UC Libraries-Supported Open Access Monographs

In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, Crystal Mun-hye Baik blends different genres, from narrative prose to epistles to ancestral mourning rites, to offer an intimate cultural history of war, illness, and estrangement through the experiential lens of her family.

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

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.

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

In Queer Traffic, Jennifer Tyburczy traces how sexual dissidents across the Mexico-Canada-US borderlands transport the objects and experiences that nourish their sexual and social lives. She situates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a pivot point in the formation of panics aimed at stamping out these outlaw sex practices. Highlighting NAFTA’s erotic investments in hetero- and homonormativity, racial capitalism, markets of dispossession, and neocolonialism, Tyburczy directly engages with art, activism, and archives to revisit the struggles of people who invented circuits of sexual exchange through four decades of violence and criminalization. In conversing with actors from bureaucrats to pornographers and in studying choreographies, social movements, and street vocabularies, she examines an array of tactics that undermine the market logics of trade law and policy. Dreaming of other forms of living that go beyond mere survival, Queer Traffic guides us through the renegade pathways that circumvent the seemingly endless reach of free-trade capitalism toward other routes to pleasure.

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

In The Aesthetic Character of Blackness, Jemma DeCristo theorizes the means by which black art liberates the free world but does not and cannot liberate black people. Drawing on Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke and as well as the aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Theodor Adorno, DeCristo critiques the exaltation of black culture and art’s saving power by analyzing the violence underneath aesthetic production. She tracks black music’s representational and anti-representational capacities in projects of black non/humanization from nineteenth-century abolitionism and the founding of the recording industry to the emergence of black queer blues performers and the rise of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Theorizing the contemporary neoliberalization of black audio-visual spectacle, DeCristo ultimately demonstrates that the voluptuous world of black aesthetics beautifies an anti-black world that wields black art and culture as a weapon against black life.

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

In The Possible Form of an Interlocution, Nahum Dimitri Chandler provides an epistemological and theoretical elaboration of the correspondence between W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in 1904 and 1905. Their interlocution took place under the heading of Du Bois’s famous formulation “the problem of the color line.” This study takes as its incipient reference Weber’s statement to Du Bois that “I am absolutely convinced that the ‘color-line’ problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world.” Chandler provides a concise statement of Du Bois’s thought of “the problem of the color line” as a general formulation for understanding African American matters within modern historicity on a worldwide scale. He then examines Weber’s earliest writings to understand in just what way “the ‘color-line’ problem", served as a problematization for Weber in both his thought and itinerary, across the 1890s and through the time of their interlocution.

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

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 self, she contributes a decolonial critique of the study of knowledge and being. In so doing, Foster replaces the Cartesian-colonial “I think, therefore I am” with a decolonial “I move, and therefore I know.”

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

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.

Despite the massive costs associated with data breaches, ransomware, viruses, and cyberattacks, most organizations remain thoroughly unprepared to safeguard consumer data. Over the past two decades, the insurance industry has begun offering cyber insurance to help organizations manage cybersecurity and privacy law compliance, while also offering risk management services as part of their insurance packages. These insurers have thus effectively evolved into de facto regulators—yet at the same time, they have failed to effectively curtail cybersecurity breaches. Drawing from interviews, observations, and extensive content analysis of the cyber insurance industry, this book reveals how cyber insurers' risk management services convey legitimacy to the public and to insureds but fall short of actually improving data security, rendering them largely symbolic. Speaking directly to broader debates on regulatory delegation to nonstate actors, Shauhin A. Talesh proposes a new institutional theory of insurance to explain how insurers shape the content and meaning of privacy law and cybersecurity compliance, offering policy recommendations for how insurers and governments can work together to improve cybersecurity and foster greater algorithmic justice.

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

Ma Vang examines the experiences of Hmong refugees who migrated to the United States following the secret war in Laos (1961–1975) to theorize “history on the run” as a framework for understanding refugee histories, in particular those of the Hmong.

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

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 longstanding divide between nativist approaches to development, based on innateness, and empiricist approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally dependent species is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends.

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