• A Variety Best Music Book of 2022
• A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022
• A Library Journal Best Arts and Humanities Book of 2022
• A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022
• A Boot Best Music Book of 2022
• A Ticketmaster Best Music Book of 2022
• A Happy Magazine Best Music Book of 2022
• Woody Guthrie First Book Award winner
• Awarded a Certificate of Merit in the 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in the category Best Historical Research in Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music.

Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame forty years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists’ expansive music and personal identities.

Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.

Exploring the relationship between queer sexuality and music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity approaches modern sexuality by way of music. Through the hidden or lost stories of composers, scholars, patrons, performers, audiences, repertoires, venues, and specific works, this intriguing volume explores points of intersection between music and queerness in Europe and the United States in the years 1870 to 1950--a period when dramatic changes in musical expression and in the expression of individual sexual identity played similar roles in washing away the certainties of the past. Pursuing the shadowy, obscured tracks of queerness, contributors unravel connections among dissident identities and concrete aspects of musical style, gestures, and personae.

Contributors are Byron Adams, Philip Brett, Malcolm Hamrick Brown, Sophie Fuller, Mitchell Morris, Jann Pasler, Ivan Raykoff, Fiona Richards, Eva Rieger, Gillian Rodger, Sherrie Tucker, and Lloyd Whitesell.

The seven Indigenous directions—east, south, west, north, up, down, and center—provide a map of understanding gender in media history.

In Queer Indigenous Cinemas, scholarGabriel S. Estrada offers an analysis of queer Indigenous media from the Americas, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. This groundbreaking work uses Indigenous directional space and sovereign mapping methods to uncover the emotional, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of queer Indigenous lives. The book’s seven chapters—each one of the directions—look closely at media such as cinema and streaming videos that draw on Indigenous concepts from diverse nations such as Diné, Caxcan, Kanaka Maoli, and Nehiyawak. Estrada discusses how the cinema brings into focus the ways that many Indigenous genders do not conform with the male/female binary, genders and sexualities that may or may not overlap with contemporary constructions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and two-spirit (LGBTQI2+) identities.

Highlighting the struggles and resistances of two-spirit peoples, Estrada’s analysis engages with films that represent the diverse and sovereign identities of queer Indigenous peoples. Estrada provides a framework for understanding how queer Indigenous media producers confront colonial trauma and reclaims space for the spiritual and bodily sovereignty of LGBTQI2+ peoples.

Viewing contemporary Latin American films through the lens of queer studies reveals that many filmmakers are exploring issues of gender identity and sexual difference, as well as the homophobia that attempts to defeat any challenge to the heterosexual norms of patriarchal culture. In this study of queer issues in Latin American cinema, David William Foster offers highly perceptive queer readings of fourteen key films to demonstrate how these cultural products promote the principles of an antiheterosexist stance while they simultaneously disclose how homophobia enforces the norms of heterosexuality.

Foster examines each film in terms of the ideology of its narrative discourse, whether homoerotic desire or a critique of patriarchal heterosexism and its implications for Latin American social life and human rights. His analyses underscore the difficulties involved in constructing a coherent and convincing treatment of the complex issues involved in critiquing the patriarchy from perspectives associated with queer studies. The book will be essential reading for everyone working in queer studies and film studies.

The films discussed in this book are:

• De eso no se habla (I Don't Want to Talk about It)
• El lugar sin límites (The Place without Limits)
• Aqueles dois (Those Two)
• Convivencia (Living Together)
• Conducta impropia (Improper Conduct)
• The Disappearance of García Lorca
• La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins)
• Doña Herlinda y su hijo (Doña Herlinda and Her Son)
• No se lo digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone)
• En el paraíso no existe el dolor (There Is No Suffering in Paradise)
• A intrusa (The Interloper)
• Plata quemada (Burnt Money)
• Afrodita (Aphrodite)
• Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)

Challenging the myths about LGBTQ+ kids and bullying: what it means to protect queer kids in schools

 

Conversations around LGBTQ+ kids in school have become dominated by the subject of bullying. Although this may be due to good-faith efforts to protect vulnerable students, Queer Kids and Social Violence demonstrates that a focus on bullying as acts of individual peer aggression fails to address the social norms that perpetuate the violence. Considering the broader contexts of bullying, this volume offers ways to engage with queer youth that are both more humanizing and more likely to create sustainable change.

Essays by leading international scholars analyze how bullying discourse shapes policy and practice, using in-depth case studies, research findings, and examinations of political policy to guide readers through the various forms of violence, identity regulation, and identity erasure in schools. Offering conversation-shifting interventions to respond to a difficult and frightening political moment for LGBTQ+ youth, Queer Kids and Social Violence is a rounded, empathetic picture that does queer youth justice and points the way toward safer schools for all.

Contributors: Ana María Amigo-Ventureira, Durell M. Callier, Cristyn Davies, Renée DePalma, Tania Ferfolja, Jessica Fields, Elliot Fonarev, Jen Gilbert, Tristan Gleason, Dominique C. Hill, Angela Ingram, Laurie Gutmann Kahn, Cris Mayo, Mollie McQuillan, Aoife Neary, C.J. Pascoe, Victoria Rawlings, EJ Renold, Jessica Ringrose, Kerry H. Robinson, Dorte Marie Søndergaard, Cris Townley, Jacqueline Ullman, Boni Wozolek.

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How the queer correspondence art of Ray Johnson disrupted art world conventions and anticipated today’s highly networked culture

Once regarded as “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” Ray Johnson was a highly visible outlier in the art world, his mail art practice reflecting the changing social relations and politics of queer communities in the 1960s. A vital contribution to the growing scholarship on this enigmatic artist, Queer Networks analyzes how Johnson’s practice sought to undermine the dominant mechanisms of the art market and gallery system in favor of unconventional social connections.

Utilizing the postal service as his primary means of producing and circulating art, Johnson cultivated an international community of friends and collaborators through which he advanced his idiosyncratic body of work. Applying both queer theory and network studies, Miriam Kienle explores how Johnson’s radical correspondence art established new modes of connectivity that fostered queer sensibilities and ran counter to the conventional methods by which artists were expected to develop their reputation.

While Johnson was significantly involved with the Pop, conceptual, and neo-Dada art movements, Queer Networks crucially underscores his resistance to traditional art historical systems of categorization and their emphasis on individual mastery. Highlighting his alternative modes of community building and playful antagonism toward art world protocols, Kienle demonstrates how Ray Johnson’s correspondence art offers new ways of envisioning togetherness in today’s highly commodified and deeply networked world.

A new paradigm for queer theory

Michael Snediker offers a much-needed counterpoint to queer theoretical discourse, which has long privileged melancholy, self-shattering, incoherence, shame, and the death drive. Recovering the forms of positive affect that queer theory has jettisoned, Snediker insists that optimism must itself be taken beyond conventional tropes of hope and futurity and reimagined as necessary for critical engagement.

The first-ever monograph on the history of queer biblical interpretation of a controversial biblical passage

Since the 1950s, homoerotic readings of the pericope in which Jesus heals a Roman centurion’s slave have been built upon three of the account’s features: the specific Greek word pais, which can refer to youth, slave, or the junior partner in a sexual relationship between two men; Luke’s characterization of the young man as “dear” (entimos) to the centurion; and commonplace homoeroticism in the Roman army. Rather than affirming or denying the historical reality of a sexual relationship between the centurion and the young man, Christopher B. Zeichmann instead traces the shifting patterns of queer readings of the text and the influences of the sexual, political, and theological discourses of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Europe, the United States, and Australia. Readers will see how distinct political contexts have led interpreters to find very different meanings about the sexual subtexts of this story.

Championing the liberatory potential of silence to address the fraught disability politics of queerness

In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words.

Queer Silence begins by historicizing silence’s negative reputation, beginning with the ways homophile activists rejected medical models pathologizing homosexuality as a disability, resulting in the silencing of disability itself. This silencing was redoubled by HIV/AIDS activism’s demand for “out, loud, and proud” rhetorical activities that saw silence as capitulation.

Reading a range of cultural artifacts whose relative silence has failed to attract queer attachment, from anonymous profiles on Grindr to ex-gays to belated gender transitions to disability performance art, Smilges argues for silence’s critical role in serving the needs of queers who are never named as such. Queer Silence urges queer activists and queer studies scholars to reconcile with their own ableism by acknowledging the liberatory potential of silence, a mode of engagement that disattached queers use every day for resistance, sociality, and survival.

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Cover alt text: Background detail of a painting on canvas shows a partial view of the upper body and face of a figure, bearded and naked; title in painted script.

John Leo and Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA), 2020

In Queer Timing, Susan Potter offers a counter-history that reorients accepted views of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema. Potter sees the emergence of lesbian figures as only the most visible but belated outcome of multiple sexuality effects. Early cinema reconfigured older erotic modalities, articulated new--though incoherent--sexual categories, and generated novel forms of queer feeling and affiliation.

Potter draws on queer theory, silent film historiography, feminist film analysis, and archival research to provide an original and innovative analysis. Taking a conceptually oriented approach, she articulates the processes of filmic representation and spectatorship that reshaped, marginalized, or suppressed women's same-sex desires and identities. As she pursues a sense of "timing," Potter stages scenes of the erotic and intellectual encounters shared by historical spectators, on-screen figures, and present-day scholars. The result is a daring revision of feminist and queer perspectives that foregrounds the centrality of women's same-sex desire to cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality.

A fascinating exploration of hidden Indígena histories and silences, Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas blends scholarship with spirit practices to reimagine the root work, dis/connection to land, and the political decolonization of Xicana/x peoples.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 launched Iran as a pioneer in a broad-based movement to establish democratic rule in the non-Western world. In a book that provides essential context for understanding modern Iran, Fakhreddin Azimi traces a century of struggle for the establishment of representative government.

The promise of constitutional rule was cut short in the 1920s with the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza Shah, whose despotic rule Azimi deftly captures, maintained the façade of a constitutional monarch but greeted any challenge with an iron fist: “I will eliminate you,” he routinely barked at his officials. In 1941, fearful of losing control of the oil-rich region, the Allies forced Reza Shah to abdicate but allowed Mohammad Reza to succeed his father. Though promising to abide by the constitution, the new Shah missed no opportunity to undermine it.

The Anglo-American–backed coup of 1953, which ousted reformist premier Mohammed Mosaddeq, dealt a blow to the constitutionalists. The Shah’s repressive policies and subservience to the United States radicalized both secular and religious opponents, leading to the revolution of 1979. Azimi argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood this event by characterizing it as an “Islamic” revolution when it was in reality the expression of a long-repressed desire for popular sovereignty. This explains why the clerical rulers have failed to counter the growing public conviction that the Islamic Republic, too, is impervious to political reform—and why the democratic impulse that began with the Constitutional Revolution continues to be a potent and resilient force.

As the United States championed principles of freedom and equality during World War II, it denied fundamental rights to many non-white citizens. In the wake of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy with Latin America, African American and Mexican American civil rights leaders sought ways to make that policy of respect and mutual obligations apply at home as well as abroad. They argued that a whites-only democracy not only denied constitutional protection to every citizen but also threatened the war effort and FDR’s aims.

Neil Foley examines the complex interplay among regional, national, and international politics that plagued the efforts of Mexican Americans and African Americans to find common ground in ending employment discrimination in the defense industries and school segregation in the war years and beyond. Underlying differences in organizational strength, political affiliation, class position, and level of assimilation complicated efforts by Mexican and black Americans to forge strategic alliances in their fight for economic and educational equality. The prospect of interracial cooperation foundered as Mexican American civil rights leaders saw little to gain and much to lose in joining hands with African Americans.

Over a half century later, African American and Latino civil rights organizations continue to seek solutions to relevant issues, including the persistence of de facto segregation in our public schools and the widening gap in wealth and income in America. Yet they continue to grapple with the difficulty of forging solidarity across lines of cultural, class, and racial-ethnic difference, a struggle that remains central to contemporary American life.

A concise, yet engaging introduction to the field of ethics, this volume offers a systematic study of the foundations of moral responsibility. Montague Brown guides the reader on an examination of a wide range of ethical positions, including relativism, emotivism, egoism, utilitarianism, Kantian formalism, and natural law.

Brown explains not only the history behind the development of each position, but also the roles science, democracy, and religion play in moral thinking today.

Students and teachers of philosophy, ethics, and religion, as well as the general reader, will find that this book tackles the serious issues and offers an insightful, accessible introduction to major ethical positions and the great moral philosophers.

China’s history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been framed as a long coda of imperial decline, played out during its last dynasty, the Qing. Quest for Power presents a sweeping reappraisal of this narrative. Stephen Halsey traces the origins of China’s great-power status in the twentieth century to this era of supposed decadence and decay. Threats from European and Japanese imperialism and the growing prospect of war triggered China’s most innovative state-building efforts since the Qing dynasty’s founding in the mid-1600s.

Through a combination of imitation and experimentation, a new form of political organization took root in China between 1850 and 1949 that shared features with modern European governments. Like them, China created a military-fiscal state to ensure security in a hostile international arena. The Qing Empire extended its administrative reach by expanding the bureaucracy and creating a modern police force. It poured funds into the military, commissioning ironclad warships, reorganizing the army, and promoting the development of an armaments industry. State-built telegraph and steamship networks transformed China’s communication and transportation infrastructure. Increasingly, Qing officials described their reformist policies through a new vocabulary of sovereignty—a Western concept that has been a cornerstone of Chinese statecraft ever since. As Halsey shows, the success of the Chinese military-fiscal state after 1850 enabled China to avoid wholesale colonization at the hands of Europe and Japan and laid the foundation for its emergence as a global power in the twentieth century.

Challenging standard interpretations of American dominance and French weakness in postwar Western Europe, Michael Creswell argues that France played a key role in shaping the cold war order. In the decade after the war, the U.S. government's primary objective was to rearm the Federal Republic of Germany within the framework of a European defense force--the European Defense Community. American and French officials differed, however, over the composition of the EDC and the rules governing its organization and use.

Although U.S. pressure played a part, more decisive factors--in both internal French politics and international French concerns--ultimately led France to sanction the plan to rearm West Germany. Creswell sketches the successful French challenge to the United States, tracing the genuine, sometimes heated, debate between the two nations that ultimately resulted in security arrangements preferred by the French but acceptable to the Americans.

Impressively researched and vigorously argued, A Question of Balance advances significantly our understanding of power politics and the rise of the cold war system in Western Europe.

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

A Question of Upbringing (1951) introduces us to the young Nick Jenkins and his housemates at boarding school in the years just after World War I. Boyhood pranks and visits from relatives bring to life the amusements and longueurs of schooldays even as they reveal characters and traits that will follow Jenkins and his friends through adolescence and beyond: Peter Templer, a rich, passionate womanizer; Charles Stringham, aristocratic and louche; and Kenneth Widmerpool, awkward and unhappy, yet strikingly ambitious. By the end of the novel, Jenkins has finished university and is setting out on a life in London; old ties are fraying, new ones are forming, and the first steps of the dance are well underway.

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times



"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”—Kingsley Amis

“There is no other work in the annals of European fiction that attempts meticulously to recreate half a century of history, decade by decade, with anything like the emotional precision or details of Powell’s twelve volumes. Neither Balzac’s panorama of the Restoration, nor Zola’s chronicles of the Second Empire, nor Proust’s reveries in the Belle Epoque can match a comparable span of time, an attention to variations within it, or a compositional intricacy capable of uniting them into a single narrative. . . . The elegance of this artifice was only compatible with comedy.”—Perry Anderson

The extent of human impact on world environments is undeniable. At scales ranging from local to global, investigations continue to demonstrate that the ecosystems to which we currently belong are structured by human behavior. Catastrophic events such as war, disaster, disease, or economic decay have, at various times throughout history, led to the human abandonment of particular environments. What happens to a human-structured environment when the manner in which people use it abruptly changes? In Questioning Rebound, authors Emily Lena Jones and Jacob L. Fisher explore the archaeological record of the Americas during the period immediately following European contact, a time when the human footprint on the land abruptly shifted. During this era of disease-driven mortality, genocide, incarceration, and forced labor of Indigenous peoples, American landscapes changed in fundamental ways, producing short-lived ecosystems that later became the basis of myths regarding the natural state of environments across the Americas.

Questioning Rebound explores the record and the causes of environmental change during the period following European contact, featuring case studies throughout the Americas. While both the record for and the apparent causes of the changes in the human footprint vary, the record of post- contact environmental change consistently reflects the impacts of past social upheaval.

With all the intrigue and twists of a mystery, Questions for Freud uncovers the paradoxes that riddle psychoanalysis today and traces them to Freud's vacillation at key points in his work--and from there to a traumatic event in Freud's life.

What role did censored family history play in shaping Freud's psychological inquiries, promoting and impeding them by turns? With this question in mind, Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok develop a new biographical and conceptual approach to psychoanalysis, one that outlines Freud's contradictory theories of mental functioning against the backdrop of his permanent lack of insight into crucial and traumatic aspects of his immediate family's life. Taking us through previously unpublished documents and Freud's dreams, his clinical work and institutional organization, the authors show how a shameful event in 1865 that shook Freud and his family can help explain the internal clashes that later beset his work--on the origins of neurosis, reality, trauma, fantasy, sexual repression, the psychoanalytic study of literature, and dream interpretation.

Steeped in the history, theory, and practice of psychoanalysis, this book offers a guide to the wary, a way of understanding the flaws and contradictions of Freud's thought without losing sight of its significance. This book will alter the terms of the current debate about the standing of psychoanalysis and Freud.

Rachel Hadas reaches the peak of her poetic prowess in Questions in the Vestibule. A deeply personal and meditative collection in three sections, Questions moves through the liminal space of solitude and the coded landscape of dreams toward the startling power of a life-changing love.

Hadas’s voice and her formal elegance, as distinctive and distinguished as ever, endow this new work with a precise and thoughtful beauty. Questions in the Vestibule takes readers into a new territory of unapologetic bliss.

A Greek king and a Buddhist monk engage in a transformational philosophical dialogue.

The legendary conversation between the Greek King Milinda, traditionally identified as Menander, and the Buddhist monk Nagasena is believed to have taken place after Alexander’s campaign in India. The earliest versions of this dialogue originate from the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent, known as Greater Gandhara, where Buddhism had taken root as early as the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE. While the historical authenticity of this exchange remains uncertain, the dialogue—known in Pali as Milindapañha—has endured for over two millennia and is regarded as one of the most revered texts in Theravada Buddhism.

Throughout their conversation, Milinda and Nagasena explore fundamental questions about the nature of the world, kingship, and the sources of knowledge. Milinda’s probing inquiries drive the dialogue, while Nagasena offers insights grounded in Buddhist teachings, gradually transforming the Greek king from a curious skeptic into a committed Buddhist.

This edition features a modern English translation of one of the most renowned works of ancient Buddhist philosophy, alongside the original Pali text.

Tenure is the abortion issue of the academy, igniting arguments and inflaming near-religious passions. To some, tenure is essential to academic freedom and a magnet to recruit and retain top-flight faculty. To others, it is an impediment to professorial accountability and a constraint on institutional flexibility and finances. But beyond anecdote and opinion, what do we really know about how tenure works?

In this unique book, Richard Chait and his colleagues offer the results of their research on key empirical questions. Are there circumstances under which faculty might voluntarily relinquish tenure? When might new faculty actually prefer non-tenure track positions? Does the absence of tenure mean the absence of shared governance? Why have some colleges abandoned tenure while others have adopted it? Answers to these and other questions come from careful studies of institutions that mirror the American academy: research universities and liberal arts colleges, including both highly selective and less prestigious schools.

Lucid and straightforward, The Questions of Tenure offers vivid pictures of academic subcultures. Chait and his colleagues conclude that context counts so much that no single tenure system exists. Still, since no academic reward carries the cachet of tenure, few institutions will initiate significant changes without either powerful external pressures or persistent demands from new or disgruntled faculty.

Syncretistic exegesis.

The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BC to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Greek as well as Jewish learning. In attempting to reconcile biblical teachings with Greek philosophy he developed ideas that had wide influence on Christian and Jewish religious thought.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of the works of Philo is in ten volumes and two supplements, distributed as follows. Volume I: Creation; Interpretation of Genesis II and III. II: On the Cherubim; The Sacrifices of Abel and Cain; The Worse Attacks the Better; The Posterity and Exile of Cain; On the Giants. III: The Unchangeableness of God; On Husbandry; Noah's Work as a Planter; On Drunkenness; On Sobriety. IV: The Confusion of Tongues; The Migration of Abraham; The Heir of Divine Things; On the Preliminary Studies. V: On Flight and Finding; Change of Names; On Dreams. VI: Abraham; Joseph; Moses. VII: The Decalogue; On Special Laws Books I–III. VIII: On Special Laws Book IV; On the Virtues; Rewards and Punishments. IX: Every Good Man Is Free; The Contemplative Life; The Eternity of the World; Against Flaccus; Apology for the Jews; On Providence. X: On the Embassy to Gaius; indexes. Supplement I: Questions on Genesis. II: Questions on Exodus; index to supplements.

Syncretistic exegesis.

The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BC to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Greek as well as Jewish learning. In attempting to reconcile biblical teachings with Greek philosophy he developed ideas that had wide influence on Christian and Jewish religious thought.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of the works of Philo is in ten volumes and two supplements, distributed as follows. Volume I: Creation; Interpretation of Genesis II and III. II: On the Cherubim; The Sacrifices of Abel and Cain; The Worse Attacks the Better; The Posterity and Exile of Cain; On the Giants. III: The Unchangeableness of God; On Husbandry; Noah's Work as a Planter; On Drunkenness; On Sobriety. IV: The Confusion of Tongues; The Migration of Abraham; The Heir of Divine Things; On the Preliminary Studies. V: On Flight and Finding; Change of Names; On Dreams. VI: Abraham; Joseph; Moses. VII: The Decalogue; On Special Laws Books I–III. VIII: On Special Laws Book IV; On the Virtues; Rewards and Punishments. IX: Every Good Man Is Free; The Contemplative Life; The Eternity of the World; Against Flaccus; Apology for the Jews; On Providence. X: On the Embassy to Gaius; indexes. Supplement I: Questions on Genesis. II: Questions on Exodus; index to supplements.

Since the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the Maya population of Guatemala has been forced to adapt to extraordinary challenges. Under colonial rule, the Indians had to adapt enough to satisfy the Spanish while resisting those changes not necessary for survival, applying their understanding of the world to the realities they confronted daily. Despite the major changes wrought in their way of life by centuries of submission, the Maya have managed to regenerate, and thus maintain, their self-identity.

Among the major challenges they have faced has been the imposition of outside religions. Quiché Rebelde examines what happened when Acción Católica came into the Guatemalan municipio of San Antonio Ilotenango, Quiché, to convert its inhabitants.

Ricardo Falla, a Guatemalan Jesuit priest and anthropologist, analyzes the movement's origins and why some people became part of it while others resisted. He shows how religion was used as another tool to readapt to the changing environment—natural, economic, political, and social. His work is the first major empirical study of how change occurred in a Maya community with no serious loss of Maya identity—and how the process of conversion is related to more general processes of cultural change that actually strengthen ethnic identity.

The appellation “polymath” is often lightly bestowed, but it can be applied with confidence to the celebrated philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. Quine’s areas of interest are panoramic, as this lively book amply demonstrates.

Moving from A (alphabet) to Z (zero), Quiddities roams through more than eighty topics, each providing a full measure of piquant thought, wordplay, and wisdom, couched in easy and elegant prose—“Quine at his unbuttoned best,” in Donald Davidson’s words. Philosophy, language, and mathematics are the subjects most fully represented; tides of entries include belief, communication, free will, idiotisms, longitude and latitude, marks, prizes, Latin pronunciation, tolerance, trinity. Even the more technical entries are larded with homely lore, anecdote, and whimsical humor.

Quiddities will be a treat for admirers of Quine and for others who like to think, who care about language, and who enjoy the free play of intellect on topics large and small. For this select audience, it is an ideal book for browsing.

Reimagining humanities scholarship with humility and inclusive attention

How might foregrounding the writings of colonized peoples transform the ways we work in the humanities? In an era dominated by loud political rhetoric, Suzanne Bost advocates for quieter modes of scholarship: intellectual humility rather than ego, collaboration and conversation rather than singular argumentation, continual reflection and revision rather than defensiveness, and a willingness to believe in different ways of being and knowing rather than adhering to academic norms. With Quiet Methodologies, she demonstrates practical decolonial scholarship and proposes alternative approaches for fostering meaningful engagement.

Turning to feminist, queer, and decolonial writings from Gloria Anzaldúa, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and many others, Bost reflects on what we do when we work with literature, culture, and ideas. She weaves together multiple voices, methods of writing, and culturally diverse epistemologies and uses creative devices such as collage, her own original poetry, revision, lists, images, and conversation to disengage academic thought and writing from colonial theories and archives that have passed as neutral. Eschewing conventional monograph formats, her work embraces a reciprocal and heterogeneous learning process with profound ethical implications.

Part of a movement of reimagining research and education through care, Quiet Methodologies is a powerful exploration of the possibilities of criticism during crises. It encourages readers to be visionary and pragmatic, challenging current conditions and offering alternative ideas for the future of the humanities.

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