BiblioVault - Books by Jerome

Race and Retail

Consumption across the Color Line

Bay, Mia

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses.

Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods. In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil.

Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

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Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture

Edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris

University of Alabama Press, 2009

"What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself!"
--Franz Kafka

Kafka's quip--paradoxical, self-questioning, ironic--highlights vividly some of the key issues of identity and self-representation for Jewish writers in the 20th century. No group of writers better represents the problems of Jewish identity than Jewish poets writing in the American modernist tradition--specifically secular Jews: those disdainful or suspicious of organized religion, yet forever shaped by those traditions.

This collection of essays is the first to address this often obscured dimension of modern and contemporary poetry: the secular Jewish dimension. Editors Daniel Morris and Stephen Paul Miller asked their contributors to address what constitutes radical poetry written by Jews defined as "secular," and whether or not there is a Jewish component or dimension to radical and modernist poetic practice in general. These poets and critics address these questions by exploring the legacy of those poets who preceded and influenced them--Stein, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, and Ginsberg, among others.

While there is no easy answer for these writers about what it means to be a Jew, in their responses there is a rich sense of how being Jewish reflects on their aesthetics and practices as poets, and how the tradition of the avant-garde informs their identities as Jews. Fragmented identities, irony, skepticism, a sense of self as "other" or "outsider," distrust of the literal, and belief in a tradition that questions rather than answers--these are some of the qualities these poets see as common to themselves, the poetry they make, and the tradition they work within.

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Repression and Dissociation

Implications for Personality Theory, Psychopathology and Health

Jerome L. Singer

University of Chicago Press, 1990

This book features contributions from twenty six leading experts that survey the theoretical, historical, methodological, empirical, and clinical aspects of repression and the repressive personality style, from both psychoanalytic and cognitive psychological perspectives.

"Rarely does a volume present contributions on a controversial topic from such distinguished clinicians and experimentalists . . . . There is something of interest in this volume for almost anyone involved in experimental cognitive psychology and psychiatry."—Carroll E. Izard, Contemporary Psychology

"The concept of repression is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory. . . . This is a delightful book, unusually well-written. . . . Recommended."—Choice

"Readable, thorough, wide ranging and consistently interesting. . . . A testament to the continuing power of psychodynamic ideas when faced with individual psychopathology."—Sue Llewelyn, Psychologist

"Singer has brought together some of the best empirical research in the areas of unconscious mental activity and repression—that is at once interdisciplinary and scholarly."—Howard D. Lerner, International Review of Psycho-analysis

"A rich reference, replete with summaries and citations, covering a variety of topics related to the psychology of repression and dissociation. . . . A thoughtful, detailed and eclectic discussion of the scientific and theoretical basis of repression and dissociation."—Steven Lazrove, M.D., American Journal of Psychiatry

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A Right to Health

Medicine, Marginality, and Health Care Reform in Northeastern Brazil

By Jessica Scott Jerome

University of Texas Press, 2015

In 1988, a new health care system, the Sistema Único de Saúde (Unified Health Care System or SUS) was formally established in Brazil. The system was intended, among other goals, to provide universal access to health care services and to redefine health as a citizen’s right and a duty of the state. A Right to Health explores how these goals have unfolded within an urban peripheral community located on the edges of the northeastern city of Fortaleza. Focusing on the decade 1998–2008 and the impact of health care reforms on one low-income neighborhood, Jessica Jerome documents the tensions that arose between the ideals of the reforms and their entanglement with pervasive socioeconomic inequality, neoliberal economic policy, and generational tension with the community.

Using ethnographic and historical research, the book traces the history of political activism in the community, showing that, since the community’s formation in the early 1930s, residents have consistently fought for health care services. In so doing, Jerome develops a multilayered portrait of urban peripheral life and suggests that the notion of health care as a right of each citizen plays a major role not only in the way in which health care is allocated, but, perhaps more importantly, in how health care is understood and experienced.

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The Romantic Ideology

A Critical Investigation

Jerome J. McGann

University of Chicago Press, 1983

Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideology—by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations—Jerome J. McGann presents a new, critical view of the subject that calls for a radically revisionary reading of Romanticism.

In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities.

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