Recent uclalib_oabooks items

Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing lessons from the intersection of literature, photography, cinema, television, dance-drama, and ethnography, this book presents a unique analysis of Indian activist thought spread over two centuries. It discusses two presuppositions of liberal individualism: personal autonomy and ethical autonomy. Besides, it argues that the ‘individual’ has been creatively indigenized in modern non-Western cultures: thinkers attentive to gender in postcolonial cultures embrace selected ethical premises of the Enlightenment and its human rights discourse while they refuse possessive individualism. Debating influential schools of postcolonial and transnational studies, the chapter provides radical argument through a rich tapestry of gender portrayals drawn from two moments of modern Indian thought: the rise of humanism in the colony and the growth of new individualism in contemporary liberalized India. From autobiographical texts by nineteenth century Bengali prostitutes, point-of-view...

The New Corporate Governance in Theory and Practice

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Forty years ago, managerialism dominated corporate governance. In both theory and practice, a team of senior managers ran the corporation with little or no interference from other stakeholders. Boards of directors were little more than rubber stamps. Today, corporate governance looks very different. In particular, several trends have coalesced to encourage more active and effective board oversight. Much director compensation is now paid in stock, for example, which helps align director and shareholder interests. Courts have made clear that effective board processes and oversight are essential if board decisions are to receive the deference traditionally accorded to them under the business judgment rule, especially insofar as structural decisions are concerned (such as those relating to management buy-outs). Third, director conduct is constrained by an active market for corporate control, ever-rising rates of shareholder litigation, and, some say, activist shareholders. As a...

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This book presents a roadmap for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also be an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hardwired components frozen in the evolutionary past, this book presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions and evolutionary histories that shape how they develop, what information they use, and what they do with it. The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be adaptively plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using the rich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges...

The Baseball Trust A History of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The impact of antitrust law on sports is in the news all the time, especially when there is labor conflict between players and owners, or when a team wants to move to a new city. And if the majority of Americans have only the vaguest sense of what antitrust law is, most know one thing about it—that baseball is exempt. This book illuminates the series of court rulings that resulted in one of the most curious features of our legal system: baseball's exemption from antitrust law. The book provides a history of the game as seen through the prism of an extraordinary series of courtroom battles, ranging from 1890 to the present. The book looks at such pivotal cases as the 1922 Supreme Court case which held that federal antitrust laws did not apply to baseball; the 1972 Flood v. Kuhn decision that declared that baseball is exempt even from state antitrust laws; and several cases from the 1950s, one involving boxing and the other football, that made clear that the exemption is only...

Indigenous Archives: The Maya Diaspora and Mobile Cultural Production

Tue, 3 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Indigenous Archives analyzes the modes through which young Guatemalan Mayas in Los Angeles and Guatemala make sense of and respond to transnational structures of settler colonialism. Drawing on in-depth analysis of cultural production and interviews with Guatemalan Maya youth and young adults, Floridalma Boj Lopez examines how Mayas in diaspora craft and circulate narratives about their experiences across borders. Citing a more active practice of “archives in formation,” Boj Lopez depicts Indigenous archives as a cross-generational, collective conversation rooted in memory, survival, and cultural expression where Indigenous cultural practices and artifacts move, adapt, and assert their presence in the contemporary. Indigenous Archives invites readers to consider Indigeneity as a process, lived experience, and historical perspective, rather than as a static identity, and shows how extending analysis across borders is critical to understanding Latinidad and Indigeneity.

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Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands

Tue, 3 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions between the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shapeshifting spirit demons called baka/bacá as a way to reckon with a shared history of enslavement, colonialism, and exploitation.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

Studying Native America: Problems and Prospects

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

"The White Man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative process. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped rock and soil." The words of Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear foretold the current debate on the value of Native American studies in higher education. Studying Native America addresses for the first time in a comprehensive way the place of this critical discipline in the university curriculum. Leading scholars in anthropology, demography, English and literature, history, law, social work, linguistics, public health, psychology, and sociology have come together to explore what Native American studies has been, what it is, and what it may be in the future.

The book's thirteen contributors and editor Russell Thornton, stress the frequent incompatibility of traditional academic teaching methods with the social and cultural concerns that gave rise to the field of Native American...

Knowing as Moving: Perception, Memory, and Place

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Knowing as Moving, Susan Leigh Foster theorizes how the act of moving in and through the world creates the potential for individual and collective bodies to connect. Starting from the assertion that knowing takes place through bodily movement, Foster moves away from the Western philosophical traditions of dance, critiquing the Cartesian mind-body duality and its colonizing politics. She draws on Native and Indigenous studies, ecological cognitive science, disability studies, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore how knowledge is neither static nor storable. Thinking is a physical action and the product of an entire neuromuscular system with its mobile postural and gestural configurations, perceptual systems, and brain activity. Foster outlines how reading, examining, talking, and remembering are all forms of moving and contends that any process of knowing establishes one’s identity and relationality. By focusing on the centrality of bodily movement to thought and...