You Must Fight Them (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) is a novella by Maceo Montoya. In it, a short, bookish half-Mexican doctoral student returns to his hometown of Woodland, California and tries to reconnect with Lupita Valdez, the girl he worshipped in high school. First he must come to terms with her three hulking brothers and his own identity.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books by Sasha Abramsky, a continuing lecturer in the University Writing Program, examines the life of his grandfather Chimen Abramsky and his remarkable collection of books on Jewish life, history, communism and socialism. Chimen and his wife hosted gatherings in their house of books that brought together many of the age’s greatest thinkers.
Humankind: How Biology and Geography Shape Human Diversity by Alexander Harcourt, professor emeritus of anthropology, explains how the expansion of the human species around the globe and our interaction with our environment explains much about why humans differ from one region of the world to another, not only biologically, but culturally.
Bread from Stones: The Middle East & The Making of Modern Humanitarianism, by Keith David Watenpaugh, an associate professor in Religious Studies, analyzes genocide and mass violence, human trafficking and the forced displacement of millions in the Eastern Mediterranean as the background for this exploration of humanitarianism’s role in the history of human rights.
In Soundtracks of Asian America, Grace Wang explores how Asian Americans use music to construct narratives of self, race, class, and belonging in national and transnational spaces. She highlights how they navigate racialization in different genres by considering the experiences of Asians and Asian Americans in Western classical music, U.S. popular music, and Mandopop (Mandarin-language popular music).
Perched on a tall bookshelf between mythology and folklore texts in Michael Dylan Foster’s office sits a green statuette, its mouth agape and hiding its eyes behind webbed fingers. Foster is an author, anthology editor and the host of a mini-series about “yōkai” for The Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK).
Migrants in Translation is an ethnographic reflection on foreign migration, mental health, and cultural translation in Italy. Its larger context is Europe and the rapid shifts in cultural and political identities that are negotiated between cultural affinity and a multicultural, multiracial Europe.
The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. Focusing on the concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life, Scott Cutler Shershow employs Derridean deconstruction to uncover self-contradictory and damaging assumptions that underlie both sides of the debate.
Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California’s Santa Clara Valley (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the ways in which Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrants transformed agricultural practices along with ideologies of race and American national identity from 1880 to 1940 in a region once celebrated around the world for its horticultural productivity, now commonly known as “Silicon Valley.”
