A Union by Law
Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism MICHAEL W. MCCANN with GEORGE I. LOVELL Starting in the 1920s, large numbers of Filipino workers came to the United States, finding work as wage laborers in West Coast agricultural fields and at Alaskan salmon canneries. There, they found themselves segregated in both the jobs they could have and where they could live. In time, Filipino workers formed unions to represent their interests and struggled persistently for class, race, and gender-based social justice. A Union by Law focuses on one of the most infamous civil rights suits filed by Filipino workers, Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio, situating Wards Cove within the broader social and legal history of racialized workers’ struggles for social justice. Organized chronologically, the book spans most of the twentieth cen-
tury, beginning with the US invasion of the Philippines and the extension of colonial rule at the dawn of the twentieth century. It then follows the migration of Filipino workers to the United States, where they struggled within and against the American racial capitalist empire that the Wards Cove majority willfully ignored, significantly increasing the obstacles for workers seeking remedies for institutionalized racism. A reclamation of a long legacy of racial capitalist domination over Filipinos and other low-wage or unpaid migrant workers, A Union by Law also tells a story of the many ways law was mobilized both to enforce and to challenge race, class, and gender hierarchy at work.
Chicago Series in Law and Society MARCH 512 p., 24 halftones 6 x 9 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67987-7 Cloth $105.00x/£84.00 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67990-7 Paper $35.00s/£28.00 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68007-1 LAW POLITICAL SCIENCE
Michael W. McCann is the Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. George I. Lovell is professor and chair in the Department of Political Science and the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies at the University of Washington.
Intimate Disconnections
Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan ALLISON ALEXY In many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two people involved. But anyone who has gone through a divorce knows the additional public dimensions of breaking up, from intense shame and societal criticism, to friends’ and relatives’ unsolicited advice. In Intimate Disconnections, Allison Alexy tells the fascinating story of the changing customs surrounding divorce in Japan in the early 2000s, when sudden demographic and social changes made it a newly visible and viable option. Not only will one of three Japanese marriages end in divorce, but divorces are suddenly much more likely to be initiated by women who cite new
standards for intimacy as their motivation. As people across Japan now consider divorcing their spouses, or work to avoid it, they face complicated questions about the risks and possibilities marriage brings: How can couples be intimate without becoming suffocatingly close? How should they build loving relationships when older models are no longer feasible? What do you do, both legally and socially, when you just can’t take it anymore? Relating the intensely personal stories from people experiencing different stages of divorce, Alexy provides a rich ethnography of Japan while also speaking more broadly to contemporary visions of love and marriage across the globe.
Allison Alexy is assistant professor in the Asian Languages and Cultures and Women’s Studies departments at the University of Michigan. She is coeditor of Home and Family in Japan and Intimate Japan.
JUNE 248 p., 6 halftones, 2 tables 6 x 9 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69965-3 Cloth $82.50x/£66.00 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70095-3 Paper $27.50s/£22.00 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70100-4 ANTHROPOLOGY ASIAN STUDIES
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