The Uncoiling Python
South African Storytellers and Resistance
There are many collections of African oral traditions, but few as carefully organized as The Uncoiling Python. Harold Scheub, one of the world’s leading scholars of African oral traditions and folklore, explores the ways in which oral traditions have served to combat and subvert colonial domination in South Africa.…
Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice
Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa
Edited by Anna Bohlin, Cherryl Walker, Ruth Hall and Thembela Kepe
Land is a significant and controversial topic in South Africa. Addressing the land claims of those dispossessed in the past has proved to be a demanding, multidimensional process. In many respects the land restitution program that was launched as part of the county’s transition to democracy in 1994 has failed to meet expectations, with ordinary citizens, policymakers, and analysts questioning not only its progress but also its outcomes and parameters.…
Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music
By Anne Grimes
Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music is a treasury of American traditional music and Ohio’s folklife heritage. Traveling along the highways and byways of Ohio in the 1950s as a folksinger and collector of traditional music, Anne Grimes encountered people from many different backgrounds who opened up their homes to her to share their most precious family heirlooms—their songs.…
The Room Within
Poems
By Moore Moran
The Room Within is a retrospective survey of a poetic career dating back to the late fifties. A student of Yvor winters at Stanford, Moore Moran has deservedly earned a reputation, along with fellow Winters students Turner Cassity and Edgar Bowers, as a "poet's poet.…
Making a World after Empire
The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives
Edited by Christopher J. Lee
In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world.…
The Dred Scott Case
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law
Edited by David Thomas Konig, Paul Finkelman and Christopher Alan Bracey
In 1846 two slaves, Dred and Harriet Scott, filed petitions for their freedom in the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. As the first true civil rights case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Dred Scott v.…
Out of the Mountains
Appalachian Stories
Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.…
The Tiki King
Stories
A Lebanese housewife, a former horror-film maker, and a cantankerous Russian librarian are among the inhabitants of the offbeat world found in this impressive debut collection. Stacy Tintocalis’s stories take us from a defunct women’s shelter off a Missouri country road to the streets of low-income Hollywood, where her characters yearn for the love that is always just out of reach.…
Midwest Modern
The Color Woodcuts of Mabel Hewit
Edited by Jane Glaubinger
Midwest Modern: The Color Woodcuts of Mabel Hewit is the first book showcasing the work of an important modernist printmaker.An Ohio artist, Hewit (1903-1984), who came of age in the 1920s, was well aware of European modernism and other contemporary trends and worked in both representational and abstract styles.…
Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa
Edited by Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts and Elizabeth Thornberry
Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa reveals the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency.…
The Law and the Prophets
Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977
“No nation can win a battle without faith,” Steve Biko wrote, and as Daniel R. Magaziner demonstrates in The Law and the Prophets, the combination of ideological and theological exploration proved a potent force.…
Trustee for the Human Community
Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa
Edited by Robert A. Hill and Edmond J. Keller
Ralph J. Bunche (1904–1971), winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, was a key U.S. diplomat in the planning and creation of the United Nations in 1945. In 1947 he was invited to join the permanent UN Secretariat as director of the new Trusteeship Department.…
Nature and History in Modern Italy
Edited by Marco Armiero and Marcus Hall
Is Italy il bel paese—the beautiful country—where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity’s greed and nature’s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator’s vision of Italy.…












