Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Among the various genres popular in the capital city of Kinshasa, Congolese rumba occupies a special place and can be counted as one of the DRC's most well-known cultural exports. The public image of rumba was ......
Leonid Tsypkin, Uncensored Literature, and Soviet Jewishness
Russian-Jewish writer Leonid Tsypkin (1926-82), a doctor by trade, wrote primarily "for the drawer," fearing professional consequences if he were to publish his fiction. Despite Tsypkin's almost complete lack of readership during his lifetime, his work has received international posthumous recognition, with Susan Sontag calling his work "among the ......
Within and between Nation-States in Mainland Southeast Asia
The Kingdom of Champassak was founded in 1713 in what is now southern Laos, and its royal lineage, the House of Champassak, continues to the present. In this first historical study of Champassak, Ian Baird explores the ways it has asserted its sovereignty across time and through monumental historical shifts, including the delineation of national ......
As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as "Charlottengrad." Traditionally, the Russian EmigrE community has been understood as one of exiles aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the Bolshevik ......
Amateur sleuths Nora Barnes and Toby Sandler find themselves caught up in a labyrinth of speculation when they arrive at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for Nora's faculty exchange. Campus police are baffled by the discovery of human remains in the attic of the university's administration building. Nora connects the bones to the Vietnam-era ......
"There are fevers you still wish to forget," writes Eduardo MartInez-Leyva, but how fortunate for the rest of us that he remembers. These tenderly crafted autobiographical poems pierce through to the heart of pain, love, loss, and the ongoing search for salvation-or at least a salve. Housed in the lived experiences of a queer Latinx person born ......
"It was breeding season, / wasn't it, and they were running from something," writes Caitlin Roach. Surveille's queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia, surveilling her body, civic bodies, natural and political landscapes, and the child she longs to bring into-and ultimately protect from-this ......
With Door County caught in the grip of a fierce winter storm, Sheriff Dave Cubiak agrees to a seemingly simple favor: checking in on an affluent widow with a questionable new suitor. His initial disquiet is easily dismissed-until she is found dead the next morning in her home. Lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs, clutching a valuable bronze ......
Recent years have witnessed a growing affinity between increasingly radicalized right-wing movements in the United States and Russia, countries that only recently viewed each other as intractable foes. In Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the United States and Russia, Alexandar Mihailovic untangles this confluence, considering ......
