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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Authenticating Loss And Contesting Recovery: Fema And The Politics Of Colonial Disaster Management, Sarah Molinari
Authenticating Loss And Contesting Recovery: Fema And The Politics Of Colonial Disaster Management, Sarah Molinari
Publications and Research
The chapter discusses how institutional regulators of disaster recovery "authenticate" loss and contribute to the process of disciplining disaster subjects. Drawing on ethnographic research after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the chapter suggests that alternative grassroots approaches to disaster recovery point to a reimagining of "recovery" organized around a framework of support and affective relations.
Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage Within Ongoing Struggles Over African Marriage In South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough
Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage Within Ongoing Struggles Over African Marriage In South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough
Publications and Research
This article examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, the author argues that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in …
“We Like Mexican Laborers Better”: Citizenship And Immigration Policies In The Formation Of Puerto Rican Farm Labor In The United States, Ismael Garcia-Colon
“We Like Mexican Laborers Better”: Citizenship And Immigration Policies In The Formation Of Puerto Rican Farm Labor In The United States, Ismael Garcia-Colon
Publications and Research
This paper examines how colonialism and immigration policies define the citizenship of Puerto Rican farmworkers in relation to the immigration policies of guestwork. The Jones Act created in practice an ambiguous status for Puerto Rican migrants by granting U.S. citizenship to colonial subjects in a time when citizenship still meant being White and Anglophone. In addition, the importation of Mexican braceros tended to shape people’s perceptions of farmworkers as “foreign.” Puerto Ricans were and are constantly asked, challenged, and suspected by mainstream society of being “illegal aliens.” These perceptions had a lasting effect through World War II, the H-2 Program, …
Confronting The Present: Migration In Sidney Mintz’S Journal For The People Of Puerto Rico, Ismael Garcia-Colon
Confronting The Present: Migration In Sidney Mintz’S Journal For The People Of Puerto Rico, Ismael Garcia-Colon
Publications and Research
Sidney Mintz’s field journal for The People of Puerto Rico, published in 1956, is a valuable source for historical anthropological work. Until now, however, it has remained a hidden treasure for the anthropology of migration. By the late 1940s and 1950s, migration was central to the lives of Puerto Rican sugarcane workers and their families, and Mintz recorded important details of it. His journal shows how people maneuvered within fields of power that were full of opportunities and constraints for people seeking to make a living by migrating. Thanks to Mintz, anthropologists can learn about working-class Puerto Ricans’ experiences, lives, …
South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough
South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough
Publications and Research
Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …
Conjuring The Close From Afar A Border-Crossing Tale Of Vieques’ Activism And Obama-Empire, Víctor M. Torres-Vélez, Sarah Molinari, Katharine Lawrence
Conjuring The Close From Afar A Border-Crossing Tale Of Vieques’ Activism And Obama-Empire, Víctor M. Torres-Vélez, Sarah Molinari, Katharine Lawrence
Publications and Research
After more than 60 years of military occupation, 30 of these under violent military practices, a social movement forced the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. This victory would not have been possible without the highly effective organization of civil disobedience carried out on the island. But the sum total of the actions that eventually forced out the U.S. Navy, neither happened exclusively within the boundaries of Vieques, nor was carried out by Viequense residents alone. In this article we want to suggest that this amazing victory—a testament of people’s will in the face of globalization—is also a border- …