The occurrence in some criminal cases of "cultural defenses" on behalf of "minority" defendants has stirred much debate. This book is the first to illuminate how "cultural evidence" — i.e., "evidence" regarding ethnicity — is actually negotiated by attorneys, expert/lay witnesses, and defendants in criminal trials. Caroline Braunmühl demonstrates that this has occurred, overwhelmingly, in ways shaped by colonialist and patriarchal discourses common in the Western world. She argues that the controversy regarding the legitimacy of a "cultural defense" has tended to obscure this fact, and has been biased against minorities as well as all women from its inception, in the very terms in which the question for debate has been framed. This study also breaks new ground by analyzing the strategies, and the failures, in which colonialist and patriarchal constructions of cultural evidence are resisted or — more commonly — colluded in by opposing attorneys, witnesses, and defendants themselves. The constructions at hand emerge as contradictory and unstable, belying the notion that cultural evidence is a matter of objective "information" about another culture, rather than — as Braunmühl argues — of discourses that are inevitably normatively charged. Colonial Discourse and Gender in US Criminal Courts moves the debate about cultural defenses onto an entirely new plane, one based upon the understanding that only in-depth empirical analyses informed by critical, rigorous theoretical reflection can do justice to the irreducibly political character of any discussion of "cultural evidence," and of its presentation in court.

Brydon, Forsgren, and Fur’s Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds demonstrates the value of reading for concurrences in situating discussions of archives, voices, and history in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Starting with the premise that our pluriversal world is constructed from concurrent imaginaries yet the role of concurrences has seldom been examined, the collection brings together case studies that confirm the productivity of reading, looking, and listening for concurrences across established boundaries of disciplinary or geopolitical engagement. Contributors working in art history, sociology, literary, and historical studies bring examples of Nordic colonialism together with analyses of colonial practices worldwide. The collection invites uptake of the study of concurrences within the humanities and in interdisciplinary fields such as postcolonial, cultural, and globalization studies.

CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.

Focuses on women and the civilizations and societies in which Islam has played a historic role. Surveys all facets of life (society, economy, politics, religion, the arts, popular culture, sports, health, science, medicine, environment, and so forth) of women in these societies.