Recent ucb_es items

On Relationality, on Blackness: A Listening Post

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This introductory essay considers the critical purchase of “relationality” in current scholarly debates in Comparative Ethnic Studies and Comparative Literature. It foregrounds Blackness and/as incommensurability as they are treated in these fields' distinct and overlapping institutional locations, historical developments, and epistemic investments.

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921

Osamah F. Khalil, America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, $36.00). Pp. 295. isbn 978 0 6749 7157 8.

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Osamah F. Khalil, America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, $36.00). Pp. 295. isbn 978 0 6749 7157 8.

Pamela E. Pennock , The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s–1980s, Justice, Power, Politics (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Pp. 328. $85.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781469630977

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pamela E. Pennock , The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s–1980s, Justice, Power, Politics (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Pp. 328. $85.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781469630977

Environmental Health Threats to Latino Migrant Farmworkers

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Approximately 75% of farmworkers in the United States are Latino migrants, and about 50% of hired farmworkers do not have authorization to work in the United States. Farmworkers face numerous chemical, physical, and biological threats to their health. The adverse effects of these hazards may be amplified among Latino migrant farmworkers, who are concurrently exposed to various psychosocial stressors. Factors such as documentation status, potential lack of authorization to work in the United States, and language and cultural barriers may also prevent Latino migrants from accessing federal aid, legal assistance, and health programs. These environmental, occupational, and social hazards may further exacerbate existing health disparities among US Latinos. This population is also likely to be disproportionately impacted by emerging threats, including climate change and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Latino migrant farmworkers are essential to agriculture...

Me Espera Un Pueblo: Return Migration to Ancestral Homelands in Oaxaca, Mexico

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Between the years 2005-2010, 1.4 million Mexican migrants residing in the US migrated back to reside in Mexico. The state of Oaxaca, a primary return destination, holds the highest and most diverse population of Indigenous nations in Mexico, with especially strong forms of communal organization locally and in diaspora. This project consists of both a documentary film in progress and an Ethnic Studies honors thesis composed of interviews with migrants who have returned to their ancestral homelands in Oaxaca after living in the US for several years. In the record of migration literature, theorizations of return migration have centered around settler colonial, nation-state forces of immobilization and confinement, thus, overlooking and oversimplifying the complex affective experiences of return. In contrast to such literature, my methodology and theoretical framework, grounded in Cine Comunitario (communal filmmaking) and Border Abolition, intentionally facilitate relationship building...

It’s a Racialized World After All: A Transnational Study of Oakland, California and Durban, South Africa as Racialized, Yet Resistant Geographies

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Traditional, Western geographers have theorized a separation between land, capital, and labor, which naturalizes a conception of geography as completely independent of sociohistorical factors. This conventional ideology strips the landscape from its ongoing relationship with capital and labor, isolating the land from its white supremacist histories, which—according to Andrea Smith—are embodied through processes of anti-black racism/slaveability, genocide, and orientalism. Scholarship in critical geography has revealed that forces of colonialism and imperialism transcend conventional spatial-temporal limitations, constructing geographies of confinement for people in contemporary times. In focusing on Moms 4 Housing—a collective of Black, marginally housed mothers in Oakland, California—along with Abahlali baseMjondolo (Abahlali)—a Black, South African grassroots movement run by and for shack dwellers in Durban, South Africa—this paper investigates how racial capitalism maps onto...

Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies

Mon, 9 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies

Pornographic encounters and interpretative interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior

Mon, 9 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Pornographic encounters and interpretative interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior

Keyword 6

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Keyword 6

Re-Indigenizing Spaces: How Mapping Racial Violence Shows the Interconnections Between Settler Colonialism and Gentrification

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Re-Indigenizing Spaces: How Mapping Racial Violence Shows the Interconnections Between Settler Colonialism and Gentrification

Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States

International adoption and cultural insecurity

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

International adoption and cultural insecurity

The awesome and mundane adventures of Flor de Manilay San Francisco

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The awesome and mundane adventures of Flor de Manilay San Francisco

Framed in Black

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I've had Nina Simone's “sinnerman” on repeat for months. The propulsive force of Simone's 1965 live version of this gospel song drives its ten-minute ferocity straight into the contemporary American zeitgeist. As she tells her audience in the lead-up to a lesser-known performance of the song, recorded in 1961, Simone learned “Sinnerman” when she was a “little bitty girl in revival meetings. It happened when my mother and lots more like her tried to save souls.” The song's judgment-day tale of redemption's refusal is told doubly, both by the sinner—“I cried rock / don't you see I need you, rock”—and by those from whom the sinner begs, if not forgiveness, then simply some measure of mercy from the divine justice to come: “Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?” The break in the middle of the 1965 recording strips the song down to Simone's handclaps on the second and fourth beats. All that remains is the tenuous intensity of the time neither of redemption nor of damnation but merely...

Queer Politics, Bisexual Erasure: Sexuality at the Nexus of Race, Gender, and Statistics

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Queer Politics, Bisexual Erasure: Sexuality at the Nexus of Race, Gender, and Statistics

Gesto a Tiempo de Mambo

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Gesto a Tiempo de Mambo

“Una evidencia queer: Trabajo sexual y metodologías afectivas”

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

“Una evidencia queer: Trabajo sexual y metodologías afectivas”

Blinded by Sight: The Racial Body and the Origins of the Social Construction of Race

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Osagie K. Obasogie's Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind (2014) makes important contributions to both to the sociology of law and to critical race studies. The book challenges “colorblind” racial ideology by showing empirically that people who are blind from birth nevertheless “see” race, grasping it as a nearly omnipresent feature of social interaction and social organization. These insights, however, do not diminish the importance of the racial body. Beyond refuting colorblindness, Obasogie's book points to a neverending tension, embedded in what we call racial formation, between the social construction of race and the corporeality of race. This tension has been present since the dawn of empire and African slavery. Obasogie's achievement of falsifying colorblindness should not lead us to neglect the importance of the racial body.

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