A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY98 start with P start with P
Council for Wisconsin Writers, Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award winner
In this often-surprising book of essays, Krista Eastman explores the myths we make about who we are and where we’re from. The Painted Forest uncovers strange and little-known “home places”—not only the picturesque hills and valleys of the author’s childhood in rural Wisconsin, but also tourist towns, the “under-imagined and overly caricatured” Midwest, and a far-flung station in Antarctica where the filmmaker Werner Herzog makes an unexpected appearance.
The Painted Forest upends easy narratives of place, embracing tentativeness and erasing boundaries. But it is Eastman’s willingness to play—to follow her curiosity down every odd path, to exude a skeptical wonder—that gives this book depth and distinction. An unlikely array of people, places, and texts meet for close conversation, and tension is diffused with art, imagination, and a strong sense of there being some other way forward. Eastman offers a smart and contemporary take on how we wander and how we belong.
The twenty-first century is witnessing a dynamic broadening of how blackness signifies both in the U.S. and abroad. Literary writers of the new African diaspora are at the forefront of exploring these exciting approaches to what black subjectivity means. Pan-African American Literature is dedicated to charting the contours of literature by African born or identified authors centered around life in the United States. The texts examined here deliberately signify on the African American literary canon to encompass new experiences of immigration, assimilation and identification that challenge how blackness has been previously conceived. Though race often alienates and frustrates immigrants who are accustomed to living in all-black environments, Stephanie Li holds that it can also be a powerful form of community and political mobilization.
Faced with budget problems and an aging population, European governments in recent years have begun reconsidering the structure and extent of the welfare state. Guarantees and directives have given way to responsibilities and choice. This volume analyzes the effect of this change on the citizens of Germany, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. It traces the emergence of new discourses around social movements for greater independence, power, and control, and the way these discourses serve to reframe the struggle at hand. Making use of ethnographic research and policy analysis, the authors analyze the cultural transition, tensions, and trajectory of this call toward active citizenship.
Wheels-down in Iowa—that most important of primary states—Pacewicz looks to two cities, one traditionally Democratic, the other traditionally Republican, and finds that younger voters are rejecting older-timers’ strict political affiliations. A paradox is emerging—as the dividing lines between America’s political parties have sharpened, Americans are at the same time growing distrustful of traditional party politics in favor of becoming apolitical or embracing outside-the-beltway candidates. Pacewicz sees this change coming not from politicians and voters, but from the fundamental reorganization of the community institutions in which political parties have traditionally been rooted. Weaving together major themes in American political history—including globalization, the decline of organized labor, loss of locally owned industries, uneven economic development, and the emergence of grassroots populist movements—Partisans and Partners is a timely and comprehensive analysis of American politics as it happens on the ground.
Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author’s hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region’s invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors. Often employing forms—sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas—they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience.
From the Russian Revolution, through May '68 and the Prague Spring, to the present day, we hear from feminists, trade unionists, conscientious objectors and activists and learn of immigration struggles, anti-colonial conflicts and labour movements. Cutting against the grain of mainstream histories, this is a history of Europe told from below.
Containing new and fascinating insights, Raquel Varela paints a different picture of the European story; one where ordinary Europeans are active agents of their own history.
In 2001, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō launched a crusade to privatize Japan’s postal services. The plan was hailed as a necessary structural reform, but many bemoaned the loss of traditional institutions and the conservative values they represented. Few expected the plan to succeed, given the staunch opposition of diverse parties, but four years later it appeared that Koizumi had transformed not only the post office but also the very institutional and ideological foundations of Japanese finance and politics. By all accounts, it was one of the most astonishing political achievements in postwar Japanese history.
Patricia L. Maclachlan analyzes the interplay among the institutions, interest groups, and leaders involved in the system’s evolution from the early Meiji period until 2010. Exploring the postal system’s remarkable range of economic, social, and cultural functions and its institutional relationship to the Japanese state, this study shows how the post office came to play a leading role in the country’s political development. It also looks into the future to assess the resilience of Koizumi’s reforms and consider the significance of lingering opposition to the privatization of one of Japan’s most enduring social and political sanctuaries.
In Greece, dance (and, by extension, the body) has historically held a central role in the process of national identity construction. When the crisis broke out, artists had to navigate through a precariously fluctuating landscape, with their bodies as their only stable referent. In Greece, dance has held a historical role in national identity construction of Greece as the cradle of Western civilization. As the financial crisis coincided with the European Refugee Crisis, dancing bodies became agents to advocate for human rights. By centering the analysis of the Greek crisis on the dancing bodies, Performing the Greek Crisis is able to examine the various ways that artists reconceptualized their history and reframed ideas of national belonging, race, citizenship, and immigration.
The so-called “New Russian Drama” emerged at the end of the twentieth century, following a long period of decline in dramatic writing in the late Soviet and post-Soviet era. In Performing Violence, Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky examine the representation of violence in these new dramatic works by young Russian playwrights. Reflecting the disappointment in Yeltsin’s democratic reforms and Putin’s neoconservative politics, the plays focus on political and social representations of violence, its performances, and its justifications.
As the first English-language study of Russian drama and theatre in the twenty-first century, Performing Violence seeks a vantage point for the analysis of brutality in post-Soviet culture. While previous generations had preferred poetry and prose, this new breed of authors—the Presnyakov brothers, Evgeni Grishkovets, and Vasili Sigarev among them—have garnered international recognition for their fierce plays. This book investigates the violent portrayal of the identity crisis of a generation as represented in their theatrical works, and will be a key text for students and scholars of drama, Russian studies, and literature.
Performing Whitely examines the multiple speech acts, political acts, and theatrical acts of the Afrikaner volk or nation in theatrical and public life, including pageants, museum sites, film, and popular music as well as theatrical productions. Lewis explores the diverse ways in which Afrikaners perform whitely, and the tactics they use, including nostalgia, melodrama, queering, abjection, and kitsch. She first investigates the way that apartheid’s architects leveraged whiteness in support of their nation-building efforts in the early twentieth century. In addition to re-enacting national pilgrimages of colonial-era migrations and building massive monuments at home, Afrikaner nationalists took their show to the United States, staging critical events of the Boer War at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. A case study of the South African experience, Performing Whitely also offers parables for global whitenesses in the postcolonial era.
The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art clarifies the continuities and differences between the second-wave dance avant-garde in the 1950s‒1970s and the third-wave starting in the 1990s. Through close readings of key artists such as Maria Hassabi, Sarah Michelson, Boris Charmatz, Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher, Adam Linder, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Shelley Lasica and Latai Taumoepeau, The Persistence of Dance traces the relationship between the third-wave and gallery-based work. Looking at these artists highlights how the discussions and practices associated with “conceptual dance” resonate with the categories of conceptual and post-conceptual art as well as with the critical work on the function of visual art categories. Brannigan concludes that within the current post-disciplinary context, there is a persistence of dance and that a model of post-dance exists that encompasses dance as a contemporary art medium.
Persuasive Acts: Women’s Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century gathers an expansive array of voices and texts from well-known figures including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, Michelle Obama, Lindy West, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, so that readers may converse with them, and build rhetorics of their own. Editors Shari J. Stenberg and Charlotte Hogg have complied timely and provocative rhetorics that represent critical issues and rhetorical affordances of the twenty-first century.
Hilary Putnam’s unceasing self-criticism has led to the frequent changes of mind he is famous for, but his thinking is also marked by considerable continuity. A simultaneous interest in science and ethics—unusual in the current climate of contention—has long characterized his thought. In Philosophy in an Age of Science, Putnam collects his papers for publication—his first volume in almost two decades.
Mario De Caro and David Macarthur’s introduction identifies central themes to help the reader negotiate between Putnam past and Putnam present: his critique of logical positivism; his enduring aspiration to be realist about rational normativity; his anti-essentialism about a range of central philosophical notions; his reconciliation of the scientific worldview and the humanistic tradition; and his movement from reductive scientific naturalism to liberal naturalism. Putnam returns here to some of his first enthusiasms in philosophy, such as logic, mathematics, and quantum mechanics. The reader is given a glimpse, too, of ideas currently in development on the subject of perception.
Putnam’s work, contributing to a broad range of philosophical inquiry, has been said to represent a “history of recent philosophy in outline.” Here it also delineates a possible future.
Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding.
Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like.
Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.
Contributors. Mary Bergstein, Jonathan Fardy, Kristan Horton, Terri Kapsalis, Sarah Kofman, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zoe Leonard, Gabrielle Moser, Mignon Nixon, Thy Phu, Mark Reinhardt, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski, Laura Wexler, Kelly Wood, Andrés Mario Zervigón
China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary observers and historians alike have attributed these inequalities to distinct stages of China's political economy: the dualistic economy of semicolonialism, rural-urban divisions in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China, Mark Baker shows how different states across twentieth-century China shaped these inequalities in similar ways, concentrating resources in urban and core areas at the expense of rural and regional peripheries.
Pivot of China examines this dynamic through the city of Zhengzhou, one of the most dramatic success stories of China’s urbanization: a railroad boomtown of the early twentieth century, a key industrial center and provincial capital of Henan Province in the 1950s, and by the 2020s a “National Central City” of almost ten million people. However, due to the spatial politics of resource concentration, Zhengzhou’s twentieth-century growth as a regional city did not kickstart a wider economic takeoff in its hinterland. Instead, unequal spatial politics generated layers of inequality that China is still grappling with in the twenty-first century.
Positing place as a pivotal axis of identification and heralding emplacement as a crucial model for cultural, intellectual, and political activity in a period marked and imperiled by a tendency toward dislocation, the critical vocabulary of this project centers upon the work of place-making. It attends to a poetics that extends beyond epic and lyric modes while relying simultaneously on auditory and visual effects and proceeding in the interests of environmental advocacy and social justice, often in contrast to the more orthodox concerns of literary modernism, global capitalism, and print culture. Focusing on poets of international reputation, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams, Places in the Making also considers work by more recent figures, including Kamau Brathwaite, Joy Harjo, Myung Mi Kim, and Craig Santos Perez. In its larger comparative, multiethnic, and transnational emphases, this book addresses questions of particular moment in American literary and cultural studies and aspires to serve as a catalyst for further interdisciplinary work connecting geography and the humanities.
Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas
A remarkable collection of words and illustrations documenting the first year of the pandemic.
In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey raced home to Austin, Texas. The next day, he published on social media a sketch of “A Very Determined Young Man.” The day after, he posted another drawing. One year and one hundred and fifty Tombow B pencil stubs later, he was still drawing.
Carey’s pencil fills the page with the marvelous and intriguing, picturing people, characters, animals, monsters, and his favorite bird to draw, the grackle. He reaches into history and fiction to escape grim reality through flights of vivid imagination—until events demand the drawings “look straight on.”
Breonna Taylor, the Brontë sisters, John Lewis, King Lear, and even the portraits that mark the progress of the year for the Very Determined Young Man combine into a remarkable document of the pandemic and its politics. For Carey, though, trapped inside a home he loves, these portraits are something more, a way to chart time, an artist’s way of creating connection in isolation. With an introduction by Max Porter, this exceptional collection from the acclaimed author of Little marks a year of a man trapped with his pencil, determined to find solace amid uncertainty.
Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty—and sheer variety—leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, Burt canvasses American poetry of the past four decades, from the headline-making urgency of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to the stark pathos of Louise Glück, the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell.
The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them is a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. It presents a wide range of poems selected by Burt for this volume, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture. Included here are some classroom classics (by Ashbery, Komunyakaa, Hass), less famous poems by very famous poets (Glück, Kay Ryan), and poems by prizewinning poets near the start of their careers (such as Brandon Som), and by others who are not—or not yet—well known.
The Poem Is You will appeal to poets, teachers, and students, but it is intended especially for readers who want to learn more about contemporary American poetry but who have not known where or how to start. It describes what American poets have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.
Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to Department of Defense data, fewer than half of them are accused of committing any hostile act against the United States or its allies. In hundreds of cases, even the circumstances of their initial detainment are questionable.
This collection gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who submitted each line to Pentagon scrutiny, Poems from Guantánamo brings together twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees, most still at Guantánamo, in legal limbo.
If, in the words of Audre Lorde, poetry “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change,” these verses—some originally written in toothpaste, others scratched onto foam drinking cups with pebbles and furtively handed to attorneys—are the most basic form of the art.
This book reviews and analyzes the modern history of Kuwait through the life of Abd al-Aziz Sa‘ud al-Babtain, a wealthy businessman, philanthropist, and poet. He is the head of a large, influential international cultural foundation based in Kuwait City. Abd al-Aziz’s life story tightly interweaves with modern discussions on the history of the state of Kuwait. There are very few books taking a collective grip on the history of the state of Kuwait. Likewise, there are very few studies about the generation of Gulf individuals who experienced, benefitted from, and even suffered from the discovery of oil, and who has been a crucial part of socioeconomic and cultural developments in countries like Kuwait in recent history. By constructing a cohesive overview of the modern history of Kuwait enriched by the life of an individual that has lived through the better part of that particular history, this book fills a lacuna in contemporary scholarship on the Middle East, and especially the Arabian or the Persian Gulf.
Poetic Justice is the first anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry in English. The work is primarily composed of poets who began writing after Moroccan independence in 1956 and includes work written in Moroccan Arabic (darija), classical Arabic, French, and Tamazight.
Why Poetic Justice? Moroccan poetry (and especially zajal, oral poetry now written in Moroccan Arabic) is often published in newspapers and journals and is thus a vibrant form of social commentary; what’s more, there is a law, a justice, in the aesthetic act that speaks back to the law of the land. Poetic Justice because literature has the power to shape the cultural and moral imagination in profound and just ways.
Reading this oeuvre from independence until the new millennium and beyond, it is clear that what poet Driss Mesnaoui calls the “letters of time” have long been in the hands of Moroccan poets, as they write their ethics, their aesthetics, as well as their gendered and political lives into poetic being.
Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivismexamines late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time. The book argues for a reconfiguration of Objectivism, adding contingency to its historical values of sincerity and objectification, within the context of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.
Essays and conversations from emerging and established poets and scholars engage a network of communities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., shaped by contemporaneous oppositions as well as genealogical (albeit discontinuous) historicisms. This book articulates Objectivism as an inclusively local, international, and interdisciplinary ethos, and reclaims Objectivist poetics and praxis as modalities for contemporary writers concerned with radical integrations of aesthetics, lyric subjectivities, contingent disruption, historical materialism, and social activism. The chapter authors and roundtable contributors reexamine foundational notions about Objectivism—who the Objectivists were and are, what Objectivism has been, now is, and what it might become—delivering critiques of aesthetics and politics; of race, class, and gender; and of the literary and cultural history of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.
Contributors: Rae Armantrout, Julie Carr, Amy De’Ath, Jeff Derksen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Graham Foust, Alan Golding, Jeanne Heuving, Ruth Jennison, David Lau, Steve McCaffery, Mark McMorris, Chris Nealon, Jenny Penberthy, Robert Sheppard
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Naous’s book offers analyses of Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz and Crescent, Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War, Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land, and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf as ways to answer this question. Naous explores how these novels negotiate queer desire, music, Western and Middle Eastern art, gender, and relationships between other minorities. These poetics enable readers to see the nuance and richness of Arab American experience. Naous ultimately argues that fiction creates crucial spaces for reimagining and redefining intercultural relationships.
Poetry Matters explores poetry written by women from the United States and Canada, which documents the social and political turmoil of the early twenty-first century and places this poetry in dialogue with recent currents of feminist theory including new materialism, affect theory, posthumanism, and feminist engagements with neoliberalism and capitalism. Central to this project is the conviction that a poetics that explores the political dimensions of affect; demonstrates an understanding of subjectivity as posthuman and transcorporeal; critically reflects on the impact of capitalism on queer, racialized, and female bodies; and develops an ethical vocabulary for reimagining the nation state and critically engaging with issues of democracy and citizenship is now more urgent than ever before.
Milne focuses on poetry published after 2001 by writers who mostly began writing after the feminist writing movements of the 1980s, but who have inherited and built upon their political and aesthetic legacies. The poets discussed in this book—including Jennifer Scappettone, Margaret Christakos, Larissa Lai, Rita Wong, Nikki Reimer, Rachel Zolf, Yedda Morrison, Marcella Durand, Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Dionne Brand, Jena Osman, and Jen Benka—bring a sense of political agency to poetry. These voices seek new vocabularies and dissenting critical and aesthetic frameworks for thinking across issues of gender, materiality, capitalism, the toxic convergences of nationalism and racism, and the decline of democratic institutions. This is poetry that matters—both in its political urgency and in its attentiveness to the world as “matter”—as a material entity under siege. It could not be more timely or more relevant.
Editors Benjamin S. Grossberg and Clare Rossini selected poems to reflect broad themes of labor, history and economic forces, social equity, and the environment. In addition, they asked each poet to provide a brief prose comment to introduce their work. Some give broad statements on the nature of wealth in America today; others are intimate, offering insight into how life experiences inform their writing; still others reflect on the art of poetry itself and its unique power to speak to economic pressures of the moment.
Contributors include Mary Jo Bang, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Alan Chazaro, Mark Doty, Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dorianne Laux, Kimiko Hahn, Sharon Olds, George Perreault, Robert Pinsky, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, and others.
"The great pleasure of this book is the writing itself. Not only is it free of academic and ‘lit-crit' jargon, it is lively prose, often deliciously witty or humorous, and utterly contemporary. Poetry's Afterlife has terrific classroom potential, from elementary school teachers seeking to inspire creativity in their students, to graduate students in MFA programs, to working poets who struggle with the aesthetic dilemmas Stein elucidates, and to teachers of poetry on any level."
--- Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Arizona State University
"Kevin Stein is the most astute poet-critic of his generation, and this is a crucial book, confronting the most vexing issues which poetry faces in a new century."
---David Wojahn, Virginia Commonwealth University
At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed "death," Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates.
Kevin Stein is Caterpillar Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bradley University and has served as Illinois Poet Laureate since 2003, having assumed the position formerly held by Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism.
digitalculturebooksis an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
Out to see America and satisfy his travel bug, W. T. Pfefferle resigned from his position as director of the writing program at Johns Hopkins University and hit the road to interview sixty-two poets about the significance of place in their work. The lively conversations that resulted may surprise with the potential meanings of a seemingly simple concept. This gathering of voices and ideas is illustrated with photo and word portraits from the road and represented with suitable poems.
The poets are James Harms, David Citino, Martha Collins, Linda Gregerson, Richard Tillinghast, Orlando Ricardo Menes, Mark Strand, Karen Volkman, Lisa Samuels, Marvin Bell, Michael Dennis Browne, David Allan Evans, David Romtvedt, Sandra Alcosser, Robert Wrigley, Nance Van Winckel, Christopher Howell, Mark Halperin, Jana Harris, Sam Hamill, Barbara Drake, Floyd Skloot, Ralph Angel, Carol Muske-Dukes, David St. John, Sharon Bryan, Donald Revell, Claudia Keelan, Alberto Rios, Richard Shelton, Jane Miller, William Wenthe, Naomi Shihab Nye, Peter Cooley, Miller Williams, Beth Ann Fennelly, Natasha Trethewey, Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath, Terrance Hayes, Alan Shapiro, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Rita Dove, Henry Taylor, Dave Smith, Nicole Cooley, David Lehman, Lucie Brock-Broido, Michael S. Harper, C. D. Wright, Mark Wunderlich, James Cummins, Frederick Smock, Mark Jarman, Carl Phillips, Scott Cairns, Elizabeth Dodd, Jonathan Holden, Bin Ramke, Kenneth Brewer, and Paisley Rekdal.
The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since World War II.
Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies.
The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between voters’ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump.
Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.
Drawing on insights from critical theory, media ecology, and psychoanalysis, Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn advances a new way to interpret our contemporary political context that explains why so many of us have difficulty deciphering the appeal of aberrant public figures. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis.
Alan Wolfe has an answer. In The Politics of Petulance he argues that the core of our problem isn’t Trump himself—it’s that we are mired in an age of political immaturity. That immaturity is not grounded in any one ideology, nor is it a function of age or education. It’s in an abdication of valuing the character of would-be leaders; it’s in a failure to acknowledge, even welcome the complexity of government and society; and it’s in a loss of the ability to be skeptical without being suspicious. In 2016, many Americans were offered tantalizingly simple answers to complicated problems, and, like children being offered a lunch of Pop Rocks and Coke, they reflexively—and mindlessly—accepted.
The good news, such as it is, is that we’ve been here before. Wolfe reminds us that we know how to grow up and face down Trump and other demagogues. Wolfe reinvigorates the tradition of public engagement exemplified by midcentury intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling—and he draws lessons from their battles with McCarthyism and conspiratorial paranoia. Wolfe mounts a powerful case that we can learn from them to forge a new path for political intervention today.
Wolfe has been thinking and writing about American life and politics for decades. He sees this moment as one of real risk. But he’s not throwing up his hands; he’s bracing us. We’ve faced demagogues before. We can find the intellectual maturity to fight back. Yes we can.
Eils breaks strict disciplinary silos by putting visibility/surveillance studies, ethnic studies, and narrative studies in conversation with one another. Eils also puts texts in the Native, Latinx, and Asian American literary canon in conversation with each other. She focuses on texts by Viet Thanh Nguyen, David Treuer, Monique Truong, Rigoberto González, Nam Le, and Stephen Graham Jones that call into question our positions as readers and critics. In deliberately and self-consciously evading readers through the form of their fiction, these writers seize privacy as a political tool for claiming and wielding power in both representational and material registers.
With The Politics of Resentment, Katherine J. Cramer uncovers an oft-overlooked piece of the puzzle: rural political consciousness and the resentment of the “liberal elite.” Rural voters are distrustful that politicians will respect the distinct values of their communities and allocate a fair share of resources. What can look like disagreements about basic political principles are therefore actually rooted in something even more fundamental: who we are as people and how closely a candidate’s social identity matches our own. Using Scott Walker and Wisconsin’s prominent and protracted debate about the appropriate role of government, Cramer illuminates the contours of rural consciousness, showing how place-based identities profoundly influence how people understand politics, regardless of whether urban politicians and their supporters really do shortchange or look down on those living in the country.
The Politics of Resentment shows that rural resentment—no less than partisanship, race, or class—plays a major role in dividing America against itself.
Each case shows how the concrete actions of a group of citizens can prompt us to reflect on what is needed for a just and sustainable economic system. In one case, activists raised questions about the responsibilities of business, in the second about the significance of local economies, and in the third about the contributions of the public sector. Through these movements, Jane L. Collins maps a set of cultural conversations about the types of investments and activities that contribute to the health of the economy. Compelling and persuasive, The Politics of Value offers a new framework for viewing economic value, one grounded in thoughtful assessment of the social division of labor and the relationship of the state and the market to civil society.
Drawn from presentations at the annual Experience Music Project Pop Conference—hailed by Robert Christgau as “the best thing that’s ever happened to serious consideration of pop music”—the essays in this book include inquiries into the sonic dimension of war in Iraq; the cultural life of jazz in post-Katrina New Orleans; Isaac Hayes’s reappropriation of a country song, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” as a symbol of black nationalism; and punk rock pranks played on record execs looking for the next big thing in central Virginia. Offering a diverse range of voices, perspectives, and approaches, this volume mirrors the eclecticism of pop itself.
Contributors: Larry Blumenfeld , Austin Bunn, Nate Chinen, J. Martin Daughtry, Brian Goedde, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Jonathan Lethem, Eric Lott, Kembrew McLeod, Elena Passarello, Diane Pecknold, David Ritz, Carlo Rotella, Scott Seward, Tom Smucker, Greg Tate, Karen Tongson, Alexandra T. Vazquez, Oliver Wang, Eric Weisbard, Carl Wilson
Published to accompany his wonderfully inscrutable exhibition Forlesen at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Pope.L: Showing Up to Withhold is simultaneously an artist’s book and a monograph. In addition to reproductions of a number of his most recent artworks, it includes images of significant works from the past decade, and presents a forum for reflection and analysis on art making today with contributions by renowned critics and scholars, including Lawrie Balfour, Nick Bastis, Lauren Berlant, and K. Silem Mohammad.
The authors also highlight key trends that will continue to transform the state: domestic migration out of the state and immigration into it; increasing diversity; slower overall population growth; contracting fertility; the household revolution and changing living arrangements; generational disruptions; and suburbanization versus re-urbanization. All of these factors help place in context the result of the 2020 decennial U.S. Census.
While the book focuses on New Jersey, the Garden State is a template of demographic, economic, social, and other forces characterizing the United States in the twenty-first century.
Based on ethnographic and archival research, Marino focuses on performances of the devil figure, tracing this beloved trickster through religious fiestas, mid-century theater and film, and other media as it both antagonizes and unifies a movement against dictatorship and neoliberalism. She then demonstrates that performance became a vehicle through which cultural producers negotiated boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in ways that overcame the simplistic logic of good versus evil, us versus them. The result is a nuanced insight into the process of building political mobilization out of crisis and through monumental times of change.
The book will interest readers of Latin American politics, cultural studies, political science, and performance studies by providing a vital record of the revolution, with valuable insights into its internal dynamics and lessons towards building a populist movement of the left in contentious times.
After World War II, the concept of borders became unsettled, especially after the rise of subaltern and multicultural studies in the 1980s. Art at the U.S.-Mexico border came to a turning point at the beginning of that decade with the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Beginning with a political history of the border, with an emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, Ila Sheren explores the forces behind the shift in thinking about the border in the late twentieth century.
Particularly in the world of visual art, borders have come to represent a space of performance rather than a geographical boundary, a cultural terrain meant to be negotiated rather than a physical line. From 1980 forward, Sheren argues, the border became portable through performance and conceptual work. This dematerialization of the physical border after the 1980s worked in two opposite directions—the movement of border thinking to the rest of the world, as well as the importation of ideas to the border itself. Beginning with site-specific conceptual artwork of the 1980s, particularly the performances of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Sheren shows how these works reconfigured the border as an active site. Sheren moves on to examine artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, and Marcos Ramirez “ERRE.” Although Sheren places emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, this groundbreaking book suggests possibilities for the expansion of the concept of portability to contemporary art projects beyond the region.
A study of Cuban culture and media in the twenty-first century as both a global phenomenon and a local reality, at a time when the declared death of socialism coexists in tension with emerging anticapitalist movements worldwide.
Why does Cuban socialism endure as an object of international political desire, while images of capitalist markets consume Cuba’s national imagination? This bold new study argues that Cuba’s changing media cultures are key to our understanding of the global postsocialist condition and its competing political imaginaries.
Portable Postsocialisms calls on a vast multimedia archive to offer a groundbreaking cultural interpretation of Cuban postsocialism. Paloma Duong examines songs, artworks, advertisements, memes, literature, jokes, and networks that refuse exceptionalist and exoticizing visions of Cuba. Expanding postsocialist critical theory to read this complex mediascape, Duong argues that a materialist critique of Cuba’s revolutionary legacy must account for Cubans’ everyday demands for agency and self-representation. This long overdue reassessment of Cuba’s place in Latin American and post-Marxist studies shows Cuban postsocialism to be an urgent and indispensable referent for core debates on the politics of participatory cultures in new media studies. Portable Postsocialisms performs the crucial task of redefining how we envision imaginaries of social change in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Post-anarchism has been of considerable importance in the discussions of radical intellectuals across the globe in the last decade. In its most popular form, it demonstrates a desire to blend the most promising aspects of traditional anarchist theory with developments in post-structuralist and post-modernist thought. Post-Anarchism: A Reader includes the most comprehensive collection of essays about this emergent body of thought, making it an essential and accessible resource for academics, intellectuals, activists and anarchists interested in radical philosophy.
Many of the chapters have been formative to the development of a distinctly 'post-anarchist' approach to politics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Others respond to the so-called 'post-anarchist turn' with caution and scepticism. The book also includes original contributions from several of today's 'post-anarchists', inviting further debate and new ways of conceiving post-anarchism across a number of disciplines.
2019 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist
Bringing Chicana/o studies into conversation with queer theory and transgender studies, Post-Borderlandia examines why gender variance is such a core theme in contemporary Chicana and Chicanx narratives. It considers how Chicana butch lesbians and Chicanx trans people are not only challenging heteropatriarchal norms, but also departing from mainstream conceptions of queerness and gender identification.
Expanding on Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic formulation of the Chicana as transformer of the “borderlands,” Jackie Cuevas explores how a new generation of Chicanx writers, performers, and filmmakers are imagining a “post-borderlands” subjectivity, where shifting national, racial, class, sexual, and gender identifications produce complex power dynamics. In addition, Cuevas offers fresh archival analysis of the Chicana feminist canon to reveal how queer gender variance has always been crucial to this literary tradition.
Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing—including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements—has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others—both human and nonhuman—in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.
Rastogi creates a narratology for postcolonial disaster fiction and brings concepts from Disaster Studies into the realm of literary analysis.
The works featured are inventive and current, and the writers covered are visionaries who are boldly redefining Indigenous literary aesthetics. The artists covered include Orlando White, LeAnne Howe, Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Heid E. Erdrich, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others.
Postindian Aesthetics is expansive and comprehensive with essays by many of today’s leading Indigenous studies scholars. Organized thematically into four sections, the topics in this book include working-class and labor politics, queer embodiment, national and tribal narratives, and new directions in Indigenous literatures. By urging readers to think beyond the more popularized Indigenous literary canon, the essays in this book open up a new world of possibilities for understanding the contemporary Indigenous experience.
The volume showcases thought-provoking scholarship about literature written by important contemporary Indigenous authors who are inspiring critical acclaim and offers new ways to think about the Indigenous literary canon and encourages instructors to broaden the scope of works taught in literature courses more broadly.
ContributorsEric Gary Anderson
Ellen L. Arnold
Debra K. S. Barker
Laura J. Beard
Esther G. Belin
Jeff Berglund
Sherwin Bitsui
Frank Buffalo Hyde
Jeremy M. Carnes
Gabriel S. Estrada
Stephanie Fitzgerald
Jane Haladay
Connie A. Jacobs
Daniel Heath Justice
Virginia Kennedy
Denise Low
Molly McGlennen
Dean Rader
Kenneth M. Roemer
Susan Scarberry-García
Siobhan Senier
Kirstin L. Squint
Robert Warrior
The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern.
Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.
Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition is a timely exploration of the increasingly widespread and disturbing effect of “post-truth” on public discourse in the United States. Bruce McComiskey analyzes the instances of bullshit, fake news, feigned ethos, hyperbole, and other forms of post-truth rhetoric employed in recent political discourse.
The book frames “post-truth” within rhetorical theory, referring to the classic triad of logos, ethos, and pathos. McComiskey shows that it is the loss of grounding in logos that exposes us to the dangers of post-truth. As logos is the realm of fact, logic, truth, and valid reasoning, Western society faces increased risks—including violence, unchecked libel, and tainted elections—when the value of reason is diminished and audiences allow themselves to be swayed by pathos and ethos. Evaluations of truth are deferred or avoided, and mendacity convincingly masquerades as a valid form of argument.
In a post-truth world, where neither truth nor falsehood has reliable meaning, language becomes purely strategic, without reference to anything other than itself. This scenario has serious consequences not only for our public discourse but also for the study of composition.
Why do so many people worldwide suffer hunger and poverty when there is enough food and other resources globally to prevent it? This book shows how famine and food insecurity are an essential part of modern capitalism. Although trade, debt relief and development initiatives are important, they do not alter the structure of the global economy and the poverty that is created by processes like privatisation, trade liberalisation and market reform.
Despite the rhetoric of the World Bank and the G8, high levels of poverty actually sustain western wealth and power. But there is some hope for change. Using case studies from Egypt and North Africa, Nigeria, Sudan and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, Ray Bush illustrates that there is resistance to neoliberal policies, and that struggles over land, mining and resources can shape real alternatives to existing globalisation.
Drawing on dozens of data sources ranging from debit and credit card spending, the first national databases of school and childcare center closures in the U.S., and bi-weekly Census-run surveys on well-being, Parolin finds that entering the pandemic in poverty substantially increased a person’s likelihood of experiencing negative health outcomes due to the pandemic, such as contracting and dying from COVID, as well as losing their job. Additionally, he found that students from poor families suffered the greatest learning losses as a result of school closures and the shift to distance learning during the pandemic.
However, unprecedented legislative action by the U.S. government, including the passage of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) helped mitigate the economic consequences of the pandemic and lifted around 18 million Americans out of poverty. Based on the success of these policies, Parolin concludes with policy suggestions that the U.S. can implement in more ‘normal’ times to improve the living conditions of low-income households after the pandemic subsides, including expanding access to Unemployment Insurance, permanently expanding the Child Tax Credit, promoting greater access to affordable, high-quality healthcare coverage, and investing more resources into the Census Bureau’s data-collection capabilities. He also details a method of producing a monthly measurement of poverty, to be used in conjunction with the traditional annual measurement, in order to better understand the intra-year volatility of poverty that many Americans experience.
Poverty in the Pandemic provides the most complete account to date of the unique challenges that low-income households in the U.S. faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Political participation rates have declined steadily in Mexico since the 1990s. The decline has been most severe among the poor, producing a stratified pattern that more and more mirrors Mexico’s severe socioeconomic inequalities. Poverty of Democracy examines the political marginalization of Mexico’s poor despite their key role in the struggle for democracy.
Claudio A. Holzner uses case study evidence drawn from eight years of fieldwork in Oaxaca, and from national surveys to show how the institutionalization of a free-market democracy created a political system that discourages the political participation of Mexico’s poor by limiting their access to politicians at the local and national level. Though clean elections bolster political activity, Holzner shows that at the local level, and particularly in Mexico’s poorest regions, deeply rooted enclaves of authoritarianism and clientelism still constrict people’s political opportunities.
To explain this phenomenon, Holzner develops an institutional theory in which party systems, state-society linkages, and public policies are the key determinants of citizen political activity. These institutions shape patterns of political participation by conferring and distributing resources, motivating or discouraging an interest in politics, and by affecting the incentives citizens from different income groups have for targeting the state with political activity.
Holzner’s study sheds light on a disturbing trend in Latin America (and globally), in which neoliberal systems exacerbate political and economic disparities and create institutions that translate economic inequalities into political ones.
The 2008 outcry over the “global land grab” made headlines around the world, leading to a sustained interest in the dynamics and fate of customary land among both academics and development practitioners. In Power/Knowledge/Land, author Laura German profiles the consolidation of a global knowledge regime surrounding land and its governance within international development circles in the decade following this outcry, and the growing enrollment of previously antagonistic actors within it. Drawing theoretical insights on the inseparability of power and knowledge, German reveals the dynamics of knowledge practices that have enabled the longstanding project of commodifying customary land – and the more contemporary interests in acquiring and financializing it – to be advanced and legitimated by capturing the energies of socially progressive forces. By bringing theories of change from the emergent land governance orthodoxy into dialogue with the ethnographic evidence from across the African continent and beyond, concepts masquerading as universal and self-evident truths are provincialized, and their role in commodifying customary land and entrenching colonial futurities put on display. In doing so, the volume brings wider academic debates surrounding productive forms of power into the heart of the land grab debate, while enhancing their accessibility to a wider audience.
Power/Knowledge/Land takes current scholarly debates surrounding land grabs beyond their theoretical moorings in critical agrarian studies, political economy and globalization into contemporary debates surrounding the politics of knowledge—from theories of coloniality to ontological anthropology, thereby enabling new dynamics of the phenomenon to be revealed. The book deploys a pioneering epistemology integrating deconstructionist approaches (to reveal the tactics, truth claims and ontological assumptions of global knowledge brokers), with systematic qualitative reviews and comparative study (to contrast these dominant constructs with the evidence and reveal alternative ways of knowing “land” and practicing “security” from the ethnographic literature). This helps to reveal the Western and modernist biases in the narratives that have been advanced about women, custom, and security, revealing how the coloniality of knowledge works to grease the wheels of land takings by advancing highly provincialized constructs aligned with western interests as universal truths.
Only recently have international relations scholars started to seriously examine the influence of collective memory on foreign policy formation and relations between states and peoples. The ways in which the memories of past events are interpreted, misinterpreted, or even manipulated in public discourse create the context that shapes international relations.
Power and the Past brings together leading history and international relations scholars to provide a groundbreaking examination of the impact of collective memory. This timely study makes a contribution to developing a theory of memory and international relations and also examines specific cases of collective memory’s influence resulting from the legacies of World War II, the Holocaust, and September 11. Addressing concerns shared by world leaders and international institutions as well as scholars of international studies, this volume illustrates clearly how the memory of past events alters the ways countries interact in the present, how memory shapes public debate and policymaking, and how memory may aid or more frequently impede conflict resolution.
With former Lord Speaker Frances D’Souza serving as Jowell’s interlocutor, this book provides a passionate and inspiring interpretation on moral duty. Ultimately, The Power of Politicians offers not just a case study of the life and everyday work of a politician, but also attends to deeper questions about what is demanded from the political class. The overall result is a nothing less than a master class in how to be a good politician.
In a thorough comparison of the Bush and Obama administrations’ national security policies, Chris Edelson demonstrates that President Obama and his officials have used softer rhetoric and toned-down legal arguments, but in key areas—military action, surveillance, and state secrets—they have simply found new ways to assert power without meaningful constitutional or statutory constraints.
Edelson contends that this legacy of the two immediately post-9/11 presidencies raises crucial questions for future presidents, Congress, the courts, and American citizens. Where is the political will to restore a balance of powers among branches of government and adherence to the rule of law? What are the limits of authority regarding presidential national security power? Have national security concerns created a permanent shift to unconstrained presidential power?
Wesley writes poetry that moves with her through life, land, and love, seeing with eyes that have witnessed both national and personal tragedy and redemption. Born in Tugbakeh, Liberia and raised in Monrovia, Wesley immigrated to the United States in 1991 to escape the Liberian civil war. In this moving collection, she invites us to join her as she buries loved ones, explores long-distance connections through social media, and sings bittersweet praises of the women around her, of mothers, and of Africa.
As shown by China’s relationship to Japan, and Japan’s relationship to South Korea, even growing regional economic interdependencies are not enough to overcome bitter memories grounded in earlier wars, invasions, and periods of colonial domination. Although efforts to ease historical animosity have been made, few have proven to be successful in Northeast Asia. In previous research scholars anticipated an improvement in relations through thick economic interdependence or increased societal contact. In economic terms, however, Japan and China already trade heavily: Japan has emerged as China’s largest trading partner and China as second largest to Japan. Societal contact is already intense, as millions of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese visit one another’s countries annually as students, tourists, and on business trips. But these developments have not alleviated international distrust and negative perception, or resolved disagreement on what constitutes “adequate reparation” regarding the countries’ painful history.
Noticing clashes of strong nationalisms around the world in areas like Northeast Asia, numerous studies have suggested that more peaceful relations are likely only if countries submerge or paper over existing national identities by promoting universalism. Pride, Not Prejudice argues, to the contrary, that affirmation of national identities may be a more effective way to build international cooperation. If each national population reflects on the values of their national identity, trust and positive perception can increase between countries. This idea is consistent with the theoretical foundation that those who have a clear, secure, and content sense of self, in turn, can be more open, evenhanded, and less defensive toward others. In addition, this reduced defensiveness also enhances guilt admission by past “inflictors” of conflict and colonialism. Eunbin Chung borrows the social psychological theory of self-affirmation and applies it to an international context to argue that affirmation of a national identity, or reflecting on what it means to be part of one’s country, can increase trust, guilt recognition, and positive perception between countries.
Who am I? The question today haunts every society in the Western world.
Legions of people—especially the young—have become unmoored from a firm sense of self. To compensate, they join the ranks of ideological tribes spawned by identity politics and react with frenzy against any perceived threat to their group.
As identitarians track and expose the ideologically impure, other citizens face the consequences of their rancor: a litany of “isms” run amok across all levels of cultural life, the free marketplace of ideas muted by agendas shouted through megaphones, and a spirit of general goodwill warped into a state of perpetual outrage.
How did we get here? Why have we divided against one another so bitterly? In Primal Screams, acclaimed cultural critic Mary Eberstadt presents the most provocative and original theory to come along in recent years. The rise of identity politics, she argues, is a direct result of the fallout of the sexual revolution, especially the collapse and shrinkage of the family.
As Eberstadt illustrates, humans have forged their identities within the kinship structure from time immemorial. The extended family, in a real sense, is the first tribe and teacher. But with its unprecedented decline across various measures, generations of people have been set adrift and can no longer answer the question Who am I? concerning primordial ties. Desperate for solidarity and connection, they claim membership in politicized groups whose displays of frantic irrationalism amount to primal screams for familial and communal loss.
Written in her impeccable style and with empathy rarely encountered in today’s divisive discourse, Eberstadt’s theory holds immense explanatory power that no serious citizen can afford to ignore. The book concludes with three incisive essays by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel, each sharing their perspective on the author’s formidable argument.
Smith's poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive.
Mortality in Smith's work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world.
The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.
The shifting meaning of race and class in the age of Trump
The profound concentration of economic power in the United States in recent decades has produced surprising new forms of racialization. In Producers, Parasites, Patriots, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes show that while racial subordination is an enduring feature of U.S. political history, it continually changes in response to shifting economic and political conditions, interests, and structures.
The authors document the changing politics of race and class in the age of Trump across a broad range of phenomena, showing how new forms of racialization work to alter the economic protections of whiteness while promoting some conservatives of color as models of the neoliberal regime. Through careful analyses of diverse political sites and conflicts—racially charged elections, attacks on public-sector unions, new forms of white precarity, the rise of black and brown political elites, militia uprisings, multiculturalism on the far right—they highlight new, interwoven deployments of race in the ascendant age of inequality. Using the concept of “racial transposition,” the authors demonstrate how racial meanings and signification can be transferred from one group to another to shore up both neoliberalism and racial hierarchy.
From the militia movement to the Alt-Right to the mainstream Republican Party, Producers, Parasites, Patriots brings to light the changing role of race in right-wing politics.
In Profiles and Plotlines, Katherine Johnston engages this energetic reformation of contemporary literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Fiction and poetry are capable of addressing precisely that for which algorithms cannot or do not account: the effects of profile culture; the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data; the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched; and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Johnston analyzes prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable.
A new and original history of the forces that shaped the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era’s darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?
The Project-State and Its Rivals offers a radical alternative interpretation that takes us from the transforming challenges of the world wars to our own time. Instead of the traditional narrative of domestic politics and international relations, Charles S. Maier looks to the political and economic impulses that propelled societies through a century when territorial states and transnational forces both claimed power, engaging sometimes as rivals and sometimes as allies. Maier focuses on recurring institutional constellations: project-states including both democracies and dictatorships that sought not just to retain power but to transform their societies; new forms of imperial domination; global networks of finance; and the international associations, foundations, and NGOs that tried to shape public life through allegedly apolitical appeals to science and ethics.
In this account, which draws on the author’s studies over half a century, Maier invites a rethinking of the long twentieth century. His history of state entanglements with capital, the decline of public projects, and the fragility of governance explains the fraying of our own civic culture—but also allows hope for its recovery.
The Promise of Failure is part memoir of the writing life, part advice book, and part craft book; sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching, but always honest. McNally uses his own life as a blueprint for the writer’s daily struggles as well as the existential ones, tackling subjects such as when to quit and when to keep going, how to deal with depression, what risking something of yourself means, and ways to reenergize your writing through reinvention.
What McNally illuminates is how rejection, in its best light, is another element of craft, a necessary stage to move the writer from one project to the next, and that it’s best to see rejection and failure on a life-long continuum so that you can see the interconnectedness between failure and success, rather than focusing on failure as a measure of self-worth. As brutally candid as McNally can sometimes be, The Promise of Failure is ultimately an inspiring book—never in a Pollyannaish self-help way. McNally approaches the reader as a sympathetic companion with cautionary tales to tell. Written by an author who has as many unpublished books under his belt as published ones, The Promise of Failure is as much for the newcomer as it is for the established writer.
Propaganda Blitz shows that the corporate media does not just 'spin' the news - it fundamentally distorts everything it touches, hiding the real issues from public view, and often completely reversing the truth. This book uncovers a storm of top-down campaigns behind war reporting from Iraq, Syria and Palestine, as well as the destruction of the credibility of figures on the left, including Jeremy Corbyn and Hugo Chavez.
Exposing propagandists at the top levels of the BBC, as well as their reporting on the Scottish independence referendum, the dismantling of the NHS and looming climate chaos, Propaganda Blitz explains the real meaning of 'objective' journalism, exposes the fake news about 'fake news' and outlines a model for anti-business media activism.
Chubin brings attention to the varying class, ethnic, religious, and national identities of NGO staff and clients that shaped their differing understandings of oppression and justice. Her examination of the tensions within the organization reveals why the efforts of the NGO workers failed to gain purchase among the intended beneficiaries.
Proper Women concludes by encouraging feminist activists to not only examine the role of local politics and transnational connections in shaping their definitions of empowerment, but also consider the advantages of a justice-enhancing practice as opposed to justice monism for their target populations.
Almost every museum in the world is confronted with plastics in their collections. Research initiatives and knowledge concerning the conservation of heritage objects made of plastics have proliferated over the last twenty-five years, necessitating this up-to-date, comprehensive resource. Intended as a highly practical guide for the conservation community, this authoritative book offers information essential to understanding plastics, polymers, and rubber/elastomers and their behaviors in the cultural heritage context. Numerous graphs, diagrams, and illustrations allow readers to compare the mechanical, physical, thermal, and optical properties of these substances during conservation. Aimed at the hands-on museum practitioner, this book will assist professionals in choosing the appropriate methods and materials for preserving and treating plastic objects.
Complementing the main chapters, fifty-six illustrated “fact sheets” summarize, at a glance, the properties of those plastics most commonly found in museum collections. Six informative case studies present real-world examples of current conservation approaches to works of art and design made of plastics and rubber/elastomers. Under the expert authorship of Thea B. van Oosten, conservation scientist, educator, and internationally regarded authority on the behavior and properties of plastics, this instructive volume is destined to become an invaluable resource for the field.
A focus on the representation of everyday life in women’s prose reveals that a first generation of female writers (Natal’ia Baranskaia, Irina Grekova) both legitimated and limited their successors (Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Tat’iana Tolstaia, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Svetlana Vasilenko) in their choice of literary topics. The Prose of Life traces the development, and intriguing ruptures, of recent Russian women’s prose, becoming a must-read for readers interested in Russian literature and gender studies.
2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
What can neighborhood baseball tell us about class and gender cultures, urban change, and the ways that communities value public space? Through a close exploration of a boys’ baseball league in a gentrifying neighborhood of Philadelphia, sociologist Sherri Grasmuck reveals the accommodations and tensions that characterize multicultural encounters in contemporary American public life. Based on years of ethnographic observation and interviews with children, parents, and coaches, Protecting Home offers an analysis of the factors that account for racial accommodation in a space that was previously known for racial conflict and exclusion. Grasmuck argues that the institutional arrangements and social characteristics of children’s baseball create a cooperative environment for the negotiation of social, cultural, and class differences.
Chapters explore coaching styles, parental involvement, institutional politics, parent-child relations, and children’s experiences. Grasmuck identifies differences in the ways that the mostly white, working-class “old-timers” and the racially diverse, professional newcomers relate to the neighborhood. These distinctions reflect a competing sense of cultural values related to individual responsibility toward public space, group solidarity, appropriate masculine identities, and how best to promote children’s interests—a contrast between “hierarchical communalism” and “child-centered individualism.”
Through an innovative combination of narrative approaches, this book succeeds both in capturing the immediacy of boys’ interaction at the playing field and in contributing to sophisticated theoretical debates in urban studies, the sociology of childhood, and masculinity studies.
In the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Portland made national news with nightly social justice protests, often met with violent response by counter protestors and law enforcement. Though frequently regarded as a progressive hub, Portland has a long history of racial inequality and oppression, and the city’s entrenched divisions gained new attention during the Trump years. The photographs in Protest City present a visceral visual record of this significant moment in Portland’s history.
Rian Dundon, who has been photographing the rise of extreme politics on the West Coast since 2016, lived only a short walk from the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd. For one hundred days, Dundon enmeshed himself in the demonstrations with an unobtrusive point-and-shoot camera. The result is a graphic portrayal of how social movements become politicized, how spectacle serves as a subtext to change in the digital age, and how modern protests blur distinctions among performance, ritual, and surveillance. As he follows the progress of Portland’s conflicts, Dundon draws connections to Oregon’s legacy as a stronghold of white supremacist extremism and interrogates the role of whiteness in racial justice movements.
Dundon’s striking photos recreate the immediacy and impact of the protests, while a foreword by journalist Donnell Alexander and introduction by historian Carmen P. Thompson contextualize the uprising’s sociopolitical background. A chronology and author’s note are also featured.
The publisher and author would like to thank the Magnum Foundation, Documentary Arts, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project for their generous support of this publication. Additional funding has been provided by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community edited by Carrie N. Baker and Aviva Dove-Viebahn, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond the traditional academic classroom and scholarly journals to share their work with the public.
Part one explores how feminist scholars engage broader audiences through art, media, and public programming, including essays on a public discussion series teaching intersectional feminist analysis of popular films, and a podcast from Latina scholars discussing issues of reproductive justice, social justice, motherhood, sexuality, race, and gender. Part two focuses on activism and public education, including essays on “Take Back the Night,” and archiving the women’s march protests. Part three turns to public writing and scholarship, including an essay on elevating the perspectives and voices of underrepresented creatives in the film and television industry. Part four explores feminist pedagogies for community engagement and for teaching public feminisms.
Accessible and engaging to a broad range of readers, the essays in this volume are a rich resource for scholars and students interested in infusing their academic knowledge into the public sphere. With this timely book, the editors offer an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and highlight some of the important public-facing work feminist scholars are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable.
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