front cover of How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters
How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters
Saúl Hernández
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
One is never sure who the monsters are in these poems, only that the narrator desperately doesn’t want to be one. In his brilliant debut collection, Hernández explores grief, loss, identity, lineage, and belonging with grace, insight, and compassion. 

These pages are infused with comfort, with desire, with heartache. Never absent is love, family. Hernández—hyperaware of American society’s dismissal or hatred of people who look like him—writes with a refreshing confidence, a sure knowledge of who he is and where he comes from. Transcending any particular experience, this volume will continue to resonate with multiple readings.
 
he says I deserve someone who will love me the way 
I love him. I want to kiss him, tell him love isn’t measured.
I squeeze his hand instead, afraid of the thought of anyone looking at us 
from the outside of my car.
—Excerpt from “Defying the Dangers of Being”
[more]

front cover of Kill the Overseer!
Kill the Overseer!
The Gamification of Slave Resistance
Sarah Juliet Lauro
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Explores the representation of slave revolt in video games—and the trouble with making history playable

Kill the Overseer! profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave’s choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. In this work, Sarah Juliet Lauro questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin’s Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery’s victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance. 

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

[more]

front cover of Licensed To Kill?
Licensed To Kill?
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Shoreham Power Plant
Joan Aron
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998
Examines the nuclear power plant constructed at Shoreham, New York, and the accumulated miscalculations and mishaps that eventually forced its deconstruction. An intricate study of the groups, policies and regulatory issues involved in a historic legal battle.
[more]

front cover of Reimagining
Reimagining "To Kill a Mockingbird"
Family, Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law
Austin Sarat
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
Fifty years after the release of the film version of Harper Lee's acclaimed novel To Kill a Mockingbird, this collection of original essays takes a fresh look at a classic text in legal scholarship. The contributors revisit and examine Atticus, Scout, and Jem Finch, their community, and the events that occur there through the interdisciplinary lens of law and humanities scholarship.

The readings in this volume peel back the film's visual representation of the many-layered social world of Maycomb, Alabama, offering sometimes counterintuitive insights through the prism of a number of provocative contemporary theoretical and interpretive questions. What, they ask, is the relationship between the subversion of social norms and the doing of justice or injustice? Through what narrative and visual devices are some social hierarchies destabilized while others remain hegemonic? How should we understand the sacrifices characters make in the name of justice, and comprehend their failures in achieving it?

Asking such questions casts light on the film's eccentricities and internal contradictions and suggests the possibility of new interpretations of a culturally iconic text. The book examines the context that gave meaning to the film's representation of race and how debates about family, community, and race are played out and reframed in law.

Contributors include Colin Dayan, Thomas L. Dumm, Susan Sage Heinzelman, Linda Ross Meyer, Naomi Mezey, Imani Perry, and Ravit Reichman.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter