Welcome to the Zombie Apocalypse

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood, by Dr. Terry Rey, our latest title published by North Broad Press, a joint open access imprint of Temple University Libraries and Temple University Press.

 

North Broad Press,has published a new textbook. Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood, by Dr. Terry Rey.

Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood explores the intellectual and cultural histories of two highly influential and essentially religious ideas, that of the zombie and that of the apocalypse. The former is a modern idea rooted in Haitian Vodou and its popular African and European religious antecedents, while the latter is an ancient one rooted in Zoroastrianism and the Bible and widely expanded in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and is arguably one of the most influential ideas in world history. Today the merger of the zombie and the apocalypse has pervaded popular culture, with the zombie surpassing the vampire and Frankenstein as the most prolific monster in popular American consciousness.

Drawing on biblical studies, African studies, Caribbean studies, and the sociology and history of religion, Parts I (Holy Land) and II (Haiti) explore the religious origins of these ideas. Part III (Hollywood) uses aspects of cultural studies, literary analysis, critical race theory, and cinema studies to document the (primarily) American obsession with the zombie and the zombie apocalypse.

The apocalypse and the zombie have been momentous intellectual, historical, and cultural realities and social forces in both very ancient and very recent human history and culture. As such, Zombie Apocalypse provides a focused analysis of certain fundamental aspects of human existence. It challenges readers to cultivate their critical thinking skills while learning about two of the most compelling notions in human religious history and the impact they continue to have. 

Terry Rey is Professor and Undergraduate Chair of the Department of Religion at Temple University, where he specializes in the anthropology and history of African and African diasporic religions. His current research projects focus on violence and religion in Central African and Haitian history. Rey developed the Temple course “Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood,” which he began teaching in spring 2020. 

The struggles of Black migrants and refugees are everyone’s problem

This week in North Philly Notes, Philip Krestedemas, coeditor of Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations, writes about the impact of the wet foot/dry foot policy.

The U.S. government’s wet foot/dry foot policy for Cuban and Haitian refugees, which was rolled out in the mid-1990s, is often cited as an example of the racially biased double standards that are baked into U.S. refugee policy. Under this policy, Cuban asylum seekers who touched ground on U.S. soil were eligible to receive asylum. Haitians who did the same thing were detained and returned to Haiti. But on closer inspection, the wet foot/dry foot policy is not just a story about how Haitian refugees were treated differently from Cubans.  It’s also a story about how the exclusionary treatment of Haitians established a precedent that weakened asylum rights for all Caribbean asylum seekers.
            The disparate treatment of Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers is most apparent in the way the “dry foot” criterion was applied (i.e., what happened once refugees reached U.S. soil).  The “wet foot” criterion was applied the same way to Cubans and Haitians. This wasn’t much of a change for Haitian refugees. For Cuban refugees, on the other hand, it marked the end of the more generous “open arms” policy that had been in effect since the early 1960s. Under the “open arms” policy, Cuban refugees were fast-tracked for asylum whether they were apprehended at sea or on the shores of south Florida. Under wet foot/dry foot, this generous asylum policy was limited to Cubans who touched U.S. soil. Cubans who were apprehended at sea were treated no different from Haitians. 
            The saga of wet foot/dry foot is just one example of a story that has repeated itself many times over in U.S. history. Black communities are often the first to be affected by deprivations, coercions, and incursions on personal liberty that, eventually, spread to the wider society. Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations aims to give the reader an insight into the depth of this problem, examining it from several theoretical, historical, and geo-political vantage points.The book’s contributors note that anti-Black racism doesn’t just describe a group-specific experience of race; it is foundational to the structures of thought and feeling that gave rise to the modern world. One implication of this analysis is that the problems that Black people contend with can tell you a lot about problems that pervade our entire society. 
            Think of a house that is built on top of a sinkhole. The people on the bottom floor of the house are more at risk of falling into the sinkhole. The people on the upper floors of the house may not feel the same sense of urgency to address the problem and may feel comforted by the thought that they are in a somewhat better situation. But they are ignoring the fact that when the foundation finally gives way, everyone’s falling into the hole. 
            This may not be a perfect metaphor, but it captures a dynamic that is very common to the Black experience. Haitians, for example, were the first U.S. refugee population to be subjected to mandatory detention. Thirty years later, mandatory detention is not only standard for most asylum seekers in the US., it has become the norm for how governments around the world manage refugee populations.  The same can be said for the interdiction practices initially rolled out to control Haitian asylum seekers in the 1980s. These were expanded throughout the 1980s and 1990s to all refugees trying to enter the U.S. by water, imitated by European governments in the 2000s that were trying to control flows of African and Asian refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, and were also cited as a precedent by the U.S. government in the 2010s when it rolled out programs to control the growing numbers of asylum seekers (mostly Central American, but also including Haitians and many other nationalities) at the US–Mexico border. These are just some examples from the recent history of U.S. refugee policy.  You can find similar processes at work in the U.S. history of mass incarceration, predatory lending practices in housing markets, unsafe work conditions in low-wage employment sectors, medical neglect in the health care sector, and the list goes on.
            Although Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations is focused on the migrant experience, it engages this experience with an eye to the bigger picture I’ve just described.  Our analysis is premised on the understanding that the Black experience can be used as a starting point for diagnosing problems that affect everyone, and also in a way that elevates the value of Black life. But in order to do this, we have to step outside of the ways of seeing that normalize all of the problems I’ve just described. This sums up  the purpose of the book—to invite the reader to take this step.
 

The issues raised by this blog will be discussed in more depth at a free webinar hosted by the Acacia Center for Justice, to be held on Monday, February 26, 3pm (EST), featuring faculty from Morehouse College, Temple, and Bowdoin Universities and guest speakers from Undocublack, Families for Freedom and the Haitian Bridge Alliance. Click here for more info and to register.  

What Is Solidarity?

This week in North Philly Notes, Alana Lee Glaser, author of Solidarity & Care, writes about how her days as a labor activist informed her new book.

What is solidarity? What do we—as members of a society—owe one another? How might we effectively uphold and institutionalize our mutual obligations? These questions have animated my own activism and scholarship since I was an undergraduate student turned labor activist two decades ago. More recently, these same questions motivated me to write a book for undergraduate students that I hope might inspire them to solidarity action themselves.

During my first year as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I, along with ten or so other students, staged a sit-in in the Chancellor’s historic South Building office on UNC’s central campus to protest the sweatshop labor behind the manufacture of the university’s licensed apparel. Months earlier, on a lark, I had attended a small meeting of anti-sweatshop activists. Over the course of those few months, I had what I now recognize as a full-scale world-view revolution. I entered college with an esteem for volunteerism and letter-writing campaigns (both of which I continue to endorse) and before my first year ended, I was a self-proclaimed labor activist and student radical.  To contextualize, let me add that this all occurred in 1998, before historical hindsight would allow me to place my consciousness within broader anti-neoliberal globalization movements that united “Teamsters and turtles” in Seattle and countless others in global mass demonstrations against the anti-labor, free-trade policies of the World Trade Organization, IMF, and World Bank. Virtually all my subsequent endeavors have built upon the foundational experiences of student-labor solidarity that took place throughout my undergraduate career, leading me to Domestic Workers United, the organization of immigrant women domestic worker activists that is the subject of my book, Solidarity & Care.

Solidarity & Care addresses these questions of solidarity, mutual aide, and activism through an accessible ethnographic description of Domestic Workers United’s decade-long fight to establish workplace protections in New York and the ramifications of this legislation in the ten years since it passed. Historically, U.S. labor laws have excluded care work performed in the home—housekeeping, childcare, and elder care—from labor law protections, leaving the women who work in this highly personalized, low-wage sector vulnerable to wage theft, harassment, abrupt termination, and abuse. In summer 2010, New York State passed the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the nation’s first-ever legislation granting formal protections to in-home workers.

Solidarity & Care chronicles the laboring lives and activist endeavors of immigrant women care workers across New York’s five boroughs, as they manage the implications of the new law in their workplaces, transnational communities, and political organizations. The introduction of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights hasn’t attenuated many of the issues with which childcare providers, housecleaners, and home health aides contend on a regular basis—frequent termination, employer inconsideration, long hours, dismally low pay, mistreatment, and lack of control over their own labor. Solidarity & Care describes how care work positions exemplify increasing worker insecurity across industries—wrought by neoliberal economic policy and employer efforts to reduce wages and eliminate worker benefits through overseas outsourcing where possible and through casualization, deskilling, and fragmentation here in the United States. In this way, the book invites undergraduate students, many already working in low waged labor sectors themselves, to contextualize their own labor and to consider their experiences and interests in common with domestic workers.

By foregrounding the activist successes and setbacks of primarily Caribbean, Latina, and African women care workers, Solidarity & Care showcases how intersectional labor organizing and solidarity can effectively protect workers in this and other industries. It centers the voices and experiences of immigrant women workers through their oral histories, vibrant accounts of their roles in protest actions, and their own analyses of the overlapping oppressions they face as women of color, immigrants, and low-wage workers in New York City. Just as I was drawn to understand the historic and political circumstances during which I protested sweatshops by “sitting-in” as a an undergraduate, my hope is that Solidarity & Care will be an approachable invitation to undergraduates, and even the broader public, to reflect on their own political-economic position and to stand in solidarity with immigrant women workers, like the members of Domestic Workers United, and workers across the U.S. labor movement.

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase titles for Hispanic Heritage Month. View our full list of Latino/a Studies and Latin American/Caribbean Studies titles. (Also of interest Studies in Latin American and Caribbean Music series)

Accessible Citizenships shows how disability provides a new perspective on our understanding of the nation and the citizen.

Afro-Caribbean Religions provides a comprehensive introduction to the Caribbean’s African-based religions.

Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music recounts the life and times of one of Cuba’s most important musicians.

The Brazilian Sound is an encyclopedic survey of Brazilian popular music—now updated and expanded.

Caribbean Currents is the classic introduction to the Caribbean’s popular music brought up to date.

Chilean New Song provides an examination of the Chilean New Song movement as an organic part of the struggles for progressive social change, deeper democracy, and social justice in Chile in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Coolie Speaks offers a remarkable examination of bondage in Cuba that probes questions of slavery, freedom, and race.

Daily Labors examines the vulnerabilities, discrimination, and exploitation—as well as the sense of belonging and community—that day laborers experience on an NYC street corner.

Democratizing Urban Development shows how community organizations fight to prevent displacement and secure affordable housing across cities in the U.S. and Brazil.

Dominican Baseball, from the author of Sugarball, looks at the important and contested relationship between Major League Baseball and Dominican player development.

Fernando Ortiz on Music features selections from the influential Fernando Ortiz’s publications on Afro-diasporic music and dance—now available in English.

From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia is a history of Puerto Rican immigration to Philadelphia.

Globalizing the Caribbean, now in Paperback, illustrates how global capitalism finds new ways to mutate and grow in the Caribbean.

How Did You Get to Be Mexican? is a readable account of a life spent in the borderlands between racial identity.

The International Monetary Fund and Latin America chronicles the sometimes questionable relationship between the International Monetary Fund and Latin America from 1944 to the present.

Latino Mayors is the first book to examine the rise of Latino mayors in the United States.

Latinos and the U.S. Political System is an analysis of American politics from the vantage point of the Latino political condition.

Latinx Environmentalisms puts the environmental humanities into dialogue with Latinx literary and cultural studies.

Liberation Theology asks: How does the church function in Latin America on an everyday, practical, and political level?

Merengue, now available as an ebook, is a fascinating examination of the social history of merengue dance music and its importance as a social and cultural symbol.

Migration and Mortality documents and denounces the violent impacts of restrictive migration policies in the Americas, linking this institutional violence to broader forces of racial capitalism.

Música Norteña is the first history of the music that binds together Mexican immigrant communities.

New Immigrants, Old Unions provides a case study of a successful effort to unionize undocumented immigrant workers.

The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation is a landmark history of the New York Young Lords, and what their activism tells us about contemporary Latino/a politics.

Not from Here, Not from There/No Soy de Aquí ni de Allá is a lively autobiography by Nelson Díaz, a community activist, judge, and public advocate who blazed a trail for Latinos in Philadelphia.

Revolution Around the Corner is the first book-length story of the radical social movement, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party.

Selecting Women, Electing Women offers an analytic framework to show how the process of candidate selection often limits the participation of women in various Latin American countries.

The Sorcery of Color is an examination of how racial and gender hierarchies are intertwined in Brazil.

Sounding Salsa takes readers inside New York City’s vibrant salsa scene.

Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants is a comprehensive analysis of changes in immigration policy, politics, and enforcement since 9/11.

Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil explains what the rise and fall of Brazil’s first and only female president can teach us about women’s empowerment.