BiblioVault - Books about Present

The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson

Harry J. Elam, Jr.

University of Michigan Press, 2004

Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright August Wilson, author of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson, among other dramatic works, is one of the most well respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. The founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic project is to review twentieth-century African American history by creating a play for each decade.

Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam examines Wilson's published plays within the context of contemporary African American literature and in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, race and representation. Elam finds that each of Wilson's plays recaptures narratives lost, ignored, or avoided to create a new experience of the past that questions the historical categories of race and the meanings of blackness.

Harry J. Elam, Jr. is Professor of Drama at Stanford University and author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (The University of Michigan Press).

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The Past in the Present

Women's Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South

Amy T. McCandless

University of Alabama Press, 1999

The history of higher education in the 20th-century South, like the history of the region, both mirrors and diverges from the national pattern. Not surprisingly the region’s demographic, economic, social, political, and cultural characteristics have accounted for many of the variations between the education of southern women and women in the rest of the nation.

Southern students, McCandless finds, have generally been more Protestant, more rural, more conservative, and less affluent than their northern and western counterparts. Southern institutions have been slower to raise matriculation and graduation standards and to revise the classical curriculum. Southern administrators and legislators have opposed coeducation and integration longer and harder than college officials elsewhere. Certain types of institutions, such as all-black colleges, public women’s colleges, and separate agricultural colleges, have been more prevalent in the South. Although many of these differences are not gender-specific, all have contributed to the distinctive educational experience of women in this region.

Much has been written on the distinctiveness of this region, but virtually nothing has been published on the education of women in the South. By focusing on both black and white women at a wide variety of institutions and drawing on oral interviews and campus publications as well as traditional histories, McCandless is able to construct a more detailed picture of women’s collegiate experiences in the 20th-century South than those provided by general studies that rely primarily on materials from the North and Midwest.

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The Past, Present, and Future of Early Modern Digital Studies

Iter at 25

Edited by Laura Estill and Ray Siemens

Iter Press, 2025

A collection of essays considering developing models and new research possibilities in early modern digital studies.

Early modern digital studies is a thriving field that draws in strands from publishing, textual studies, digital humanities, and more. Yet it is also rapidly changing. This volume shows that early modern digital studies must be reconsidered from different perspectives as new projects and tools emerge, change, or disappear, and as we make advances into better understanding the past. The chapters in this volume explore how and what we publish (digitally and otherwise), how we value, evaluate, and sustain those publications and digital projects, and how these projects enable us to ask new research questions about early modern literature and culture. This collection does not seek to be a definitive or final state-of-the-field, but rather, a celebration of existing scholarship and an invitation to further scholarship about our ever-evolving practices.

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Performance in the Zócalo

Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present

Ana Martínez

University of Michigan Press, 2020

For more than five centuries, the Plaza Mayor (or Zócalo) in Mexico City has been the site of performances for a public spectatorship. During the period of colonial rule, performances designed to ensure loyalty to the Spanish monarchy were staged there, but over time, these displays gave way to staged demonstrations of resistance. Today, the Zócalo is a site for both official government-sponsored celebrations and performances that challenge the state. Performance in the Zócalo examines the ways that this city square has achieved symbolic significance over the centuries, and how national, ethnic, and racial identity has been performed there.

A saying in Mexico City is “quien domina el centro, domina el país” (whoever dominates the center, dominates the country) as the Zócalo continues to act as the performative embodiment of Mexican society. This book highlights how particular performances build upon each other by recycling past architectures and performative practices for new purposes. Ana Martínez discusses the singular role of collective memory in creating meaning through space and landmarks, providing a new perspective and further insight into the problem of Mexico’s relationship with its own past. Rather than merely describe the commemorations, she traces the relationship between space and the invention of a Mexican imaginary. She also explores how indigenous communities, Mexico’s alienated subalterns, performed as exploited objects, exotic characters, and subjects with agency. The book’s dual purposes are to examine the Zócalo as Mexico’s central site of performance and to unmask, without homogenizing, the official discourse regarding Mexico’s natives. This book will be of interest for students and scholars in theater studies, Mexican Studies, Cultural Geography, Latinx and Latin American Studies.

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Poetry of the Law

From Chaucer to the Present

David Kader

University of Iowa Press, 2010

Since the time of Blackstone's "Farewell," poetry has been seen as celestial, pastoral, solitary, and mellifluous; law as venerable, social, urban, and cacophonous. This perception has persisted even to the present, with the bourgeoning field of law and literature focusing almost exclusively on fiction and drama. Poetry of the Law, however, reveals the richness of poetry about the law.

Poetry of the Law is the first serious anthology of law-related poetry ever published in the United States. As the editors make clear, though, serious need not imply solemn. Instead, David Kader and Michael Stanford have assembled a surprisingly capacious collection of 100 poems from the 1300s to the present.

Set in courtrooms, lawyers’ offices, law-school classrooms, and judges’ chambers; peopled with attorneys, the imprisoned (both innocent and guilty), judges, jurors, witnesses, and law-enforcement officers; based on real events (think “Scottsboro”) or exploring the complexity of abstract legal ideas; the poems celebrate justice or decry the lack of it, ranging in tone from witty to wry, sad to celebratory, funny to infuriating. Poetry of the Law is destined to become an authoritative source for years to come.

Contributors Include:

W. H. Auden

Robert Burns

Lewis Carroll

John Ciardi

Daniel Defoe

Emily Dickinson

John Donne

Rita Dove

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Martín Espada

Thomas Hardy

Seamus Heaney

A. E. Housman

Langston Hughes

Ben Jonson

X. J. Kennedy

Yusef Komunyakaa

Ted Kooser

D. H. Lawrence

Edgar Lee Masters

W. S. Merwin

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sir Walter Raleigh

Muriel Rukeyser

Carl Sandburg

William Shakespeare

Jonathan Swift

Mona Van Duyn

Oscar Wilde

William Carlos Williams

from “The Hanging Judge” by Eavan Boland

Come to the country where justice is seen to be done,

Done daily. Come to the country where

Sentence is passed by word of mouth and raw

Boys split like infinitives. Look, here

We hanged our son, our only son

And hang him still and still we call it law.

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Policing Black Lives

State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

Robyn Maynard

Duke University Press, 2025

Robyn Maynard’s bestselling Policing Black Lives offers a comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization, and punishment of Black lives in Canada. In this revised and expanded edition, Maynard exposes Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance to document how half a century of police reforms have expanded the scope and scale of policing and undermined Black freedom struggles in the wake of global Black uprisings in 2020. She traces the afterlives of slavery across multiple institutions and illuminates the state’s role in perpetuating colonial dispossession, racial profiling, police killings, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labor practices, and the school-to-prison pipeline. At the same time, Maynard foregrounds the ubiquity of Black resistance while offering new insights on how to build liveable futures without policing. Advancing a compelling vision for making policing obsolete and building new forms of safety, Policing Black Lives is an essential text that will guide and inspire activists, students, scholars, and all those working toward Black futures beyond surveillance and confinement.

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Predator Effect

Understanding the Past, Present and Future of Deceptive Academic Journals

Simon Linacre

Against the Grain, LLC, 2022

The Predator Effect concerns predatory publishing — it is the first to chart both the rise and impact of deceptive publishing. The author — a scientific communications expert with 20 years’ experience — looks at how predatory journals had become an accepted part of scholarly publishing, reviewing in turn the history, development and impact of predatory journals. The book also puts their rise in context of wider issues such as Open Access and publication ethics. Other issues it addresses include: defining predatory journals, the history of predatory publishing practices, Beall’s List, authors’ motivations and the future of predatory publishing practices.

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The Present of the Future

Edited by Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier

Diaphanes, 2018

As the world teeters on the brink of crisis and potentially catastrophic change, outlooks for the future have come to be characterized by anxiety. The skepticism that meets utopian visions of the future has given rise to collective nostalgia for seemingly reliable ideas. But rather than stagnate in idealism, how can artists and scholars create the potential for real change?

The result of a lecture series held at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, The Present of the Future explores our current relationship to the future and considers strategies for artists and scholars to establish effective action for shaping alternative futures. Contributors to the book approach this problem from the perspective of diverse disciplines, including art, design, architecture, and philosophy.

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