A brilliantly savage story, Queer People is, according to Budd Schulberg, “a racy testament to an era as totally vanished as the civilization of the Aztecs,” and if not the Hollywood novel is “at least a truly seminal work.”
Today’s readers will recognize in this long-forgotten Hollywood novel the seeds of three longer-lived ones, The Day of the Locust, What Makes Sammy Run?,and The Last Tycoon. They may also recognize Whitey, the hero of the Grahams’ novel, as a forerunner of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby.
The central figure in the novel is an archetypal newspaper reporter who drifts to Hollywood. Whitey discovers the social microcosm of the studio-people, and finds himself in his element. He penetrates strange places and encounters queer people—the story conference, the three-day party, the titans and the moguls. When a murder ends his interlude he leaves Hollywood as casually as he discovered it.
Originally published in 1930 Queer People was a scandalous roman à clef, irreverent to the “industry,” and totally amoral—qualities lacking in later Hollywood fiction. Hence itis at once an important social document and an exciting original work.
Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.
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.
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.
Contributors. Lionel Cantú, Gabriel Giorgi, Venetia Kantsa, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Michael Luongo, Kevin Markwell, Jasbir Kaur Puar, Dereka Rushbrook
Contributors. Judith Butler, David Eng, Licia Fiol-Mata, Judith Halberstam, Phillip Brian Harper, Neville Hoad, Rachel Holmes, Don Kulick, Tim Lawrence, Rosalind Morris, José Esteban Muñoz, Ben Singer, David Valentine, Priscilla Wald, Riki Anne Wilchins
In this first-ever comprehensive examination of queerbaiting, fan studies scholar Joseph Brennan and his contributors examine cases that shed light on the sometimes exploitative industry practice of teasing homoerotic possibilities that, while hinted at, never materialize in the program narratives. Through a nuanced approach that accounts for both the history of queer representation and older fan traditions, these essayists examine the phenomenon of queerbaiting across popular TV, video games, children’s programs, and more.
Contributors: Evangeline Aguas, Christoffer Bagger, Bridget Blodgett, Cassie Brummitt, Leyre Carcas, Jessica Carniel, Jennifer Duggan, Monique Franklin, Divya Garg, Danielle S. Girard, Mary Ingram-Waters, Hannah McCann, Michael McDermott, E. J. Nielsen, Emma Nordin, Holly Eva Katherine Randell-Moon, Emily E. Roach, Anastasia Salter, Elisabeth Schneider, Kieran Sellars, Isabela Silva, Guillaume Sirois, Clare Southerton
Combining feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and literary criticism, Freccero takes up a series of theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer theory, feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and early modern studies. She juxtaposes readings of early and late modern texts, discussing the lyric poetry of Petrarch, Louise Labé, and Melissa Ethridge; David Halperin’s take on Michel Foucault via Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Boccaccio’s Decameron; and France’s domestic partner legislation in connection with Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. Turning to French cleric Jean de Léry’s account, published in 1578, of having witnessed cannibalism and religious rituals in Brazil some twenty years earlier and to the twentieth-century Brandon Teena case, Freccero draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality to propose both an ethics and a mode of interpretation that acknowledges and is inspired by the haunting of the present by the past.
How were indigenous social practices deemed queer and aberrant by colonial forces?
In Queering Colonial Natal, T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natalestablished by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal provinceto show how settler regimes “queered” indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy; restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship; and assigning only Europeans to government schools.
Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natal’s white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims.
Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each group’s claim to authority.
Co-Winner of the 2015 Charles Tilly Award for Best Book of the Collective Behavior and Social Movements section from the American Sociological Association
Over four thousand gay and lesbian couples married in the city of San Francisco in 2004. The first large-scale occurrence of legal same-sex marriage, these unions galvanized a movement and reignited the debate about whether same-sex marriage, as some hope, challenges heterosexual privilege or, as others fear, preserves that privilege by assimilating queer couples.
In Queering Marriage, Katrina Kimport uses in-depth interviews with participants in the San Francisco weddings to argue that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as simply entrenching or contesting heterosexual privilege. Instead, she contends, these new legally sanctioned relationships can both reinforce as well as disrupt the association of marriage and heterosexuality.
During her deeply personal conversations with same-sex spouses, Kimport learned that the majority of respondents did characterize their marriages as an opportunity to contest heterosexual privilege. Yet, in a seeming contradiction, nearly as many also cited their desire for access to the normative benefits of matrimony, including social recognition and legal rights. Kimport’s research revealed that the pattern of ascribing meaning to marriage varied by parenthood status and, in turn, by gender. Lesbian parents were more likely to embrace normative meanings for their unions; those who are not parents were more likely to define their relationships as attempts to contest dominant understandings of marriage.
By posing the question—can queers “queer” marriage?—Kimport provides a nuanced, accessible, and theoretically grounded framework for understanding the powerful effect of heterosexual expectations on both sexual and social categories.
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.
Queering Mestizaje employs theories of postcolonial cultural studies (including performance studies, queer and feminist theory) to examine the notion of mestizaje---the mixing of races, and specifically indigenous peoples, with European colonizers---and how this phenomenon manifests itself in three geographically diverse spaces: the United States, Latin America, and the Philippines. Alicia Arrizón argues that, as an imaginary site for racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, mestizaje raises questions about historical transformation and cultural memory across Spanish postcolonial sites.
Arrizón offers new, queer readings of the hybrid, the intercultural body, and the hyphenated self, building on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Walter Mignolo, and Vera Kutzinski, while challenging accepted discourses about the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Queering Mestizaje is unique in the connections it makes between the Spanish colonial legacy in the Philippines and in the Americas. An engagingly eclectic array of cultural materials---including examples from performance art, colonial literature, visual art, fashion, and consumer products---are discussed, and included in the book's twenty-nine illustrations.
"Arrizón takes as her point of departure the connections and distinctions between the four keywords in the title (each with a long, specific, and convoluted history in its own right) while bringing together the Philippines, the Hispanophone Caribbean, and the United States to configure a map carved by the same blade of colonialism and imperialism. In its conjoining of queer, mestizaje, transculturation and performance, the pleasurable and enlightening variety of its textual examples, and its commitment to theorize desire from the space of queer mestizaje, her book makes a unique and accomplished contribution."
---Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Stanford University
Alicia Arrizón is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage and co-editor of Latinas on Stage: Practice and Theory.
Illustration: Judith F. Baca, La Mestizaje (1991), pastel on paper. © SPARC.
Mamo provides an overview of a shift within some lesbian communities from low-tech methods of self-insemination to a reliance on outside medical intervention and fertility treatments. Reflecting on the issues facing lesbians who become parents through assisted reproductive technologies, Mamo explores questions about the legal rights of co-parents, concerns about the genetic risks of choosing an anonymous sperm donor, and the ways decisions to become parents affect sexual and political identities. In doing so, she investigates how lesbians navigate the medical system with its requisite range of fertility treatments, diagnostic categories, and treatment trajectories. Combining moving narratives and insightful analysis, Queering Reproduction reveals how medical technology reconfigures social formations, individual subjectivity, and notions of kinship.
The introduction provides a discussion of the theoretical and critical motivations for understanding the middle as a queer vantage, while the six articles focus on social movements, queer community networks, Midwest-based expressive cultures, and local and diasporic rearticulations of racial, gender, and sexual politics.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Martin Manalansanis Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Chantal Nadeau is Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Richard T. Rodríguez and Siobhan B. Somerville are Associate Professors in the Department of English.
De la Dehesa studied the archives of activists, social-movement organizations, political parties, religious institutions, legislatures, and state agencies, and he interviewed hundreds of individuals, not only LGBT activists, but also feminists, AIDS and human-rights activists, party militants, journalists, academics, and state officials. He marshals his prodigious research to reveal the interplay between evolving representative institutions and LGBT activists’ entry into the political public sphere in Latin America, offering a critical analysis of the possibilities opened by emerging democratic arrangements, as well as their limitations. At the same time, exploring activists’ engagement with the international arena, he offers new insights into the diffusion and expression of transnational norms inscribing sexual rights within a broader project of liberal modernity. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a landmark examination of LGBT political mobilization.
Contributors. Alan Bray, Marcie Frank, Carla Freccero, Jonathan Goldberg, Janet Halley, Graham Hammill, Margaret Hunt, Donald N. Mager, Jeff Masten, Elizabeth Pittenger, Richard Rambuss, Alan K. Smith, Dorothy Stephens, Forrest Tyler Stevens, Valerie Traub, Michael Warner
The issue, featuring essays by both established and emerging scholars, situates queer migration within global processes of colonization, globalization, capitalism, nationalism, and slavery. One contributor argues that a queer Atlantic history emerged during the Middle Passage experience of slavery, connecting this history to the contemporary movement of Haitian refugees and Dominican migrant laborers. Another contributor considers how the policing of queer migrant bodies and of “unnatural offenses” by colonial administrations in the Nicobar and Andaman islands ultimately reconfigured the ecology of the entire Indian Ocean archipelago. Still another contributor theorizes how gay couples composed of young Asian émigrés and considerably older white citizens negotiate Australian immigration policy to subvert dominant forms of nationalism and citizenship embedded in long histories of inequality between Australia and Asia. Other essays explore how transgender histories and theories transform queer migration scholarship; how “queer complicities” with contemporary neoliberal migration politics uphold regimes of violence and inequality; and how migration regimes and settlement policies in various parts of the world identify individuals as “queer,” “deviant,” or “abnormal” within racial, gender, class, cultural, and geopolitical hierarchies.
Contributors. Bobby Benedicto, Carlos Ulises Decena, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Maja Horn, Adi Kuntsman, Eithne Luibhéid, Clare Sears, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Kath Weston, Audrey Yue
The definitive social history of the Disciples of Christ in the 19th century
The Disciples of Christ, led by reformers such as Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone, was one of a number of early-19th-century primitivist religious movements seeking to “restore the ancient order of things.” The Disciples movement was little more than a loose collection of independent congregations until the middle of the 19th century, but by 1900 three clear groupings of churches had appeared. Today, more than 5 million Americans—members of the modern-day Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), Independent Christian Churches, and Churches of Christ, among others—trace their religious heritage to this “Restoration Movement.”
In 1948, when “Mrs. G.,” hospitalized with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, became the first person to receive a mysterious new compound—cortisone—her physicians were awestruck by her transformation from enervated to energized. After eighteen years of biochemical research, the most intensively hunted biological agent of all time had finally been isolated, identified, synthesized, and put to the test. And it worked. But the discovery of a long-sought “magic bullet” came at an unanticipated cost in the form of strange side effects. This fascinating history recounts the discovery of cortisone and pulls the curtain back on the peculiar cast of characters responsible for its advent, including two enigmatic scientists, Edward Kendall and Philip Hench, who went on to receive the Nobel Prize. The book also explores the key role the Mayo Clinic played in fostering cortisone’s development, and looks at drugs that owe their heritage to the so-called “King of Steroids.”
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.
Questing Fictions was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Questing Fictions analyzes twentieth-century Latin American fiction in the light of contemporary literary theory. Djelal Kadir examines key works by several writers—including Jorges Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes—and demonstrates how these writers are obliged to invent their own reality and how their successors inevitably must continue that inventive tradition. In a larger sense, Kadir describes how works of literature originate and, in turn, generate other literary works.
Aiming at the specific nature of discourse written from the perspective of non-European cultures, Questing Fictions identifies and focuses on the predicament of writers caught between the cultural domination of Europe and the need to strive for cultural autonomy. Kadir explains that this predicament is shared by all Latin American authors and may well characterize all recently emergent literatures. He traces the problems of continuity and rupture within the Latin American tradition and addresses, as well, deeper questions of narrative and narration. In the process, Kadir reveals the interrelatedness of the continent's principal fables and shows their relationship to the larger Western tradition. Finally, Questing Fictions posits that Latin American narratives cannot escape the the quest for an identity that they can never fully attain.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.
Boeckmann links character, literary genre, and science, revealing how major literary works both contributed to and disrupted the construction of race in turn-of-the-century America.
In A Question of Character, Cathy Boeckmann establishes a strong link between racial questions and the development of literary traditions at the end of the 19th century in America. This period saw the rise of "scientific racism," which claimed that the races were distinguished not solely by exterior appearance but also by a set of inherited character traits. As Boeckmann explains, this emphasis on character meant that race was not only a thematic concern in the literature of the period but also a generic or formal one as well.
Boeckmann explores the intersections between race and literary history by tracing the language of character through both scientific and literary writing. Nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy had a vocabulary for discussing racial character that overlapped conceptually with the conventions for portraying race in literature. Through close readings of novels by Thomas Dixon, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson—each of which deals with a black character "passing" as white—Boeckmann shows how this emphasis on character relates to the shift from romantic and sentimental fiction to realism. Because each of these genres had very specific conventions regarding the representation of character, genres often dictated how races could be depicted.
Contributors. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Petra Kuppers, Jennifer Reardon, Gayle Salamon, Elizabeth A. Wilson
In southern politics, 1970 marked a watershed. A group of southern governors entered office that year and changed both the way the nation looked at the South and the way the constituents of those states viewed themselves. Reubin Askew in Florida, John West in South Carolina, Jimmy Carter in Georgia, and Albert Brewer in Alabama all represented a new breed of progressive moderate politician that helped demolish Jim Crow segregation and the dual economies, societies, and educational systems notorious to the Sunbelt South. Historian Gordon Harvey explores the political lives and legacies of three of these governors, examining the conditions that led to such a radical change in political leadership, the effects their legislative agendas had on the identity of their states, and the aftermath of their terms in elected office.
A common thread in each governor's agenda was educational reform. Albert Brewer's short term as Alabama governor resulted in a sweeping education package that still stands as the most progressive the state has seen. Reubin Askew, far more outspoken than Brewer, won the Florida gubernatorial election through a campaign that openly promoted desegregation, busing, and tax reform as a means of equal school funding. John West's commitment to a policy of inclusion helped allay fears of both black and white parents and made South Carolina's one of the smoothest transitions to integrated schools.
As members of the first generation of New South governors, Brewer, Askew, and West played the role of trailblazers. Their successful assaults on economic and racial injustice in their states were certainly aided by such landmark events as Brown v. Board of Education, the civil rights movement, and the expansion of voting rights-all of which sounded the death knell for the traditional one-party segregated South. But in this critical detailing of their work for justice, we learn how these reform-minded men made education central to their gubernatorial terms and, in doing so, helped redefine the very character of the place they called home.
The subjects treated in this symposium have one major characteristic in common, that they have recently, or relatively recently, enjoyed high popularity among readers. Also, they have received from substantial to torrents of comment.
In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Finkel carves a clearing out of the backyard brush and the intellectual brambles of existence.
Whether he writes a short lyric or a long experimental series, Finkel relies on concrete images—a breeze through grass, a cigarette in a piano player’s hand—to ground his central questions about the clash of order and chaos in our everyday lives.
He delights in naming weeds and towering trees, cars and streets. Yet, in each poem, there is a constant tension between the actual wind and the words we must use to convey the wind’s force.
Working fluently in formal lines and in free verse, he can write with equal authority of butchers or great painters, aged bookkeepers or schizophrenics, Greek gods or house cats. In this new collection, Finkel has given us the priceless keepsakes, the best gifts from the clearing his words have won.
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.
Hatif Janabi’s poems are passionate, jolting, apocalyptic, and painful. They deal with war and death, perception and truth, drawing from his family life, his exile in Poland, the Gulf War, violence in Iraq, and his experience in the United States.
The speaker in many of Janabi’s poems moves from a confrontational stance to one of resigned desperation, and from coyness to deep longing, where, occasionally, hope surfaces. The associative processes and the often bizarre surreal imagery he employs are very effective in expressing his profound sense of political and spiritual alienation. Janabi is among a generation of Arab poets who, because of censorship, can speak only obliquely about the harsh reality of their lives. In these poems he has created symbolic landscapes that attempt to reveal the political, social, and psychological stresses with which suffering people live.
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.
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