"Radical Dreamers"

New from Oxford University Press: Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education by Joseph P. Viteritti.

About the book, from the publisher:

An immersive and authoritative history of the school choice movement--from its idealistic roots among Black activists to the costly unaccountable programs of today.

Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of educational achievement in America. In attempting to address this divide, many school reformers have championed school choice: solutions like charter schools, vouchers, and other innovations designed to build more options into the system. Today, at least thirty-five states have laws that enable parents to send their children to private and religious schools at public expense while forty-six states have legalized charter schools.

In Radical Dreamers, Joseph P. Viteritti tells the definitive history of the school choice movement. In the 1990s, school choice emerged as an effort by a coalition of Black activists and conservative lawmakers seeking to offer economically disadvantaged students of color a way out of failing schools. As Viteritti shows, however, today's movement--championed by Republicans, conservatives, and faith-based organizations--has become less about placing disadvantaged children in better schools and more about providing public funding to students, irrespective of income, attending private--and frequently religious--schools.

Viteritti, an education insider and supporter of school choice for underserved students, profiles six influential figures, the "radical dreamers," who were integral to understanding the movement for greater education equality and the role that choice can play in fully realizing the movement's potential. Radical Dreamers urges us to have an honest conversation about education in America and where we have gone wrong. Viteritti's compelling narrative of how some of the most passionate educators conceived of school choice provides a valuable context to our nation's long struggle to offer every child in America a good education, and how that goal was undermined by advocates on both the left and right.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Miraculous Celebrity"

New from the University of Texas Press: Miraculous Celebrity: The Christ of Ixmiquilpan and Colonial Piety in Mexico City by Derek S. Burdette.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan, a historically beloved religious icon from sixteenth-century Mexico, and its evolving cultural importance.

The life-sized crucifix known as the Christ of Ixmiquilpan (also the Señor de Santa Teresa) was one of the most important artworks in colonial Mexico. The statue began as an ordinary devotional image, but in 1621 devotees witnessed it undergo a miraculous renovation that gave it a supernatural beauty. Over the next two and half centuries, its perceived power increased until it was surpassed in importance only by the Virgin of Guadalupe. Despite its historical significance, the Christ of Ixmiquilpan’s history has yet to be fully told.

Derek Burdette brings the miraculous crucifix out of the shadows and explores its instrumental role in shaping the devotional culture of New Spain. Following the arc of the statue’s life, he chronicles the story of the statue’s creation, miraculous renovation, and subsequent veneration at the heart of Mexico City. He also reveals how colonial politics were woven into the statue’s life from the very start. Reconstructing the history of a key artwork, Miraculous Celebrity sheds new light on the intersection of art, faith, and politics in the Spanish colonial world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Access Vernaculars"

New from Cornell University Press: Access Vernaculars: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia by Cassandra Hartblay.

About the book, from the publisher:

Access Vernaculars explores moments when accessible design fails. Observing how both disabled and nondisabled people in Russia recognize and point out poorly executed accessible design in built environments, ethnographer Cassandra Hartblay traces how disabled people in one Russian city narrate experiences of pervasive inaccess, and interprets popular images of failed accessibility as critiques of the Russian state and ablenationalism. In the process, Hartblay asks how disability advocacy movements proceed when ablenationalism co-opts accessibility and calls for a critical global disability studies that pushes back against Euro-American hegemony.

Through the stories disabled people tell about access and inaccess, this book examines local terminology used by those with mobility impairments to describe the built environment―a unique lexicon combining translated terms from global disability advocacy with Russophone words inherited from generations of political advocacy. These ethnographic accounts demonstrate the ways vocabularies of disability access spread in friction, taking on dynamic and unexpected meanings in transnational sociopolitical contexts. Access Vernaculars presents a global perspective on the intersection of critical disability studies and sociocultural anthropology.

Visit Cassandra Hartblay's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Heretic of Cacheu"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa by Toby Green.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tells the extraordinary story of seventeenth-century West African slave trader Crispina Peres to explore the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived.

In 1665, Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave-trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Portuguese Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers, the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau?

In The Heretic of Cacheu, award-winning historian Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, immersing us in the atmosphere of an otherwise distant setting. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses; styled their clothes; healed themselves from illness; and worshipped, worked, and played. Green renders the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationships between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas were already old and tangled, with slaving ports, colonies, and military bases having intermingled over many generations. But Cacheu also profoundly troubled this dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women such as Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire.

For the first time, through surviving documents recording Peres’s case, The Heretic of Cacheu lets readers experience the reality of this unique place and time through a remarkable act of historical recovery.

Visit Toby Green's website.

--Marshal Zeringue