Through a rich interpretation of the remarkable photographs W. E. B. Du Bois compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Shawn Michelle Smith reveals the visual dimension of the color line that Du Bois famously called "the problem of the twentieth century." Du Bois's prize-winning exhibit consisted of three albums together containing 363 black-and-white photographs, mostly of middle-class African Americans from Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. Smith provides an extensive analysis of the images, the antiracist message Du Bois conveyed by collecting and displaying...

A study of the Ellis Island museum, its gift shop, and the Statue of Liberty form the basis of reflections on sex, nation, and immigration.

"The Last "Darky"" establishes the late 19th- and early 20th-century comedian Bert Williams, an Afro-Caribbean who often performed in blackface, as central to the development of a global black modernism centered in Harlem's Renaissance.

While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886 1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa s stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor s remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille s The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the...

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into...

A Certain Age is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrazek visited Indonesia throughout the 1990s, recording lengthy interviews with elderly intellectuals in and around Jakarta. With few exceptions, they were part of an urban elite born under colonial rule and educated at Dutch schools. From the early twentieth century, through the late colonial era, the national revolution, and well into independence after 1945, these intellectuals injected their ideas...

Starn examines the career of Tiger Woods, from child star to global sports celebrity. The author shows that the scandal following the revelation of Tiger's infidelities was like many similar media-generated scandals of recent years, and he brings an anthropologist's perspective to bear on Tigergate.