A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY271 start with I start with I
This study of the Guatemalan legal system during the regimes of two of Latin America’s most repressive dictators reveals the surprising extent to which Maya women used the courts to air their grievances and defend their human rights.
Winner, Bryce Wood Book Award, Latin American Studies Association, 2015
Given Guatemala’s record of human rights abuses, its legal system has often been portrayed as illegitimate and anemic. I Ask for Justice challenges that perception by demonstrating that even though the legal system was not always just, rural Guatemalans considered it a legitimate arbiter of their grievances and an important tool for advancing their agendas. As both a mirror and an instrument of the state, the judicial system simultaneously illuminates the limits of state rule and the state’s ability to co-opt Guatemalans by hearing their voices in court.
Against the backdrop of two of Latin America’s most oppressive regimes—the dictatorships of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) and General Jorge Ubico (1931–1944)—David Carey Jr. explores the ways in which indigenous people, women, and the poor used Guatemala’s legal system to manipulate the boundaries between legality and criminality. Using court records that are surprisingly rich in Maya women’s voices, he analyzes how bootleggers, cross-dressers, and other litigants crafted their narratives to defend their human rights. Revealing how nuances of power, gender, ethnicity, class, and morality were constructed and contested, this history of crime and criminality demonstrates how Maya men and women attempted to improve their socioeconomic positions and to press for their rights with strategies that ranged from the pursuit of illicit activities to the deployment of the legal system.
With the Senate's organized crime hearings and the brighter-than-bright myth of the American Dream as a backdrop, Miklitsch examines the style and history, and the production and cultural politics, of classic pictures from The Big Heat and The Asphalt Jungle to lesser-known gems like 711 Ocean Drive and post-Fifties movies like Ocean’s Eleven. Miklitsch pays particular attention to trademark leitmotifs including the individual versus the collective, the family as a locus of dissension and rapport, the real-world roots of the heist picture, and the syndicate as an octopus with its tentacles deep into law enforcement, corporate America, and government. If the memes of gangster noir remain prototypically dark, the look of the films becomes lighter and flatter, reflecting the influence of television and the realization that, under the cover of respectability, crime had moved from the underworld into the mainstream of contemporary everyday life.
"In Albin J. Zak III's highly original study, phonograph records are not just the medium for disseminating songs but musical works unto themselves. Fashioned from a mix of copyright law, recording studios and techniques, the talent of musicians and disc jockeys, the ingenuity and avarice of producers, and the appetites of record buyers, the all-powerful marketplace Zak describes is an unruly zone where music of, by, and for the people is made and anointed."
---Richard Crawford, author of America's Musical Life: A History
"Wrestling clarity from the exuberant chaos of early rock 'n' roll, Albin Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody redefines our understanding of the record in the shaping of the post–World War II soundscape. Zak tracks the story which extends from Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra through Elvis and Buddy Holly to the Beatles and Bob Dylan with excursions into dozens of lesser known, but crucial, players in a game with few established rules. A crucial addition to the bookshelf."
---Craig Werner, author of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America
"I Don't Sound Like Nobody is a superb account of the transformation of American popular music in the 1950s. Albin Zak insightfully explores what recording actually means in terms of the process of making and consuming music. His discussion of the legal, aesthetic, and industrial ramifications of changes in the recording process over the course of the 1950s will make popular music scholars and record collectors reconsider what they think they know about the period."
---Rob Bowman, author of Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records
"Informative, original, and entertaining. Through a narrative that is not only enlightening but also compelling, I Don't Sound Like Nobody probes the sources and mechanisms of change within post-war American popular music, shedding a cultural and historical light on the convergence of musical idioms that created '50s rock and roll."
---Stan Hawkins, author of Settling the Pop Score
"From the birth of the record industry through the legacy of Presley, the development of rock and roll, and the Beatles 'stunning arrival on the world's stage,' Albin Zak takes us on a journey of exceptional scholarship. The breadth of coverage and deep examination of recordings and repertoire reveal the author's reverence and sensitivity to the many dimensions and origins of this complex musical soundscape."
---William Moylan, author of Understanding and Crafting the Mix: The Art of Recording
The 1950s marked a radical transformation in American popular music as the nation drifted away from its love affair with big band swing to embrace the unschooled and unruly new sounds of rock 'n' roll.
The sudden flood of records from the margins of the music industry left impressions on the pop soundscape that would eventually reshape long-established listening habits and expectations, as well as conventions of songwriting, performance, and recording. When Elvis Presley claimed, "I don't sound like nobody," a year before he made his first commercial record, he unwittingly articulated the era's musical Zeitgeist.
The central story line of I Don't Sound Like Nobody is change itself. The book's characters include not just performers but engineers, producers, songwriters, label owners, radio personalities, and fans---all of them key players in the decade's musical transformation.
Written in engaging, accessible prose, Albin Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody approaches musical and historical issues of the 1950s through the lens of recordings and fashions a compelling story of the birth of a new musical language. The book belongs on the shelf of every modern music aficionado and every scholar of rock 'n' roll.
Albin J. Zak III is Professor of Music at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the editor of The Velvet Underground Companion and the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, a groundbreaking study of rock music production. Zak is also a record producer, songwriter, singer, and guitarist.Jacket design by Paula Newcomb
Jacket photograph © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos
Louis Moore draws on the life stories of African American fighters active from 1880 to 1915 to explore working-class black manhood. As he details, boxers bought into American ideas about masculinity and free enterprise to prove their equality while using their bodies to become self-made men. The African American middle class, meanwhile, grappled with an expression of public black maleness they saw related to disreputable leisure rather than respectable labor. Moore shows how each fighter conformed to middle-class ideas of masculinity based on his own judgment of what culture would accept. Finally, he argues that African American success in the ring shattered the myth of black inferiority despite media and government efforts to defend white privilege.
With an upbeat tempo and amusing tone, I Have No Regrets contains detailed accounts of the author’s love affairs, daily life, writing, and reflections. Like the heroines in her stories, Reimann was impetuous and outspoken, addressing issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the era of the German Democratic Republic. She followed the state’s call for artists to leave their ivory towers and engage with the people, moving to the new town of Hoyerswerda to work part-time at a nearby industrial plant and run writing classes for the workers. Her diaries and letters provide a fascinating parallel to her fictional writing. By turns shocking, passionate, unflinching, and bitter—but above all life-affirming—they offer an unparalleled insight into what life was like during the first decades of the GDR.
In "I Hear America Singing," Rachel Donaldson traces the vibrant history of the twentieth-century folk music revival from its origins in the 1930s through its end in the late 1960s. She investigates the relationship between the revival and concepts of nationalism, showing how key figures in the revival--including Pete Seeger , Alan Lomax, Moses Asch, and Ralph Rinzler--used songs to influence the ways in which Americans understood the values, the culture, and the people of their own nation.
As Donaldson chronicles how cultural norms were shaped over the course of the mid-twentieth century, she underscores how various groups within the revival and their views shifted over time. "I Hear America Singing" provides a stirring account of how and why the revivalists sustained their culturally pluralist and politically democratic Americanism over this tumultuous period in American history.
From living among New York's abstract expressionists in the mid-1950s as a young woman to working in the Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture to instill revolutionary values in the media during the Sandinista movement, the story of Randall's life reads like a Hollywood production. Along the way, she edited a bilingual literary journal in Mexico City, befriended Cuban revolutionaries, raised a family, came out as a lesbian, taught college, and wrote over 150 books. Throughout it all, Randall never wavered from her devotion to social justice.
When she returned to the United States in 1984 after living in Latin America for twenty-three years, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered her to be deported for her “subversive writing.” Over the next five years, and with the support of writers, entertainers, and ordinary people across the country, Randall fought to regain her citizenship, which she won in court in 1989.
As much as I Never Left Home is Randall's story, it is also the story of the communities of artists, writers, and radicals she belonged to. Randall brings to life scores of creative and courageous people on the front lines of creating a more just world. She also weaves political and social analyses and poetry into the narrative of her life. Moving, captivating, and astonishing, I Never Left Home is a remarkable story of a remarkable woman.
When the sacred music business expanded after the Civil War, writing hymn texts gave publishing opportunities to women who were forbidden to preach, teach, or pray aloud in mixed groups. Authorized by oral expression, gospel hymns allowed women to articulate alternative spiritual models within churches that highly valued orality.
These feminized hymns are the focus of "I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent." Drawing upon her own experience as a Baptist, June Hadden Hobbs argues that the evangelical tradition is an oral tradition--it is not anti-intellectual but antiprint. Evangelicals rely on memory and spontaneous oral improvisation; hymns serve to aid memory and permit interaction between oral and written language.
By comparing male and female hymnists' use of rhetorical forms, Hobbs shows how women utilized the only oral communication allowed to them in public worship. Gospel hymns permitted women to use a complex system of images already associated with women and domesticity. This feminized hymnody challenged the androcentric value system of evangelical Christianity by making visible the contrasting masculine and feminine versions of Christianity. When these hymns were sung in church, women's voices and opinions moved out of the private sphere and into public religion. The hymns are so powerful that they are suppressed by some contemporary fundamentalists today.
In "I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent" June Hadden Hobbs employs an interdisciplinary mix of feminist literary analysis, social history, rhetoric and composition theory, hymnology, autobiography, and theology to examine hymns central to worship in most evangelical churches today.
On June 4, 1923, the Bolivian military turned a machine gun on striking miners in the northern Potosí town of Uncía. The incident is remembered as Bolivia’s first massacre of industrial workers. The violence in Uncía highlights a formative period in the development of a working class who would eventually challenge the oligarchic control of the nation.
Robert L. Smale begins his study as Bolivia’s mining industry transitioned from silver to tin; specifically focusing on the region of Oruro and northern Potosí. The miners were part of a heterogeneous urban class alongside artisans, small merchants, and other laborers. Artisan mutual aid societies provided miners their first organizational models and the guidance to emancipate themselves from the mine owners’ political tutelage. During the 1910s both the Workers’ Labor Federation and the Socialist Party appeared in Oruro to spur more aggressive political action. In 1920 miners won a comprehensive contract that exceeded labor legislation debated in Congress in the years that followed. Relations between the working class and the government deteriorated soon after, leading to the 1923 massacre in Uncía. Smale ends his study with the onset of the Great Depression and premonitions of war with Paraguay—twin cataclysms that would discredit the old oligarchic order and open new horizons to the labor movement.
This period’s developments marked the entry of workers and other marginalized groups into Bolivian politics and the acquisition of new freedoms and basic rights. These events prefigure the rise of Evo Morales—a union activist born in Oruro—in the early twenty-first century.
Advocating nuclear war, attempting communication with dolphins, and taking an interest in the paranormal and UFOs, there is perhaps no greater (or stranger) cautionary tale for the Left than that of Posadism. Named after the Argentine Trotskyist J. Posadas, the movement’s journey through the fractious and sectarian world of mid-20th century revolutionary socialism was unique. This book is a “dumpster dive” into the weird and wonderful world of the Posadists.
Although at times significant, Posadas' movement was ultimately a failure. As it disintegrated, it increasingly grew to resemble a bizarre cult, detached from the working class it sought to liberate. The renewed interest in Posadism today, especially for its more outlandish fixations, speaks to both a cynicism towards the past and nostalgia for the earnest belief that a better world is possible. Chapters include:
*Revolutionary Youth or Patriotic Youth
*The Death Throes of Capitalism
*The Origins of Posadism
*Flying Saucers, the Process of Matter and Energy, Science, the Revolutionary and Working-Class Stuggle, and the Socialist Future of Mankind
*What Exists Cannot be True
*Why Don’t Extraterrestrials Make Public Contact
*UFOs to the People
In the Introduction, A.M. Gittlitz writes, “Insurrection or first contact could come any day, Marxists and ufologists both tell us, but both are far more likely if we desire them, embracing a sentiment enigmatically expressed in a meme come before its time, a poster on the wall of rouge FBI agent Fox Mulder in the ‘90s sci-fi noir The X-Files: hovering alongside a granny image of a comically unconvincingly flying saucer and the words I WANT TO BELIEVE".
Drawing on considerable archival research, and numerous interviews with ex- and current Posadists, I Want to Believe tells the fascinating story of this most unusual socialist movement and considers why it continues to capture the imaginations of leftists today.
In 1993, Prince infamously changed his name to a unique, unpronounceable symbol. Yet this was only one of a long string of self-reinventions orchestrated by Prince as he refused to be typecast by the music industry’s limiting definitions of masculinity and femininity, of straightness and queerness, of authenticity and artifice, or of black music and white music.
Revealing how he continually subverted cultural expectations, I Wonder U examines the entirety of Prince’s diverse career as a singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, record label mogul, movie star, and director. It shows how, by blending elements of R&B, rock, and new wave into an extremely videogenic package, Prince was able to overcome the color barrier that kept black artists off of MTV. Yet even at his greatest crossover success, he still worked hard to retain his credibility among black music fans. In this way, Adilifu Nama suggests, Prince was able to assert a distinctly black political sensibility while still being perceived as a unique musical genius whose appeal transcended racial boundaries.
“Ich Kuss Die Hand”: The Letters of H. L. Mencken to Gretchen Hood relates an episode in Mencken's life that has received only passing mention from his biographers. Gretchen Hood's acquaintance with the journalistic life of Washington formed a bond with Mencken, who thought of himself, first and foremost, as an inveterate newspaperman (they playfully entertained the idea of starting their own Washington newspaper), and she had a ready appreciation for his performances as a connoisseur of the Washington political spectacle. Mencken, the amateur musician and music buff, respected her talent and professional background.
His letters indicate that he found in her an intelligent, witty, and charming respondent to his characteristic traits of personality and style. She both flattered his ego and challenged him to exhibit his celebrated manner at its best. On her part, Hood was not simply awestruck by Mencken's attentions but met them with her independent verve. “Nothing scared me,” she later said of her attitude; “ready to take on all comers.” Mencken liked to refer to her as “a licensed outlaw,” a designation that captures his impression of her and describes as well the fashionable unconventionality, which fueled the Mencken vogue.
Mencken wrote Hood over two hundred letters, and she must have written him about the same number. For much of the time they corresponded, they exchanged several letters every month, sometimes as many as four or five a week. As their communications blossomed into a four-year friendship, personal meetings soon supplemented the flow of letters.
Yuliya Komska transports readers to the western edge of the Bohemian Forest, one of Europe’s oldest borderlands, where in the 1950s civilians set out to shape the so-called prayer wall. A chain of new and repurposed pilgrimage sites, lookout towers, and monuments, the prayer wall placed two long-standing German obsessions, forest and border, at the heart of the century’s most protracted conflict. Komska illustrates how civilians used the prayer wall to engage with and contribute to the new political and religious landscape. In the process, she relates West Germany’s quiet sylvan periphery to the tragic pitch prevalent along the Iron Curtain’s better-known segments.
Steeped in archival research and rooted in nuanced interpretations of wide-ranging cultural artifacts, from vandalized religious images and tourist snapshots to poems and travelogues, The Icon Curtain pushes disciplinary boundaries and opens new perspectives on the study of borders and the Cold War alike.
Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon can be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English.
Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani—imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.
The Idea of Spatial Form contains the classic essay that introduced the concept of "spatial form" into literary discussion in 1945, and has since been accepted as one of the foundations for a theory of modern literature. It is here reprinted along with two later reconsiderations, one of which answers its major critics, while the second places the theory in relation to Russian Formalism and French Structuralism. Originally conceived to clarify the formal experiments of avant-garde literature, the idea of spatial form, when placed in this wider context, also contributes importantly to the foundations of a general poetics of the literary text. Also included are related discussions of André Malraux, Heinrich Wölfflin, Herbert Read, and E. H. Gombrich.
New material has been added to the essays in the form of footnotes and postscripts to two of them. These either illustrate the continuing relevance of the questions raised, or offer Frank's more recent opinions on the topic.
Winner of the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize
“The Idealist is a powerful book, gorgeously written and consistently insightful. Samuel Zipp uses the 1942 world tour of Wendell Willkie to examine American attitudes toward internationalism, decolonization, and race in the febrile atmosphere of the world’s first truly global conflict.”
—Andrew Preston, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith
A dramatic account of the plane journey undertaken by businessman-turned-maverick-internationalist Wendell Willkie to rally US allies to the war effort. Willkie’s tour of a planet shrunk by aviation and war inspired him to challenge Americans to fight a rising tide of nationalism at home.
In August 1942, as the threat of fascism swept the world, a charismatic Republican presidential contender boarded the Gulliver at Mitchel Airfield for a seven-week journey around the world. Wendell Willkie covered 31,000 miles as President Roosevelt’s unofficial envoy. He visited the battlefront in North Africa with General Montgomery, debated a frosty de Gaulle in Beirut, almost failed to deliver a letter to Stalin in Moscow, and allowed himself to be seduced by Chiang Kai-shek in China. Through it all, he was struck by the insistent demands for freedom across the world.
In One World, the runaway bestseller he published on his return, Willkie challenged Americans to resist the “America first” doctrine espoused by the war’s domestic opponents and warned of the dangers of “narrow nationalism.” He urged his fellow citizens to end colonialism and embrace “equality of opportunity for every race and every nation.” With his radio broadcasts regularly drawing over 30 million listeners, he was able to reach Americans directly in their homes. His call for a more equitable and interconnected world electrified the nation, until he was silenced abruptly by a series of heart attacks in 1944. With his death, America lost its most effective globalist, the man FDR referred to as “Private Citizen Number One.”
At a time when “America first” is again a rallying cry, Willkie’s message is at once chastening and inspiring, a reminder that “one world” is more than a matter of supply chains and economics, and that racism and nationalism have long been intertwined.
Totoricagüena offers a superb quantitative study of an aspect of Basque culture that has been largely ignored by scholars—the diaspora. In doing so, she enlarges the understanding of cultural identity in general—how it is defined and preserved, how it evolves over time, and how both the politics of distant places and the most intimate family habits can shape an individual’s sense of self. Identity, Culture, and Politics in the Basque Diaspora is a major contribution to the knowledge of Basques and their persistent political and cultural traditions.
Identity Papers was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
What does citizenship mean? What is the process of "naturalization" one goes through in becoming a citizen, and what is its connection to assimilation? How do the issues of identity raised by this process manifest themselves in culture? These questions, and the way they arise in contemporary France, are the focus of this diverse collection.
The essays in this volume range in subject from fiction and essay to architecture and film. Among the topics discussed are the 1937 Exposition Universelle; films dealing with Vichy France; François Truffaut's Histoire d'Adèle H.; the war of Algerian independence; and nation building under François Mitterrand.
Contributors: Anne Donadey, Elizabeth Ezra, Richard J. Golsan, Lynn A. Higgins, T. Jefferson Kline, Panivong Norindr, Shanny Peer, Rosemarie Scullion, David H. Slavin, Philip H. Solomon; Florianne Wild, .
Steven Ungar is professor of cinema and comparative literature at the University of Iowa and author of Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930 (Minnesota, 1995). Tom Conley is professor of French at Harvard University.
The ideogram changed the course of modern American poetry, and Ideogram is the first history of this important poetic tradition.
In modern poetry the ideogram is an idea presented to the reader by means of the juxtaposition of concrete particulars, usually without connective words or phrases. The poem is therefore presented in precise images, usually very tersely, and free from conventional form and meter. The idea of presenting a concept in this manner derives in part from Ernest Fenollosa's essay "The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry," the Chinese written character itself being a juxtaposition of pictographs to form a new meaning.
Ezra Pound's search for an alternative to traditional forms of verse composition resulted in his use of the ideogrammic method which, Laszlo K. Géfin asserts, became the major mode of presentation in twentieth-century American poetry. Two generations of avant-garde, experimental poets since Pound have turned to it for inspiration, evolving their own methods from its principles.
Géfin begins by tracing the development of Pound's poetics from the pre-Imagist stage through Imagism and Vorticism to the formulation of the ideogrammic method. He then examines the Objectivist poetics of Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and George Oppen; the contributions to the ideogrammic tradition of William Carlos Williams; and the Projectivist theories of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. He concludes with an exploration of Allen Ginsberg's theory of the ellipse and Gary Snyder's "riprap" method. Throughout, Géfin maintains that the ideogrammic mode is the literary representation of the twentieth-century post-logical—even post-humanist—world view.
Anthony Di Renzo makes available for the first time since their original publication some eighty years ago a collection of fifteen of Sinclair Lewis’s early business stories.
Among Lewis’s funniest satires, these stories introduce the characters, themes, and techniques that would evolve into Babbitt. Each selection reflects the commercial culture of Lewis’s day, particularly Reason Why advertising, self-help manuals, and the business fiction of the Saturday Evening Post. The stories were published between October 1915 and May 1921 (nine in the Saturday Evening Post, four in Metropolitan Magazine, one in Harper’s Magazine, and one in American Magazine).
Because some things have not changed in the American workplace since Lewis’s day, these highly entertaining and unflinchingly accurate office satires will appeal to the fans of Dilbert and The Drew Carey Show. In a sense, they provide lay readers with an archaeology of white-collar angst and regimentation. The horror and absurdities of contemporary corporate downsizing already existed in the office of the Progressive Era. For an audience contemplating the death of the American middle class, Lewis’s stories provide an important retrospective on earlier times and a preliminary autopsy on the American dream.
Appearing just in time to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Babbitt, this collection rescues Lewis’s best early short fiction from obscurity, provides extensive information about his formative years in advertising and public relations, and analyzes both his genius for marketing and his carefully cultivated persona as the Great Salesman of American letters.
Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation. If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress provides an in-depth historical analysis—from the days of the Great Migration to the present—of the people and movements that made the city a center of political activism. The editor and contributors show how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and put presidents in the White House.
If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress emphasizes the strength of political strategies such as the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” movement and the Double V campaign. It demonstrates how Black activism helped shift Philadelphia from the Republican machine to Democratic leaders in the 1950s and highlights the election of politicians like Robert N. C. Nix, Sr., the first African American representative from Philadelphia. In addition, it focuses on grassroots movements and the intersection of race, gender, class, and politics in the 1960s, and shows how African Americans from the 1970s to the present challenged Mayor Frank Rizzo and helped elect Mayors Wilson Goode, John Street, and Michael Nutter.
If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress cogently makes the case that Black activism has long been a powerful force in Philadelphia politics.
I’ll Tell You Mine is an extraordinary anthology, a book rooted in Iowa’s successful program that goes beyond mere celebration to present some of the best nonfiction writing of the past thirty years. Eighteen pieces produced by Iowa graduates exemplify the development of both the program and the field of nonfiction writing. Each is accompanied by commentary from the author on a challenging issue presented by the story and the writing process, including drafting, workshopping, revising, and listening to (or sometimes ignoring) advice. The essays are put into broader context by a prologue from Robert Atwan, founding editor of the Best American Essays series, who details the rise of nonfiction as a literary genre since the New Journalism of the 1960s.
Creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing writing concentration in the country, with more than one hundred and fifty programs in the United States. I’ll Tell You Mine shows why Iowa’s leads the way. Its insider’s view of the Iowa program experience and its wealth of groundbreaking nonfiction writing will entertain readers and inspire writers of all kinds.
In the Cold War era, Chinese Americans were caught in a double-bind. The widespread stigma of illegal immigration, as it was often called, was most easily countered with the model minority, assimilating and forming nuclear families, but that in turn led to further stereotypes. In Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities, Heidi Kim investigates how Chinese American writers navigated a strategy to normalize and justify the Chinese presence during a time when fears of Communism ran high.
Kim explores how writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Jade Snow Wong, and C. Y. Lee, among others, addressed issues of history, family, blood purity, and law through then-groundbreaking novels and memoirs. Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities also uses legal cases, immigration documents, and law as well as mass media coverage to illustrate how writers constructed stories in relation to the political structures that allowed or disallowed their presence, their citizenship, and their blended identity.
Kim illuminates the rapidly shifting political and social pressures on Chinese American authors who selectively concealed, revealed, and reconstructed issues of citizenship, belonging, and inclusion in their writing.
In 1969, citizen gadfly Sherman Skolnick accused two Illinois Supreme Court justices of accepting valuable bank stock from an influential Chicago lawyer in exchange for deciding an important case in the lawyer’s favor. The resulting feverish media coverage prompted the state supreme court to appoint a special commission to investigate. Within six weeks and on a shoestring budget, the commission mobilized a small volunteer staff to reveal the facts. Stevens, then a relatively unknown Chicago lawyer, served as chief counsel. His work on this investigation would launch him into the public spotlight and onto the bench.
Manaster, who served on the commission, tells the real story of the investigation, detailing the dead ends, tactics, and triumphs. Manaster expertly traces Stevens’s masterful courtroom strategies and vividly portrays the high-profile personalities involved, as well as the subtleties of judicial corruption. A reflective foreword by Justice Stevens himself looks back at the case and how it influenced his career.
Now the subject of the documentary Unexpected Justice: The Rise of John Paul Stevens, Manaster’s book is both a fascinating chapter of political history and a revealing portrait of the early career of a Supreme Court justice.
In 1969, citizen gadfly Sherman Skolnick accused two Illinois Supreme Court justices of accepting valuable bank stock from an influential Chicago lawyer in exchange for deciding an important case in the lawyer’s favor. The resulting feverish media coverage prompted the state supreme court to appoint a special commission to investigate. Within six weeks and on a shoestring budget, the commission mobilized a small volunteer staff to reveal the facts. Stevens, then a relatively unknown Chicago lawyer, served as chief counsel. His work on this investigation would launch him into the public spotlight and onto the bench.
Manaster, who served on the commission, tells the real story of the investigation, detailing the dead ends, tactics, and triumphs. Manaster expertly traces Stevens’s masterful courtroom strategies and vividly portrays the high-profile personalities involved, as well as the subtleties of judicial corruption. A reflective foreword by Justice Stevens himself looks back at the case and how it influenced his career.
Now the subject of the documentary Unexpected Justice: The Rise of John Paul Stevens, this fascinating chapter of political history offers a revealing portrait of the early career of a Supreme Court justice.
For most of literary history, personal confessions about illness were considered too intimate to share publicly. By the mid-twentieth century, however, a series of events set the stage for the emergence of the illness narrative. The increase of chronic disease, the transformation of medicine into big business, the women’s health movement, the AIDS/HIV pandemic, the advent of inexpensive paperbacks, and the rise of self-publishing all contributed to the proliferation of narratives about encounters with medicine and mortality.
While the illness narrative is now a staple of the publishing industry, the genre itself has posed a problem for literary studies. What is the role of criticism in relation to personal accounts of suffering? Can these narratives be judged on aesthetic grounds? Are they a collective expression of the lost intimacy of the patient-doctor relationship? Is their function thus instrumental—to elicit the reader’s empathy?
To answer these questions, Ann Jurecic turns to major works on pain and suffering by Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Eve Sedgwick and reads these alongside illness narratives by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Reynolds Price, and Anne Fadiman, among others. In the process, she defines the subgenres of risk and pain narratives and explores a range of critical responses guided, alternately, by narrative empathy, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the practice of reparative reading.
Illness as Narrative seeks to draw wider attention to this form of life writing and to argue for new approaches to both literary criticism and teaching narrative. Jurecic calls for a practice that’s both compassionate and critical. She asks that we consider why writers compose stories of illness, how readers receive them, and how both use these narratives to make meaning of human fragility and mortality.
While Kwasniewski's camera captured the sights and sounds of Milwaukee at the turn of the century from the perspective of a single ethnic group in a single neighborhood, his photographs resonate far beyond Milwaukee's Polish South Side. They illuminate the particulars of American life during the early decades of the twentieth century. "What we see, reflected in the distant mirror," says John Gurda, "is ourselves."
Looking back over her life from a precocious childhood in Georgia to her painful decline from a series of crippling strokes, McCullers offers poignant and unabashed remembrances of her early writing success, her family attachments, a troubled marriage to a failed writer, and friendships with literary and film luminaries (Gypsy Rose Lee, Richard Wright, Isak Dinesen, John Huston, Marilyn Monroe), and the intense relationships of the important women in her life.
To many observers, the 1981 election of Henry Cisneros as mayor of San Antonio, Texas, represented the culminating victory in the Chicano community's decades-long struggle for inclusion in the city's political life. Yet, nearly twenty years later, inclusion is still largely an illusion for many working-class and poor Chicanas and Chicanos, since business interests continue to set the city's political and economic priorities.
In this book, Rodolfo Rosales offers the first in-depth history of the Chicano community's struggle for inclusion in the political life of San Antonio during the years 1951 to 1991, drawn from interviews with key participants as well as archival research. He focuses on the political and organizational activities of the Chicano middle class in the context of post-World War II municipal reform and how it led ultimately to independent political representation for the Chicano community. Of special interest is his extended discussion of the role of Chicana middle-class women as they gained greater political visibility in the 1980s.
In the process, Schechter shows how deeply imbricated the analyst-patient relationship is in this effort. Since the mid-twentieth century, the "real" relationship between analyst and patient is no longer the unremarked background of analysis but its very site. Psychoanalysts seek to validate the centrality of this relationship with theory and, through codified "standards," to claim it as a privileged technique. It has become the means by which psychoanalysts, in seeking to protect their disciplinary autonomy, have unwittingly bound themselves to a neoliberal discourse of regulation.
An authoritative reassessment of one of the Third Reich’s most notorious war criminals, whose alleged sexual barbarism made her a convenient scapegoat and obscured the true nature of Nazi terror.
On September 1, 1967, one of the Third Reich’s most infamous figures hanged herself in her cell after nearly twenty-four years in prison. Known as the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” Ilse Koch was singularly notorious, having been accused of owning lampshades fabricated from skins of murdered camp inmates and engaging in “bestial” sexual behavior. These allegations fueled a public fascination that turned Koch into a household name and the foremost symbol of Nazi savagery. Her subsequent prosecution resulted in a scandal that prompted US Senate hearings and even the intervention of President Truman.
Yet the most sensational atrocities attributed to Koch were apocryphal or unproven. In this authoritative reappraisal, Tomaz Jardim shows that, while Koch was guilty of heinous crimes, she also became a scapegoat for postwar Germans eager to distance themselves from the Nazi past. The popular condemnation of Koch—and the particularly perverse crimes attributed to her by prosecutors, the media, and the public at large—diverted attention from the far more consequential but less sensational complicity of millions of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich’s crimes.
Ilse Koch on Trial reveals how gendered perceptions of violence and culpability drove Koch’s zealous prosecution at a time when male Nazi perpetrators responsible for greater crimes often escaped punishment or received lighter sentences. Both in the international press and during her three criminal trials, Koch was condemned for her violation of accepted gender norms and “good womanly behavior.” Koch’s “sexual barbarism,” though treated as an emblem of the Third Reich’s depravity, ultimately obscured the bureaucratized terror of the Nazi state and hampered understanding of the Holocaust.
Image and Logic is the most detailed engagement to date with the impact of modern technology on what it means to "do" physics and to be a physicist. At the beginning of this century, physics was usually done by a lone researcher who put together experimental apparatus on a benchtop. Now experiments frequently are larger than a city block, and experimental physicists live very different lives: programming computers, working with industry, coordinating vast teams of scientists and engineers, and playing politics.
Peter L. Galison probes the material culture of experimental microphysics to reveal how the ever-increasing scale and complexity of apparatus have distanced physicists from the very science that drew them into experimenting, and have fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions much as apparatus have fragmented atoms to get at the fundamental building blocks of matter. At the same time, the necessity for teamwork in operating multimillion-dollar machines has created dynamic "trading zones," where instrument makers, theorists, and experimentalists meet, share knowledge, and coordinate the extraordinarily diverse pieces of the culture of modern microphysics: work, machines, evidence, and argument.
Modern life is steeped in images, image-making, and attempts to control the world through vision. Mastery of images has been advanced by technologies that expand and reshape vision and enable us to create, store, transmit, and display images. The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion Mark C. Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas A. Carlson, explore the power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Building on Heidegger’s notion that modern humanity aims to master the world by picturing or representing the real, they investigate the contemporary culture of the image in its philosophical, religious, economic, political, imperial, and military dimensions, challenging the abstraction, anonymity, and dangerous disconnection of contemporary images.
Taylor traces a history of capitalism, focusing on its lack of humility, particularly in the face of mortality, and he considers art as a possible way to reconnect us to the earth. Through a genealogy of iconic views from space, Rubenstein exposes the delusions of conquest associated with extraterrestrial travel. Starting with the pressing issues of surveillance capitalism and facial recognition technology, Carlson extends Heidegger’s analysis through a meditation on the telematic elimination of the individual brought about by totalizing technologies. Together, these essays call for a consideration of how we can act responsibly toward the past in a way that preserves the earth for future generations. Attending to the fragility of material things and to our own mortality, they propose new practices of imagination grounded in love and humility.
By paying special attention to the contributions of photographers and other visual artists who have not been discussed in previous accounts of black modernism, Thaggert expands the scope of our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and contributes to a growing recognition of the importance of visual culture as a distinct element within, and not separate from, black literary studies.
Thaggert trains her critical eye on the work of James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Carl Van Vechten, James Van Der Zee, and Aaron Siskind—artists who experimented with narrative and photographic techniques in order to alter the perception of black images and to question and reshape how one reads and sees the black body. Examining some of the more problematic authors and artists of black modernism, she challenges entrenched assumptions about black literary and visual representations of the early to mid twentieth century.
Thaggert concludes her study with a close look at the ways in which Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance were reimagined and memorialized in two notable texts—Wallace Thurman's 1932 satire Infants of the Spring and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's controversial 1969 exhibition "Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968."
A radical rethinking of the theory and the experience of mental images
Here, in English translation for the first time, is Gilbert Simondon’s fundamental reconception of the mental image and the theory of imagination and invention. Drawing on a vast range of mid-twentieth-century theoretical resources—from experimental psychology, cybernetics, and ethology to the phenomenological reflections of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—Imagination and Invention provides a comprehensive account of the mental image and adds a vital new dimension to the theory of psychical individuation in Simondon’s earlier, highly influential work.
Simondon traces the development of the mental image through four phases: first a bundle of motor anticipations, the image becomes a cognitive system that mediates the organism’s relation to its milieu, then a symbolic and abstract integration of motor and affective experience to, finally, invention, a solution to a problem of life that requires the externalization of the mental image and the creation of a technical object. An image cannot be understood from the perspective of one phase alone, he argues, but only within the trajectory of its progressive metamorphosis.
Imagination has long been regarded as central to C. S. Lewis's life and to his creative and critical works, but this is the first study to provide a thorough analysis of his theory of imagination, including the different ways he used the word and how those uses relate to each other. Peter Schakel begins by concentrating on the way reading or engaging with the other arts is an imaginative activity. He focuses on three books in which imagination is the central theme—Surprised by Joy, An Experiment in Criticism, and The Discarded Image—and shows the important role of imagination in Lewis's theory of education.
He then examines imagination and reading in Lewis's fiction, concentrating specifically on the Chronicles of Narnia, the most imaginative of his works. He looks at how the imaginative experience of reading the Chronicles is affected by the physical texture of the books, the illustrations, revisions of the texts, the order in which the books are read, and their narrative "voice," the "storyteller" who becomes almost a character in the stories.
Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis also explores Lewis's ideas about imagination in the nonliterary arts. Although Lewis regarded engagement with the arts as essential to a well- rounded and satisfying life, critics of his work and even biographers have given little attention to this aspect of his life. Schakel reviews the place of music, dance, art, and architecture in Lewis's life, the ways in which he uses them as content in his poems and stories, and how he develops some of the deepest, most significant themes of his stories through them.
Schakel concludes by analyzing the uses and abuses of imagination. He looks first at "moral imagination." Although Lewis did not use this term, Schakel shows how Lewis developed the concept in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man long before it became popularized in the 1980s and 1990s. While readers often concentrate on the Christian dimension of Lewis's works, equally or more important to him was their moral dimension.
Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis will appeal to students and teachers of both children's literature and twentieth-century British writers. It will also be of value to readers who wish to compare Lewis's creations with more recent imaginative works such as the Harry Potter series.
The post–Civil Rights era was marked by an explosion of black political thought and aesthetics. Reflecting a shifting horizon of expectations around race relations, the unconventional sounds of free jazz coupled with experimental literary creation nuanced the push toward racial equality and enriched the possibilities for aesthetic innovation within the Black Arts Movement. In Imagine the Sound, Carter Mathes demonstrates how African American writers used sound to further artistic resistance within a rapidly transforming political and racial landscape.
While many have noted the oral and musical qualities of African American poetry from the post–Civil Rights period, Mathes points out how the political implications of dissonance, vibration, and resonance produced in essays, short stories, and novels animated the ongoing struggle for equality. Situating literary works by Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, and Toni Cade Bambara in relation to the expansive ideas of sound proposed by free jazz musicians such as Marion Brown and Sun Ra, not only does this book illustrate how the presence of sound can be heard and read as political, but it recuperates critically neglected, yet important, writers and musicians. Ultimately, Mathes details how attempts to capture and render sound through the medium of writing enable writers to envision alternate realities and resistance outside of the linear frameworks offered by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
In precise and elegant prose, Mathes shows how in conceptualizing sound, African American writers opened up the political imaginations of their readers. By exploring this intellectual convergence of literary artistry, experimental music, and sound theory, Imagine the Sound reveals how taking up radically new forms of expression allows us to speak to the complexities of race and political resistance.
With his dirty, tattered clothes and hollowed-out face, Oliver Twist is the enduring symbol of the young indigent spilling out of orphanages and haunting the streets of late-nineteenth-century London. Although poor children were often portrayed as real-life Oliver Twists—either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy parents—they in fact frequently maintained contact and were eventually reunited with their families.
In Imagined Orphans, Lydia Murdoch focuses on this discrepancy between the representation and the reality of children’s experiences within welfare institutions—a discrepancy that she argues stems from conflicts over middle- and working-class notions of citizenship that arose in the 1870s and persisted until the First World War. Reformers’ efforts to depict poor children as either orphaned or endangered by abusive or “no-good” parents fed upon the poor’s increasing exclusion from the Victorian social body. Reformers used the public’s growing distrust and pitiless attitude toward poor adults to increase charity and state aid to the children.
With a critical eye to social issues of the period, Murdoch urges readers to reconsider the complex situations of families living in poverty. While reformers’ motivations seem well intentioned, she shows how their methods solidified the public’s antipoor sentiment and justified a minimalist welfare state that engendered a cycle of poverty. As they worked to fashion model citizens, reformers’ efforts to protect and care for children took on an increasingly imperial cast that would continue into the twentieth century.
Through her detailed interpretations of visual representations of la chica moderna, Hershfield demonstrates how the images embodied popular ideas and anxieties about sexuality, work, motherhood, and feminine beauty, as well as class and ethnicity. Her analysis takes into account the influence of mexicanidad, the vision of Mexican national identity promoted by successive postrevolutionary administrations, and the fashions that arrived in Mexico from abroad, particularly from Paris, New York, and Hollywood. She considers how ideals of the modern housewife were promoted to Mexican women through visual culture; how working women were represented in illustrated periodicals and in the Mexican cinema; and how images of traditional “types” of Mexican women, such as la china poblana (the rural woman), came to define a “domestic exotic” form of modern femininity. Scrutinizing photographs of Mexican women that accompanied articles in the Mexican press during the 1920s and 1930s, Hershfield reflects on the ways that the real and the imagined came together in the production of la chica moderna.
This volume considers the relationship between the development of evolution and its historical representations by focusing on the so-called Darwinian Revolution. The very idea of the Darwinian Revolution is a historical construct devised to help explain the changing scientific and cultural landscape that was ushered in by Charles Darwin’s singular contribution to natural science. And yet, since at least the 1980s, science historians have moved away from traditional “great man” narratives to focus on the collective role that previously neglected figures have played in formative debates of evolutionary theory. Darwin, they argue, was not the driving force behind the popularization of evolution in the nineteenth century. This volume moves the conversation forward by bringing Darwin back into the frame, recognizing that while he was not the only important evolutionist, his name and image came to signify evolution itself, both in the popular imagination as well as in the work and writings of other evolutionists. Together, contributors explore how the history of evolution has been interpreted, deployed, and exploited to fashion the science behind our changing understandings of evolution from the nineteenth century to the present.
One of the most powerful nationalist ideas in modern Europe is the assertion that there is a link between people and their landscape. Focusing on the heart of German romanticism, the Rhineland, Thomas Lekan examines nature protection activities from Wilhelmine Germany through the end of the Nazi era to illuminate the relationship between environmental reform and the cultural construction of national identity.
In the late nineteenth century, anxieties about national character infused ecological concerns about industrialization, spurring landscape preservationists to protect the natural environment. In the Rhineland’s scenic rivers, forests, and natural landmarks, they saw Germany as a timeless and organic nation rather than a recently patchworked political construct. Landscape preservation also served conservative social ends during a period of rapid modernization, as outdoor pursuits were promoted to redirect class-conscious factory workers and unruly youth from “crass materialism” to the German homeland. Lekan’s examination of Nazi environmental policy challenges recent work on the “green” Nazis by showing that the Third Reich systematically subordinated environmental concerns to war mobilization and racial hygiene.
This book is an original contribution not only to studies of national identity in modern Germany but also to the growing field of European environmental history.
In the early 1920s, Fannie Hurst’s enormous popularity made her the highest-paid writer in America. She conquered the literary scene at the same time the silent movie industry began to emerge as a tremendously profitable and popular form of entertainment. Abe C. Ravitz parallels Hurst’s growing acclaim with the evolution of silent films, from which she borrowed ideas and techniques that furthered her career. Ravitz notes that Hurst was amazingly adept at anticipating what the public wanted. Sensing that the national interest was shifting from rural to urban subjects, Hurst set her immigrant tales and her "woiking goil" tales in urban America. In her early stories, she tried to bridge the gap between Old World and New World citizens, each somewhat fearful and suspicious of the other. She wrote of love and ethnicity—bringing the Jewish Mother to prominence—of race relations and prejudice, of the woman alone in her quest for selfhood. Ravitz argues, in fact, that her socially oriented tales and her portraits of women in the city clearly identify her as a forerunner of contemporary feminism.
Ravitz brings to life the popular culture from 1910 through the 1920s, tracing the meteoric rise of Hurst and depicting the colorful cast of characters surrounding her. He reproduces for the first time the Hurst correspondence with Theodore Dreiser, Charles and Kathleen Norris, and Gertrude Atherton. Fellow writers Rex Beach and Vachel Lindsay also play important roles in Ravitz’s portrait of Hurst, as does Zora Neale Hurston, who awakened Hurst’s interest in the Harlem Renaissance and in race relations, as shown in Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life.
Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including plays, lachrymose novels, popular movies, and even highly publicized funerals and political trials, the essays in Imitations of Life argue that melodrama has consistently offered models of behavior for times of transition, and that contemporary televised versions of melodrama continue to help Russians cope with national events that they understand implicitly but are not yet able to articulate. In contrast to previous studies, this collection argues for a reading that takes into account the subtle but pointed challenges to national politics and to gender and class hierarchies made in melodramatic works from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Collectively, the contributors shift and cross borders, illustrating how the cultural dismissal of melodrama as fundamentally escapist and targeted primarily at the politically disenfranchised has subverted the drama’s own intrinsically subversive virtues.
Imitations of Life will interest students and scholars of contemporary Russia, and Russian history, literature, and theater.
Contributors. Otto Boele, Julie Buckler, Julie Cassiday, Susan Costanzo, Helena Goscilo, Beth Holmgren, Lars Lih, Louise McReynolds, Joan Neuberger, Alexander Prokhorov, Richard Stites
Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the “foreigner-within.” In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant—at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation—displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a “failed” integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders.
In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.
Examining race and ethnic relations through an intersectional lens, Shirley Yee's An Immigrant Neighborhoodinvestigates the ways that race, class, and gender together shaped concepts of integration and assimilation as well as whiteness and citizenship in lower Manhattan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.
In contrast to accounts of insulated neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves, Yee unearths the story of working class urban dwellers of various ethnic groups—Chinese, Jews, Italians, and Irish—routinely interacting in social and economic settings.
Yee's numerous, fascinating anecdotes—such as one about an Irishman who served as the only funeral director for Chinese for many years—recount the lived experiences of these neighborhoods, detailing friendships, business relationships, and sexual relationships that vividly counter the prevailing idea that different ethnic groups did not mix except in ways marked by violence and hostility.
In The Immigrant Scene, Sabine Haenni reveals how theaters in New York created ethnic entertainment that shaped the culture of the United States in the early twentieth century. Considering the relationship between leisure and mass culture, The Immigrant Scene develops a new picture of the metropolis in which the movement of people, objects, and images on-screen and in the street helped residents negotiate the complexities of modern times.
In analyzing how communities engaged with immigrant theaters and the nascent film culture in New York City, Haenni traces the ways in which performance and cinema provided virtual mobility—ways of navigating the socially complex metropolis—and influenced national ideas of immigration, culture, and diversity in surprising and lasting ways.
Leo Lucassen tackles the question of whether the integration process of these recent immigrants will fundamentally differ in the long run (over multiple generations) from the experiences of similar immigrant groups in the past. For comparison, Lucassen focuses on "large and problematic groups" from Western Europe's past (the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Poles in Germany, and the Italians in France) and demonstrates a number of structural similarities in the way migrants and their descendants integrated into these nation states. Lucassen emphasizes that the geographic sources of the "threat" have changed and that contemporaries tend to overemphasize the threat of each successive wave of immigrants, in part because the successfully incorporated immigrants of the past have become invisible in national histories.
Zimmer focuses on Italians and Eastern European Jews in San Francisco, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey. Tracing the movement's changing fortunes from the pre–World War I era through the Spanish Civil War, Zimmer argues that anarchists, opposed to both American and Old World nationalism, severed all attachments to their nations of origin but also resisted assimilation into their host society. Their radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity instead embraced diversity and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. Though ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of Americanism and other nationalisms, the anarchist movement nonetheless provided a shining example of a transnational collective identity delinked from the nation-state and racial hierarchies.
In Imperfect Fit, Fisher focuses on the role of fracturing, ruptures, and breakages in many traditional ties between art and poetry, as well as the resulting use of collage and assemblage by practitioners of those arts. Fisher addresses, among other subjects, destruction as a signifier in twentieth-century art; the poetic employment of bureaucratic vocabularies and “business speak”; and the roles of public performance and memory loss in the fashioning of human knowledge and art.
Commonplace notions of coherence, logic, and truth are reimagined and deconstructed in this study, and Fisher concludes by suggesting that contemporary culture offers a particularly robust opportunity—and even necessity—to engage in the production of art as a pragmatic act. Scholars of art, poetry, and aesthetics will be engaged and challenged by this insightful work.
A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).
The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.
Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.
An Imperial Path to Modernity examines the role of liberal intellectuals in reshaping transnational ideas and internationalist aspirations into national values and imperial ambitions in early twentieth-century Japan. Perceiving the relationship between liberalism and the international world order, a cohort of Japanese thinkers conformed to liberal ideas and institutions to direct Japan’s transformation into a liberal empire in Asia. To sustain and rationalize the imperial enterprise, these Japanese liberals sought to make the domestic political stage less hostile to liberalism. Facilitating the creation of print-mediated public opinion, liberal intellectuals attempted to enlist the new middle class as a social ally in circulating liberal ideas and practices within Japan and throughout the empire.
In tracing the interconnections between liberalism and the imperial project, Jung-Sun N. Han focuses on the ideas and activities of Yoshino Sakuzo (1878–1933), who was and is remembered as a champion of prewar Japanese liberalism and Taisho democracy. Drawing insights from intellectual history, cultural studies, and international relations, this study argues that prewar Japanese liberalism grew out of the efforts of intellectuals such as Yoshino who worked to devise a transnational institution to govern the Japanese empire.
Sophisticated and tightly argued, Impressionist Subjects is a substantial contribution to the reassessment and expansion of the modernist fiction canon.
The mystery stories and other popular fiction of Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) brought her wealth and fame, but she was much more than a writer. She was a well-known American, respected and loved during a time when few women achieved national influence.
Her early life was conventional enough. Trained as a nurse, she met and married a physician, with whom she had three sons. She was living the stereotypical life of a young matron in Allegheny (now part of Pittsburgh), when her husband’s investments evaporated during a stock market crash. She began writing as a means to supplement the family income.
Rinehart became a prolific writer. In addition to her mysteries, she wrote serious fiction, plays, poems, magazine articles, and editorials. Her regular contributions to the <I>Saturday Evening Post</I> were immensely popular and helped the magazine mold middle-class taste and manners.
In this fascinating account of a woman ahead of her time, Cohn illuminates the tensions that pervaded Rinehart’s life. Rinehart’s commercial success conflicted with her domestic roles of wife and mother; she often endured periods of illness and depression but also pursued adventure, including a job as the first woman war correspondent at the Belgian front during World War I. Throughout, Cohn presents Rinehart as a woman of many complexities whose zest for life always prevailed.
Travel back to the year 1926 and into the rush of experiences that made people feel they were living on the edge of time. Touch a world where speed seemed the very essence of life. It is a year for which we have no expectations. It was not 1066 or 1588 or 1945, yet it was the year A. A. Milne published Winnie-the-Pooh and Alfred Hitchcock released his first successful film, The Lodger. A set of modern masters was at work--Jorge Luis Borges, Babe Ruth, Leni Riefenstahl, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Greta Garbo, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Martin Heidegger--while factory workers, secretaries, engineers, architects, and Argentine cattle-ranchers were performing their daily tasks.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht opens up the space-time continuum by exploring the realities of the day such as bars, boxing, movie palaces, elevators, automobiles, airplanes, hair gel, bullfighting, film stardom, dance crazes, and the surprise reappearance of King Tut after a three-thousand-year absence. From the vantage points of Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York, Gumbrecht ranges widely through the worlds of Spain, Italy, France, and Latin America. The reader is allowed multiple itineraries, following various routes from one topic to another and ultimately becoming immersed in the activities, entertainments, and thought patterns of the citizens of 1926.
We learn what it is to be an "ugly American" in Paris by experiencing the first mass influx of American tourists into Europe. We visit assembly lines which turned men into machines. We relive a celebrated boxing match and see how Jack Dempsey was beaten yet walked away with the hearts of the fans. We hear the voice of Adolf Hitler condemning tight pants on young men. Gumbrecht conveys these fragments of history as a living network of new sensibilities, evoking in us the excitement of another era.
In a Closet Hidden traces Freeman's evolution as a writer, showing how her own inner conflicts repeatedly found expression in her art. As Glasser demonstrates, Freeman's work examined the competing claims of creativity and convention, self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice, spinsterhood and marriage, lesbianism and heterosexuality.
Showcasing poems by more than ninety contemporary American poets, In a Fine Frenzyreveals what Shakespeare’s poetic children have made of their inheritance. Particularly interested in Viola, Miranda, Prospero, Desdemona, Iago, Lear, Cordelia, Hamlet, Horatio, and Ophelia, the poets respond to the sonnets, the comedies, the tragedies, the romances, and, to a lesser degree, Shakespeare the man. In so doing they reveal the aspects of his work most currently captivating to modern writers.
Those who cherish Shakespeare’s mercurial wit will delight in the rapid shifts, from grief to hilarity, so characteristic of the bard himself. Comic poems about tragedies follow decidedly somber poems about comedies. Single poems contain multiple emotional twists and turns. Some pay homage; most interact directly with the original Shakespearean text. Collectively, they corroborate Ben Jonson's assertion that Shakespeare is “not of an age, but for all time.”
The extreme anti-Western actions and attitudes of Iranians in the 1980s astonished and dismayed the West, which has characterized the Iranian positions as irrational and inexplicable. In this groundbreaking study of images of the West in Iranian literature, however, M. R. Ghanoonparvar reveals that these attitudes did not develop suddenly or inexplicably but rather evolved over more than two centuries of Persian-Western contact.
Notable among the authors whose works Ghanoonparvar discusses are Sadeq Hedayat, M. A. Jamalzadeh, Hushang Golshiri, Gholamhoseyn Sa'edi, Simin Daneshvar, Moniru Ravanipur, Sadeq Chubak, and Jalal Al-e Ahmad. This survey significantly illuminates the sources of Iranian attitudes toward the West and offers many surprising discoveries for Western readers, not least of which is the fact that Iranians have often found Westerners to be as enigmatic and incomprehensible as we have believed them to be.
In and Out of Phase is the first sustained look at the creative interactions between artists and musicians of this era, looking at four pairs of creators who used process-oriented ideas and techniques in their music and art: Dan Flavin and La Monte Young; Sol LeWitt and Milton Babbitt; Richard Serra and Steve Reich; and Bruce Nauman and Meredith Monk. Maizels uncovers not just the social and intellectual connections between these two groups of creators, but illuminates how the focus on repetitive actions, pattern and process, and an emphasis on “surface” created mutual influence—and stylistic change—between music and art during this period. The book’s concluding chapter briefly addresses the enduring influence of the innovations of the 1960s on more recent works.
In Close Association is the first English-language study of the local networks of women and men who built modern Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Marnie Anderson uncovers in vivid detail how a colorful group of Okayama-based activists founded institutions, engaged in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, promoted social reform, and advocated “civilization and enlightenment” while forging pathbreaking conceptions of self and society. Alongside them were Western Protestant missionaries, making this story at once a local history and a transnational one.
Placing gender analysis at its core, the book offers fresh perspectives on what women did beyond domestic boundaries, while showing men’s lives, too, were embedded in home and kin. Writing “history on the diagonal,” Anderson documents the gradual differentiation of public activity by gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meiji-era associations became increasingly sex-specific, though networks remained heterosocial until the twentieth century.
Anderson attends to how the archival record shapes what historians can know about individual lives. She argues for the interdependence of women and men and the importance of highlighting connections between people to explain historical change. Above all, the study sheds new light on how local personalities together transformed Japan.
So began a decade of hardship for Ed and Jean Yellin and their three young children as the repressive weight of the U.S. government, caught up in the throes of McCarthyism, crashed down upon their careers, their daily household budget, and their relationships to colleagues, neighbors, and their country. In Contempt is a faithful, factual testament to the enduring quality of patriotic dissent in our evolving democracy—and a loving reconstruction of what it meant to be labeled “unAmerican” for defending the Constitution.
While some Brazilian elites used the issue of sexual purity to boast of their country’s moral superiority, others claimed that the veneration of such concepts as virginity actually frustrated efforts at modernization. Moreover, although individuals of all social classes invoked values they considered “traditional,” such as the confinement of women’s sexuality within marriage, these values were at odds with social practices—such as premarital sex, cohabitation, divorce, and female-headed households—that had been common throughout Brazil’s history. The persistence of these practices, together with post-World War I changes in both official and popular moral ideals, presented formidable obstacles to the Estado Novo’s renewed drive to define and enforce public morality and private family values in the late 1930s.
With sophisticated theoretical underpinnings, In Defense of Honor is written in a clear and lively manner, making it accessible to students and scholars in a variety of disciplines, including Brazilian and Latin American studies, gender studies, and legal history.
The collection's contributors examine international and everyday contests over political power and cultural representation, focusing on communities and groups above and underground, on state houses and diplomatic board rooms manned by Latin American and international governing elites, on the relations among states regionally, and, less frequently, on the dynamics between the two great superpowers themselves. In addition to charting new directions for research on the Latin American Cold War, In From the Cold seeks to contribute more generally to an understanding of the conflict in the global south.
Contributors. Ariel C. Armony, Steven J. Bachelor, Thomas S. Blanton, Seth Fein, Piero Gleijeses, Gilbert M. Joseph, Victoria Langland, Carlota McAllister, Stephen Pitti, Daniela Spenser, Eric Zolov
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century Minnesota produced three young men of great talent who each went east to become writers. Two of them became famous: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. This is the story of the third man: Charles Macomb Flandrau.
Flandrau, a model of style and worldly sophistication and destined, almost everyone agreed, for greatness, was among the most talented young writers of his generation. His short stories about Harvard in the 1890s were called “the first realistic description of undergraduate life in American colleges” and sold out of the first printing in a few weeks. From 1899 to 1902 Flandrau was among the most popular contributors to the Saturday Evening Post. Alexander Woollcott rated him the best essayist in America. And Viva Mexico!, Flandrau’s account of life on a Mexican coffee plantation, is a classic, perhaps the best travel book ever written by an American. Yet Flandrau turned his back on it all. Financially independent, he chose a solitary, epicurean life in St. Paul, Mexico, Majorca, Paris, and Normandy. In later years, he confined his writing to local newspaper pieces and letters to his small circle of family and friends.
Using excerpts from these newspaper columns and unpublished letters, Larry Haeg has painstakingly recreated the story of this urbane, talented, witty, lazy, enigmatic, supremely private man who never reached the peak of literary success to which his talent might have taken him.
This very readable biography provides a detailed and honest portrayal of Flandrau and his times. It will fascinate readers interested in writers’ life stories and scholars of American literature as well as general readers interested in midwestern literary history.
Finalist for the 2015 Aidoo-Snyder Prize
In Idi Amin’s Shadow is a rich social history examining Ugandan women’s complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship to Amin’s military state. Based on more than one hundred interviews with women who survived the regime, as well as a wide range of primary sources, this book reveals how the violence of Amin’s militarism resulted in both opportunities and challenges for women. Some assumed positions of political power or became successful entrepreneurs, while others endured sexual assault or experienced the trauma of watching their brothers, husbands, or sons “disappeared” by the state’s security forces. In Idi Amin’s Shadow considers the crucial ways that gender informed and was informed by the ideology and practice of militarism in this period. By exploring this relationship, Alicia C. Decker offers a nuanced interpretation of Amin’s Uganda and the lives of the women who experienced and survived its violence.
Each chapter begins with the story of one woman whose experience illuminates some larger theme of the book. In this way, it becomes clear that the politics of military rule were highly relevant to women and gender relations, just as the politics of gender were central to militarism. By drawing upon critical security studies, feminist studies, and violence studies, Decker demonstrates that Amin’s dictatorship was far more complex and his rule much more strategic than most observers have ever imagined.
There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. In Levittown’s Shadow tells us there’s more to this story, offering an eye-opening account of diverse, poor residents living and working in those same neighborhoods. Tim Keogh shows how public policies produced both suburban plenty and deprivation—and why ignoring suburban poverty doomed efforts to reduce inequality.
Keogh focuses on the suburbs of Long Island, home to Levittown, often considered the archetypal suburb. Here military contracts subsidized well-paid employment welding airplanes or filing paperwork, while weak labor laws impoverished suburbanites who mowed lawns, built houses, scrubbed kitchen floors, and stocked supermarket shelves. Federal mortgage programs helped some families buy orderly single-family homes and enter the middle class but also underwrote landlord efforts to cram poor families into suburban attics, basements, and sheds. Keogh explores how policymakers ignored suburban inequality, addressing housing segregation between cities and suburbs rather than suburbanites’ demands for decent jobs, housing, and schools.
By turning our attention to the suburban poor, Keogh reveals poverty wasn’t just an urban problem but a suburban one, too. In Levittown’s Shadow deepens our understanding of suburbia’s history—and points us toward more effective ways to combat poverty today.
Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in the United States!
Winner of the Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award!
This detailed case study of the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, which began only a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s family home, explores the social origins of rioting by whites against the city’s African American community after a white woman alleged that a black man had raped her. Over two days rioters wrecked black-owned businesses, burned neighborhoods to the ground, killed two black men, and injured many others.
Author Roberta Senechal de la Roche draws from a wide range of sources to describe the riot, identify the rioters and their victims, and challenge previous interpretations that attribute rioting to interracial competition for jobs, housing, or political influence. Written in a direct and clear style, In Lincoln’s Shadow documents a violent explosion of racial hatred that shocked the nation and reveals the complexity of white racial attitudes in the early twentieth century.
If contemporary culture were a school, with all the tasks and expectations meted out by modern life as its curriculum, would anyone graduate? In the spirit of a sympathetic teacher, Robert Kegan guides us through this tricky curriculum, assessing the fit between its complex demands and our mental capacities, and showing what happens when we find ourselves, as we so often do, in over our heads. In this dazzling intellectual tour, he completely reintroduces us to the psychological landscape of our private and public lives.
A decade ago in The Evolving Self, Kegan presented a dynamic view of the development of human consciousness. Here he applies this widely acclaimed theory to the mental complexity of adulthood. As parents and partners, employees and bosses, citizens and leaders, we constantly confront a bewildering array of expectations, prescriptions, claims, and demands, as well as an equally confusing assortment of expert opinions that tell us what each of these roles entails. Surveying the disparate expert “literatures,” which normally take no account of each other, Kegan brings them together to reveal, for the first time, what these many demands have in common. Our frequent frustration in trying to meet these complex and often conflicting claims results, he shows us, from a mismatch between the way we ordinarily know the world and the way we are unwittingly expected to understand it.
In Over Our Heads provides us entirely fresh perspectives on a number of cultural controversies—the “abstinence vs. safe sex” debate, the diversity movement, communication across genders, the meaning of postmodernism. What emerges in these pages is a theory of evolving ways of knowing that allows us to view adult development much as we view child development, as an open-ended process born of the dynamic interaction of cultural demands and emerging mental capabilities. If our culture is to be a good “school,” as Kegan suggests, it must offer, along with a challenging curriculum, the guidance and support that we clearly need to master this course—a need that this lucid and richly argued book begins to meet.
Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of mythic heroes, antiheroes are not necessarily "failures." They display different kinds of courage more in tune with our time and our needs: deficiency translated into strength, failure experienced as honesty, dignity achieved through humiliation. Brombert explores these paradoxes in the works of Büchner, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Svevo, Hašek, Frisch, Camus, and Levi. Coming from diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, these writers all use the figure of the antihero to question handed-down assumptions, to reexamine moral categories, and to raise issues of survival and renewal embodying the spirit of an uneasy age.
Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook in one of the Western Hemisphere's most infamous vice districts, Nella Larsen (1891-1964) lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. She wrote about that life, was briefly celebrated in her time, then was lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many as the best black novelist of her generation. In his search for Nella Larsen, the "mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance," George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding this central figure of modern literary studies, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as it was lived by one person who truly embodied all of its ambiguities and complexities.
Author of a landmark study of the Harlem Renaissance, Hutchinson here produces the definitive account of a life long obscured by misinterpretations, fabrications, and omissions. He brings Larsen to life as an often tormented modernist, from the trauma of her childhood to her emergence as a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Showing the links between her experiences and her writings, Hutchinson illuminates the singularity of her achievement and shatters previous notions of her position in the modernist landscape. Revealing the suppressions and misunderstandings that accompany the effort to separate black from white, his book addresses the vast consequences for all Americans of color-line culture's fundamental rule: race trumps family.
The Black Arts Movement (1965–76) consisted of artists across the United States deeply concerned with the relationship between politics and the black aesthetic. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers examines the ways in which black women playwrights in the movement advanced feminist and womanist perspectives from within black nationalist discourses. La Donna L. Forsgren recuperates the careers, artistic theories, and dramatic contributions of four leading playwrights: Martie Evans-Charles, J.e. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer. Using original interviews, production recordings, playbills, and unpublished manuscripts, she investigates how these women, despite operating within a context that equated the collective well-being of black people with black male agency, created works that validated black women's aspirations for autonomy and explored women's roles in the struggle for black liberation.
In Search of Our Warrior Mothers demonstrates the powerful contributions of women to the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of black aesthetic theory, thus opening an interdisciplinary conversation at the intersections of theater, performance, feminist, and African American studies and identifying and critiquing the gaps and silences within these fields.
One contributor evaluates the legal basis of the Panthers’ revolutionary struggle, explaining how they utilized and critiqued the language of the Constitution. Others explore the roles of individuals, looking at a one-time Panther imprisoned for a murder he did not commit and an FBI agent who monitored the activities of the Panthers’ Oakland branch. Contributors assess the Panthers’ relations with Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and the Peace and Freedom Party. They discuss the Party’s use of revolutionary aesthetics, and they show how the Panthers manipulated and were manipulated by the media. Illuminating some of the complexities involved in placing the Panthers in historical context, this collection demonstrates that the scholarly search for the Black Panthers has only just begun.
Contributors. Bridgette Baldwin, Davarian L. Baldwin, David Barber, Rod Bush, James T. Campbell, Tim Lake, Jama Lazerow, Edward P. Morgan, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Roz Payne, Robert O. Self, Yohuru Williams, Joel Wilson
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