Bookshelf: Social Sciences Division

Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies

Yen Le Espiritu, Lan Duong, Ma Vang, Victor Bascara, Khatharya Um, Lila Sharif, Nigel Hatton
2022

Departures supports, contextualizes, and advances the field of critical refugee studies by providing a capacious account of its genealogy, methods, and key concepts as well as its premises, priorities, and possibilities. The book outlines the field's main tenets, questions, and concerns and offers new approaches that integrate theoretical rigor and policy considerations with refugees' rich and complicated lived worlds. It also provides examples of how to link communities, movements, networks, artists, and academic institutions and forge new and humane reciprocal paradigms, dialogues...

Written On Water

Translated by Andrew F. Jones
2023

Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1945, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang's reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and woman, set amid the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She...

America Street: A Multicultural Anthology of Stories

Edited by Brice Particelli and Anne Mazer
2019
When published in 1993, America Street was the very first collection of stories about young people growing up in our diverse society. It has informed and inspired hundreds of thousands of readers. Now this influential and much-loved anthology is expanded and updated for a new generation. Twenty stories, twelve new and eight returning favorites, focus on life issues, from the personal to the political: from making friends and keeping up traditions to the right to an equal education and to protest.

Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Undocumented Vignettes from a Pre-American Life

Alberto Ledesma
2017

“The future of America, its openness and understanding that we, as a nation, have always depended has thrived on the energy, ideas and struggle of immigrants like Alberto Ledesma. The promised land can only be envisioned by the newcomer to our shore. Ledesma’s story, its powerful images, is needed now more than ever in an age of rising xenophobia and continual exploitation.” —Andrew Lam, winner of the PEN Open Book Award

“Alberto Ledesma’s gorgeous drawings have fascinated me for a long time. Now his stunning work has become a book for the ages.” —Luis Alberto Urrea

In this...

Persian Carpets : The Nation as a Transnational Commodity

Minoo Moallem
2018

Persian Carpets: the Nation As a Transnational Commodity tracks the Persian carpet as an exotic and mythological object, as a commodity, and as an image from mid-nineteenth-century England to contemporary Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Following the journey of this single object, the book brings issues of labor into conversation with the politics of aesthetics. It focuses on the carpet as a commodity which crosses the boundaries of private and public, religious and secular, culture and economy, modern and traditional, home and diaspora, and art and commodity to tell the story of...