Rutgers University Press Blog

Negras in Brazil

A review of Kia Caldwell's Negras in Brazil appears in the Autumn 2008 issue of SIGNS: JOURNAL OF WOMEN IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY, which is based at Rutgers:

Caldwell tries to show that the "use of essentialist discourses and practices offers a means of challenging hegemonic nationalist discourses which are premised on racial anti-essentialism" (179). The move seems complicated, but it is also part of a cultural war going on, and not just in Brazil. In order to dispense with the traditionally evoked Brazilian notion of "an ostensibly fluid and nonpolar color continuum" (36) as a form of "mestico essentialism" (28), her book is looking for race in a place where it seems that race has dissolved into the air - or rather into flesh of all colors.

Download the review as a PDF here.

Mark Largent's Breeding Contempt

Mark Largent's Breeding Contempt was recently reviewed in ISIS, the history of science journal based in Toronto and published by the University of Chicago Press:

Breeding Contempt is a throwback to the first phase of eugenics scholarship. Drawing only sporadically on accumulating narrow studies of episodes in the history of eugenics, Largent offers a broad historical overview of coercive sterilization practices in the United States that is reminiscent of Philip Reilly's The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Johns Hopkins, 1991).

A Place at the Multicultural Table

Prema Kurien's book, A Place at the Multicultural Table, was reviewed in the Fall 2008 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MODERN SOCIOLOGY:

Through her ethnographic accounts collected over a period of a decade and a well-grounded content analysis of the web interactions of immigrant Hindus, Kurien offers a rich and thoughtfully nuanced analysis of American Hinduism...Kurien has done a magnificent job in examining recent trends in the development of American Hinduism. The insights about immigrant religion in the context of a multicultural society are valuable to the larger field of immigration studies.

"Un-American" Hollywood

The JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY favorably reviews our recent book on film during the blacklist era, "Un-American" Hollywood:

These essays advance our knowledge of the blacklistees' artistic contributions by skillfully placing them in historical context. Examining the political environment, social context, auteur intent, and reception of selected films, the contributors demonstrate that critical judgments must be tempered by an understanding of historical conditions as well as the objectives of the artists involved.