A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
“Be always converting, and be always converted; turn us again, O Lord,” Thomas Shepard urged his Cambridge congregation in the 1640s. This mandate coming down from American Puritan times to New Age seekers, to be “always converting, and always converted,” places a radical burden on the self as site of renewal and world-change, even as conversion becomes surrounded by deconversion (rejection of prior beliefs) and counterconversion (turns to alternative beliefs) across global modernity.
Rob Wilson’s reconceptualization of the American project of conversion begins with the story of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity, “torn from the stomach” of his Native Pacific homeland and transplanted to New England. Wilson argues that ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s conversion is both remarkable and prototypically American, because he dared to redefine himself via this drive to rebirth.
By mapping the poetics and politics of conversion and counterconversion, Wilson returns conversion to its central place in the American literature, history, and psyche. Through ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s story, and through the works of the Tongan social scientist and fiction writer Epeli Hau‘ofa, Wild West poet Ai, and the mercurial Bob Dylan, Wilson demonstrates that conversion—seemingly an anachronistic concern in this secular age—is instead a global, yet deeply American subject, less about “salvation” or finality than about “experimentation” and the quest for modern beatitude.
Be Faithful unto Death is the moving story of a bright and sensitive schoolboy growing up in an old-established boarding school in the city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. Misi, a dreamer and would-be writer, is falsely accused of stealing a winning lottery ticket. The torments through which he goes – and grows – are superbly described.
The novel is brimming with vivid detail from the provincial life that Móricz knew so well and shot through with a sense of the tragic fate of a newly truncated Hungary.
Homosexuality has become increasingly accepted in mainstream America over the past two decades. Yet despite indications of progress that can be found everywhere from academia to popular culture, gay men and women remain the target of much discrimination and stigma, particularly within conservative Christianity.
In Be Not Deceived, Michelle Wolkomir explores the difficult dilemma that gay Christians face in their attempts to reconcile their religious and sexual identities. She introduces the ideologies and practices of two alternative and competing ministries that offer solutions for Christians who experience homosexual desire.
One organization—the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches—believes that God made people gay to suit divine purposes. Changing one’s sexuality is therefore impossible and a defiance of God. In contrast, Exodus International preaches that homosexuality is a sin and a symptom of disordered psychological development—one that can be cured through redemptive prayer. By comparing participant experiences in these ministries, Wolkomir explores the paths and processes by which members learn to become gay or ex-gay Christians.
Through careful analysis of the groups’ ideologies, interactions, and symbolic resources, Be Not Deceived goes far beyond the obvious differences between the ministries to uncover their similarities, namely that both continue to define heterosexuality as the normative and dominant lifestyle.
Silicon Valley tech giants design their products to hook even the most sophisticated adults. Imagine, then, the influence these devices have on the developing minds of young people. Touted as tools of the future that kids must master to ensure a job in the new economy, they are, in reality, the culprits, stealing our children’s attention, making them anxious, agitated, and depressed.
What’s worse, schools across the country are going digital under the assumption that a tablet with a wi-fi connection is what’s lacking in our education system. Add to that the legion of dangers invited by unregulated access to the internet, and it becomes clear that our screen-saturated culture is eroding some of the essential aspects of childhood.
In Be the Parent, Please, former New York Post and Wall Street Journal writer Naomi Schaefer Riley draws from her experience as a mother of three and delves into the latest research on the harmful effects that excessive technology usage has on a child’s intellectual, social, and moral formation. Throughout each chapter, she backs up her discussion with “tough mommy tips”—realistic advice for parents who want to take back control from tech.
With the alluring array of gadgets, apps, and utopian promises expanding by the day, engulfing more and more of our lives, Be the Parent, Please is both a wake-up call and an indispensable guide for parents who care about the healthy development of their children.
In Be Water, Ming-sho Ho examines the dynamics of the city-wide uprising from the perspective of agency power. He seeks to understand how numerous and anonymous Hongkongers contributed to this epoch-making campaign as well as how they responded to the full-scale state repression that enveloped them. Ho praises and questions the durability of the inventive Be Water Revolution and how the activists encouraged protests spontaneously, through interpersonal networks and by voluntarily collaborating with strangers at great personal risk.
Ho posits a new concept of “collective improvisation” to make sense of such a decentralized yet creative way of protesting. Be Water seeks to understand the rise and long afterlife of this movement and illustrate its efficacy. As Ho shows, these dynamics of collective improvisation have implications for contemporary protest movements around the world.
Our beaches are eroding, sinking, washing out right under our houses, hotels, bridges; vacation dreamlands become nightmare scenes of futile revetments, fills, groins, what have you—all thrown up in a frantic defense against the natural system. The romantic desire to live on the seashore is in doomed conflict with an age-old pattern of beach migration. Yet it need not be so. Conservationist Wallace Kaufman teams up with marine geologist Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., in an evaluation of America's beaches from coast to coast, giving sound advice on how to judge a safe beach development from a dangerous one and how to live at the shore sensibly and safely.
Beaches, Bays, and Barrens introduces readers to the natural wonders of the Jersey Shore, revealing its unique ecology and fascinating history. The journey begins with the contributions and discoveries of early naturalists who visited the region and an overview of endangered species and natural history, followed by chapters that explore different facets of the shore’s environments. These start with sandy beaches and dunes and culminate in the engaging Pine Barrens, the vital watershed for much of the state’s varied coastline. Along the way, readers will also learn about whaling, decoy carvers, an extinct duck, and the cultivation of wild blueberries.
Including over seventy color photographs, the book also features twenty-three infoboxes that go deep into areas of ecological or historical interest, such as the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge or the Jaws-like shark attacks of 1916. From Cape May to Sandy Hook, biologist Eric G. Bolen takes you on a guided tour of the Jersey Shore’s rich ecological heritage.
How Arab states use tourism for their own ends
Despite being viewed as a dangerous region to visit, leisure travel across the Middle East has thrived even in the post–9/11 era. In Beaches, Ruins, Resorts, Waleed Hazbun investigates this overlooked industry to show how tourism is shaping the economic development and international relations of the region in dramatic ways.
Following Europeans seeking Mediterranean beaches, Israelis crossing into Jordan as leisure tourists, and visitors discovering Dubai, Hazbun offers an original perspective on the Middle East and North Africa and challenges common portrayals of Arab nations as disconnected from the rest of the world. Rather, Hazbun reveals how government elites are using tourism to take part in globalization while, at the same time, crafting it to serve state interests. Paradoxically, the expansion of travel in the region has allowed states to encourage integration into the global economy while simultaneously expanding control over their society. Beaches, Ruins, Resorts also explores tourism’s broader beneficial effects on the region, such as aiding the peace process between Israel and Jordan, fostering Tunisia’s economic connection with Europe, and transforming Arab cities into hubs of international travel.Hazbun tells the new and surprising story of how the draw of glittering beaches, luxury hotels and resorts, and sightseeing at ancient ruins impacts the Arab world—promoting both economic globalization and political authoritarianism. In doing so, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts provides a much-needed guide for those interested in the changing nature of this fraught region and its place in the world.
Beachlight is a sustained poem divided into smaller parts that take on the anonymous voices of those lost and forgotten. A walk along a Singaporean beach transforms into a meditation that bridges an ecological consciousness to the sexual and the homoerotic. The poems in Beachlight expose revelations about the nature of desire, inviting readers to walk beside—and inside—them, reminding us of what we gain when we abandon ourselves to nature and exhorting us to reclaim our primordial connections to the world and to one another.
The Liang dynasty (502–557) is one of the most brilliant and creative periods in Chinese history and one of the most underestimated and misunderstood. Under the Liang, literary activities, such as writing, editing, anthologizing, and cataloguing, were pursued on an unprecedented scale, yet the works of this era are often dismissed as “decadent” and no more than a shallow prelude to the glories of the Tang.
This book is devoted to contextualizing the literary culture of this era—not only the literary works themselves but also the physical process of literary production such as the copying and transmitting of texts; activities such as book collecting, anthologizing, cataloguing, and various forms of literary scholarship; and the intricate interaction of religion, particularly Buddhism, and literature. Its aim is to explore the impact of social and political structure on the literary world.
In this fresh new take on the two women’s stories, Jennifer Pullen takes us away from the familiar and deeper into their experiences. Rewriting Homer, Pullen revitalizes these two figures for the contemporary era. In A Bead of Amber on Her Tongue, Aphrodite maintains autonomy through her experience of her own body, even when forced into marriage. Helen of Troy, meanwhile, harbors a love for her maid, Esme, that no conquering hero can vanquish. Revisiting these classic stories with an inventive twist, Pullen shows that, with a little imagination, the classics may yet bear new insights.
In Bealport, Jeffrey Lewis takes us inside the town, revealing its secrets, acknowledging its problems, and honoring its ambitions. Brilliantly deploying a large cast from all walks of life, this novel reveals small town America in the early twenty-first century through the interwoven secrets and desires of its residents, and through them delivers a striking portrait of America at a moment of national uncertainty.
Bealport, called “a hugely satisfying read” by the Evening Standard and “deeply appealing” by the Times Literary Supplement, is now available in paperback.
Bear draws on cultural material from around the world to examine the various legends and myths surrounding the bear, including ceremonies and taboos that govern the hunting, killing, and eating of bears. The book also looks at the role of bears in modern culture as the subjects of stories, songs, and films; as exhibited objects in circuses and zoos; and, perhaps most famously, as toys. Bieder also considers the precarious future of the bear as it is threatened by loss of habitat, poaching, global warming, and disease and discusses the impact of human behavior on bears and their environments.
Accompanied by numerous vibrant photographs and illustrations, and written in an engaging fashion, Bear is an appealing and informative volume for anyone who has curled up with Winnie-the-Pooh or marveled at this powerful king of the forest.
All the world over, people tell stories to express their deepest feelings about such things as what makes a "real" man or woman; what true love, courage, or any other virtue is; what the proper relationships are between people. Often groups of people widely separated by space or time will tell the same basic story, but with differences in the details that reveal much about a particular group's worldview.
This book looks at differences in the telling of several common Hispanic folktales. James Taggart contrasts how two men—a Spaniard and an Aztec-speaking Mexican—tell such tales as "The Bear's Son." He explores how their stories present different ways of being a man in their respective cultures.
Taggart's analysis contributes to a revision of Freud's theory of gender, which was heavily grounded in biological determinism. Taggart focuses instead on how fathers reproduce different forms of masculinity in their sons. In particular, he shows how fathers who care for their infant sons teach them a relational masculinity based on a connected view of human relationships. Thus, The Bear and His Sons will be important reading not only in anthropology and folklore, but also in the growing field of men's studies.
Following desperate characters in desperate circumstances in the rural Midwest
In these colorful, darkly comic stories, veteran journalist and crime reporter John Counts takes readers to an often-ignored part of the country: a fictional Great Lakes coastal town in northern Michigan defined by beauty and bleakness. The cast of characters in these connected stories ranges from addicts to backwoods misfits to ruined lumber families, all bound together by their desire to obtain something just out of reach. Big Frank breaks out of a rehab facility trying to outrun grief. The women in the village of Brotherhood grapple with sterility resulting from an environmental calamity. A local politician must convince her mother to leave a nudist colony. And in the final, sweeping story, a splinter group from the local tribe attempts to reclaim its ancestral land by force. The people of Bear County and their predicaments encompass the wildly original and yet totally ordinary truths about American life off the beaten track.
The oldest discovered statue, fashioned some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, is of a bear. The lion was not always king. From antiquity to the Middle Ages, the bear’s centrality in cults and mythologies left traces in European languages, literatures, and legends from the Slavic East to Celtic Britain. Historian Michel Pastoureau considers how this once venerated creature was deposed by the advent of Christianity and continued to sink lower in the symbolic bestiary before rising again in Pyrrhic triumph as a popular toy.
The early Church was threatened by pagan legends of the bear’s power, among them a widespread belief that male bears were sexually attracted to women and would violate them, producing half-bear, half-human beings—invincible warriors who founded royal lines. Marked for death by the clergy, bears were massacred. During the Renaissance, the demonic prestige bears had been assigned in biblical allegory was lost to the goat, ass, bat, and owl, who were the devil’s new familiars, while the lion was crowned as the symbol of nobility. Once the undefeated champions of the Roman arena, prized in princely menageries, bears became entertainers in the marketplace, trained to perform humiliating tricks or muzzled and devoured by packs of dogs for the amusement of humans. By the early twentieth century, however, the bear would return from exile, making its way into the hearts of children everywhere as the teddy bear.
This compelling history reminds us that men and bears have always been inseparable, united by a kinship that gradually moved from nature to culture—a bond that continues to this day.
Craig Denton's documentary takes on these questions. He tells the story of the river and the people, of many sorts, with diverse purposes, who live and depend on it. Bear River begins in alpine snowfields, lakes, and creeks in the Uinta Mountains, flows north through Wyoming, loops south in Idaho, and enters the inland sea by way of the an environmentally critical bird refuge. Along the way it has many uses: habitat, farms, electricity, recreation, lawns and homes. Denton researches the natural and human history of the river, photographed it, interviewed many stakeholders, and tried to capture the river perspective. His photographs, printed as crisp duotones, carry us downstream, ultimately to big questions, begging to be answered soon, about what we should and can make of the Bear River. Denton writes,
Gravity my engine,
Water my soul.
I am the teller of life and deep time.
You would measure me.
Sever me.
Own me.
In your name.
Let me flow
In your imagination
That I may speak.
Borrowing from Romare Bearden’s aesthetic palette and inspired by his Odysseus series, Bearden’s Odyssey gathers, for the first time, poems from thirty-five of the most revered African diaspora poets in the United States. Poetic echoes come forth in themes of inspiration with historical intersections of one of the greatest visual artists of the twentieth century.
The award-winning editors, Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda, assemble an esteemed literary congregation, with original poems by Chris Abani, Rita Dove, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Ed Roberson, Aracelis Girmay, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more. With a powerful foreword by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and stunning visual reproductions of select Bearden masterpieces, this anthology fuses art and literature, standing as a testament to Romare Bearden’s power and influence in the contemporary artistic world.
Beards make frequent appearances in medieval German poetry—as esteemed markers of majestic wisdom or as hilarious props for undignified manhandling. In Beards and Texts, Sebastian Coxon traces this preeminent symbol of masculinity through four major poetic traditions across the twelfth and sixteenth centuries—Pfaffe Konrad’s Rolandslied, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm, ‘Sangspruchdichtung’, and Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring. By attending to this hairy trope, Beards and Texts sheds new light on the construction of both poetic form and masculinity in the Middle Ages.
Bearheart, Gerald Vizenors first novel, overturns “terminal creeds” and violence in a decadent material culture. American civilization has collapsed and Proude Cedarfair, his wife, Rosina, and a bizarre collection of disciples, are forced on a pilgrimage when government agents descend on the reservation to claim their sacred cedar trees for fuel. The tribal pilgrims reverse the sentiments of Manifest Destiny and travel south through the ruins of a white world that ran out of gas.
As we all know and as many of our well-established textbooks have argued for decades, the Inquisition was one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history; Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic and rightfully called “Hitler’s Pope,” the Dark Ages were stunting the progress of knowledge to be redeemed only by the secular spirit of the Enlightenment. The religious Crusades were an early example of the rapacious Western thirst for riches and power. But what if these long held beliefs were all wrong?
In this stunning, powerful, and ultimately persuasive book, Rodney Stark, one of the most highly regarded sociologists of religion and bestselling author of The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco 1997), argues that some of our most firmly held ideas about history, ideas that paint the Catholic Church in the least favorable light are, in fact, fiction. Why have we held these wrongheaded ideas so firmly and for so long? And if our beliefs are wrong, what is the truth?
In each chapter, Stark takes on a well-established anti-Catholic myth, gives a fascinating history of how each myth became conventional wisdom and presents a startling picture of the real truth. For example, instead of the Spanish Inquisition being an anomaly of torture and murder of innocent people persecuted for “imaginary” crimes such as witchcraft and blasphemy, Stark argues that not only did the Spanish Inquisition spill very little blood, but it was a major force in support of moderation and justice.
Stark dispels the myth of Pope Pius XII being apathetic or even helpful to the Nazi movement, such as to merit the title “Hitler’s Pope,” and instead shows that the campaign to link Pope Pius XII to Hitler was initiated by the Soviet Union, presumably in hopes of neutralizing the Vatican in post-World War II affairs. Many praised Pope Pius XIIs vigorous and devoted efforts to saving Jewish lives during the war.
Instead of understanding the Dark Ages as a millennium of ignorance and backwardness inspired by the Catholic Church’s power, Stark argues that the whole notion of the “Dark Ages” was an act of pride perpetuated by anti-religious intellectuals who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of “Enlightenment.”
In the end, readers of Bearing False Witness will have a more accurate history of the Catholic Church and will also understand why it became unfairly maligned for so long. Bearing False Witness is a compelling and sobering account of how egotism and ideology often work together to give us a false truth.
During the 1830s the United States experienced a wave of movements for social change over temperance, the abolition of slavery, anti-vice activism, and a host of other moral reforms. Michael Young argues for the first time in Bearing Witness against Sin that together they represented a distinctive new style of mobilization—one that prefigured contemporary forms of social protest by underscoring the role of national religious structures and cultural schemas.
In this book, Young identifies a new strain of protest that challenged antebellum Americans to take personal responsibility for reforming social problems.In this period activists demanded that social problems like drinking and slaveholding be recognized as national sins unsurpassed in their evil and immorality. This newly awakened consciousness undergirded by a confessional style of protest, seized the American imagination and galvanized thousands of people. Such a phenomenon, Young argues, helps explain the lives of charismatic reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison and the Grimké sisters, among others.
Marshalling lively historical materials, including letters and life histories of reformers, Bearing Witness against Sin is a revelatory account of how religion lay at the heart of social reform.
On May 14, 2018, a respected international human-rights court, the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, began a week-long hearing on the impacts of fracking and climate change on human and Earth rights. In its advisory opinion, the Tribunal ruled that fracking systematically violates substantive and procedural human rights; that governments are complicit in the rights violations; and that to protect human rights and the climate, the practice of fracking should be banned.
The case makes history. It revokes the social license of extreme-extraction industries by connecting environmental destruction to human-rights violations. It affirms that climate change, and the extraction techniques that fuel it, directly violate deeply and broadly accepted moral norms encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Bearing Witness maps a promising new direction in the ongoing struggle to protect the planet from climate chaos. It tells the story of this landmark case through carefully curated court materials, including searing eye-witness testimony, groundbreaking legal testimony, and the Tribunal’s advisory opinion. Essays by leading climate writers such as Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber and legal experts such as John Knox, Mary Wood, and Anna Grear give context to the controversy. Framing essays by the editors, experts on climate ethics and human rights, demonstrate that a human-rights focus is a powerful, transformative new tool to address the climate crisis.
Gulliford’s engaging narrative explains prehistoric Pueblo villages and cliff dwellings, Navajo and Ute history, stories of Mormon families who arrived by wagon train in 1880, impacts of the Atomic Age, uranium mining, and the pothunting and looting of Native graves that inspired the passage of the Antiquities Act over a century ago. The book describes how the national monument came about and its deep significance to five native tribes.
Bears Ears National Monument is a bellwether for public land issues in the American West. Its recognition will be relevant for years to come.
Winner of the Global Humanities Prize
A classic of modern Provençal literature, Jóusè d’Arbaud’s 1926 masterpiece “The Beast of Vacarés” (also known as “The Beast of Vaccarès”) is a haunting parable. Set during the fifteenth century, the tale is narrated by a solitary bull herder—known as a gardian—who stumbles upon a starving creature that is half man, half goat. Terrified, the gardian is nonetheless drawn to the eloquent Beast, a dying demigod who laments the loss of his glorious past even as he wields power over the animals around him. Torn between pity and fear, unable to understand his experiences and afraid he will be condemned for heresy, the gardian records his encounters in a journal, hoping that one day readers will make sense of what he cannot.
Set in the vast, lonely landscape of the Camargue delta, where the Rhône meets the Mediterranean, The Beast seamlessly melds fantasy with naturalistic detail about the region’s flora and fauna. Three additional stories—“The Caraco,” “Pèire Guilhem’s Remorse,” and “The Longline”—explore the lives of twentieth-century gardians in the region. Each man succumbs to fears and social pressure, tragically losing what he most loves.
When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English.
The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.
Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
The first book to focus on the multifaceted images of deer and hunting in ancient Maya art, from the award-winning author of To Be Like Gods: Dance in Ancient Maya Civilization.
Winner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2019
The white-tailed deer had a prominent status in Maya civilization: it was the most important wild-animal food source at many inland Maya sites and also functioned as a major ceremonial symbol. Offering an in-depth semantic analysis of this imagery, The Beast Between considers iconography, hieroglyphic texts, mythological discourses, and ritual narratives to translate the significance and meaning of the vibrant metaphors expressed in a variety of artifacts depicting deer and hunting.
Charting the importance of deer as a key component of the Maya diet, especially for elites, and analyzing the coupling of deer and maize in the Maya worldview, The Beast Between reveals a close and long-term interdependence between the Maya and these animals. Not only are deer depicted naturalistically in hunting and ritual scenes, but also they are assigned human attributes. This rich imagery reflects the many ways in which deer hunting was linked to status, sexuality, and war as part of a deeper process to ensure the regeneration of both agriculture and ancestry. Drawing on methodologies of art history, archaeology, and ethnology, this illuminating work is poised to become a key resource for multiple fields.
Velten travels back in history to describe a time when Londoners shared their homes with pets and livestock—along with a variety of other pests, vermin, and bedbugs; Londoners imported beasts from all corners of the globe for display in their homes, zoos, and parks; and ponies flying in hot air balloons and dancing fleas were considered entertainment. As she shows, London transformed from a city with a mainly exploitative relationship with animals to the birthplace of animal welfare societies and animal rights’ campaigns. Packed with over one hundred illustrations, Beastly London is a revealing look at how animals have been central to the city’s success.
In Beasts at Bedtime, scientist (and father) Liam Heneghan examines the environmental underpinnings of children’s stories. From Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter, Heneghan unearths the universal insights into our inextricable relationship with nature that underlie so many classic children’s stories. Some of the largest environmental challenges in coming years—from climate instability, the extinction crisis, freshwater depletion, and deforestation—are likely to become even more severe as this generation of children grows up. Though today’s young readers will bear the brunt of these environmental calamities, they will also be able to contribute to environmental solutions if prepared properly. And all it takes is an attentive eye: Heneghan shows how the nature curriculum is already embedded in bedtime stories, from the earliest board books like The Rainbow Fish to contemporary young adult classics like The Hunger Games.
Beasts at Bedtime is an awakening to the vital environmental education children’s stories can provide—from the misadventures of The Runaway Bunny to more overt tales like The Lorax. Heneghan serves as our guide, drawing richly upon his own adolescent and parental experiences, as well as his travels in landscapes both experienced and imagined. Organized into thematic sections, the work winds its way through literary forests, colorful characters, and global environments.
This book enthralls as it engages. Heneghan as a guide is as charming as he is insightful, showing how kids (and adults) can start to experience the natural world in incredible ways from the comfort of their own rooms. Beasts at Bedtime will help parents, teachers, and guardians extend those cozy times curled up together with a good book into a lifetime of caring for our planet.
Humans have lived in close proximity to other animals for thousands of years. Recent scientific studies have even shown that the presence of animals has a positive effect on our physical and mental health. People with pets typically have lower blood pressure, show fewer symptoms of depression, and tend to get more exercise.
But there is a darker side to the relationship between animals and humans. Animals are carriers of harmful infectious agents and the source of a myriad of human diseases. In recent years, the emergence of high-profile illnesses such as AIDS, SARS, West Nile virus, and bird flu has drawn much public attention, but as E. Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken reveal, the transfer of deadly microbes from animals to humans is neither a new nor an easily avoided problem.
Beginning with the domestication of farm animals nearly 10,000 years ago, Beasts of the Earth traces the ways that human-animal contact has evolved over time. Today, shared living quarters, overlapping ecosystems, and experimental surgical practices where organs or tissues are transplanted from non-humans into humans continue to open new avenues for the transmission of infectious agents. Other changes in human behavior like increased air travel, automated food processing, and threats of bioterrorism are increasing the contagion factor by transporting microbes further distances and to larger populations in virtually no time at all.
While the authors urge that a better understanding of past diseases may help us lessen the severity of some illnesses, they also warn that, given our increasingly crowded planet, it is not a question of if but when and how often animal-transmitted diseases will pose serious challenges to human health in the future.
In this collection of essays, talks, and reviews, Major Jackson revels in the work of poetry not only to limn and assess the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of poets, but to amplify the controversies and inner conflicts that define our age: political unrest, climate crises, the fallout from bewildering traumas, and the social function of the art of poetry itself. Accessible and critically minded, Jackson returns to the poem as an unparalleled source of linguistic pleasure that structures a multilayered “lyric self.” In his interviews, Jackson illustrates poetry’s distinct ability to mediate the inexplicable while foregrounding the possibilities of human song.
Collected over several decades, these essays find Jackson praising mythmaking in Frank Bidart and Ai’s poetry, expressing bafflement at the silence of white-identified poets in the cause of social and racial justice, unearthing the politics behind Gwendolyn Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize, and marveling at the “hallucinatory speed of thought” in a diverse range of poets including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Brenda Hillman, Afaa Michael Weaver, Forrest Gander, and Terrance Hayes. This collection passionately surveys the radical shifts of the art and notes poetry as a necessity for a modern sensibility.
The remarkable story of how modern Irish music was shaped and spread through the brash efforts of a Chicago police chief.
Irish music as we know it today was invented not just in the cobbled lanes of Dublin or the green fields of County Kerry, but also in the burgeoning metropolis of early-twentieth-century Chicago. The genre’s history combines a long folk tradition with the curatorial quirks of a single person: Francis O’Neill, a larger-than-life Chicago police chief and an Irish immigrant with a fervent interest in his home country’s music.
Michael O’Malley’s The Beat Cop tells the story of this singular figure, from his birth in Ireland in 1865 to his rough-and-tumble early life in the United States. By 1901, O’Neill had worked his way up to become Chicago’s chief of police, where he developed new methods of tracking criminals and recording their identities. At the same time, he also obsessively tracked and recorded the music he heard from local Irish immigrants, enforcing a strict view of what he felt was and wasn’t authentic. Chief O’Neill’s police work and his musical work were flip sides of the same coin, and O’Malley delves deep into how this brash immigrant harnessed his connections and policing skills to become the foremost shaper of how Americans see, and hear, the music of Ireland.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are four of the most famous names in the history of music. In the 1960s, the Beatles became the bestselling pop band in the world, inspiring legions of fans and developing into popular music icons. Fifty years later, their recordings are still in demand. But none of this happened overnight. As Ian Inglis reveals in this tale of the band’s early years, before they took the world by storm, the Beatles were little more than an inexperienced, semi-professional group of talented musicians in dire need of practice.
This volume treats the White Album as a whole, with essays scrutinizing it from a wide range of perspectives. These essays place the album within the social and political context of a turbulent historical moment; locate it within the Beatles’ lives and careers, taking into consideration the complex personal forces at play during the recording sessions; investigate the musical as well as pharmaceutical influences on the record; reveal how it reflects new developments in the Beatles’ songwriting and arranging; revisit the question of its alleged disunity; and finally, track its legacy and the breadth of its influence on later rock, pop, and hip-hop artists.
The Beatles through a Glass Onion features the scholarship of Adam Bradley, Vincent Benitez, Lori Burns, John Covach, Walter Everett, Michael Frontani, Steve Hamelman, Ian Inglis, John Kimsey, Mark Osteen, Russell Reising, Stephen Valdez, Anthony D. Villa, Kenneth Womack, and Alyssa Woods. John Covach’s Afterword summarizes the White Album’s lasting impact and value. The Beatles through a Glass Onion represents a landmark work of rock music scholarship. It will prove to be an essential and enduring contribution to the field.
Beatrice of Bayou Têche is a work of great historical and artistic interest: a late-nineteenth-century novel by a white woman about a black woman artist-protagonist. As the introduction for this reprint edition shows, Alice Ilgenfritz Jones was the first white woman to take an extended interest in the intersection of creativity, race, and gender. In Beatrice, Jones seeks to unveil the relationships between white and African Americans during the twenty years before the Civil War by following her mixed-race protagonist from her childhood as a slave in New Orleans through her career as a free woman and inspired painter and opera singer. Beatrice renders the white author’s effort to find a place for the mixed-race woman in relation to paradigms of creativity that are not only gendered but racialized. In the process, it exposes the fault lines of ideology and literary convention that underlie attempts to negotiate issues of race, gender, and creativity in late nineteenth-century America.
The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its culture in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. It also devotes individual chapters to women such as Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger, who each made Mexico a central setting of their work and interrogated the misogyny they encountered in both American and Mexican culture.
The Beats in Mexico not only considers individual Beat writers, but also places them within a larger history of countercultural figures, from D.H. Lawrence to Antonin Artaud to Jim Morrison, who mythologized Mexico as the land of the Aztecs and Maya, where shamanism and psychotropic drugs could take you on a trip far beyond the limits of the American imagination.
Lawrence exchanged plants and gardening tips with everyone from southern “farm ladies” trading bulbs in garden bulletins to prominent regional gardeners. She corresponded with nursery owners, everyday backyard gardeners, and literary luminaries such as Katharine White and Eudora Welty. Her books, including A Southern Garden, The Little Bulbs, and Gardens in Winter, inspired several generations of gardeners in the South and beyond.
The columns in this volume cover specific plants, such as sweet peas, hellebores, peonies, and the bamboo growing outside her living-room window, as well as broader topics including the usefulness of vines, the importance of daily pruning, and organic gardening. Like all of Lawrence’s writing, these columns are peppered with references to conversations with neighbors and quotations from poetry, mythology, and correspondence. They brim with knowledge gained from a lifetime of experimenting in her gardens, from her visits to other gardens, and from her extensive reading.
Lawrence once wrote, “Dirty fingernails are not the only requirement for growing plants. One must be as willing to study as to dig, for a knowledge of plants is acquired as much from books as from experience.” As inspiring today as when they first appeared in the Charlotte Observer, the columns collected in Beautiful at All Seasons showcase not only Lawrence’s vast knowledge but also her intimate, conversational writing style and her lifelong celebration of gardens and gardening.
Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, semiotics, and gender studies. She brings together thinkers rarely, if ever, read together in a single study—James Baldwin, Radclyffe Hall, Jean Genet, Toni Morrison, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eldridge Cleaver, Todd Haynes, Norman Mailer, Leslie Feinberg, David Fincher, and Quentin Tarantino—and reads them with and against major theorists, including Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Leo Bersani. Stockton asserts that there is no clear, mirrored relation between the terms “black” and “queer”; rather, seemingly definitive associations attached to each are often taken up or crossed through by the other. Stockton explores dramatic switchpoints between these terms: the stigmatized “skin” of some queers’ clothes, the description of blacks as an “economic bottom,” the visual force of interracial homosexual rape, the complicated logic of so-called same-sex miscegenation, and the ways in which a famous depiction of slavery (namely, Morrison’s Beloved) seems bound up with depictions of AIDS. All of the thinkers Stockton considers scrutinize the social nature of shame as they examine the structures that make debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable, and creative, even in their darkness.
Eva Antonia Wilbur inherited a unique affinity for the land. Granddaughter of a Harvard-educated physician who came to the Territory in the 1860s, she was the firstborn child of a Mexican mother and Anglo father who instilled in her an appreciation for both cultures. Little Toña learned firsthand the responsibilities of ranching—an education usually reserved for boys—and also experienced the racial hostility that occurred during those final years before the Tohono O'odham were confined to a reservation.
Begun as a reminiscence to tell younger family members about their "rawhide tough and lonely" life at the turn of the century, Mrs. Wilbur-Cruce's book is rich with imagery and dialogue that brings the Arivaca area to life. Her story is built around the annual cycle of ranch life—its spring and fall round-ups, planting and harvesting—and features a cavalcade of border characters, anecdotes about folk medicine, and recollections of events that were most meaningful in a young girl's life. Her account constitutes a valuable primary source from a region about which nothing similar has been previously published, while the richness of her story creates a work of literature that will appeal to readers of all ages.
The immune system holds the key to human health. In The Beautiful Cure, leading immunologist Daniel M. Davis describes how the scientific quest to understand how the immune system works—and how it is affected by stress, sleep, age, and our state of mind—is now unlocking a revolutionary new approach to medicine and well-being.
The body’s ability to fight disease and heal itself is one of the great mysteries and marvels of nature. But in recent years, painstaking research has resulted in major advances in our grasp of this breathtakingly beautiful inner world: a vast and intricate network of specialist cells, regulatory proteins, and dedicated genes that are continually protecting our bodies. Far more powerful than any medicine ever invented, the immune system plays a crucial role in our daily lives. We have found ways to harness these natural defenses to create breakthrough drugs and so-called immunotherapies that help us fight cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and many age-related diseases, and we are starting to understand whether activities such as mindfulness might play a role in enhancing our physical resilience.
Written by a researcher at the forefront of this adventure, The Beautiful Cure tells a dramatic story of scientific detective work and discovery, of puzzles solved and mysteries that linger, of lives sacrificed and saved. With expertise and eloquence, Davis introduces us to this revelatory new understanding of the human body and what it takes to be healthy.
Featuring two hundred color plates, this history of the craft of scientific inquiry is as exquisite as the experiments whose stories it shares.
This illustrated history of experimental science is more than just a celebration of the ingenuity that scientists and natural philosophers have used throughout the ages to study—and to change—the world. Here we see in intricate detail experiments that have, in some way or another, exhibited elegance and beauty: in their design, their conception, and their execution. Celebrated science writer Philip Ball invites readers to marvel at and admire the craftsmanship of scientific instruments and apparatus on display, from the earliest microscopes to the giant particle colliders of today. With Ball as our expert guide, we are encouraged to think carefully about what experiments are, what they mean, and how they are used. Ranging across millennia and geographies, Beautiful Experiments demonstrates why “experiment” remains a contested notion in science, while also exploring how we came to understand the way the world functions, what it contains, and where the pursuit of that understanding has brought us today.
In Beautiful Fighting Girl, Saito Tamaki offers a far more sophisticated and convincing interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. For Saito, the beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku (obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, Saito understands the otaku’s ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated world—a logical outcome of the media they consume.
Featuring extensive interviews with Japanese and American otaku, a comprehensive genealogy of the beautiful fighting girl, and an analysis of the American outsider artist Henry Darger, whose baroque imagination Saito sees as an important antecedent of otaku culture, Beautiful Fighting Girl was hugely influential when first published in Japan, and it remains a key text in the study of manga, anime, and otaku culture. Now available in English for the first time, this book will spark new debates about the role played by desire in the production and consumption of popular culture.
Selected from the country’s leading literary journals and publications—Colorado Review, Creative Nonfiction, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, The Normal School, and others—Beautiful Flesh gathers eighteen essays on the body, essentially building a multi-gender, multi-ethnic body out of essays, each concerning a different part of the body: belly, brain, bones, blood, ears, eyes, hair, hands, heart, lungs, nose, ovaries, pancreas, sinuses, skin, spine, teeth, and vas deferens. The title is drawn from Wendy Call’s essay “Beautiful Flesh,” a meditation on the pancreas: “gorgeously ugly, hideously beautiful: crimson globes embedded in a pinkish-tan oval, all nestled on a bed of cabbage-olive green, spun through with gossamer gold.”
Other essays include Dinty W. Moore’s “The Aquatic Ape,” in which the author explores the curious design and necessity of sinuses; Katherine E. Standefer’s “Shock to the Heart, Or: A Primer on the Practical Applications of Electricity,” a modular essay about the author’s internal cardiac defibrillator and the nature of electricity; Matt Roberts’s “Vasectomy Instruction 7,” in which the author considers the various reasons for and implications of surgically severing and sealing the vas deferens; and Peggy Shinner’s “Elective,” which examines the author’s own experience with rhinoplasty and cultural considerations of the “Jewish nose.” Echoing the myriad shapes, sizes, abilities, and types of the human body, these essays showcase the many forms of the genre: personal, memoir, lyric, braided, and so on.
Contributors: Amy Butcher, Wendy Call, Steven Church, Sarah Rose Etter, Matthew Ferrence, Hester Kaplan, Sarah K. Lenz, Lupe Linares, Jody Mace, Dinty W. Moore, Angela Pelster, Matt Roberts, Peggy Shinner, Samantha Simpson, Floyd Skloot, Danielle R. Spencer, Katherine E. Standefer, Kaitlyn Teer, Sarah Viren, Vicki Weiqi Yang
Published originally as La flor mas bella de la maquiladora, this beautifully written book is based on interviews the author conducted with more than fifty Mexican women who work in the assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border. A descriptive analytic study conducted in the late 1970s, the book uses compelling testimonials to detail the struggles these women face.
The experiences of women in maquiladoras are attracting increasing attention from scholars, especially in the context of ongoing Mexican migration to the country's northern frontier and in light of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This book is among the earliest accounts of the physical and psychological toll exacted from the women who labor in these plants. Iglesias Prieto captures the idioms of these working women so that they emerge as dynamic individuals, young and articulate personalities, inexorably engaged in the daily struggle to change the fundamental conditions of their exploitation.
The Beautiful Immunity asks how we create good in an imperfect world of fallible souls. Spare and formally daring, these poems were refined through the catastrophes of wildfires, recession, and a major public health crisis through the hope of a beautiful immunity—an everlasting salve for the lost. This slender volume reads as the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of labor, documenting large-scale social, cultural, and political upheavals, as well as the moment when the word “anthropause” floated indelibly into the world’s vocabulary.
The Beautiful Lesson of the I is a collection of finely made poems by an accomplished poet. It will reward the scholar and the student of poetry, as well as the reader looking for the simple pleasures of poetic insight authentically felt. Winner of the Swenson Poetry Award 2005. Now in paperback.
The 1992 presidential election campaign showed just how deep were the divisions within the Republican party. In Beautiful Losers, Samuel Francis argues that the victory of the Democratic party marks not only the end of the Reagan-Bush era, but the failure of the American conservatism.
Apes and dolphins: primates and cetaceans. Could any creatures appear to be more different? Yet both are large-brained intelligent mammals with complex communication and social interaction. In the first book to study apes and dolphins side by side, Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford, a dolphin biologist and a primatologist who have spent their careers studying these animals in the wild, combine their insights with compelling results. Beautiful Minds explains how and why apes and dolphins are so distantly related yet so cognitively alike and what this teaches us about another large-brained mammal: Homo sapiens.
Noting that apes and dolphins have had no common ancestor in nearly 100 million years, Bearzi and Stanford describe the parallel evolution that gave rise to their intelligence. And they closely observe that intelligence in action, in the territorial grassland and rainforest communities of chimpanzees and other apes, and in groups of dolphins moving freely through open coastal waters. The authors detail their subjects’ ability to develop family bonds, form alliances, and care for their young. They offer an understanding of their culture, politics, social structure, personality, and capacity for emotion. The resulting dual portrait—with striking overlaps in behavior—is key to understanding the nature of “beautiful minds.”
The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by.
Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse."
Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy.
Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.
Now in her twenties, Millie has never been able to express herself verbally, but she has a thriving social environment rooted in the people around her and in things her companions and family can see, hear, smell, and feel. Life in Millie’s world is far richer than might be immediately evident to those who think and communicate in conventional ways.
Beautiful Mystery explores what it means to be a person in the spaces between what we can and cannot say, and how we can fight to care for those we love when they don’t have the language to fight for themselves. Through her unique lens as a mother and an anthropologist, Rutherford tells the story of arriving in Millie’s world, what she found there, and how Millie showed her that words aren’t always what makes us human. Enlightening and deeply felt, Beautiful Mystery proves that you don’t have to understand someone to love them—a lesson that, if we all learned it, might allow us to live together in a fractured world.
Yucatecan trova is a music genre comprising a type of romantic song that is considered “the soul of Yucatán and Yucatecans.” This first book on Yucatecan trova offers an insider’s view of the history and practice of a treasured cultural heritage. A central theme of Gabriela Vargas-Cetina’s ethnography is what she refers to as the “beautiful politics of music” practiced by Yucatecan trova patrons and organizations, which is a way of asserting the importance of groups and issues through nonconfrontational means.
Trova emerged on the peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century and continues to be part of the general urban soundscape in the states of Yucatán and Campeche. Until the 1920s, this music was little known outside Yucatán and became absorbed into the larger Latin American Bolero genre, making it difficult to perceive its uniqueness and relation to life in Yucatán.
Vargas-Cetina, a native Yucatecan and trova musician, offers ethnographic insight into the local music scene. With family connections, she embedded herself as a trovadora, and her fieldwork—singing, playing the guitar in a trova group, and extensively researching the genre and talking with fellow enthusiasts and experts—ensued. Trova, like other types of artistic endeavors, is the result of collaboration and social milieu. She describes the dedicated trova clubs, cultural institutions, the Yucatecan economy of agricultural exports, and identity politics that helped the music come about and have maintained it today.
Positioned in the larger context of the music of Mexico and Latin America and engaging with theories of modernity and cosmopolitanism, experimental ethnography, and the anthropology of organizations, Beautiful Politics of Music consists of rigorous scholarship. It is also a warm tribute to performers and songs that have inspired many people around the world for more than two centuries.
In her first collection of poems, Kansas native Amy Fleury captures images of dragging clotheslines, baked lawns, and sweet potato babies, inserting them with an earnest dignity into her stories of midwestern life. Beautiful Trouble explores the subtleties of landscape, place, families, girlhood, womanhood, and everyday existence on the prairie. Fleury writes of the Midwest with authenticity, speaks of romance with delicate allure, and recalls the heartbreak of childhood without self-pity. In meditations on resilience and life’s contradictions, Fleury engages her characters fully and paints their souls and sensations evenly in language both rare and beautiful. She is a poet in love with sound and its power to summon majesty from quotidian scenes. Her poems are brief and striking, depending on exquisite word choice and balance to achieve a simple order on the page.
During its five-year run from 1997 to 2002, the popular TV show Ally McBeal engaged viewers in debates over what it means to be a woman or a man in the modern workplace; how romance factors into the therapeutic understanding of relationships; what value eccentricity has and how much oddity society should tolerate; and what utility fantasy has in the pragmatic world. In addition to these social concerns, however, Ally McBeal stood out for being well-constructed, narratively complex, and stylistically rich—in short, beautiful TV.
Starting from the premise that much of television today is "drop-dead gorgeous" and that TV should be studied for its formal qualities as well as its social impact, Greg M. Smith analyzes Ally McBeal in terms of its aesthetic principles and narrative construction. He explores how Ally's innovative use of music, special effects, fantasy sequences, voiceovers, and flashbacks structures a distinctive fictional universe, while it also opens up new possibilities for televisual expression. Smith also discusses the complex narrative strategies that Ally's creator David E. Kelley used to develop a long-running storyline and shows how these serial narrative practices can help us understand a wide range of prime-time TV serials.
By taking seriously the art and argument of Ally McBeal, Beautiful TV conclusively demonstrates that aesthetic and narrative analysis is an indispensable key for unlocking the richness of contemporary television.
Beautiful War: Studies in a Dreadful Fascination is a wide-ranging exploration of armed conflict as depicted in art that illustrates the constant presence of war in our everyday lives. Philip D. Beidler investigates the unending assimilation and pervasive presence of the idea of war in popular culture, the impulses behind the making of art out of war, and the unending and debatably aimless trajectories of war itself.
Beidler’s critical scope spans from Shakespeare’s plays, through the Victorian battle paintings of Lady Butler, into the post-World War I writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, and up to twenty-first-century films such as The Hurt Locker and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. As these works of art have become ubiquitous in contemporary culture, the many faces of war clearly spill over into our art and media, and Beidler argues that these portrayals in turn shift the perception of war from a savage truth to a concept.
Beautiful War argues that the representation of war in the arts has always been, and continues to be, an incredibly powerful force. Incorporating painting, music, photography, literature, and film, Beidler traces a disturbing but fundamental truth: that war has always provided an aesthetic inspiration while serving ends as various and complex as ideological or geopolitical history, public memory, and mass entertainment.
Beautiful War is a bold and vivid account of the role of war and military conflict as a subject of art that offers much of value to literary and cultural critics, historians, veterans, students of art history and communication studies, and those interested in expanding their understanding of art and media’s influence on contemporary values and memories of the past.
According to popular media and scholarship, Detroit, the once-vibrant city that crumbled with the departure of the auto industry, is where dreams can be reborn. It is a place that, like America itself, is gritty and determined. It has faced the worst kind of adversity, and supposedly now it’s back. But what does this narrative of “new Detroit” leave out? Beautiful Wasteland reveals that the contemporary story of Detroit’s rebirth is an upcycled version of the American Dream, which has long imagined access to work, home, and upward mobility as race-neutral projects. They’re not. As Rebecca J. Kinney shows, the narratives of Detroit’s rise, decline, and potential to rise again are deeply steeped in material and ideological investments in whiteness.
By remapping the narratives of contemporary Detroit through an extension of America’s frontier mythology, Kinney analyzes a cross-section of twentieth and twenty-first century cultural locations—an Internet forum, ruin photography, advertising, documentary film, and print and online media. She illuminates how the stories we tell about Detroit as a frontier of possibility enable the erasure of white privilege and systemic racism. By situating Detroit as a “beautiful wasteland,” both desirable and distressed, this shows how the narrative of ruin and possibility form a mutually constituted relationship: the city is possible precisely because of its perceived ruin.
Beautiful Wasteland tackles the key questions about the future of postindustrial America. As cities around the country reckon with their own postindustrial landscapes, Rebecca Kinney cautions that development that elides considerations of race and class will only continue to replicate uneven access to the city for the poor, working class, and people of color.
In order to understand the nature of pain, Anna undertakes a meditation practice. We tend to think of pain as self-absorbing and exclusively our own ("my pain," "I am in pain"). In distinction, Sharon Cameron’s Anna comes to explore pain as common property, and as the basis for a radically reconceived selfhood. Resisting the limitations of memoir, Beautiful Work speaks from experience and simultaneously releases it from the closed shell of personal ownership. Outside of the not quite inevitable stories we tell about it, experience is less protected, less compromised, and more vivid than could be supposed.
Beautiful Work brings to bear the same interest in consciousness and intersubjectivity that characterizes Cameron’s other work.
Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl’s photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans’ Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising “morality” plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly “African” aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope.
Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès
Beauty and Brutality provides an exciting, original, and critical encounter with this labyrinthine city’s imagined and material landscape. The authors and contributors investigate the “messy, fleshy, recalcitrant, mercurial, and immeasurable qualities of the city,” examining its urban space and smell: how it is represented in films, literature, music, and urban streetart; how it has endured the politics of colonialism, U.S. imperialism, neoliberalism, and globalization; as well as how its queer citizens engage with digital media platforms to communicate and connect with each other.
The first volume to offer a cultural and urban studies approach to Manila, Beauty and Brutality considers the tensions of the Filipino diaspora as they migrate and “re-turn,” as well as the citizens’ responses to the Marcos (and post-Marcos) dictatorship, President Duterte’s authoritarianism, and “Drug War.” Essays also map out of geographies of repression and resistance in the urban war of classes, genders and sexualities, ethnicities and races, and generations, along with the violence of urban life and growth. Ultimately, Beauty and Brutality frames Manila as a vibrant and ever-evolving metropolis that, even in the face of its difficulties, instills hope.
Contributors: Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza, Christine Bacareza Balance, Vanessa Banta, Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo, Roland Sintos Coloma, Gary C. Devilles, Faith R. Kares, John B. Labella, Raffy Lerma, Bliss Cua Lim, Ferdinand M. Lopez, Paul Nadal, Jema M. Pamintuan, Oscar Tantoco Serquiña, Jr., Louise Jashil R. Sonido, and the editors.
Beauty and the Beast begins with the question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual’s beauty with an often overlooked counterpart, surgeries performed—often on high profile criminals—to disguise one’s identity. Situating this globally shared phenomenon within the economic, cultural, and political history of Colombia, Taussig links the country’s long civil war and its bodily mutilation and torture to the beauty industry at large, sketching Colombia as a country whose high aesthetic stakes make it a stage where some of the most important and problematic ideas about the body are played out.
Central to Taussig’s examination is George Bataille’s notion of depense, or “wasting.” While depense is often used as a critique, Taussig also looks at the exuberance such squandering creates and its position as a driving economic force. Depense, he argues, is precisely what these procedures are all about, and the beast on the other side of beauty should not be dismissed as simple recompense. At once theoretical and colloquial, public and intimate, Beauty and the Beast is a true-to-place ethnography—written in Taussig’s trademark voice—that tells a thickly layered but always accessible story about the lengths to which people will go to be physically remade.
Scholarly interest in issues of national identity and representation has been increasing for years, and cinema is a major resource for that work, as it allows for cross-cultural dialogue and the portrayal of different layers of representation and cultural stereotypes. Beauty and the Beast takes a look at the depictions of Italy and the Italians in British cinema.
Elisabetta Girelli draws upon cultural and social history to assess the ongoing representation of “Italianness” in British film, and its crucial role in defining and challenging British national identity. Girelli provides an original survey of archival material such as World War II footage, and an analysis of significant British films like Summer Madness and A Room With A View. Drawing on British literary and filmic tradition to analyze the rise of specific images of the Italian other, Beauty and the Beast is a noteworthy and unique contribution to film and cultural studies.
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series volume 74
Women entered the book trade in significant numbers in China during the late sixteenth century, when it became acceptable for women from “good families” to write poetry and seek to publish their collected poems. At about the same time, a boom in the publication of fiction began, and semiprofessional novelists emerged.
This study begins with three case studies, each of which probes one facet of the relationship between women and fiction in the early nineteenth century. It examines in turn the prefaces written by four women for a novel about women; the activities of a woman editor and writer of fiction; and writings on fiction by three leading literary women. Building on these case studies, the second half of the book focuses on the many sequels to the Dream of the Red Chamber—one of which was demonstrably written by a woman—and the significance of this novel for women. As Ellen Widmer shows, by the end of the century, women were becoming increasingly involved in the novel as critical readers, writers, and editors. And if women and their relationship to fiction changed over the nineteenth century, the novel changed as well, not the least in its growing recognition of the importance of female readers.
Between the 1770s and the 1860s, people all across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. These once-popular but now-discredited disciplines were based on a deceptively simple premise: that facial features or skull shape could reveal a person’s intelligence, character, and personality. In the United States, these were culturally ubiquitous sciences that both elite thinkers and ordinary people used to understand human nature.
While the modern world dismisses phrenology and physiognomy as silly and debunked disciplines, Beauty and the Brain shows why they must be taken seriously: they were the intellectual tools that a diverse group of Americans used to debate questions of race, gender, and social justice. While prominent intellectuals and political thinkers invoked these sciences to justify hierarchy, marginalized people and progressive activists deployed them for their own political aims, creatively interpreting human minds and bodies as they fought for racial justice and gender equality. Ultimately, though, physiognomy and phrenology were as dangerous as they were popular. In addition to validating the idea that external beauty was a sign of internal worth, these disciplines often appealed to the very people who were damaged by their prejudicial doctrines. In taking physiognomy and phrenology seriously, Beauty and the Brain recovers a vibrant—if largely forgotten—cultural and intellectual universe, showing how popular sciences shaped some of the greatest political debates of the American past.
Examining the history of phrenology and physiognomy, Beauty and the Brain proposes a bold new way of understanding the connection between science, politics, and popular culture in early America.
Between the 1770s and the 1860s, people all across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. These once-popular but now discredited disciplines were based on a deceptively simple premise: that facial features or skull shape could reveal a person’s intelligence, character, and personality. In the United States, these were culturally ubiquitous sciences that both elite thinkers and ordinary people used to understand human nature.
While the modern world dismisses phrenology and physiognomy as silly and debunked disciplines, Beauty and the Brain shows why they must be taken seriously: they were the intellectual tools that a diverse group of Americans used to debate questions of race, gender, and social justice. While prominent intellectuals and political thinkers invoked these sciences to justify hierarchy, marginalized people and progressive activists deployed them for their own political aims, creatively interpreting human minds and bodies as they fought for racial justice and gender equality. Ultimately, though, physiognomy and phrenology were as dangerous as they were popular. In addition to validating the idea that external beauty was a sign of internal worth, these disciplines often appealed to the very people who were damaged by their prejudicial doctrines. In taking physiognomy and phrenology seriously, Beauty and the Brain recovers a vibrant—if largely forgotten—cultural and intellectual universe, showing how popular sciences shaped some of the greatest political debates of the American past.
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