A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
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?
Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley, and Ciraj Rassool take the reader to sites of historical production in which complex ideas about pasts are invoked, and navigate a path toward understanding the agencies of image-making and memory production. This volume is the outcome of the authors’ intensive collaborative research and engagement over twenty-five years on questions including the production and performance of apartheid history; the cultural politics of social history; South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and practices of orality; tourism as an arena of image-making and historical construction; museums as sites of heritage production for a new South Africa; photographs, archival meanings, and the construction of the social documentary; and the centenary commemorations of the South African War and the making of race. The authors not only witnessed many of these instances of history-making but were also participants in their constitution.
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.
In her analysis, Lurie traces each author’s strategies for revealing and challenging the ways that patriarchal gender ideology profits from what is always plural and contested female subjectivity. Only such an inquiry, Lurie demonstrates, can explain the impasses that have steered poststructuralist feminism away from gender as a category of analysis and can point toward the models necessary for a more complete feminist critique of patriarchal power.
Migrants made up a growing class of workers in late sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England. In fact, by 1650, half of England’s rural population consisted of homeless and itinerant laborers. Unsettled is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the everyday lives of these dispossessed people. Patricia Fumerton offers an expansive portrait of unsettledness in early modern England that includes the homeless and housed alike.
Fumerton begins by building on recent studies of vagrancy, poverty, and servants, placing all in the light of a new domestic economy of mobility. She then looks at representations of the vagrant in a variety of pamphlets and literature of the period. Since seamen were a particularly large and prominent class of mobile wage-laborers in the seventeenth century, Fumerton turns to seamen generally and to an individual poor seaman as a case study of the unsettled subject: Edward Barlow (b. 1642) provides a rare opportunity to see how the laboring poor fashioned themselves, for he authored a journal of over 225,000 words and 147 pages of drawings. Barlow’s journal, studied extensively here for the first time, vividly charts what he himself termed his “unsettled mind” and the perpetual anxieties of England’s working and wayfaring poor. Ultimately, Fumerton explores representations of seamen as unsettled in the broadside ballads of Barlow’s time.
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.”
Payne draws on interviews, unedited television film, newspaper archives, and books written by perpetrators to analyze confessions of state violence in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa. Each of these four countries addressed its past through a different institutional form—from blanket amnesty, to conditional amnesty based on confessions, to judicial trials. Payne considers perpetrators’ confessions as performance, examining what they say and what they communicate nonverbally; the timing, setting, and reception of their confessions; and the different ways that they portray their pasts, whether in terms of remorse, heroism, denial, or sadism, or through lies or betrayal.
A collection of accessible, interdisciplinary essays that explore archival practices to unsettle traditional archival theories and methodologies.
What would it mean to unsettle the archives? How can we better see the wounded and wounding places and histories that produce absence and silence in the name of progress and knowledge? Unsettling Archival Research sets out to answer these urgent questions and more, with essays that chart a more just path for archival work.
Unsettling Archival Research is one of the first publications in rhetoric and writing studies dedicated to scholarship that unsettles disciplinary knowledge of archival research by drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, and community perspectives. Written by established and emerging scholars, essays critique not only the practices, ideologies, and conventions of archiving, but also offer new tactics for engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on efforts to unsettle and counteract racist, colonial histories, confront the potentials and pitfalls of common archival methodologies, and chart a path for the future of archival research otherwise. Unsettling Archival Research intervenes in a critical issue: whether the discipline’s assumptions about the archives serve or fail the communities they aim to represent and what can be done to center missing voices and perspectives. The aim is to explore the ethos and praxis of bearing witness in unsettling ways, carried out as a project of queering and/or decolonizing the archives.
Unsettling Archival Research takes seriously the rhetorical force of place and wrestles honestly with histories that still haunt our nation, including the legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and systemic racism.
In Unsettling Assumptions, editors Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye examine how tradition and gender come together to unsettle assumptions about culture and its study.
Contributors explore the intersections of traditional expressive culture and sex/gender systems to question, investigate, or upset concepts like family, ethics, and authenticity. Individual essays consider myriad topics such as Thanksgiving turkeys, rockabilly and bar fights, Chinese tales of female ghosts, selkie stories, a noisy Mennonite New Year’s celebration, the Distaff Gospels, Kentucky tobacco farmers, international adoptions, and more.
In Unsettling Assumptions, folkloric forms express but also counteract negative aspects of culture like misogyny, homophobia, and racism. But expressive culture also emerges as fundamental to our sense of belonging to a family, an occupation, or friendship group and, most notably, to identity performativity and the construction and negotiation of power.
Articles in this issue address topics as rich and varied as the friendship between Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison; hybridity, montage, and the avant-garde in the works of Jean Toomer; and the interplay of eugenics and racial uplift in W. E. B. DuBois’s Crisis. One piece explores Langston Hughes’s use of bebop in Montage, and another considers the ways in which James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man challenges assumptions about black music and its relationship to the "classics." The collection moves into a discussion of physical space when Arlene Keizer assesses Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnnie, a novel in which the geography and architecture of Washington, D.C. construct as well as express the slave-owning, patriarchal culture.
Unsettling Blackness would be a valuable addition to the syllabus of any course grappling with the galaxy of issues surrounding African American literature and culture.
Analyzes favela, quilombola, and indigenous communities’ responses to settler colonialism in urban Brazil. Based on ethnographic research and her experiences growing up in Brazil, the author tells the stories of communities in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte
Unsettling Brazil offers a powerful account of five urban Indigenous and Black communities and movements in Brazil that illuminates their struggle for land, dignity, and their ways of life amid historic and ongoing settler colonialism, marked by militarization and dependent capitalist development. The in-depth case studies are the Indigenous movement Aldeia Maracanã and the quilombola community Sacopã in Rio, the Quilombo dos Luízes in Belo Horizonte, the Indigenous movement behind the Pindorama scholarship program in São Paulo, and the Complexo da Maré favela in Rio. For each, Poets vividly documents the intersectional and transnational structures of power that perpetuate the erasure, dispossession, and exploitation of nonwhite populations and the creative ways that Black and Indigenous communities have mobilized to unsettle these structures.
Drawing on the knowledge produced by Black and Indigenous organizers and thinkers, Poets argues for an interdisciplinary framework that prioritizes the voices and experiences of these communities. Addressing increasingly salient calls for decolonization, Poets ponders the paradoxical role of rights, citizenship, and the state in the fight for freedom and justice. Unsettling Brazil urges readers to confront the uncomfortable truths about the nation's history and stands in solidarity with those fighting to reclaim their heritage, identity, and land.
How the Great Recession revealed a system of school choice built on crisis, precarity, and exclusion
What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.
Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families.
As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.
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In recent decades, scholars working in postcolonial history have successfully challenged the primacy of Western historiography and its Eurocentric worldview. With Unsettling History, a group of historians extend that challenge to two central components of work in history: archiving and narrating. Archival resources, they argue, despite their air of impartiality, are the product of established interests and subject to various practices of selection, cataloguing, and preservation. Narrating, too, is more complicated than it might at first seem, especially as the range of genres available to the historians for presenting their findings has expanded in recent years.
Since contact, attempts by institutions such as the British Crown and the Catholic Church to assimilate indigenous peoples have served to mark those people as “Other” than the settler majority. In Unsettling Mobility, Michelle A. Lelièvre examines how mobility has complicated, disrupted, and—at times—served this contradiction at the core of the settler colonial project.
Drawing on archaeological, ethnographic, and archival fieldwork conducted with the Pictou Landing First Nation—one of thirteen Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia—Lelièvre argues that, for the British Crown and the Catholic Church, mobility has been required not only for the settlement of the colony but also for the management and conversion of the Mi’kmaq. For the Mi’kmaq, their continued mobility has served as a demonstration of sovereignty over their ancestral lands and waters despite the encroachment of European settlers.
Unsettling Mobility demonstrates the need for an anthropological theory of mobility that considers not only how people move from one place to another but also the values associated with such movements, and the sensual perceptions experienced by moving subjects. Unsettling Mobility argues that anthropologists, indigenous scholars, and policy makers must imagine settlement beyond sedentism. Rather, both mobile and sedentary practices, the narratives associated with those practices, and the embodied experiences of them contribute to how people make places—in other words, to how they settle.
Unsettling Mobility arrives at a moment when indigenous peoples in North America are increasingly using movement as a form of protest in ways that not only assert their political subjectivity but also remake the nature of that subjectivity.
What happens when operas that are comfortably ensconced in the canon are thoroughly rethought and radically recast on stage? What does a staging do to our understanding of an opera, and of opera generally? While a stage production can disrupt a work that was thought to be established, David J. Levin here argues that the genre of opera is itself unsettled, and that the performance of operas, at its best, clarifies this condition by bringing opera’s restlessness and volatility to life.
Unsettling Opera explores a variety of fields, considering questions of operatic textuality, dramaturgical practice, and performance theory. Levin opens with a brief history of opera production, opera studies, and dramatic composition, and goes on to consider in detail various productions of the works of Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Ultimately, the book seeks to initiate a dialogue between scholars of music, literature, and performance by addressing questions raised in each field in a manner that influences them all.
In September 1999, Sensation, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, opened its doors, igniting a controversy still burning in the art world. This collection of cutting-edge art from the Saatchi collection in England, and the museum’s arrangements with Charles Saatchi to finance the show, so offended New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani that he attempted to shut the museum down by withholding city funds that are crucially needed by that institution. Only a legal ruling prevented him from doing so. Like the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition before it, Sensation once again raises questions about public spending for “controversial” art, but with the added dimension of religious conflict and charges of commercialization.
The contributors to this volume use the Sensation exhibition as a stepping-stone to analyze larger questions such as the authority the government has to withhold funds, various interpretations of the First Amendment, how to respect divergent cultural and religious values; and the economic stake of museums and dealers in art. In their articles—written expressly for this volume, and spanning the disciplines of law, cultural studies, public policy, and art—the contributors consider issues at the center of arts policy. They propose various legal strategies, curatorial practices, and standards of doing business intended to serve the public interest in the arts.
In September 1999, Sensation, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, opened its doors, igniting a controversy still burning in the art world. This collection of cutting-edge art from the Saatchi collection in England, and the museum’s arrangements with Charles Saatchi to finance the show, so offended New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani that he attempted to shut the museum down by withholding city funds that are crucially needed by that institution. Only a legal ruling prevented him from doing so. Like the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition before it, Sensation once again raises questions about public spending for “controversial” art, but with the added dimension of religious conflict and charges of commercialization.
The contributors to this volume use the Sensation exhibition as a stepping-stone to analyze larger questions such as the authority the government has to withhold funds, various interpretations of the First Amendment, how to respect divergent cultural and religious values; and the economic stake of museums and dealers in art. In their articles—written expressly for this volume, and spanning the disciplines of law, cultural studies, public policy, and art—the contributors consider issues at the center of arts policy. They propose various legal strategies, curatorial practices, and standards of doing business intended to serve the public interest in the arts.
Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film examines the politics of representing Aboriginality, in the process bringing frequently marginalized voices and visions, issues and debates into the limelight. Corinn Columpar uses film theory, postcolonial theory, and Indigenous theory to frame her discussion of the cinematic construction and transnational circulation of Aboriginality. The result is a broad interdisciplinary analysis of how Indigeneity is represented in cinema, supported by more than twenty rigorous and theoretically informed case studies of contemporary feature films by both First- and Fourth-World filmmakers in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Columpar relies heavily on textual analysis of the films but also explores contextual issues in filmmaking such as funding, personnel, modes of production, and means of distribution.
Part one of Unsettling Sights focuses on contact narratives in which the Aboriginal subject is constructed in reactive response to a colonizing or invading presence. Films such as The Piano and The Proposition, wherein a white man “goes native,” and The New World and Map of the Human Heart, which approach contact from the perspective of an Aboriginal character, serve as occasions to examine the ways in which Aboriginal identities are negotiated within dominant cinema. Part two shifts the focus from contact narratives to films that seek to define Aboriginality on its own terms, with reference to a (lost) homeland and/or Indigenous practices of (hi)story-telling: while texts such as Once Were Warriors and Smoke Signals foster an engagement with issues of deterritorialization, relocation, and urbanization, discussion of beDevil, Atanarjuat, and The Business of Fancydancing, among others,bring questions of voice, translation, and the relationship between cinema and oral tradition to the forefront.
Unsettling Sights is the first significant, scholarly examination of Aboriginality and cinema in an international context and will be invaluable to scholars and students in many fields including cinema studies, anthropology, critical race studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.
Conaghan and Malloy draw on insights from the political economy literature, viewing policy making as a “historically conditioned” process, and they conclude that the disturbing tendencies their research reveals are not due to regional pathology but are part of the more general experience of postmodern democracy.
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.
This book mounts a sustained attack on ideas that are dear to many practitioners of analytic philosophy. Charles Travis targets the seductive illusion that—in Wittgenstein’s terms—“if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it, he is operating a calculus according to definite rules.” This book rejects the idea that thoughts are essentially representational items whose content is independent of context. In doing so, it undermines the foundations of much contemporary philosophy of mind.
Travis’s main argument in Unshadowed Thought is that linguistic expressions and forms are occasion-sensitive; they cannot be abstracted out of a concrete context. With compelling examples and a thoroughgoing scrutiny of opposing positions, his book systematically works out the implications of the work of J. L. Austin, Hilary Putnam, and John McDowell. Eloquently insisting that there is no particular way one must structure what one relates to, no one way one must represent it, Unshadowed Thought identifies and resists a certain strain of semantic Platonism that permeates current philosophy—a strain that has had profoundly troubling consequences for our ideas about attitudes and beliefs and for our views about what language might be.
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.
Gaza, the centre of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to the occupation, is the linchpin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the key to its resolution. Since 2005, Israel has deepened the isolation of the territory, severing it almost completely from its most vital connections to the West Bank, Israel and beyond, and has deliberately shattered its economy, transforming Palestinians from a people with political rights into a humanitarian problem.
Sara Roy unpacks this process, looking at US foreign policy towards the Palestinians, as well as analysing the trajectory of Israeli policy toward Gaza, which became a series of punitive approaches meant not only to contain the Hamas regime but weaken Gazan society.
Roy also reflects on Gaza's ruination from a Jewish perspective and discusses the connections between Gaza's history and her own as a child of Holocaust survivors. This book, a follow up from the renowned Failing Peace, comes from one of the world's most acclaimed writers on the region.
Gaza, the centre of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to the occupation, is the linchpin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the key to its resolution. Since 2005, Israel has deepened the isolation of the territory, severing it almost completely from its most vital connections to the West Bank, Israel and beyond, and has deliberately shattered its economy, transforming Palestinians from a people with political rights into a humanitarian problem.
Sara Roy unpacks this process, looking at US foreign policy towards the Palestinians, as well as analysing the trajectory of Israeli policy toward Gaza, which became a series of punitive approaches meant not only to contain the Hamas regime but weaken Gazan society.
Roy also reflects on Gaza's ruination from a Jewish perspective and discusses the connections between Gaza's history and her own as a child of Holocaust survivors. This book, a follow up from the renowned Failing Peace, comes from one of the world's most acclaimed writers on the region.
This collection of essays on the music of migrant minorities in and from Japan examines the central role music plays in the ongoing adjustment, conciliation, and transformation of newcomers and “hosts” alike. It is the first academic text to address musical activities across a range of migrant groups in Japan––particularly those of Tokyo and its neighboring areas and the first to juxtapose such communities with those of Japanese emigrants as ethnic minorities elsewhere. It presents both archival and fieldwork-based case studies that highlight music in the dynamics of encounter and attempted identity-making, under a unifying framework of migration.
The 2019 introduction of a new “Specified Skilled Worker” visa category marked the beginning of Japan’s “new immigration era,” led by the slogan of tabunka kyosei, or “multicultural coexistence.” The contributors to this volume analyze the concept itself and the many problems around realizing this ideal through ethnographic accounts of current minorities, including South Indians, Brazilians, Nepalis, Filipinos, Iranians, and Ainu domestic migrants. This volume will be of interest to ethnomusicologists, students of the cultures of migrant communities, and those engaged with cultural change and diversity in Japan and East Asia.
The world is complex, but acknowledging its complexity requires an appreciation for the many roles context plays in shaping natural phenomena. In Unsimple Truths, Sandra Mitchell argues that the long-standing scientific and philosophical deference to reductive explanations founded on simple universal laws, linear causal models, and predict-and-act strategies fails to accommodate the kinds of knowledge that many contemporary sciences are providing about the world. She advocates, instead, for a new understanding that represents the rich, variegated, interdependent fabric of many levels and kinds of explanation that are integrated with one another to ground effective prediction and action.
Mitchell draws from diverse fields including psychiatry, social insect biology, and studies of climate change to defend “integrative pluralism”—a theory of scientific practices that makes sense of how many natural and social sciences represent the multi-level, multi-component, dynamic structures they study. She explains how we must, in light of the now-acknowledged complexity and contingency of biological and social systems, revise how we conceptualize the world, how we investigate the world, and how we act in the world. Ultimately Unsimple Truths argues that the very idea of what should count as legitimate science itself should change.
Unspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs—including sources by the children Douglas encountered—Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. Her book delineates how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time and offers insight into how society can confront similar scandals today, celebrity and otherwise.
In fourteen chapters on topics ranging from film comedy to reporter movies to Latins in Manhattan, contributors from diverse disciplines explore ethnicity as a broad, complex, multilayered concept. The book's first section scrutinizes ethnicity within the context of traditional modes of film analysis---historical, auteurist, and generic. Essays in the second section relate ethnicity to broader areas of critical thought such as cultural studies, ethnography, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and class studies, analyzing how each intersects and amplifies the other.
Tucked within Missouri's borders are eight Congressionally designated Wilderness areas. These magnificent forests, scattered across the southern portion of the state, combine a wide variety of unique ecosystems. In Unspoiled Beauty, Charles Farmer captures the essence of the Missouri Wilderness experience, allowing even those who have never set foot in the wilderness to enjoy its wonders and appreciate its importance.
Farmer begins by describing the wilderness region prior to the Congressional Wilderness designation, providing an overview of the numerous battles that were waged to reclaim the state's wilderness and to assure its preservation. Featured are key players who were instrumental in the acquisition and preservation of Missouri wilderness.
Farmer devotes a chapter to each of the eight Wilderness areas, accompanied by numerous engaging photographs, many in color. He provides a brief history of each and shares his own fascinating personal experiences of camping, hiking, backpacking, hunting, and fishing within each. He discusses trails, fauna, flora, and other colorful details along the way. His adventures take place during different seasons of the year; he is sometimes alone, sometimes in company. Through his eyes, each area is brought vividly to life.
"Wilderness Tips" and a guide with rules for the novice camper, hiker, backpacker, hunter, and fisherman enhance the book's usefulness. The final chapter lists the areas in Missouri that qualify for Wilderness designation in the New Forest Plan. Unspoiled Beauty may well play a part in saving Missouri's remaining wilderness candidates. It will also help other states that are preparing campaigns to save their own wilderness areas.
Wilderness advocates, hikers and backpackers, fishermen and hunters, anyone who appreciates the great outdoors will enjoy this important new book.
In our talkative Western culture, speech is synonymous with authority and influence while silence is frequently misheard as passive agreement when it often signifies much more. In her groundbreaking exploration of silence as a significant rhetorical art, Cheryl Glenn articulates the ways in which tactical silence can be as expressive and strategic an instrument of human communication as speech itself.
Drawing from linguistics, phenomenology, feminist studies, anthropology, ethnic studies, and literary analysis, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence theorizes both a cartography and grammar of silence. By mapping the range of spaces silence inhabits, Glenn offers a new interpretation of its complex variations and uses.
Glenn contextualizes the rhetoric of silence by focusing on selected contemporary examples. Listening to silence and voice as gendered positions, she analyzes the highly politicized silences and words of a procession of figures she refers to as “all the President’s women,” including Anita Hill, Lani Guiner, Gennifer Flowers, and Chelsea Clinton. She also turns an investigative ear to the cultural taciturnity attributed to various Native American groups—Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Pueblo—and its true meaning. Through these examples, Glenn reinforces the rhetorical contributions of the unspoken, codifying silence as a rhetorical device with the potential to deploy, defer, and defeat power.
Unspoken concludes by suggesting opportunities for further research into silence and silencing, including music, religion, deaf communities, cross-cultural communication, and the circulation of silence as a creative resource within the college classroom and for college writers.
Byers believes that modern-day college sports are no longer a student activity: they are a high-dollar commercial enter-prise, and college athletes should have the same access to the free market as their coaches and colleges. He favors no one as he cites individual cases of corruption in NCAA history. From Byers' first enforcement case, against the University of Kentucky in 1952, to the NCAA's 1987 "death penalty" levied against Southern Methodist University of Dallas, he shows the change in the athletic environment from simple rules and personally responsible officials to convoluted, cyclopedic regulations with high-priced legal firms defending college violators against a limited NCAA enforcement system. This book is a must for anyone involved in college sports--athletes, coaches, fans, college faculty, and administrators.
"There has been no other executive in the history of professional, college, or amateur sports who has had such an impact in his area." --Keith Jackson, ABC Sports
"Walter Byers has done more to shape intercollegiate athletics that any single person in history. He brought a combination of leadership, insight, and integrity to intercollegiate athletics that we will never again see equaled." --Bob Knight, Head Basketball Coach, Indiana University
As NCAA executive director, Byers started the an enforcement program, pioneered a national academic rule for athletes, and signed more than fifty television contracts with ABC, CBS, NBC, ESPN, and Turner Broadcasting. He oversaw the growth of the NCAA basketball tournament to one that, in 1988, grossed $68.2 million. As the one person who has been inside college athletics for forty years, Walter Byers is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the NCAA and today's exploitation of college athletes.
Unstable Frontiers was first published in 1994. 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.
"John Erni's heartfelt and insightful book is a valuable contribution to the study of the cultural politics of AIDS."–Jeff Nunokawa Princeton University
The "cure" for AIDS: The search goes on, keeping pace with our belief that AIDS is incurable. How such a seeming paradox works-and how it may well work against the proper treatment of the disease-is the subject of Unstable Frontiers, a probing, critical look at the cultural politics behind the quest for a cure for AIDS.
This massive commercial and scientific project, John Erni suggests, actually hinges on our contradictory definitions of the disease as curable and incurable at the same time. Drawing on diverse sources, from popular media to medical literature to cultural theory, he shows how the dual discourse of curability/incurability frames the way we think about and act on issues of medical treatment for AIDS. His work makes a major advance in our understanding of—and, perhaps, humane response to—a national crisis.
In his critique of the logic and fantasies underlying the double definition of AIDS, Erni explores a broad range of issues: the scientific paradigm used to develop AZT; the politics of alternative treatment practices, of clinical drug trials, and of AIDS activism; and the notions of time and temporality operating in AIDS treatment science. He also addresses the problematic popular themes, such as "AIDS is invariably fatal" and "Knowledge = Cure."
Unique in its approach to a social and political issue still in the making, the book reveals how AIDS has challenged technomedicine's historical position of authority-and in doing so, recasts this challenge in a powerful and ultimately hopeful way.
John Nguyet Erni is assistant professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire. He has published essays on AIDS and is currently working on a book about AIDS in Thailand.
In his most probing and expansive work to date, Jerome Kagan—one of this country’s leading psychologists—demonstrates that innovative research methods in the behavioral sciences and neurobiology, together with a renewed philosophical commitment to rigorous empiricism, are transforming our understanding of human behavior. Contemporary psychology, according to Kagan, has been preoccupied with three central themes: How malleable is temperament? How predictable are the milestones of cognitive development? How accurate is consciousness as a window onto the self, its motives, beliefs, and emotions?
In a review of past approaches to these questions, Kagan argues persuasively that behavioral scientists have reached less-than-satisfactory answers because they have failed to appreciate the biases inherent in their frame of reference and the limitations of their investigative procedures. He calls into question a number of techniques that have been mainstays of psychological investigation: the Ainsworth Strange Situation for assessing the emotional attachment of an infant to its mother, and interviews and questionnaires as indexes of personality, to name only two. Kagan’s own research has used novel laboratory situations to discover a group of children who exhibit a pattern of behavior he calls “temperamentally inhibited”—they are restless and irritable from birth, and by twenty-four months cling to the mother and show biological signs of high anxiety in unfamiliar situations.
These findings, coupled with current understanding of the structure and chemistry of the nervous system, lead him to speculate that these children are born with a biological predisposition that favors the development of a shy, fearful personality. Through longitudinal studies of this kind, as well as through his cross-cultural investigations of cognitive development, Kagan has infused new meaning into the nature–nurture debate.
In Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, Sean Guynes and Martin Lund bring together a series of essays that contextualize the histories and stakes of whiteness studies, superhero comics, and superhero studies for academics, fans, and media-makers alike. The volume illustrates how the American comic book superhero is fundamentally a figure of white power and white supremacy and ultimately calls for diversity in superhero comics as well as a democratized media culture.
Contributors not only examine superhero narratives but also delve into the production, distribution, audience, and reception of those narratives, highlighting the imbrication of forces that have helped to create, normalize, question, and sometimes even subvert American beliefs about whiteness and race. Unstable Masks considers the co-constitutive nature of identity, representation, narrative, production and consumption, and historical and cultural contexts in forging the stereotypes that decide who gets to be a superhero and who gets to be American on the four-color pages of comic books.
This course-tested book provides a valuable reference for algebraic topologists and includes foundational material essential for graduate study.
"[An] unflinching portrait of the leviathan of American race relations. . . . This important book should be read by all who aspire to create a more perfect union."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Could it be that our unswerving belief in the power of our core values to produce racial equality is nothing but a comforting myth? That is the main argument put forth by Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith . . . The Unsteady March is disturbing because it calls into question our cherished national belief and does so convincingly. . . . [It] is beautifully written, and the social history it provides is illuminating and penetrating."—Aldon Morris, American Journal of Sociology
Winner of the Horace Mann Bond Award of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.
This book explores an important side of public employment that most Americans never get the opportunity to see—high-level career executives who make positive contributions to our quality of life. Norma M. Riccucci profiles six "unsung heroes," the people behind the scenes of some of the most successful programs in American government, and identifies the tools, skills, and strategies that make them effective leaders.
Through in-depth interviews and provocative story-telling, Riccucci demonstrates that while these executive-level bureaucrats—or "execucrats"—may have an overall negative public image, they create, develop, execute, and enforce a number of programs and public policies that change our country for the better. She highlights six of these modern execucrats who best exemplify the creativity, determination, and leadership found in such officials:
—William Black, Senior Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision, who attacked the rampant corruption and mismanagement that created the savings and loan crisis;
—Eileen Claussen, Director, Atmospheric and Indoor Air Programs, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who negotiated as intensely within her own government as with other countries to create an international plan to protect the earth's ozone layer;
—Ambassador Edward Perkins, U.S. State Department, the first African-American Ambassador to South Africa and the first American ambassador to meet with black South African leaders as part of his persistent efforts to end apartheid in that country;
—Stephen Marica, Assistant Inspector General, Small Business Administration, who investigated the Wedtech scandal, which bilked millions of dollars in fraudulent defense contracts from American taxpayers;
—Dr. Vince Hutchins, Director, Division of Maternal and Child Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spearheaded the team that developed "Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition," a public-private partnership that improved, and even saved, the lives of thousands of newborn babies; and
—Dr. Helene Gayle, Division Chief, HIV-AIDS Division, U.S. Centers for Disease Control, who is actively battling the AIDS virus through education and prevention programs around the world.
Riccucci not only relates the intriguing tales of these six dedicated officials who overcame the challenges before them, but she also analyzes the specific factors—from knowledge of the system to honesty, integrity, and humor—that are needed to become a dynamic government executive. Of interest to those both inside and outside government circles, Unsung Heroes gives captivating insights into effective executive leadership.
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
A hardheaded book that confronts and outlines possible solutions to a seemingly intractable problem: that helping the poor often hurts the environment, and vice versa.
Can we fight poverty and inequality while protecting the environment? The challenges are obvious. To rise out of poverty is to consume more resources, almost by definition. And many measures to combat pollution lead to job losses and higher prices that mainly hurt the poor. In Unsustainable Inequalities, economist Lucas Chancel confronts these difficulties head-on, arguing that the goals of social justice and a greener world can be compatible, but that progress requires substantial changes in public policy.
Chancel begins by reviewing the problems. Human actions have put the natural world under unprecedented pressure. The poor are least to blame but suffer the most—forced to live with pollutants that the polluters themselves pay to avoid. But Chancel shows that policy pioneers worldwide are charting a way forward. Building on their success, governments and other large-scale organizations must start by doing much more simply to measure and map environmental inequalities. We need to break down the walls between traditional social policy and environmental protection—making sure, for example, that the poor benefit most from carbon taxes. And we need much better coordination between the center, where policies are set, and local authorities on the front lines of deprivation and contamination.
A rare work that combines the quantitative skills of an economist with the argumentative rigor of a philosopher, Unsustainable Inequalities shows that there is still hope for solving even seemingly intractable social problems.
In rehab, Tave relearns life skills and comes to recognize that her future will be completely different than she’d imagined. Where will she live? How will she find the help she needs? Can her friends rise to the occasion? Or will she be forced to move back in with her mother, putting up with endless talk of faith healers? Her one beacon of hope is Beth, her physical therapist. But Beth’s relationship problems with her own girlfriend push her toward overinvolvement—and risk damaging both her career and Tave’s recovery.
A story of courage, resilience, and love, Unswerving challenges readers’ preconceived notions of disability, of limitations, and of the inevitability of fate.
This book seeks to open a new debate about the processes of frontier history in a variety of cultural contexts, untaming the frontier as an analytic concept, and releasing it in a range of unfamiliar settings. Drawing on examples from over four millennia, it shows that, throughout history, societies have been formed and transformed in relation to their frontiers, and that no one historical case represents the normal or typical frontier pattern.
The contributors—historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists—present numerous examples of the frontier as a shifting zone of innovation and recombination through which cultural materials from many sources have been unpredictably channeled and transformed. At the same time, they reveal recurring processes of frontier history that enable world-historical comparison: the emergence of the frontier in relation to a core area; the mutually structuring interactions between frontier and core; and the development of social exchange, merger, or conflict between previously separate populations brought together on the frontier.
Any frontier situation has many dimensions, and each of the chapters highlights one or more of these, from the physical and ideological aspects of Egypt’s Nubian frontier to the military and cultural components of Inka outposts in Bolivia to the shifting agrarian, religious, and political boundaries in Bengal. They explore cases in which the centripetal forces at work in frontier zones have resulted in cultural hybridization or “creolization,” and in some instances show how satellite settlements on the frontiers of core polities themselves develop into new core polities. Each of the chapters suggests that frontiers are shaped in critical ways by topography, climate, vegetation, and the availability of water and other strategic resources, and most also consider cases of population shifts within or through a frontier zone.
As these studies reveal, transnationalism in today’s world can best be understood as an extension of frontier processes that have developed over thousands of years. This book’s interdisciplinary perspective challenges readers to look beyond their own fields of interest to reconsider the true nature and meaning of frontiers.
Maurer begins by reviewing the strengths and limitations of reductionist experimental approaches. Although these studies have produced much valuable data, their small scale restricts the kinds of inferences that can be drawn from them. Maurer then demonstrates how statistical methods can be used to identify processes (such as dispersal or nonrandom extinction) that operate across broad geographic scales, yet which also have profound impacts on local ecosystems. This macroscopic perspective, Maurer suggests, provides a powerful tool for untangling ecological complexity.
In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe there has been exponential growth in the number of small independent breweries over the past thirty years – a reversal of the corporate consolidation and narrowing of consumer choice that characterized much of the twentieth century. While there are legal and policy components involved in this shift, the contributors to Untapped ask broader questions. How does the growth of craft beer connect to trends like the farm-to-table movement, gentrification, the rise of the “creative class,” and changing attitudes toward both cities and farms? How do craft beers conjure history, place, and authenticity? At perhaps the most fundamental level, how does the rise of craft beer call into being new communities that may challenge or reinscribe hierarchies based on gender, class, and race?
How special education used disability labels to marginalize Black students in public schools
The Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms.
The civil rights and the educational disability rights movements, Mayes shows, have both collaborated and worked at cross-purposes since the beginning of school desegregation. Disability rights advocates built upon the opportunity provided by the civil rights movement to make claims about student invisibility at the level of intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Although special education ostensibly included children from all racial groups, educational disability rights advocates focused on the needs of white disabled students, while school systems used disability discourses to malign and marginalize Black students.
From the 1940s to the present, social science researchers, policymakers, school administrators, and teachers have each contributed to the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, The Unteachables explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect.
The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a top-secret CIA analysis issued in October 1978. One hundred days later the shah--despite his massive military, fearsome security police, and superpower support was overthrown by a popular and largely peaceful revolution. But the CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Charles Kurzman reveals in this penetrating work; Iranians themselves, except for a tiny minority, considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred. Revisiting the circumstances surrounding the fall of the shah, Kurzman offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general.
As one Iranian recalls, "The future was up in the air." Through interviews and eyewitness accounts, declassified security documents and underground pamphlets, Kurzman documents the overwhelming sense of confusion that gripped pre-revolutionary Iran, and that characterizes major protest movements. His book provides a striking picture of the chaotic conditions under which Iranians acted, participating in protest only when they expected others to do so too, the process approaching critical mass in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Only when large numbers of Iranians began to "think the unthinkable," in the words of the U.S. ambassador, did revolutionary expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A corrective to 20-20 hindsight, this book reveals shortcomings of analyses that make the Iranian revolution or any major protest movement seem inevitable in retrospect.
Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and literature, Hayles expands our understanding of cognition and demonstrates that it involves more than consciousness alone. Cognition, as Hayles defines it, is applicable not only to nonconscious processes in humans but to all forms of life, including unicellular organisms and plants. Startlingly, she also shows that cognition operates in the sophisticated information-processing abilities of technical systems: when humans and cognitive technical systems interact, they form “cognitive assemblages”—as found in urban traffic control, drones, and the trading algorithms of finance capital, for instance—and these assemblages are transforming life on earth. The result is what Hayles calls a “planetary cognitive ecology,” which includes both human and technical actors and which poses urgent questions to humanists and social scientists alike.
At a time when scientific and technological advances are bringing far-reaching aspects of cognition into the public eye, Unthought reflects deeply on our contemporary situation and moves us toward a more sustainable and flourishing environment for all beings.
Eugene Walter’s first novel, and winner of the 1954 Lippincott Fiction Prize for Young Novelists, is about a young man from a small central Alabama town who goes south of the “salt line” to Mobile to work in a bank and study law. As soon as this unnamed pilgrim arrives, he realizes that—although he is still in Alabama—he has entered a separate physical kingdom of banana trees and palm fronds, subtropical heat and humidity, and old houses and lacy wrought-iron balconies. In Mobile, Alabama, the town that can claim the oldest Mardi Gras in America, there is no Puritan work ethic; the only ruling forces are those of chaos, craziness, and caprice. Such forces overtake the pilgrim, seduce him away from the beaten career path, and set him on a zigzag course through life.
The Untidy Pilgrim celebrates the insularity as well as the eccentricity of southerners—and Mobilians, in particular—in the mid-twentieth century. Cut off from the national mainstream, they are portrayed as devoid of that particularly American angst over what to “do” and accomplish with one’s life, and indulge instead in art, music, cooking, nature, and love. In this novel Walter dispels the gloomy southern literary tradition established by Faulkner, Capote, and McCullers to illuminate the joyous quirkiness of human existence.
While researching this book, Jack C. Mason made the kind of discovery that historians dream of. He found more than one hundred unpublished and unknown letters from Union general Israel B. Richardson to his family, written from his time as a West Point cadet until the day before his fatal wounding at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. Using these freshly uncovered primary sources as well as extensive research in secondary materials, Mason has written the first-ever biography of Israel Bush Richardson.
Mason traces Richardson’s growth as a soldier through his experiences and the guidance of his superiors, and then as a leader whose style reflected the actions of the former commanders he respected. Though he was a disciplinarian, Richardson took a relaxed attitude toward military rules, earning him the affection of his men. Unfortunately, his military career was cut short just as high-ranking officials began to recognize his aggressive leadership. He was mortally wounded while leading his men at Antietam and died on November 3, 1862.
Until Antietam brings to life a talented and fearless Civil War infantry leader. Richardson’s story, placed within the context of nineteenth-century warfare, exemplifies how one soldier’s life influenced his commanders, his men, and the army as a whole.
Winner of the Army Historical Foundation 2009 Distinguished Book Award
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.
The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.
In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption—but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora—a baby broker.
Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.
Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.
This book tells the story of one grim Sunday in September 1963 when an intentionally planted cache of dynamite ripped through the walls of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and ended the dreams and the lives of four young black girls. Their deaths spurred the Kennedy administration to send an army of FBI agents to Alabama and led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. When the Justice Department was unable to bring anyone to trial for this heinous crime, a young Alabama attorney general named Bill Baxley began his own investigation to find the perpetrators. In 1977, 14 years after the bombing, Baxley brought one Klansman to trial and, in a courtroom only blocks from the bombed church (now a memorial to the victims), persuaded a jury to return a guilty verdict. More than 20 years later two other perpetrators were tried for the bombing, found guilty, and remanded to prison.
Frank Sikora has used the court records, FBI reports, oral interviews, and newspaper accounts to weave a story of spellbinding proportions. A reporter by profession, Sikora tells this story compellingly, explaining why the civil rights movement had to be successful and how Birmingham had to change.
Rai recounts his experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theater in Bhopal: the sensory experience of the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd. From that event, he elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. He considers media as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading, connecting human bodies, organizational structures, and energies, thus creating an inextricable bond between affect and capital. Expanding on the notion of media contagion, Rai traces the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India.
Ross Chambers argues that culture produces itself as civilized by denying the forms of collective violence and other traumatic experience that it cannot control. In the context of such denial, personal accounts of collective disaster can function as a form of counter-denial. By investigating a range of writing on AIDS, the First World War, and the Holocaust, Chambers shows how such writing produces a rhetorical effect of haunting, as it seeks to describe the reality of those experiences culture renders unspeakable.
Ross Chambers is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Michigan. His other books includeFacing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author.
Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced before the dictatorship era, in what is often considered the boom of Latin American fiction. Distancing himself from previous celebratory interpretations, he understands the boom as a manifestation of mourning for literature’s declining aura. Against this background, Avelar offers a reassessment of testimonial forms, social scientific theories of authoritarianism, current transformations undergone by the university, and an analysis of a number of novels by some of today’s foremost Latin American writers—such as Ricardo Piglia, Silviano Santiago, Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll, and Tununa Mercado. Avelar shows how the ‘untimely’ quality of these narratives is related to the position of literature itself, a mode of expression threatened with obsolescence.
This book will appeal to scholars and students of Latin American literature and politics, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as to all those interested in the role of literature in postmodernity.
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.
Untimely Women recovers the work of three early-twentieth-century working women, none of whom history has understood as feminists or rhetors: cinema icon and memoirist, Mae West; silent film screenwriter and novelist, Anita Loos; and journalist and mega-publisher, Marcet Haldeman-Julius. While contemporary scholarship tends to highlight and recover women who most resemble academic feminists in their uses of propositional rhetoric, Jason Barrett-Fox uses what he terms a medio-materialist historiography to emphasize the different kinds of political and ontological gender-power that emerged from the inscriptional strategies these women employed to navigate and critique male gatekeepers––from movie stars to directors to editors to abusive husbands.
In recasting the work of West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius in this way, Barrett-Fox reveals the material and ontological ramifications of their forms of invention, particularly their ability to tell trauma in ways that reach beyond their time to raise the consciousness of audiences unavailable to them in their lifetimes. Untimely Women thus accomplishes important historical and rhetorical work that not only brings together feminist historiography, rhetorical materialism, and posthumanism but also redefines what counts as feminist rhetoric.
No matter what we do, however kind or generous our deeds may seem, a hidden motive of selfishness lurks--or so science has claimed for years. This book, whose publication promises to be a major scientific event, tells us differently. In Unto Others philosopher Elliott Sober and biologist David Sloan Wilson demonstrate once and for all that unselfish behavior is in fact an important feature of both biological and human nature. Their book provides a panoramic view of altruism throughout the animal kingdom--from self-sacrificing parasites to insects that subsume themselves in the superorganism of a colony to the human capacity for selflessness--even as it explains the evolutionary sense of such behavior.
Explaining how altruistic behavior can evolve by natural selection, this book finally gives credence to the idea of group selection that was originally proposed by Darwin but denounced as heretical in the 1960s. With their account of this controversy, Sober and Wilson offer a detailed case study of scientific change as well as an indisputable argument for group selection as a legitimate theory in evolutionary biology.
Unto Others also takes a novel evolutionary approach in explaining the ultimate psychological motives behind unselfish human behavior. Developing a theory of the proximate mechanisms that most likely evolved to motivate adaptive helping behavior, Sober and Wilson show how people and perhaps other species evolved the capacity to care for others as a goal in itself.
A truly interdisciplinary work that blends biology, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, this book will permanently change not just our view of selfless behavior but also our understanding of many issues in evolutionary biology and the social sciences.
In The Untold Story of Shiloh, Timothy B. Smith fills in those gaps, looking beyond two days of battle and offering unique insight into the history of unexplored periods and topics concerning the Battle of Shiloh and the Shiloh National Military Park.
This collection of essays, some previously unpublished, tackles a diverse range of subjects, including Shiloh's historiography, the myths about the battle that were created, and the mindsets that were established after the battle. The book reveals neglected military aspects of the battle, such as the naval contribution, the climax of the Shiloh campaign at Corinth, and the soldiers' views of the battle. The essays also focus on the Shiloh National Military Park's establishment and continuation with particular emphasis on those who played key roles in its creation.
Taken together, the essays tell the overall story of Shiloh in greater detail than ever before. General readers and historians alike will discover that The Untold Story of Shiloh is an important contribution to their understanding of this crucial episode in the Civil War.
Timothy B. Smith is on staff at the Shiloh National Military Park. He is author of Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg and This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park.
Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out of that familiar account are nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Recounting the fascinating history of audio-recorded literature, Matthew Rubery traces the path of innovation from Edison’s recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for his tinfoil phonograph in 1877, to the first novel-length talking books made for blinded World War I veterans, to today’s billion-dollar audiobook industry.
The Untold Story of the Talking Book focuses on the social impact of audiobooks, not just the technological history, in telling a story of surprising and impassioned conflicts: from controversies over which books the Library of Congress selected to become talking books—yes to Kipling, no to Flaubert—to debates about what defines a reader. Delving into the vexed relationship between spoken and printed texts, Rubery argues that storytelling can be just as engaging with the ears as with the eyes, and that audiobooks deserve to be taken seriously. They are not mere derivatives of printed books but their own form of entertainment.
We have come a long way from the era of sound recorded on wax cylinders, when people imagined one day hearing entire novels on mini-phonographs tucked inside their hats. Rubery tells the untold story of this incredible evolution and, in doing so, breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctively modern art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read.
An interlinked collection of essays representing the best of Stephen D. Moore’s groundbreaking scholarship
This collection of previously published essays is a companion to The Bible in Theory: Critical and Postcritical Essays (2010). Chapters engage postcolonial studies, cultural studies, deconstruction, autobiographical criticism, masculinity studies, queer theory, affect theory, and animality studies—methods Moore believes present unprecedented challenges to the monochrome model of Revelation scholarship based on traditional historical-critical methods.
Features:
- Nine essays on biblical literary criticism including two co-written with Jennifer A. Glancy and Catherine Keller
- Contextual introductions for each essay
- Annotated bibliographies
Told in unflinching detail, this is the story of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, also known as the Giddings Regiment or the Abolition Regiment, after its founder, radical abolitionist Congressman J. R. Giddings. The men who enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth OVI were, according to its lore, handpicked to ensure each was as pure in his antislavery beliefs as its founder. Whether these soldiers would fight harder than other soldiers, and whether the people of their hometowns would remain devoted to the ideals of the regiment, were questions that could only be tested by the experiment of war.
The Untried Life is the story of these men from their very first regimental formation in a county fairground to the devastation of Gettysburg and the march to Atlanta and back again, enduring disease and Confederate prisons. It brings to vivid life the comradeship and loneliness that pervaded their days on the march. Dozens of unforgettable characters emerge, animated by their own letters and diaries: Corporal Nathan Parmenter, whose modest upbringing belies the eloquence of his writings; Colonel Lewis Buckley, one of the Twenty-Ninth’s most charismatic officers; and Chaplain Lyman Ames, whose care of the sick and wounded challenged his spiritual beliefs.
The Untried Life shows how the common soldier lived—his entertainments, methods of cooking, medical treatment, and struggle to maintain family connections—and separates the facts from the mythology created in the decades after the war.
Reviewing the processes taken by all forty-four presidents to form new legal precedents and the constitutional conventions that have developed as a result, Harold H. Bruff shows that the president is both more and less powerful than many suppose. He explores how presidents have been guided by both their predecessors’ and their own interpretations of constitutional text, as well as how they implement policies in ways that statutes do not clearly authorize or forbid. But while executive power has expanded far beyond its original conception, Bruff argues that the modern presidency is appropriately limited by the national political process—their actions are legitimized by the assent of Congress and the American people or rejected through debilitating public outcry, judicial invalidation, reactive legislation, or impeachment. Synthesizing over two hundred years of presidential activity and conflict, this timely book casts new light on executive behavior and the American constitutional system.
Focusing on collaborations with a musical component, Albright views these works as either figures of dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias) or figures of consonance that try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung). In so doing he offers a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a compelling model for the analysis of all artistic collaborations.
Untwisting the Serpent is the recipient of the 2001 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship of the Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University.
Riaz M. Khan, a senior Pakistani diplomat, participated actively in all meetings on Afghanistan in the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and in all of the Geneva negotiating rounds (1882–1988). Drawing upon his personal experience, official documents, scholarly literature, and press accounts, he provides a unique insider’s view of these precedent-setting negotiations, which were often shrouded in secrecy and misperceptions.
Khan examines the interests, positions, and behind-the-scenes maneuverings of the major players—Afghan governments and resistance groups, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, the United States, and UN mediators—and assesses the impact of military and political developments inside Afghanistan and elsewhere, including the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. Khan’s authoritative account of these critical diplomatic initiatives sheds important light on the internal dynamics of the multilateral Afghanistan negotiations.
In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established the core psychoanalytic thesis that sexuality is central to formations of the unconscious. With this book, Eric L. Santner inverts Freud’s title to take up the sexuality of theory—or, more exactly, the modes of enjoyment to be found in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, “theory.” Santner unfolds his argument by tracking his own relationship with this tradition and the ways his intellectual and spiritual development has been informed by it.
Untying Things Together is both an intellectual history of major theoretical paradigms and a call for their reexamination and renewal. Revisiting many of the topics he has addressed in previous work, Santner proposes a new way of conceptualizing the eros of thinking, attuned to how our minds and bodies individually and collectively incorporate or “encyst” on a void at the heart of things. Rather than proposing a “return to theory,” Santner’s book simply employs theory as a way of further “(un)tying together” the resources of philosophy, art and literature, theology, psychoanalysis, political thought, and more.
The Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path launched its violent campaign against the government in Peru’s Ayacucho region in 1980. When the military and counterinsurgency police forces were dispatched to oppose the insurrection, the violence quickly escalated. The peasant community of Sarhua was at the epicenter of the conflict, and this small village is the focus of Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. There, nearly a decade after the event, Olga M. González follows the tangled thread of a public secret: the disappearance of Narciso Huicho, the man blamed for plunging Sarhua into a conflict that would sunder the community for years.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a novel use of a cycle of paintings, González examines the relationship between secrecy and memory. Her attention to the gaps and silences within both the Sarhuinos’ oral histories and the paintings reveals the pervasive reality of secrecy for people who have endured episodes of intense violence. González conveys how public secrets turn the process of unmasking into a complex mode of truth telling. Ultimately, public secrecy is an intricate way of “remembering to forget” that establishes a normative truth that makes life livable in the aftermath of a civil war.
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.
Majid moves beyond Edward Said’s unmasking of orientalism in the West to examine the intellectual assumptions that have prevented a more nuanced understanding of Islam’s legacies. In addition to questioning the pervasive logic that assumes the “naturalness” of European social and political organizations, he argues that it is capitalism that has intensified cultural misunderstanding and created global tensions. Besides examining the resiliency of orientalism, the author critically examines the ideologies of nationalism and colonialist categories that have redefined the identity of Muslims (especially Arabs and Africans) in the modern age and totally remapped their cultural geographies. Majid is aware of the need for Muslims to rethink their own assumptions. Addressing the crisis in Arab-Muslim thought caused by a desire to simultaneously “catch up” with the West and also preserve Muslim cultural authenticity, he challenges Arab and Muslim intellectuals to imagine a post-capitalist, post-Eurocentric future. Critical of Islamic patriarchal practices and capitalist hegemony, Majid contends that Muslim feminists have come closest to theorizing a notion of emancipation that rescues Islam from patriarchal domination and resists Eurocentric prejudices.
Majid’s timely appeal for a progressive, multicultural dialogue that would pave the way to a polycentric world will interest students and scholars of postcolonial, cultural, Islamic, and Marxist studies.
On the foggy, cold morning of February 1, 1896, a boy came upon what he thought was a pile of clothes. It was soon discovered to be the headless body of a young woman, brutally butchered and discarded. She was found just across the river from one of the largest cities in the country, Cincinnati, Ohio. Soon the authorities, the newspapers, and the public were obsessed with finding the poor girl’s identity and killer. Misinformation and rumor spread wildly around the case and led authorities down countless wrong paths. Initially, it appeared the crime would go unsolved. An autopsy, however, revealed that the victim was four months pregnant, presenting a possible motive. It would take the hard work of a sheriff, two detectives, and the unlikely dedication of a shoe dealer to find out who the girl was; and once she had been identified, the case came together. Within a short time the police believed they had her killers—a handsome and charismatic dental student and his roommate—and enough evidence to convict them of first-degree murder. While the suspects seemed to implicate themselves, the police never got a clear answer as to what exactly happened to the girl and they were never able to find her lost head—despite the recovery of a suspicious empty valise.
Centering his riveting new book, Unwanted: A Murder Mystery of the Gilded Age, around this shocking case and how it was solved, historian Andrew Young re-creates late nineteenth- century America, where Coca-Cola in bottles, newfangled movie houses, the Gibson Girl, and ragtime music played alongside prostitution, temperance, racism, homelessness, the rise of corporations, and the women’s rights movement. While the case inspired the sensationalized pulp novel Headless Horror, songs warning girls against falling in love with dangerous men, ghost stories, and the eerie practice of random pennies left heads up on a worn gravestone, the story of an unwanted young woman captures the contradictions of the Gilded Age as America stepped into a new century, and toward a modern age.
The baby abandoned on the doorstep is a phenomenon that has virtually disappeared from our experience, but in the early modern world, unwanted children were a very real problem for parents, government officials, and society. The Unwanted Child skillfully recreates sixteenth-century Nuremberg to explore what befell abandoned, neglected, abused, or delinquent children in this critical period.
Joel F. Harrington tackles this question by focusing on the stories of five individuals. In vivid and poignant detail, he recounts the experiences of an unmarried mother-to-be, a roaming mercenary who drifts in and out of his children’s lives, a civic leader handling the government’s response to problems arising from unwanted children, a homeless teenager turned prolific thief, and orphaned twins who enter state care at the age of nine. Braiding together these compelling portraits, Harrington uncovers and analyzes the key elements that link them, including the impact of war and the vital importance of informal networks among women. From the harrowing to the inspiring, The Unwanted Child paints a gripping picture of life on the streets five centuries ago.
Unwanted Claims is a work of political sociology that provides an illuminating account of political life in the U.S. welfare system that should be of interest to scholars, students, policy practitioners, and the general public. Written in a style that minimizes technical jargon, avoids complex statistical presentations, and makes extensive use of clients' own descriptions of their experiences, beliefs, and actions, it offers an accessible and humanizing portrait of welfare participation that challenges conventional wisdom and raises important questions about poverty, welfare, and democracy in America.
Joe Soss is Assistant Professor of Government, The American University.
Prior to 1931, many Mexican Americans left the United States voluntarily, prompted by homesickness, unemployment, and the Mexican government’s offer of free small land parcels. As the Great Depression deepened, repatriation pressures increased. Anglo groups lobbied for laws that excluded aliens from jobs and welfare benefits. Many businessmen, government officials, and social workers believed that removing Mexican Americans would open up jobs for U.S. citizens and alleviate some of the burden placed on relief agencies.
The Department of Labor’s federal deportation drive, launched in 1931, created an atmosphere of fear and tension in Mexican American communities. Immigration agents conducted surprise searches for people who had entered the country illegally, and Mexicans who had crossed the border before restrictive legislation was passed became prime targets of the deportation campaign.
Welfare agencies throughout the United States organized repatriation programs. The Los Angeles County Welfare Bureau, with the most extensive program, was responsible for the removal of more than thirteen thousand Mexican Americans. A few well-publicized deportations had frightened Mexicans who were unsure of their immigration status. Many chose repatriation over possible deportation.
Using much archival material and many previously unpublished government documents, Hoffman focuses on the repatriation experience in Los Angeles. The city’s large Mexican American population provides an excellent case study of the entire movement. He also surveys the process of Mexican repatriation throughout the entire United States.
Despite three decades of intense scrutiny and repeated attempts at ambitious reform, our laws against rape and sexual harassment still fail to protect women from sexual overreaching and abuse. What went wrong? In this original, provocative, and enlightening work, Stephen Schulhofer, a distinguished scholar in criminal law, shows the need to refocus our laws against rape and to create a new system of legal safeguards against interference with sexual autonomy.
Our laws provide comprehensive protection for property rights, labor, and other important interests, but sexual autonomy—the right to choose freely whether and when to be sexually intimate with another person—is devalued and ignored. With vivid examples, including stranger assaults, date rapes, and sexual encounters between job supervisors and subordinates, teachers and students, doctors and patients, lawyers and clients, Schulhofer shows that recent reforms of rape and sexual harassment law are overrated and inadequate. From the excessive degree of force necessary for an aggressive action to be defined as rape, to the gray areas in which coercion and exploitation can be used to elicit a false but legally valid “consent,” Schulhofer offers a clear analysis of the limits of current standards. His proposals for a radically different approach hold the promise of genuine respect and effective protection for the sexual autonomy of both women and men. It is an ambitious yet sensible vision, committed to allowing willing partners to seek consensual relationships, while fully protecting each person’s right to refuse sexual encounters that are not genuinely desired.
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