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Complicating the idea of a single immigrant narrative, the stories in Diversity Quota move from the US to Nepal and back again, showing how displacement can lead to suffering or hope--sometimes simultaneously. In Kathmandu, Nepalis are frequently caught up in battles between tradition and progress; in the United States, their cultural dislocation is often emblematic of the larger predicaments immigrants face. Ranjan Adiga navigates these larger problems of racism, inequity, and gender roles, while simultaneously centering the humanity of his characters, flaws and all. In these stories, the lines between "winners" and "losers" in a rapidly globalizing world become frayed and warped. A Nepali migrant's worst fears materialize in "Leech." A couple in "Denver" tries to acclimate to a new social class. A middle-aged man is attracted to his barber in "Haircut and Massage." A Nepali professor is captivated by a white American student in "The Diversity Committee." In often unexpected ways, Adiga captures moments of survival amid worlds colored by precarity.

After laboring in Germany for thirty years, Hüseyin uses his hard-earned savings to purchase a sunny and spacious flat in Istanbul, envisioning the joys of retirement in his home country with his wife, Emine, by his side. But in a cruel twist of fate, he dies of a heart attack on the day he moves in. As Hüseyin's children and wife travel to Turkey for his funeral, the novel explores their lives and dreams: a teenage son struggling to embrace his sexuality; a college-educated daughter desperate to align conflicting facets of her identity; a first-born son racialized and profiled all his life, forced to perform a role he could not choose for himself; a daughter left behind in rural Turkey who dreams of recapturing her family's love after joining them in Germany as a teenager; and a mother unable to break free from the cycles of violence that have defined her. In this epic tale, Fatma Aydemir explores the lives of characters who could not be more different from one another--except in their insatiable desires to be understood. Rather than a seamless narrative, the novel circles around suppressed memories, unspoken trauma, and buried pasts. Turning expectations and stereotypes of the immigrant experience on their side, Aydemir shows how we all grapple with power and beauty, the holes in our lives, and the demons that hover just out of sight.

When Mike Leckrone retired as director of bands at the University of Wisconsin in 2019, he had served in that role for an astonishing fifty years. A brilliant showman, he became known for aerial entries and sequined outfits. He created the Fifth Quarter celebration that follows all home football games, removed barriers for women to march in the band, and established regular appearances at Camp Randall by special-needs high school musicians. Above all, Leckrone has always sought joy in life--which, along with his sixty-year love affair with his late wife, UW "band mom" Phyllis Leckrone, was perhaps the secret to his remarkable career. A consummate musician, as both a trumpeter and an arranger, Leckrone remains an outstanding raconteur--a talent beautifully on display in his long-awaited memoir. This book is the next best thing to sitting down with this master storyteller. Coauthor Doug Moe captures the joys of performing--whether at Camp Randall, in the Kohl Center, or along the Rose Bowl Parade route. Reading Leckrone's story, one comes to understand the mix of discipline, showmanship, work ethic, warmth, toughness, wit, and musical skill that make him a Wisconsin treasure. Even for people who know Leckrone, Moments of Happiness details the stories behind the highlights and the unglamorous work that made his accomplishments possible. It both cements his legend and offers unprecedented insights into a career that will never be equaled.

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors. In so doing, she demonstrates that the Holocaust has been understood not only through the documentary realism and postmodern fragmentation familiar to scholars but also through a surreal mode of meaning making. From an otherworldly "Planet Auschwitz" to the spare, intimate spaces of documentary interviews, Brackney shows that the humanity of victims has been produced, undermined, and guaranteed through evolving scripts for acknowledging and mourning mass violence. Brackney offers a new look at familiar works by authors such as Claude Lanzmann, W. G. Sebald, and Paul Celan, while making surprising connections to contemporary scholars like Timothy Snyder and Donna Haraway, and events such as the Space Race. In the process, she maps out a multi-decade process through which transnational conventions of mourning have emerged in Western Europe, North America, and Israel, functioning to constitute Jewish victimization as "grievable life." Ultimately, she shows how the Holocaust has developed into a figure for the destabilization and reformulation of the category of humanity and the problem of mourning across difference.

A proud Armenian who claimed a distant link to nobility, born in what was then part of czarist Russia, Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) was one of the most astonishing and confounding figures in American film and theater, directing the original stage productions of Porgy and Bess, Carousel, and Oklahoma!, as well as films including Love Me Tonight, Queen Christina, City Streets, and Silk Stockings. He was famously fired from the film version of Porgy and Bess in a dispute over publicity and quit Cleopatra after arguments over a single scene. Mamoulian's mercurial confidence and autocratic tendencies were among the reasons he had a reputation for being uncompromising. This frustrating mix of genius and stubbornness, of critical successes and financial flops, has proven challenging for biographers.Kurt Jensen's magisterial volume, extensively researched and filled with trenchant observations, brings to life this charming, flawed, and fascinating man-and demonstrates how the wellspring of his art contained the seeds of his own destruction. Drawing upon Mamoulian's unfinished memoir and voluminous diaries, as well as interviews with the director's surviving collaborators, Jensen delivers fresh and informative insider stories from seminal productions. Meanwhile, he explores Mamoulian's aesthetic principles and strategies as manifested in lighting, choreography, and sound design. A tour de force, Peerless offers readers a multifaceted, in-depth look at an idiosyncratic genius.

Postcolonialism, the politics of ethnic and religious identity, and the role of women in African society and politics have become important, and often connected, foci in African studies. Here, fifteen chapters explore these themes in tandem. With essays that span the continent, this volume showcases the political histories, challenges, and promise of contemporary Africa.Written in honor of Crawford Young, a foundational figure in the study of African politics, the essays reflect the breadth and intellectual legacy of this towering scholar and illustrate the vast impact Young had, and continues to have, on the field. The book's themes build from his seminal publications, and the essays were written by leading scholars who were trained by Young.

One is never sure who the monsters are in these poems, only that the narrator desperately doesn't want to be one. In his brilliant debut collection, Hernández explores grief, loss, identity, lineage, and belonging with grace, insight, and compassion. These pages are infused with comfort, with desire, with heartache. Never absent is love, family. Hernández--hyperaware of American society's dismissal or hatred of people who look like him--writes with a refreshing confidence, a sure knowledge of who he is and where he comes from. Transcending any particular experience, this volume will continue to resonate with multiple readings. he says I deserve someone who will love me the way I love him. I want to kiss him, tell him love isn't measured. I squeeze his hand instead, afraid of the thought of anyone looking at us from the outside of my car. --Excerpt from "Defying the Dangers of Being"

In this biting, lyrical memoir, Camara Lundestad Joof, born in Bodø to Norwegian and Gambian parents, shares her experiences as a queer Black Norwegian woman. Joof's daily encounters belie the myth of a colorblind contemporary Scandinavia. She wrestles with the fickle palimpsest of memory, demanding communion with her readers even as she recognizes her own exhaustion in the face of constantly being asked to educate others. "I regularly decide to quit talking to white people about racism," writes Joof. Such discussions often feel unproductive, the occasional spark of hope coming at enormous personal cost. But not talking about it is impossible, a betrayal of self. The book is a self-examination as well as societal indictment. It is an open challenge to readers, to hear her as she talks about it, all the time.

In the wake of anticolonial struggles and amid the two world wars, twentieth-century Southeast Asia churned with new political, cultural, and intellectual realities. Liberal democracies flourished briefly, only to be discarded for dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes as the disorder and inefficiencies inherent to democracy appeared unequal to postcolonial and Cold War challenges. Uniquely within the region, Laos maintained a stable democracy until 1975, surviving wars, coups, and revolutions. But Lao history during this period has often been flattened, subsumed within the tug-of-war between the global superpowers and their puppets.Forsaken Causes offers a groundbreaking intellectual history of the Royal Lao Government (RLG) from 1945 to 1975. In Ryan Wolfson-Ford's account, the Lao people emerge as not merely pawns of the superpowers but agents in their own right, with the Lao elite wielding particular influence over the nation's trajectory. Their prevailing ideologies-liberal democracy and anticommunism-were not imposed from outside, but rather established by Lao themselves in the fight against French colonialism. These ideologies were rooted in Lao culture, which prized its traditional monarchy, Buddhist faith, French learning, and nationalist conception of a Lao race. Against histories that have dismissed Lao elites as instruments of foreign powers, Wolfson-Ford shows that the RLG charted its own course, guided by complex motivations, rationales, and beliefs. During this time Lao enjoyed unprecedented democratic freedoms, many of which have not been seen since the government fell to communist takeover in 1975.By recentering the Lao in their own history, Wolfson-Ford restores our understanding of this robust but often forgotten liberal democracy, recovers lost voices, and broadens our understanding of postcolonial and Cold War Southeast Asia as a whole.

"What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?" asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation's victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them.With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order-a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times-up to a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation-means Timor-Leste's dead have real, significant power in the country's efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.

The Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid, has fascinated readers ever since it was written in the first century CE, and here Celia M. Campbell offers a bold new interpretive approach. Reasserting the significance of the ancient hymnic tradition, she argues that the first pentad of Ovid's Metamorphoses draws a programmatic strain of influence from hymns to the gods, in particular conversation-and competition-with the work of the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, a favored source of inspiration to Augustan writers. She suggests that Ovid read Callimachus' six hymns as a self-conscious set-and reading the first five books of the Metamorphoses through Callimachus' hymnic collection allows us to pierce the occasionally opaque and seemingly idiosyncratic mythology Ovid constructs. Through careful, innovative close readings, Campbell illustrates that Callimachus and the hymnic tradition provide a kind of interpretative key to unlocking the dynamic landscape of divine power in Ovid's poetic cosmos.

During a wedding celebration, Jamil, the sole heir of a rich landowner, meets Naji, who sells hay for a living. The novel follows the boys' escape from their village in the hopes of finding a place where they can be together freely. Even as their love evolves, their strong connection remains, which helps see them through the upheavals of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. In Boys of Love, Ghazi Rabihavi offers both a universal story about the ups and downs of all relationships and a clear-eyed portrait of same-sex desire in Iran, where homosexuality remains punishable by death. Banned in Iran, the novel was initially published in Farsi in the UK, then translated into French and shortlisted for the Prix Médicis étranger. Rabihavi avoids both lasciviousness and exoticism in depicting a deep love between male characters living through the Iranian Cultural Revolution. Ultimately, this story challenges preconceived notions about marginalized communities in the Middle East.

Religion is deeply embedded in American history, and one cannot understand American history's broad dynamics without accounting for it. Without detailing the history of religions, teachers cannot properly explain key themes in US survey courses, such as politics, social dynamics, immigration and colonization, gender, race, or class. From early Native American beliefs and practices, to European explorations of the New World, to the most recent presidential elections, religion has been a significant feature of the American story. In Understanding and Teaching Religion in US History, a diverse group of eminent historians and history teachers provide a practical tool for teachers looking to improve history instruction at the upper-level secondary and undergraduate level.This book offers a breadth of voices and approaches to teaching this crucial part of US history. Religion can be a delicate topic, especially in public education, and many students and teachers bring strongly held views and identities to their understanding of the past. The editors and contributors aim to help the reader see religion in fresh ways, to present sources and perspectives that may be unfamiliar, and to suggest practical interventions in the classroom that teachers can use immediately.

Originally published by Howard Fertig, Inc. under the title Masses and Man, copyright Ã1980.