Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.
Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.
Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.
Whiteness revealed: an analysis of the destructive complacency of white self-consciousness
White Americans are confronting their whiteness more than ever before, with political and social shifts ushering in a newfound racial awareness. And with white people increasingly seeing themselves as distinctly racialized (not simply as American or human), white writers are exposing a self-awareness of white racialized behavior—from staunch antiracism to virulent forms of xenophobic nationalism. Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors, revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take.
Stephanie Li argues that much of the twenty-first century has been defined by this rising consciousness of whiteness because of the imminent shift to a “majority minority” population and the growing diversification of America’s political, social, and cultural institutions. The result is literature that more directly grapples with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Li contextualizes a series of literary novels as collectively influenced by changes in racial and political attitudes. Turning to works by Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others, she traces the responses to white consciousness that breed shared manifestations of ugliness. The tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice is often the source of the ugly whiteness portrayed through these narratives.
The questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.
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In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity. Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca.
Ulysses in Black closely analyzes classical themes (the nature of love and its relationship to the social, Dionysus in myth as a parallel to the black protagonist in the American scene, misplaced Ulyssean manhood) as seen in the works of such African American writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen. Rankine finds that the merging of a black esthetic with the classics—contrary to expectations throughout American culture—has often been a radical addressing of concerns including violence against blacks, racism, and oppression. Ultimately, this unique study of black classicism becomes an exploration of America’s broader cultural integrity, one that is inclusive and historic.
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
Un-American is Bill Mullen’s revisionist account of renowned author and activist W.E.B. Du Bois’s political thought toward the end of his life, a period largely dismissed and neglected by scholars. He describes Du Bois’s support for what the Communist International called “world revolution” as the primary objective of this aged radical’s activism. Du Bois was a champion of the world’s laboring millions and critic of the Cold War, a man dedicated to animating global political revolution.
Mullen argues that Du Bois believed that the Cold War stalemate could create the conditions in which the world powers could achieve not only peace but workers’ democracy. Un-American shows Du Bois to be deeply engaged in international networks and personal relationships with revolutionaries in India, China, and Africa. Mullen explores how thinkers like Karl Marx, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, and C.L.R. James helped him develop a theory of world revolution at a stage in his life when most commentators regard him as marginalized. This original political biography also challenges assessments of Du Bois as an American “race man.”
During the Cold War, Ellis Island no longer served as the largest port of entry for immigrants, but as a prison for holding aliens the state wished to deport. The government criminalized those it considered un-assimilable (from left-wing intellectuals and black radicals to racialized migrant laborers) through the denial, annulment, and curtailment of citizenship and its rights. The island, ceasing to represent the iconic ideal of immigrant America, came to symbolize its very limits.
Unbecoming Americans sets out to recover the shadow narratives of un-American writers forged out of the racial and political limits of citizenship. In this collection of Afro-Caribbean, Filipino, and African American writers—C.L.R. James, Carlos Bulosan, Claudia Jones, and Richard Wright—Joseph Keith examines how they used their exclusion from the nation, a condition he terms “alienage,” as a standpoint from which to imagine alternative global solidarities and to interrogate the contradictions of the United States as a country, a republic, and an empire at the dawn of the "American Century.”
Building on scholarship linking the forms of the novel to those of the nation, the book explores how these writers employed alternative aesthetic forms, including memoir, cultural criticism, and travel narrative, to contest prevailing notions of race, nation, and citizenship. Ultimately they produced a vital counter-discourse of freedom in opposition to the new formations of empire emerging in the years after World War II, forms that continue to shape our world today.
Julie Hanson’s award-winning collection, Unbeknownst, gives us plainspoken poems of unstoppable candor. They are astonished and sobered by the incoming data; they are funny; they are psychologically accurate and beautifully made. Hanson’s is a mind interested in human responsibility—to ourselves and to each other—and unhappy about the disappointments that are bound to transpire (“We’ve been like gods, our powers wasted”). These poems are lonely with spiritual longing and wise with remorse for all that cannot last.
“The Kindergartners” begins, “All their lives they’ve waited for / the yellow bus to come for them,” then moves directly to the present reality: “Now it’s February and the mat / is wet.” Settings and events are local and familiar, never more exotic than a yoga session at the Y, one of several instances where the body is central to the report and to the net result (“I slip in and fold / behind the wheel into the driver’s seat like a thin young thing: / My organs are surely glistening. This car was made for me.“). These poems are intimate revelations, thinking as they go, including the reader in the progress of their thoughts.
In An Uncertain Cure, Cassandra White goes deep into the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro to give a riveting account of the contemporary leprosy experience among poor and working class Brazilians. In this ethnographic treatment of leprosy sufferers, White exposes the web of historical, socioeconomic, religious, and political forces that complicate the path to wellness and perpetuate high rates of infection. Drawing on nearly ten years of research, White shows how anthropological research can contribute to more effective treatment of chronic infectious diseases around the world.
In the postwar era, American urban fiction is dominated by the imagery of containment. Across the fictional landscape, the city is divided into segregated zones, marked by the threat of inevitable violence, and set off from the safety of equally contained suburbs. Mean and dangerous, the city can only be navigated by a solitary expert, alienated and male. In Uncontained, Elizabeth A. Wheeler offers a critique of this familiar story-evident in the noir. narratives of James M. Cain and in work by Ellison, Roth, Salinger, Percy, Capote, and others —and challenges its link to the postwar city.
Discussing film, short stories, and novels from a cross-section of American cities, Wheeler integrates these stories of containment into a shared pattern and reads them across a broad spectrum of famous and forgotten works by men and women of various ethnic and literary traditions to reveal a larger vision of postwar America. Knowing that containment is never the entire story, that diversity or trauma always shows itself, she shows how the uncontained has shaped the historical moment. Aware that liberating counterstories do get told, she places them in dialogue with those of the alienated man, the war veteran, Beat hipster, noir detective, and ironic suburbanite — in historical context — and revives the idea of urban space as a place of openness, thereby challenging a literary containment of racial difference, gender, and sexuality. By reading Paule Marshall in tandem with Philip Roth, Wheeler explores the relationships between adjacent neighborhoods and reconnects separate literary and geographic areas. By bringing Ann Bannon's lesbian pulp fiction, Hubert Selby's cult novels, or the work of John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto, Chester Himes, Gwendolyn Brooks's, Jo Sinclair, and many others to bear on more canonical texts, she offers a more complete understanding of this period of American fiction — one that points toward a city that is open and inclusive.
Uncontained suggests that while decline, division, and decay form a major part of the story of mid-century urban America, the postwar city also represents much of what is best about American life. Rather than reproducing the containment of culture, Wheeler places together the wildly disparate to show how we move beyond containment.
In the postwar era, American urban fiction is dominated by the imagery of containment. Across the fictional landscape, the city is divided into segregated zones, marked by the threat of inevitable violence, and set off from the safety of equally contained suburbs. Mean and dangerous, the city can only be navigated by a solitary expert, alienated and male. In Uncontained, Elizabeth A. Wheeler offers a critique of this familiar story-evident in the noir. narratives of James M. Cain and in work by Ellison, Roth, Salinger, Percy, Capote, and others —and challenges its link to the postwar city.
Discussing film, short stories, and novels from a cross-section of American cities, Wheeler integrates these stories of containment into a shared pattern and reads them across a broad spectrum of famous and forgotten works by men and women of various ethnic and literary traditions to reveal a larger vision of postwar America. Knowing that containment is never the entire story, that diversity or trauma always shows itself, she shows how the uncontained has shaped the historical moment. Aware that liberating counterstories do get told, she places them in dialogue with those of the alienated man, the war veteran, Beat hipster, noir detective, and ironic suburbanite — in historical context — and revives the idea of urban space as a place of openness, thereby challenging a literary containment of racial difference, gender, and sexuality. By reading Paule Marshall in tandem with Philip Roth, Wheeler explores the relationships between adjacent neighborhoods and reconnects separate literary and geographic areas. By bringing Ann Bannon's lesbian pulp fiction, Hubert Selby's cult novels, or the work of John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto, Chester Himes, Gwendolyn Brooks's, Jo Sinclair, and many others to bear on more canonical texts, she offers a more complete understanding of this period of American fiction — one that points toward a city that is open and inclusive.
Uncontained suggests that while decline, division, and decay form a major part of the story of mid-century urban America, the postwar city also represents much of what is best about American life. Rather than reproducing the containment of culture, Wheeler places together the wildly disparate to show how we move beyond containment.
What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the overlooked history of art that has often seemed at odds with the politics of civil rights and racial advancement, Under a Bad Sign explores the rationale behind this tradition of criminal self-representation from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary gangsta culture.
In this lively exploration, Jonathan Munby takes a uniquely broad view, laying bare the way the criminal appears within and moves among literary, musical, and visual arts. Munby traces the legacy of badness in Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes’s detective fiction and in Claude McKay, Julian Mayfield, and Donald Goines’s urban experience writing. Ranging from Peetie Wheatstraw’s gangster blues to gangsta rap, he also examines criminals in popular songs. Turning to the screen, the underworld films of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper, the 1970s blaxploitation cycle, and the 1990s hood movie come under his microscope as well. Ultimately, Munby concludes that this tradition has been a misunderstood aspect of African American civic life and that, rather than undermining black culture, it forms a rich and enduring response to being outcast in America.
Then
You looked up vaguely
or you didn’t—even the memory
is dying. Then you whole body
breathed out, and the argument ended.
Heaven surfaced about you
like a glass tabletop, hard
and cold. Whatever you do
don’t turn me into poetry. Sorry:
I am done crying about it
but I am not done crying.
An extended meditation on how death affects those left behind, Under Sleep is a skillfully understated, beautifully rendered elegy for the poet’s partner. Formally inventive and technically sophisticated, Daniel Hall attends to the power of death to haunt every perception. The poet’s voice registers as though he were walking on the bottom of the ocean, in a state of mind somewhere “under sleep,” in a kind of waking dream. In Hall’s hands, isolated moments of perception bloom into truly touching love elegies.
The poems in Under Sleep were written over a period of ten years and, as a result, are densely interconnected, with lines and entire stanzas transplanted between different poems. Using styles ranging from free verse to sonnets, Sapphics, and rhymed haikus, Hall populates the book with literary and historical figures—Baudelaire, Pound, and Casanova—in poems set in China, the Middle East, Death Valley, and Italy. Throughout, the poetry is propelled by tension as the speaker struggles with his own better judgment—and against his lover’s wishes—to turn the loss of the beloved into art.
Praise for Daniel Hall
“Daniel Hall’s work reminds us that a poet’s sharp-sightedness, the whole business of ‘getting things right,’ is a matter of far more than accuracy. It’s a matter of—inescapably—thanksgiving.”—Brad Leithauser, New York Review of Books
“Poems that stick with you like a song that won’t stop repeating itself in your brain, poems whose cadences burrow into your bloodstream, orchestrating your breathing long before their sense attaches its hooks to your heart.”
—Washington Post on Captivity
Examining how undocumented migrants are using film, video, and other documentary media to challenge surveillance, detention, and deportation
As debates over immigration increasingly become flashpoints of political contention in the United States, a variety of advocacy groups, social service organizations, filmmakers, and artists have provided undocumented migrants with the tools and training to document their experiences.
In The Undocumented Everyday, Rebecca M. Schreiber examines the significance of self-representation by undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants, arguing that by centering their own subjectivity and presence through their use of documentary media, these migrants are effectively challenging intensified regimes of state surveillance and liberal strategies that emphasize visibility as a form of empowerment and inclusion. Schreiber explores documentation as both an aesthetic practice based on the visual conventions of social realism and a state-administered means of identification and control.
As Schreiber shows, by visualizing new ways of belonging not necessarily defined by citizenship, these migrants are remaking documentary media, combining formal visual strategies with those of amateur photography and performative elements to create a mixed-genre aesthetic. In doing so, they make political claims and create new forms of protection for migrant communities experiencing increased surveillance, detention, and deportation.
The Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA), passed in the small Rustbelt city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 2006, was a local ordinance that laid out penalties for renting to or hiring undocumented immigrants and declared English the city’s official language. The notorious IIRA gained national prominence and kicked off a parade of local and state-level legislative initiatives designed to crack down on undocumented immigrants.
In his cogent and timely book, UndocumentedFears, Jamie Longazel uses the debate around Hazleton’s controversial ordinance as a case study that reveals the mechanics of contemporary divide and conquer politics. He shows how neoliberal ideology, misconceptions about Latina/o immigrants, and nostalgic imagery of “Small Town, America” led to a racialized account of an undocumented immigrant “invasion,” masking the real story of a city beset by large-scale loss of manufacturing jobs.
Offering an up-close look at how the local debate unfolded in the city that set off this broader trend, Undocumented Fears makes an important connection between immigration politics and the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality.
Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist
Winner of the David Montgomery Award
Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Book Award
Winner of the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award
Winner of the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize
Winner of the Américo Paredes Book Award
“A deeply humane book.”
—Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects
“Necessary and timely…A valuable text to consider alongside the current fight for DACA, the border concentration camps, and the unending rhetoric dehumanizing Mexican migrants.”
—PopMatters
“A deep dive into the history of Mexican migration to and from the United States.”
—PRI’s The World
In the 1970s, the Mexican government decided to tackle rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions of Mexican men crossed into the United States to find work. They took low-level positions that few Americans wanted and sent money back to communities that depended on their support. They periodically returned to Mexico, living their lives in both countries. After 1986, however, US authorities disrupted this back-and-forth movement by strengthening border controls. Many Mexican men chose to remain in the United States permanently for fear of not being able to come back north if they returned to Mexico. For them, the United States became a jaula de oro—a cage of gold. Undocumented Lives tells the story of Mexican migrants who were compelled to bring their families across the border and raise a generation of undocumented children.
2023 SANA Book Award, Society for the Anthropology of North America
2023 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book Award NACCS Tejas Foco Award for Non-Fiction, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
2022 Nonfiction Discovery Prize, Writers' League of Texas
An intimate portrayal of the hardships faced by an undocumented family navigating the medical and educational systems in the United States.
Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter’s health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to care.
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos spent five years with Claudia. As she listened to Claudia’s experiences, she recalled her own mother’s story, another life molded by migration, the US-Mexico border, and the quest for a healthy future on either side. Witnessing Claudia’s struggles with doctors and teachers, we see how the education and medical systems enforce undocumented status and perpetuate disability. At one point, in the midst of advocating for her daughter, Claudia suddenly finds herself struck by debilitating pain. Claudia is lifted up by her comadres, sent to the doctor, and reminded why she must care for herself.
A braided narrative that speaks to the power of stories for creating connection, this book reveals what remains undocumented in the motherhood of Mexican women who find themselves making impossible decisions and multiple sacrifices as they build a future for their families.
How do you document the undocumented? UNDOCUMENTS both poses and attempts to answer this complex question by remixing the forms and styles of the first encyclopedia of the New World, the Florentine Codex, in order to tell a modern story of Greater Mexico. Employing a broad range of writing genres and scholarly approaches, UNDOCUMENTS catalogs, recovers, and erases documents and images by and about peoples of Greater Mexico from roughly the first colonial moment. This brave and bracing volume organizes and documents ancient New World Mexican peoples from the Florentine Codex (1592) to our current technology-heavy age, wherein modern lawmakers and powerful global figures desire to classify, deport, and erase immigrants and their experiences.
While grappling with anxiety and the physical and mental health consequences of the way the United States treats immigrant bodies, John-Michael Rivera documents and scrutinizes what it means to seek opportunities in America. With a focus on the poetics of Latinx documentality itself, this book is concerned with the complicated and at times contradictory ways peoples of Greater Mexico have been documented and undocumented within systems of colonial knowledges, and how these peoples have been rendered as specters of the bureaucratic state. Rivera takes us through the painful, anxiety-ridden, and complex nature of what it means to be documented or undocumented, and the cruelty married to each of these states of being.Carolina Maria de Jesus' book, Quarto de Despejo (The Trash Room), depicted the harsh life of the slums, but it also spoke of the author's pride in her blackness, her high moral standards, and her patriotism. More than a million copies of her diary are believed to have been sold worldwide. Yet many Brazilians refused to believe that someone like de Jesus could have written such a diary, with its complicated words (some of them misused) and often lyrical phrasing as she discussed world events. Doubters prefer to believe the book was either written by Audáulio Dantas, the enterprising newspaper reporter who discovered her, or that Dantas rewrote it so substantially that her book is a fraud. With the cooperation of de Jesus' daughter, recent research shows that although Dantas deleted considerable portions of the diary (as well as a second one), every word was de Jesus'.
But Dantas did "create" a different Carolina from the woman who coped with her harsh life by putting things down on paper. This book sets the record straight by providing detailed translations of de Jesus' unedited diaries and explains why Brazilian elites were motivated to obscure her true personality and present her as something she was not. It is not only about the writer but about Brazil as recorded by her sarcastic pen. The diary entries in this book span from 1958 to 1966, five years beyond text previously known to exist. They show de Jesus as she was, preserving her Joycean stream-of-consciousness language and her pithy characterizations.
Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of themselves as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far from home but who nonetheless absorbed ideas from abroad. She suggests that studies comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formation transcends national borders; attempts to understand it must do the same.
Winner of the 2023 National Indie Excellence Award in Multicultural Fiction
Winner of the 2022 Forward INDIES Silver Award for Literary Fiction
Finalist of the 2023 National Indie Excellence Award in New Fiction
Finalist of the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award
Barb Matheson doesn’t fit in: not on the Standing Rock Reservation where her mother was born; not at the mission in rural Ethiopia where she grew up; and certainly not at the Pennsylvania church where her husband preaches. Expansive and lyrical, Unfollowers is a tale of religious angst, unrequited love, and the upheaval of racial and economic privilege. Equally adrift on both sides of the Atlantic, Barb must negotiate the distance between white America and Africa, between the spirituality of her ancestors and the straight tones of evangelicalism, and between rules and grace. When a former lover crashes her daughter’s third birthday party, she’s offered the chance to find her way home to Ethiopia, leaving her to choose between a rote life in America and an improvised life abroad.
“What the women I write about have in common is that they are all rebels with a cause, and I see myself represented in their mirror,” asserts Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Looking back across a career in which she has written novels, poems, and scholarly works about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, la Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, the murdered women of Juárez, the Salem witches, and Chicana lesbian feminists, Gaspar de Alba realized that what links these historically and socially diverse figures is that they all fall into the category of “bad women,” as defined by their place, culture, and time, and all have been punished as well as remembered for rebelling against the “frames” imposed on them by capitalist patriarchal discourses.
In [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman,” Gaspar de Alba revisits and expands several of her published articles and presents three new essays to analyze how specific brown/female bodies have been framed by racial, social, cultural, sexual, national/regional, historical, and religious discourses of identity—as well as how Chicanas can be liberated from these frames. Employing interdisciplinary methodologies of activist scholarship that draw from art, literature, history, politics, popular culture, and feminist theory, she shows how the “bad women” who interest her are transgressive bodies that refuse to cooperate with patriarchal dictates about what constitutes a “good woman” and that queer/alter the male-centric and heteronormative history, politics, and consciousness of Chicano/Mexicano culture. By “unframing” these bad women and rewriting their stories within a revolutionary frame, Gaspar de Alba offers her compañeras and fellow luchadoras empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.
Literary naturalism at play in one of America’s most visionary novelists: Cormac McCarthy
It took six novels and nearly thirty years for Cormac McCarthy to find commercial success with the National Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses, followed by major prizes, more best sellers, and Hollywood adaptations of his work. Those successes, though, have obscured McCarthy’s commitment to an older form of literary expression: naturalism.
It is hardly a secret that McCarthy’s work tends to darker themes: violence, brutality, the cruel indifference of nature, themes which would not be out of place in the writing of Jack London or Stephen Crane. But literary naturalism is more than the oversimplified Darwinism that many think of. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, and humans are part of nature, but the humanity depicted in naturalist literature is capable of love, selflessness, and spirituality, as well.
In Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye illuminates all these dimensions of McCarthy’s work. In his novels and plays, McCarthy engages both explicitly and obliquely with the project of manifest destiny, in the western drama Blood Meridian, the Tennessee Valley Authority-era Tennessee novels, and the atomic frontier of Alamogordo in Cities of the Plain. McCarthy’s concerns are deeply religious and philosophical, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, and Nietzsche, among other sources. Frye argues for McCarthy not merely as a naturalist writer but as a naturalist in the most expansive sense. Unguessed Kinships includes biographical and historical context in each chapter, widening the appeal of the text to not just naturalists or McCarthy scholars but anyone studying the literature of the South or the West.
The United States of India shows how Indian and American writers in the United States played a key role in the development of anticolonial thought in the years during and immediately following the First World War. For Indians Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Americans Agnes Smedley, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Katherine Mayo, the social and historical landscape of America and India acted as a reflective surface. Manan Desai considers how their interactions provided a “transnational refraction”—a political optic and discursive strategy that offered ways to imagine how American history could shed light on an anticolonial Indian future.
Desai traces how various expatriate and immigrant Indians formed political movements that rallied for American support for the cause of Indian independence. These intellectuals also developed new forms of writing about subjugation in the U.S. and India. Providing an examination of race, caste, nationhood, and empire, Desai astutely examines this network of Indian and American writers and the genres and social questions that fomented solidarity across borders.
Finalist, 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
“Poems that lead us to striking insights and strange destinations.”
—Billy Collins
The men who recur as characters throughout Jess Williard’s Unmanly Grief perform their masculinity in a variety of ways: boxing, theater, brotherhood, labor, and familial and romantic love. Marked by a sharp nostalgia, Williard’s poems move from Wisconsin to New York City and back, tracing the geographic movement of the speaker and his family: a teenage sister who disappears and returns, changed irrevocably; an older brother dismantled in adulthood; an ever-sacrificing father. Woven through the musculature of this varied and exciting collection, music appears as readily in dexterous formal verse as in lean, scrappy storytelling. What results is a crooning celebration of struggle and tenderness in this world, “where to be small and furious is enough.”
Finalist, 2020 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award from the Binghamton Center for Writers
In literary and cinematic fictions, the fantastic blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. Lacking a consensus on definition, critics often describe the fantastic as supernatural, or similar to, but quite different from fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism.
In Unraveling the Real Cynthia Duncan provides a new theoretical framework for discussing how the fantastic explores both metaphysical and socially relevant themes in Spanish American fictions. Duncan deftly shows how authors and artists have used this literary genre to convey marginalized voices as well as critique colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism. Selecting examples from the works of such noted writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes, among others, she shows how capacious the concept is, and why it eludes standard definition.
Challenging the notion that the fantastic is escapist in nature, Unraveling the Real shows how the fantastic has been politically engaged throughout the twentieth century, often questioning what is real or unreal. Presenting a mirror image of reality, the fantastic does not promoting a utopian parallel universe but rather challenges the way we think about the world around us and the cultural legacy of colonialism.
The work and times of the Black writer, editor, and intellectual
John Cullen Gruesser edits essays that explore the literary and journalistic career of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. A Black woman writer at the turn of the twentieth century, Hopkins worked as the unacknowledged editor-in-chief of the Colored American Magazine but also wrote short fiction, novels, nonfiction articles, and a play believed to be the first by a Black woman. Versatile and politically committed, she was fired when her strong editorial stands and non-conciliatory politics offended the new owner of Colored American Magazine.
A rare examination of an overlooked figure in Black letters, The Unruly Voice explores Hopkins’s writing and her significance for contemporary readers.
Contributors: Elizabeth Ammons; Kristina Brooks; Lois Lamphere Brown; C. K. Doreski; John Cullen Gruesser; Jennie A. Kassanoff; Kate McCullough; Nelly Y. McKay; and Cynthia D. Schrager
The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime.
In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now.
The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War—revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.
To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.
To take the mess of life and make meaning from it is what all poets seek to do. For Will Wells, recipient of the thirteenth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, this includes reaching across centuries and continents, into the minds and hearts of disparate individuals—Albert Einstein, Andrea Yates, the traveler from Porlock, Dante, or Holocaust survivors, including his own grandmother—to extract the personal value embedded there for him.
By turns funny, shocking, gentle, and musing, the poems of Unsettled Accounts reflect Will Wells’s constant attention to his environment and to his past—and to our environment and our past—and his persistent effort to keep them real and whole by turning them into art.
Ping-Pong with the Nazis
Bored couriers have kicked off boots and set
their pipes aside, a Dutch interior.
The slapped ball clacks over the table
like a telegraphic code, then trickles
like faint hope across the marble floor.
How quickly he bends to retrieve it
and puts it back in play, the Jewish boy
living with false papers in a villa
owned by his mother’s Gentile friends, and now
commandeered by retreating Germans
as divisional headquarters. The young
blond soldiers, deferential to a social
better, muss his blond locks like the kid
brothers back in the fatherland, like big
brothers steeped in genial menace.
He begs another game, so they relent.
As the ball resumes its chatter across
the no-man’s-land strung with a net,
he calculates the risk that each shot brings.
And so do they. He holds his pee and serves.
After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and ‘90s. Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty.
Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the “hyperghetto.” He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life.
Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery’s afterlife?
Unsettled Solidarities examines contemporary Asian and Indigenous cross-representations within different settler states in the Américas. Quynh Nhu Le looks at literary works by both groups alongside public apologies, interviews, and hemispheric race theories to trace cross-community tensions and possibilities for solidarities amidst the uneven imposition of racialization and settler colonization.
Contrasting texts such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men with Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, among others, Le reveals how settler colonialism persists through the liberal ideological structuring or incorporation of critical and political resistance. She illuminates the tense collisions of Asian and Indigenous movements from the heroic/warrior traditions, reparations and redress, and transnational/cross-racial mobilization against global capital to mixed-race narratives.
Reading these tensions as formed through the unstable grammatical and emotional economies of liberalism, Le frames settler colonialism as a process that is invoked and yet ruptured by Asian and Indigenous peoples. In analyzing Asian/Indigenous crossings in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, Unsettled Solidarities conveys the logics and instabilities that connect these settler empires.
Analyses of the work of individual artists are grouped around three major themes that Asian American artists engaged with during the 1990s: representations of the Other; social memory and trauma; and migration, diaspora, and sense of place. Machida considers the work of the photographers Pipo Nguyen-duy and Hanh Thi Pham, the printmaker and sculptor Zarina Hashmi, and installations by the artists Tomie Arai, Ming Fay, and Yong Soon Min. She examines the work of Marlon Fuentes, whose films and photographs play with the stereotyping conventions of visual anthropology, and prints in which Allan deSouza addresses the persistence of Orientalism in American popular culture. Machida reflects on Kristine Aono’s museum installations embodying the multigenerational effects of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and on Y. David Chung’s representations of urban spaces transformed by migration in works ranging from large-scale charcoal drawings to multimedia installations and an “electronic rap opera.”
Henry David Thoreau’s interest in Native Americans is widely known and a recurring topic of scholarly attention, yet it is also a source of debate. This is a figure who both had a deep interest in Native American history and culture and was seen by many of his contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as “more like an Indian” than his white neighbors. At the same time, Thoreau did little to protest the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people across the country in his lifetime. John J. Kucich charges into this contradiction, considering how Thoreau could demonstrate respect for Native American beliefs on one hand and ignore the genocide of this group, actively happening throughout his life, on the other. Thoreau’s long study of Native peoples, as reflected in so much of his writing, allowed him to glimpse an Indigenous worldview, but it never fully freed him from the blind spots of settler colonialism.
Drawing on Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonialism, as well as new materialist approaches that illustrate Thoreau’s radical reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world, Unsettling Thoreau explores the stakes of Thoreau’s effort to live mindfully and ethically in place when living alongside, or replacing marginalized peoples. By examining the vast sweep of his writings, including the unpublished Indian Notebooks, and placing them alongside Native writers and communities in and beyond New England, this book gauges Thoreau’s effort to use Indigenous knowledge to reimagine a settler colonial world, without removing him from its trappings.
An award-winning author presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century
Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time.
Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith’s searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives:
We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’
hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us.
The poet’s unrivaled dexterity with dramatic monologue and poetic form reanimates these countenances, staring back from such yesterdays, and the stories they may have told. This is one of American literature’s finest wordsmiths doing what she does best—unreeling history to find its fierce and formidable lyric.
For centuries, people have been thinking and writing—and fiercely debating—about the meaning of marriage. Just a hundred years ago, Progressive era reformers embraced marriage not as a time-honored repository for conservative values, but as a tool for social change.
In Until Choice Do Us Part, Clare Virginia Eby offers a new account of marriage as it appeared in fiction, journalism, legal decisions, scholarly work, and private correspondence at the turn into the twentieth century. She begins with reformers like sexologist Havelock Ellis, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who argued that spouses should be “class equals” joined by private affection, not public sanction. Then Eby guides us through the stories of three literary couples—Upton and Meta Fuller Sinclair, Theodore and Sara White Dreiser, and Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood—who sought to reform marriage in their lives and in their writings, with mixed results. With this focus on the intimate side of married life, Eby views a historical moment that changed the nature of American marriage—and that continues to shape marital norms today.
American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America.
The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.
In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois brilliantly details the African American experience. Yet the renowned sociologist was also an astute chronicler of white people, particularly their racism. As Unveiling the Color Line demonstrates, Du Bois’s trenchant analysis of whiteness and white supremacy began in his earliest work—his 1890 speech on Jefferson Davis—and continued in every major book he published in his more than sixty-year career, up to The Black Flame Trilogy.
Lisa J. McLeod traces the development of Du Bois’s conception of whiteness, and the racism inherent to it, as an all-encompassing problem, whether predicated on ignorance, moral failure, or the inability to recognize the humanity in other people. In clear, elegant prose, McLeod investigates Du Bois’s complex and nuanced thinking, putting his insights into dialogue with contemporary racial theorists to demonstrate his continuing value to present-day critical thought and activism.
In The Unwritten War, Daniel Aaron examines the literary output of American writers—major and minor—who treated the Civil War in their works. He seeks to understand why this devastating and defining military conflict has failed to produce more literature of a notably high and lasting order, why there is still no "masterpiece" of Civil War fiction.
In his portraits and analyses of 19th- and some 20th-century writers, Aaron distinguishes between those who dealt with the war only marginally—Henry Adams, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain-and those few who sounded the war's tragic import—Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner. He explores the extent to which the war changed the direction of American literature and how deeply it entered the consciousness of American writers. Aaron also considers how writers, especially those from the South, discerned the war's moral and historical implications.
The Unwritten War was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1973. The New Republic declared, [This book's] major contribution will no doubt be to American literary history. In this respect it resembles Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore and is certain to become an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to explore the letters, diaries, journals, essays, novels, short stories, poems-but apparently no plays-which constitute Civil War literature. The mass of material is presented in a systematic, luminous, and useful way.
What can Evelyn Birkby possibly do to follow up the success of Neighboring on the Air: Cooking with the KMA Radio Homemakers? She can do what she has done in writing Up a Country Lane Cookbook. For forty-three years she has written a column entitled "Up a Country Lane" for the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel. Now she has chosen the best recipes from her column and interspersed them with a wealth of stories of rural life in the 1940s and 1950s, supplemented by a generous offering of vintage photographs. She has created a book that encompasses lost time.
With chapters on "The Garden," "Grocery Stores and Lockers," "Planting," and "Saturday Night in Town," to name a few, Up a Country Lane Cookbook recalls the noble simplicity of a life that has all but vanished. This is not to say that farm life in the forties and fifties was idyllic. As Birkby writes, "Underneath the pastoral exterior were threats of storms, droughts, ruined crops, low prices, sickness, and accidents."
Following the Second World War, many soldiers returned to mid-America and a life of farming. From her vantage point as a farm wife living in Mill Creek Valley in southwestern Iowa, Birkby observed the changes that accompanied improved roads, telephone service, and the easy availability of electricity. Her observations have been carefully recorded in her newspaper column, read by thousands of rural Iowans.
Up a Country Lane Cookbook is, then, much more than a cookbook. It is an evocation of a time in all its wonder and complexity which should be read by everyone from Evelyn Birkby's nearest neighbor in Mill Creek Valley to the city slicker seeking an education. Cook a meal of Plum-Glazed Baked Chicken, Elegant Peas, Creamed Cabbage, and Seven-Grain Bread, then finish it off with Frosted Ginger Creams with Fluffy Frosting. While the chicken is baking, read Evelyn's stories and think about the world the way it was.
Using the U.S. wall at the border with Mexico as a focal point, two experts examine the global surge of economic and environmental refugees, presenting a new vision of the relationships between citizen and migrant in an era of “Juan Crow,” which systematically creates a perpetual undercaste.
Winner, National Association for Ethnic Studies (NAES) Outstanding Book Award, 2017
As increasing global economic disparities, violence, and climate change provoke a rising tide of forced migration, many countries and local communities are responding by building walls—literal and metaphorical—between citizens and newcomers. Up Against the Wall: Re-imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border examines the temptation to construct such walls through a penetrating analysis of the U.S. wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as investigating the walling out of Mexicans in local communities. Calling into question the building of a wall against a friendly neighboring nation, Up Against the Wall offers an analysis of the differences between borders and boundaries. This analysis opens the way to envisioning alternatives to the stark and policed divisions that are imposed by walls of all kinds. Tracing the consequences of imperialism and colonization as citizens grapple with new migrant neighbors, the book paints compelling examples from key locales affected by the wall—Nogales, Arizona vs. Nogales, Sonora; Tijuana/San Diego; and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. An extended case study of Santa Barbara describes the creation of an internal colony in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of Mexican land, a history that is relevant to many U.S. cities and towns.
Ranging from human rights issues in the wake of massive global migration to the role of national restorative shame in the United States for the treatment of Mexicans since 1848, the authors delve into the broad repercussions of the unjust and often tragic consequences of excluding others through walled structures along with the withholding of citizenship and full societal inclusion. Through the lens of a detailed examination of forced migration from Mexico to the United States, this transdisciplinary text, drawing on philosophy, psychology, and political theory, opens up multiple insights into how nations and communities can coexist with more justice and more compassion.
Since the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., has personified black leadership with his use of direct action protests against white authority. A century ago, in the era of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington pursued a different strategy to lift his people. In this compelling biography, Norrell reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. He urged black people to acquire economic independence and to develop the moral character that would ultimately gain them full citizenship. Although widely accepted as the most realistic way to integrate blacks into American life during his time, Washington’s strategy has been disparaged since the 1960s.
The first full-length biography of Booker T. in a generation, Up from History recreates the broad contexts in which Washington worked: He struggled against white bigots who hated his economic ambitions for blacks, African-American intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois who resented his huge influence, and such inconstant allies as Theodore Roosevelt. Norrell details the positive power of Washington’s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination. Indeed, his ideas have since inspired peoples across the Third World that there are many ways to struggle for equality and justice. Up from History reinstates this extraordinary historical figure to the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.
Mary O’Connell examines the role of socially constructed masculinity in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy—Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest—which comprises the longest and most comprehensive representation of masculinity in American literature and places Updike firmly with the precursors of the contemporary movement among men to reevaluate their cultural inheritance.
A disturbing element exists, O’Connell determines, in both the texts of the Rabbit novels and in the critical community that examines them. In the novels, O’Connell finds substantial evidence to demonstrate patterns of psychological and physical abuse toward women, citing as the culminating example the mounting toll of literally or metaphorically dead women in the texts. Critics who characterize Updike as a nonviolent writer who strangely overlooks Rabbit’s repressive and violent behaviors avoid a discomforting but crucial aspect of Updike’s portrait.
Because the critical verdict of nonviolence in Updike’s novels contrasts sharply with the string of female corpses, O’Connell deems that something within the text or culture—or both—is seriously amiss.
Although she examines negative aspects of Rabbit’s behavior, O’Connell avoids the oversimplification of labeling Updike a misogynist. Instead, she looks closely at the forces shaping Rabbit’s gender identity as well as at the ways he experiences masculinity and the ways his gender identity affects his personal and spiritual development, his relationships, and, ultimately, his society. She shows how Updike challenges stereotypical masculinity, revealing its limitations and proscriptions as the source of much unhappiness for both men and women. Further, she substantiates the relation between gender, form, structure, perspective, and language use in the novels, alerting the reader to the ambivalence arising from the male author’s examination of masculinity.
O’Connell maintains that Updike does more than write Rabbit as a stereotypical male; he instead explores in depth his character’s habitually flawed ways of seeing and responding to the world. As she discusses these issues, O’Connell uses the term patriarchy in its broadest sense to refer to the practice of centralizing the male and marginalizing the female in all areas of human life. Patriarchal ideology—the assumptions, values, ideas, and patterns of thought that perpetuate the arrangement—is written as hidden text, permeating every aspect of culture, particularly language, from which it spreads to other signifying systems.
Contrary to conventional critical wisdom, Updike is not a straightforward writer; the Rabbit novels create meaning by challenging, undermining, and qualifying their own explicit content. Updike claims that his novels are "moral debates with the reader," and according to O’Connell, the resisting reader, active and skeptical, is the one most likely to discover what Rabbit conceals and to register the nuances of layered discourse.
For two spring days in 2001, John Updike visited Cincinnati, Ohio, engaging and charming his audiences, reading from his fiction, fielding questions, sitting for an interview, participating in a panel discussion, and touring the Queen City.
Successful writers typically spend a portion of their lives traveling the country to give readings and lectures. While a significant experience for author and audience alike, this public spectacle, once covered in detailed newspaper accounts, now is barely noticed by the media. Updike in Cincinnati—composed of a wealth of materials, including session transcripts, short stories discussed and read by the author, photographs, and anecdotal observations about Updike's performance and personal interactions--is unique in its comprehensive coverage of a literary visit by a major American author.
Updike's eloquence, intelligence, improvisational skills, and gift for comedy are all on display. With natural grace, he discusses a range of topics, including his novels and short stories, his mother and oldest son as writers, Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Nobel Prize, his appearance on The Simpsons, the Cold War, and Hamlet.
Augmented with commentary by critics W. H. Pritchard and Donald Greiner, and an introduction and interview by James Schiff, Updike in Cincinnati provides an engaging and detailed portrait of one of America's contemporary literary giants.
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