Identity Politics

Novelist Porochista Khakpour's family moved to Los Angeles after fleeing the Iranian Revolution, giving up their successes only to be greeted by an alienating culture. Growing up as an immigrant in America means that one has to make one's way through a confusing tangle of conflicting cultures and expectations. And Porochista is pulled between the glitzy culture of Tehrangeles, an enclave of wealthy Iranians and Persians in LA, her own family's modest life and culture, and becoming an assimilated American.

Dana Laine ha ingresado en el Centro Nacional de Inteligencia español. Su primera misión será localizar a Aleksandr Potosky, un peligroso criminal que ha aterrizado en Madrid. Todo parece sencillo de ejecutar, hasta que alguien pondrá en peligro su existencia y la confianza de los servicios españoles. En un mundo de hombres, su reputación ahora pende de un hilo. En una ciudad donde nadie aparenta ser quien es, Dana no tendrá más opción que atrapar al terrorista y salvar la vida de cientos de personas.

A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew. Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island.

If anyone knows what it takes to marshal the power needed to become a champion, Bruce Jenner does. His dramatic decathlon victory earned him a gold medal, a new world record, and America's heart. In Finding The Champion Within, Jenner offers the formula that he developed and lived by to anyone who seeks to harness their maximum potential and to become a champion themselves.

The book reveals the universal and cosmic love of the Red Road. The Red Road is the philosophy/worldview/religion of the native Indian tribes/pueblos of North and South America. This worldview promotes integration with Mother Earth and the cosmos to achieve harmony within eternally evolving existence. Using the Chicano as an example, the book explores the human lifetime as a cosmic being with eternal cycles of reincarnation and integration. This cosmic journey is examined from the perspective of the Red Road.

Scott Cruz is one of the CIA’s most valuable assets. Cruz is equal parts womanizer and lethal weapon. He is charismatic, clever and can outsmart the deadliest of enemies. Scott Cruz does not exist. He is merely a popular character in a series of blockbuster films played by Kyler Scott. What the millions of fans that flood to the theater to see Cruz’s latest adventure will never know is that its star is a real-life covert agent for the CIA.

In 2015, millennial author and cultural anthropologist Veronica Kirin drove 11,000 miles across more than 40 states to interview the last living members of the Greatest Generation. Stories of Elders is the result of her years of work to capture and share their perspective for generations to come. Stories of Elders preserves the wisdom, thoughts, knowledge, and advice of the people who make up one of America’s finest generations, including the Silent Generation. Their stories include the devastation that came from major events in US history like World War I and more.

Being transgender is a reality that is slowly, but surely, being understood. Out of the many biological and psychological theories that attempts to explain it, the mirror effect provides some of the best clues. Through this effect and the other available theories, misconceptions can be debunked, errors can be corrected, and most importantly, true understanding can be achieved.

1963, North London. Nan fosters one-year-old Florence Olajide and calls her "Ann". Florence adores her foster mother more than anything but Nan, and the children around her, all have white skin, and she can’t help but feel different. Then, four years later, after a weekend visit to her birth parents, Florence never returns to Nan. Two months after, sandwiched between her mother and father plus her three siblings, six-year-old Florence steps off a ship in Lagos to the fierce heat of the African sun.

While people used to conceal the fact that they were gay or lesbian to protect themselves from stigma and discrimination, it is now commonplace for people to "come out" and encourage others to do so as well. Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are systematically examines how coming out has moved beyond gay and lesbian rights groups and how different groups wrestle with the politics of coming out in their efforts to resist stigma and enact social change. It shows how different experiences and disparate risks of disclosure shape these groups' collective strategies.

X is an identity thief extraordinaire who steals the identity of the worst possible person! He soon becomes a fugitive, hunted by every intelligence agency in the world. The international adventures of this sardonic and amoral anti-hero combine the irony of The Third Man with the fast-paced thrills of The Bourne Identity. To survive, X must use his talent for deceit and his chameleon-like ability to adopt one persona after another, as his predicament becomes steadily more harrowing and the stakes mount.

Settler capitalism has been so effective that the very identities of Indigenous people have been usurped, misconstrued, and weaponized. In Who Gets to Be Indian?, scholar and writer Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) explores how ethnic fraud and the commodification of Indianness has resulted in mass confusion about what it means to be Indigenous in the United States.

Vivek Shraya knows this to be true: people change. We change our haircuts and our outfits and our minds. We change names, titles, labels. We attempt to blend in or to stand out. We outgrow relationships, we abandon dreams for new ones, we start fresh. We seize control of our stories. We make resolutions. In fact, nobody knows this better than Vivek, who’s made a career of embracing many roles: artist, performer, musician, writer, model, teacher. In People Change, she reflects on the origins of this impulse, tracing it to childhood influences from Hinduism to Madonna.

Sir Stafford Nye's journey home from Malaysia to London takes an unexpected twist in the passenger lounge at Frankfurt: a young woman confides in him that someone is trying to kill her.

Flight, Flight, Mimic is the first systematic study of deceptive mimicry in the context of wars. Deceptive mimicry—the manipulation of individual or group identity—includes passing off as a different individual, as a member of a group to which one does not belong, or, for a group, to "sign" its action as another group.

At the age of ten, Aaron's childhood within a diverse community shifted abruptly when his family moved to small-town Indiana. There, racist mentalities stereotyped him for his Mixed features and heritage. Marginalized as a Black person within his new, overwhelmingly European-American community, he learned to hide parts of himself that were rejected, hoping to escape harsh racial prejudices.

Sigmund Freud once said: ‘The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”' Through the relatable and moving stories of seven very different women, Maxine Mei-Fung Chung refutes this inscrutability and sheds light on our most fundamental needs and desires. What Women Want presents a fearless look into the depths of who we are so that we can better understand each other and ourselves.

"What constructs in your life must you unlearn to support inclusivity and respect for all?" This is a question that artist, actor, and activist Chella Man wrestles with in this powerful and honest essay. A story of coping and resilience, Chella journeys through his experiences as a deaf, transgender, genderqueer, Jewish person of color, and shows us that identity lies on a continuum - a beautiful, messy, and ever-evolving road of exploration.

As we approach 2050, it is projected that human consciousness will encounter a superior intelligence for the very first time: artificial machine intelligence. It is important for us to understand the evolutionary impact of this event, but also that we are being altered from the inside out for the singularity to arise.

My Korean Identity and Quest for Understanding, edited by Sora Yang of Sydney, Australia, is a very important book in the area of Korean studies. This ground-breaking book contains 13 articles by Korean youth from around the world, in India, Africa, Australia, and the USA.