Aesthetics of Displacement centers the embodied aesthetic practices of Afro-Colombian people and their experiences, asking readers to reassess Colombian national history, legacies of colonialism and racism, politics of memory, and the inheritances of violence related to the Colombian armed conflict. Through a theoretical frame of destierro or “displacement” and an examination of the Afro-Colombian philosophy vivir sabroso or “to live harmoniously,” Aesthetics of Displacement focuses on how theatre-makers, choreographers, filmmakers, activist groups, and photojournalists create an embodied Colombian perspective informed by decolonial practices and thinking that rely on movement as as strategy for existence and that counter European hegemonic aesthetics as the major foundations of taste and value. This approach not only enhances our understanding of contemporary Colombian culture, but also highlights the importance of performance as a means of resistance and identity formation.  

 In Against the Gallows, Paul Christian Jones explores the intriguing cooperation of America’s writers—including major figures such as Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Herman Melville—with reformers, politicians, clergymen, and periodical editors who attempted to end the practice of capital punishment in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. In an age of passionate reform efforts, the antigallows movement enjoyed broad popularity, waging its campaign in legislatures, pulpits, newspapers, and literary journals.

Chart the development of feminist approaches and theories of interpretation during the period when women first joined the ranks of biblical scholars

This collection of essays on feminist biblical studies in the twentieth century seeks to explore four areas of inquiry demanding further investigation. In the first section, articles chart the beginnings and developments of feminist biblical studies as a conversation among feminists around the world. The second section introduces, reviews, and discusses the hermeneutic religious spaces created by feminist biblical studies. The third segment discusses academic methods of reading and interpretation that dismantle androcentric language and kyriarchal authority. The fourth section returns to the first with work that transgresses academic boundaries in order to exemplify the transforming, inspiring, and institutionalizing feminist work that has been and is being done to change religious mindsets of domination and to enable wo/men to engage in critical readings of the Bible.

Features:

• Essays examine the rupture or break in the malestream reception history of the Bible
• Exploration of the term feminism in different social-cultural and theoretical-religious locations
• Authors from around the world present research and future directions for research challenging the next generation of feminist interpreters

An engrossing history of the century that transformed our knowledge of the body’s inner senses 

The years between 1833 and 1945 fundamentally transformed science’s understanding of the body’s inner senses, revolutionizing fields like philosophy, the social sciences, and cognitive science. In How We Became Sensorimotor, Mark Paterson provides a systematic account of this transformative period, while also demonstrating its substantial implications for current explorations into phenomenology, embodied consciousness, the extended mind, and theories of the sensorimotor, the body, and embodiment.

Each chapter of How We Became Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and historicizes its formation by means of recent scientific studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging among a diverse array of sensations, including balance, fatigue, pain, the “muscle sense,” and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed “motricity,” Paterson’s analysis moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as how forgotten pain-measurement schemes transformed criminology, or how Penfield’s outmoded concepts of the sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar psychology textbooks.

Complete with original archival research featuring illustrations and correspondence, How We Became Sensorimotor shows how the shifting and sometimes contested historical background to our understandings of the senses are being extended even today.

An influential thinker distills years of work on the philosophy of movement into one accessible account


Why are city dwellers worldwide walking on average ten percent faster than they were a decade ago? Why are newcomer immigrant groups so often maligned when migration has always constituted civilization? To analyze and understand the depth of the reasons, Thomas Nail suggests that it serves us well to turn to a philosophy of movement. Synthesizing and extending many years of his influential work, The Philosophy of Movement is a comprehensive argument for how motion is the primary force in human and natural history.

Nail critiques the bias toward stasis at the core of Western thought, asking: what would a philosophy that began with the primacy of movement look like? Interrogating the consequences of movement throughout history and in daily life in the twenty-first century, he draws connections and traces patterns between scales of reality, periods of history, and fields of knowledge. In our age of rapid movements shaped by accelerating climate change and ensuing mass global migration, as well as ubiquitous digital media, Nail provides a contemporary philosophy that helps us understand how we got here and how to grapple with these interlocking challenges.

With a foreword by philosopher Daniel W. Smith, The Philosophy of Movement: An Introduction is a must-read for scholars and students not only of philosophy but also history, anthropology, science and technology studies, mobility studies, and other fields across the humanities and social sciences.

Exploring the books and reading practices behind the creation of Transcendentalist philosophy and community

Transcendentalism emerged in early 19th century New England as a uniquely American philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement. Its first generation of thinkers—including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller—created a worldview that stressed the inherent goodness of the “self-reliant” individual and the presence of the divine in nature. These intellectuals gathered in informal symposia devoted to what Emerson called “creative reading,” a practice that stresses the transformative potential of the written word that was central to the movement’s emergence, growth, and spread. But what were these thinkers reading and how did it influence the development of Transcendentalism?

In Reading with the Transcendentalists, renowned literary scholar Philip F. Gura focuses on 10 American, British, and European books that were essential to the movement’s thoughts, writings, and activities. Many of the authors of these books—James Marsh, Madame de Staël, Samson Reed, George Ripley, Thomas Carlyle, Albert Brisbane, and George Sand—stood outside of Transcendentalism yet profoundly influenced it. Others such as Emerson, Parker, and Fuller were the movement’s central architects, whose writings in turn inspired the next generation, including Henry David Thoreau and Caroline Healey Dall. Each of these books challenged prevailing religious, philosophical, and social conventions in ways that resonated deeply with burgeoning Transcendentalist ideals.

Blending intellectual biography with book history, Gura crafts a captivating cultural history that reconstructs the dynamic social networks of the early Transcendentalists, in which ideas from the written word circulated, evolved, and acquired new meanings. The result is an rich portrait of reading as a creative and communal act, and an exploration of how books ignite curiosity, sustain friendship, and catalyze intellectual transformation. Through a carefully developed narrative structure that is filled not only with books and reading but with headline-worthy scandals, disputes, and falling outs and realignments, Gura traces the historical arc of a transnational intellectual movement that helped lay the foundation for the idea of “America.”

Between 1967 and 1972, a previously obscure group of authors entered the US cultural spotlight. During this five-year period, at least thirty anthologies of poetry and prose by African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American children came out of adult-led workshops, classrooms, and sites of juvenile incarceration. Mass-market publishers, independent imprinters, and local mimeograph machines produced volumes with titles such as I Am Somebody! and The Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices from the Ghetto. These young writers actively participated in the Black Arts Movement, and some collaborated with well-known adult authors, most prominently June Jordan. Their anthologies gained national media coverage, occasionally became bestsellers, were quoted by James Baldwin, and even inspired a hit Broadway musical. While writings by children had long attracted adult attention, this flurry of youth writing and publishing was distinguished by the widespread belief that children of color from poor and working-class neighborhoods were uniquely able to speak truth about American racism and inequality.

Focusing on Black and Latinx youth authorship within New York City, and using deep archival research and elegant close readings, Amy Fish examines child-authored texts of this era within the context of their literary production and reception. These young writers were often supervised and edited by white adults, raising concerns about the authenticity and agency of their voices. Fish contends that young authors themselves shared these concerns and that they employed savvy rhetorical strategies of address, temporality, and trope to self-consciously interrogate the perils and possibilities of their adult-influenced work. Young writers thus contributed to the era’s important debates about the nature of authorship and readership within a racist society, while also using their writing as an intimate occasion of self-discovery.