Journal of American Folklore

Rhea L. Combs is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University, concentrating on film history and visual culture, African American cultural production, and gender studies. Her current dissertation research explores the work of documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs. She has produced programs and film festivals both nationally and internationally.

Heather A. Diamond is a lecturer in the departments of American Studies and English at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Her book American Aloha: Hawai'i, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and the Negotiation of Tradition is forthcoming from University of Hawai'i Press. Her current research centers on the adaptation of American performance practices, such as Texas line dancing, in East Asia.

Emily Satterwhite is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Virginia Tech, where she teaches Appalachian studies and American studies. Her current book project, Romancing Appalachia: Popular Fictions and Imagined Geographies, examines the reasons for the appeal of particular imaginings of Appalachia among literary audiences from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Jay Straker is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures at the Colorado School of Mines. His primary research focuses on youth, nationalism, ethnicity, and cultural politics in West Africa. Other research and teaching interests include African literature and popular culture, education reform, ideologies of development, and postconflict society and culture.

Krista A. Thompson is Assistant Professor of African Diaspora and African Art at Northwestern University. She is author of An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. She is currently working on a book manuscript and documentary on visual culture and black youth in the Caribbean and Southern United States, reflecting in part on the diasporic impact of hip hop.

Ricardo D. Trimillos is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Chair of Asian Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. His research areas include the Philippines, Hawai'i, and Japan. He publishes on the arts and issues of gender, ethnicity, and cross-cultural presentation. He is an international consultant for public policy and for arts in multicultural education. [End Page 124]