare to support social aid services for Algerian families migrating across the Mediterranean. Disintegrating Empire reveals the belated collapse of specialized services more than a decade after Algerian independence. The welfare state's story, Franklin argues, was not one merely of rise and fall but of winnowing services to "deserving" clients. Defunding social services--long associated with the neoliberal turn in the 1980s and beyond--has a much longer history defined by exacting controls on colonial citizens and migrants of newly independent countries. Disintegrating Empire explores the dynamic, conflicting, and often messy nature of these relationships, which show how Algerian family migration prompted by decolonization ultimately exposed the limits of the French welfare state.

Between Black and Brown begins with a question: How do individuals with one African American parent and one Mexican American parent identify racially and ethnically? In answer, the authors explore the experiences of Blaxicans, individuals with African American and Mexican American heritage, as they navigate American culture, which often clings to monoracial categorizations. Part I analyzes racial formation and the Blaxican borderlands, comparing racial orders in Anglo-America and Latin America. The Anglo-Americanization of "Latin" North America, particularly in the Gulf Coast and Southwest regions, shapes Black and Mexican American identities. Part II delves into Blaxicans' lived experiences, examining their self-identification with pride and resilience. The book explores challenges and agency in navigating family, school, and community dynamics and discusses expectations regarding cultural authenticity. It also delves into Black and Brown relations and how situational contexts influence interactions. This work contributes to the discourse on multiracial identities and challenges prevailing monoracial norms in academia and society. Ultimately Between Black and Brown advocates for a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of identity, race, and culture.

Maricas traces the erotic lives and legal battles of Argentine and Spanish queer people, who despite state repression and sexual violence, carved out their own spaces in metropolitan and rural cultures between the 1940s and the 1980s.

The quick spread of posthumanism and of critiques of anthropomorphism in the past few decades has resulted in greater attention to concrete objects in critical theories and in philosophy. This new materialism or new object philosophy marks a renewal of interest in the existence of objects. Yet while their mode of existence is independent of human cognition, it cannot erase the relation of subject to object and the foundational role of our experience of things in our mental activity. These developments have important implications for narratology. Traditional conceptions of narrative define its core components as setting, characters, and plot, but nonhuman entities play a crucial role in characterizing the setting, in enabling or impeding the actions of characters, and thus in determining plot. Marie-Laure Ryan and Tang Weisheng combine a theoretical approach that defines the basic narrative functions of objects with interpretive studies of narrative texts that rely more closely on ideas advanced by proponents of new object philosophy. Object-Oriented Narratology opens new theoretical horizons for narratology and offers individual case studies that demonstrate the richness and diversity of the ways in which narrative, both Western and non-Western, deals with humans' relationships to their material environment and with the otherness of objects.

The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 2 explores the development of the ethnography of Salishan-speaking societies on the North American Plateau as revealed through the correspondence between Franz Boas and the Scottish-born James Teit, who married into an Interior Salish family and community and became fluent in the Nlaka'pamux language. The letters between Teit (1864-1922) and Boas (1858-1942) chronicle Teit's varied career as an ethnographer, from shortly after his initial meeting with Boas in 1894 until Teit's death at the age of fifty-eight. A postscript documents Boas's contribution to Teit's legacy through the posthumous publication of the manuscripts Teit left unfinished at his death. Teit made significant contributions to ethnography and the history of southern British Columbia through his photography of the people with whom he worked, his contributions to ethnomusicology and ethnobotany, his anthologies of mythic narrative, and his collections of Interior Salish--primarily Nlaka'pamux--material culture. In addition to collaborating with Boas in the development of Interior Salish ethnography, between 1909 and 1922 Teit worked to support Indigenous groups in British Columbia who were seeking recognition of Aboriginal title and resolution of their outstanding land claims. The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 2 meticulously tracks the impact of the differing career trajectories of Teit and Boas on the primary product of their collaboration--the initial development of the ethnography of societies speaking Interior Salish languages. This second volume of the Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition is an essential primary source of archival materials for research libraries and for students and scholars of Northwest Coast and Interior Mountain West ethnohistory, Native American and Indigenous studies, history of anthropology, and modern U.S. history. It is also an essential source for Indigenous and settler descendant communities.

Ethics at the Center culls the best of Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff's pioneering thinking in Jewish ethics over nearly five decades. Dorff shows that our response to moral issues depends ultimately on our conceptions of the nature of human beings and God; how Jewish law, theology, prayer, history, and community should also define and motivate Jewish responses to moral issues; and how the honorable and divergent stances of Western philosophy and other religions about moral living shed light on Judaism's distinctive standpoints. From there Dorff applies Judaism's ethics to real life: abortion post-Roe v. Wade, sexual orientation and human dignity, avoiding harm in communication, playing violent or defamatory video games, modern war ethics, handling donations of ill-gotten gain after the fact. In conclusion he explores how Jewish family and community, holidays and rituals, theology, study, and law have moral import as well. Dorff's personal introduction to each chapter reflects on why and when he wrote its contents, its continuing relevance, and if--and if so, how--he would now change what he wrote earlier. Readers will experience not only his evolving ethical thought but many facets of the person and the Jew that Dorff is today.Elliot N. Dorff is rector and Sol and Anne Dorff Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at American Jewish University. His many books on Jewish ethics and law include Modern Conservative Judaism (JPS, 2018); For the Love of God and People (JPS, 2007); Love Your Neighbor and Yourself (JPS, 2003); Matters of Life and Death (JPS, 1998); and the National Jewish Book Award-winner To Do the Right and the Good (JPS, 2002).

Readers, literary critics, and theorists alike have long demonstrated an abiding fascination with the author, both as a real person--an artist and creator--and as a theoretical concept that shapes the way we read literary works. Whether anonymous, pseudonymous, or trending on social media, authors continue to be an object of critical and readerly interest. Yet theories surrounding authorship have yet to be satisfactorily updated to register the changes wrought on the literary sphere by the advent of the digital age, the recent turn to autofiction, and the current literary climate more generally. In Reading the Contemporary Author the contributors look back on the long history of theorizing the author and offer innovative new approaches for understanding this elusive figure. Mapping the contours of the vast territory that is contemporary authorship, this collection investigates authorship in the context of narrative genres ranging from memoir and autobiographically informed texts to biofiction and novels featuring novelist narrators and characters. Bringing together the perspectives of leading scholars in narratology, cultural theory, literary criticism, stylistics, comparative literature, and autobiography studies, Reading the Contemporary Author demonstrates that a variety of interdisciplinary viewpoints and critical stances are necessary to capture the multifaceted nature of contemporary authorship.

The oil and natural gas boom in pre-World War I Oklahoma brought unbelievable wealth to thousands of tribal citizens in the state on whose lands these minerals were discovered. However, as Angie Debo recognizes in her seminal study of the period, And Still the Waters Run, and, more recently, as David Grann does in Killers of the Flower Moon, this affluence placed Natives in the crosshairs of unscrupulous individuals. As a result, this era was also marked by two of the most heinous episodes of racial violence in the state's history: the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the Osage Murders between 1921 and 1925. In Resisting Oklahoma's Reign of Terror Joshua Clough details the responses of one largely forgotten Native organization--the Society of Oklahoma Indians (SOI)--to the violence and pillaging of tribal resources during the 1920s. Clough provides historical understanding of its formation and its shared values of intertribal unity, Native suffrage, and protection of Native property. He also reveals why reform efforts were nearly impossible in 1920s Oklahoma and how this historical perspective informs today's conflicts between the state and its Indigenous inhabitants. Through this examination of the SOI, Clough fills the historiographic gap regarding formal Native resistance between the dissolution of the national Society of American Indians in 1923 and the formation of the National Congress of American Indians in 1944. Dismissed or overlooked for a century as an inconsequential Native activist organization, the history of the SOI, when examined carefully, reveals the sophistication and determination of tribal members in their struggle to prevent depredations on their persons and property.

In Indigenous Enlightenment Stuart D. McKee examines the methodologies, tools, and processes that British and American educators developed to inculcate Indigenous cultures of reading. Protestant expatriates who opened schools within British and U.S. colonial territories between 1790 and 1850 shared the conviction that a beneficent government should promote the enlightenment of its colonial subjects. It was the aim of evangelical enlightenment to improve Indigenous peoples' welfare through the processes of Christianization and civilization and to transform accepting individuals into virtuous citizens of the settler-colonial community. Many educators quickly discovered that their teaching efforts languished without the means to publish books in the Indigenous languages of their subject populations. While they could publish primers in English by shipping manuscripts to printers in London or Boston, books for Indigenous readers gained greater accuracy and influence when they stationed a printer within the colony. With a global perspective traversing Western colonial territories in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the South Pacific, Madagascar, India, and China, Indigenous Enlightenment illuminates the challenges that British and American educators faced while trying to coerce Indigenous children and adults to learn to read. Indigenous laborers commonly supported the tasks of editing, printing, and dissemination and, in fact, dominated the workforce at most colonial presses from the time printing began. Yet even in places where schools and presses were in synchronous operation, missionaries found that Indigenous peoples had their own intellectual systems, and most did not learn best with Western methods.

Wardship and the Welfare State examines the ideological dimensions and practical intersections of public policy and Native American citizenship, Indian wardship, and social welfare rights after World War II. By examining Native wardship's intersections with three pieces of mid-twentieth-century welfare legislation--the 1935 Social Security Act, the 1942 Servicemen's Dependents Allowance Act, and the 1944 GI Bill--Mary Klann traces the development of a new conception of first-class citizenship. Wardship and the Welfare State explores how policymakers and legislators have defined first-class citizenship against its apparent opposite, the much older and fraught idea of Indian wardship. Wards were considered dependent, while first-class citizens were considered independent. Wards were thought to receive gratuitous aid from the government, while first-class citizens were considered responsible. Critics of the federal welfare state's expansion in the 1930s through 1960s feared that as more Americans received government aid, they too could become dependent wards, victims of the poverty they saw on reservations. Because critics believed wardship prevented Native men and women from fulfilling expectations of work, family, and political membership, they advocated terminating Natives' trust relationships with the federal government. As these critics mistakenly equated wardship with welfare, state officials also prevented Native people from accessing needed welfare benefits. But to Native peoples wardship was not welfare and welfare was not wardship. Native nations and pan-Native organizations insisted on Natives' government-to-government relationships with the United States and maintained their rights to welfare benefits. In so doing, they rejected stereotyped portrayals of Natives' perpetual poverty and dependency and asserted and defined tribal sovereignty. By illuminating how assumptions about "gratuitous" government benefits limit citizenship, Wardship and the Welfare State connects Native people to larger histories of race, inequality, gender, and welfare in the twentieth-century United States.

To Educate American Indians presents the most complete versions of papers presented at the National Educational Association's Department of Indian Education meetings during a time when the debate about how best to "civilize" Indigenous populations dominated discussions. During this time two philosophies drove the conversation. The first, an Enlightenment era-influenced universalism, held that through an educational alchemy American Indians would become productive, Christianized Americans, distinguishable from their white neighbors only by the color of their skin. Directly confronting the assimilationists' universalism were the progressive educators who, strongly influenced by the era's scientific racism, held the notion that American Indians could never become fully assimilated. Despite these differing views, a frightening ethnocentrism and an honor-bound dedication to "gifting" civilization to Native students dominated the writings of educators from the NEA's Department of Indian Education. For a decade educators gathered at annual meetings and presented papers on how best to educate Native students. Though the NEA Proceedings published these papers, strict guidelines often meant they were heavily edited before publication. In this volume Larry C. Skogen presents many of these unedited papers and gives them historical context for the years 1900 to 1904.

An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru's lower Andean regions. The rebellious tone of both epics illuminates a heretofore overlooked aspect in Latin American Indigenous colonial writing: the sense of political injustice and spiritual sedition directed equally at European-imposed religious practice and at aspects of Indigenous belief. The link between spirituality and political upheaval in Native colonial writing has not been sufficiently explored until this work. Sharonah Esther Fredrick applies a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes history, literature, archaeology, and anthropology in equal measure to situate the Mayan and Andean narratives within the paradigms of their developing civilizations. An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods decolonizes readers' perspective by setting Mayan and Andean authorship center stage and illustrates the schisms and shifts in Native civilizations and literatures of Latin America in a way that other literary studies, which relegate Native literature as a prelude to Spanish-language literature, have not yet done. By demonstrating the power of Native American philosophy within the context of the conquest of Latin America, Fredrick illuminates the profound spiritual dissension and radically conflicting ideologies of the Mesoamerican and Andean worlds before and after the Spanish conquest.

Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine. Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics--from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better understand the cultural making and unmaking of colonial and anti-colonial space in Palestine. Encountering Palestine asks us to rethink how colonialism and power operate in Palestine, the ways Palestinians struggle, and the lifeways that constantly encounter, un/make, and counter the spaces of colonial violence.

In Who Gets to Go Back-to-the-Land?​, Valerie Padilla Carroll examines a variety of media from the last century that proselytized self-sufficiency as a solution to the economic instability, environmental destruction, and perceived disintegration of modern America. In the early twentieth century, books already advocated an escape for the urban, white-collar male. The suggestion became more practical during the Great Depression, and magazines pushed self-sufficiency lifestyles. By the 1970s, the idea was reborn in newsletters and other media as a radical response to a damaged world, allowing activists to promote the simple life as environmental, gender, and queer justice. At the century's end, a great variety of media promoted self-sufficiency as the solution to a different set of problems, from survival at the millennium to wanderlust of millennials. ​ Nevertheless, these utopian narratives are written overwhelmingly for a particular audience--one that is white, male, and white-collar. Padilla Carroll's archival research of the books, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, websites, blogs, and videos promoting the life of the agrarian smallholder illuminates how embedded race, class, gender, and heteronormative dogmas in these texts reinforce dominant power ideologies and ignore the experiences of marginalized people. Still, Padilla Carroll also highlights how those left out have continued to demand inclusion by telling their own stories of self-sufficiency, rewriting and reimagining the movement to be collaborative, inclusive, and rooted in both human and ecological justice.

Lessons from Fort Apache is an ethnography of Indigenous language dynamics on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona that reveals important implications for both North American and global concerns about language endangerment.

This volume challenges ideas about both national belonging and local association to emphasize how regional analysis deepens understanding of migration, race, borders, infrastructure, climate, and Native sovereignty.