This volume documents the creation of Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, a play written and performed by Monique Mojica with collaborators from diverse disciplines.  Inspired by the pictographic writing and mola textiles of the Guna, an indigenous people of Panama and Colombia, the book explores Mojica’s unique approach to the performance process. Her method activates an Indigenous theatrical process that privileges the body in contrast to Western theater’s privileging of the written text, and rethinks the role of land, body, and movement, as well as dramatic story-structure and performance style.  

Co-authored with anthropologist Brenda Farnell, the book challenges the divide between artist and scholar, and addresses the many levels of cultural, disciplinary, and linguistic translations required to achieve this. Placing the complex intellect inherent to Indigenous Knowledges at its center, the book engages Indigenous performance theory, and concepts that link body, land, and story, such as terra nullius/corpus nullius, mapping, pattern literacy, land literacy, and movement literacy. Enhanced by contributions from other artists and scholars, the book challenges Eurocentric ideologies about what counts as “performance” and what is required from an “audience,” as well as long-standing body-mind dualisms.
 

A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health.

Under this new “science of work,” fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

An outdoor adventure memoir by a legendary diver and innovator who never stopped pushing the limit

I Live Underwater is the highly anticipated posthumous memoir of Max Nohl, a larger-than-life thrill seeker and treasure hunter who revolutionized deep-sea diving. Recounting harrowing experiences with tangled air-hoses, hungry sharks, untested scientific theories, and painful cases of the bends, Nohl’s vivid narrative shows how his unquenchable thirst for adventure propelled him to transcend fear and become one of the field’s great innovators—shattering the diving record in 1937 as the first person to dive deeper than 400 feet. 

Beginning with the disquieting childhood experiences that inspired his obsession with the underwater world, Nohl goes on to discuss his innovative work on the first self-contained diving suit as a student at MIT and his risky experiments in breathing helium to achieve deeper dives. In addition to making vital contributions to the commercial diving industry, Nohl was a pioneer in underwater filming, developing equipment and techniques that were employed in many Hollywood film and television productions. 

After Nohl’s sudden death in 1960 in a car accident, his nearly complete memoir sat in the Milwaukee Public Library Archives—unpublished, until now. Accompanying this page-turning text is a dynamic assortment of images, including Nohl’s original pen-and-ink sketches and historic photos of Nohl and his collaborators. A foreword by Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen provides insights into Nohl’s many important contributions to the diving world and to Wisconsin history and culture.

Includes stories of dives in Lake Michigan (near Milwaukee), the North Atlantic (near Marblehead and Martha’s Vineyard), Walden Pond, the Gulf Coast (near Morgan City, Louisiana, and Panama City, Apalachicola, Wakulla Springs, and Tarpon Springs in Florida), and the Caribbean (near Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
 

Inside the Body of Black Feminism connects historical studies of medical racism with Black feminist theories of the body to reimagine the material and metaphoric possibilities for political subjectivity across race, gender, and culture.

Inside the Body of Black Feminism charts a cultural genealogy of antiracist and feminist engagement with some of the most objectified internal “parts” of racist medical and scientific inquiry: bones and blood, brains and hearts, guts and wombs. In a move counterintuitive to Black feminism’s emphasis on externalized representations of the body, Samantha Pinto reinterprets the relationship between embodiment, health, and race through cultural archives that reimagine the inside of the Black body. Working through materials such as medical textbooks, memoirs, data visualizations, museum displays, speculative fiction, and horror films, Pinto explores how a visually inaccessible corporeal interior becomes discernible and racialized in the public sphere. Inside the Body of Black Feminism engages expressive cultural work to ask how we might know the inside of the Black body differently through Black feminist theory and how scientific and medical inquiry might enable us to understand political subjectivity anew.

A corporeal history of music-making in early modern Europe.

Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music-making subjects—composers, performers, listeners—in the long seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon the early modern body; it is described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, and miraculous while affecting “the circulation of the humors, the purification of the blood, the dilation of the vessels and pores.”

How were these early modern European bodies constituted that music generated such potent bodily-spiritual effects? Bettina Varwig argues that early modern music-making practices challenge our modern understanding of human nature as a mind-body dichotomy. Instead, they persistently affirm a more integrated anthropology, in which body, soul, and spirit remain inextricably entangled. Moving with ease across repertories and regions, sacred and vernacular musics, and domestic and public settings, Varwig sketches a “musical physiology” that is as historically illuminating as it is relevant for present-day performance. This book makes a significant contribution not just to the history of music, but also to the history of the body, the senses, and the emotions, revealing music as a unique access point for reimagining early modern modes of being-in-the-world.

In Running, former NCAA Division I track athlete Lindsey A. Freeman presents the feminist and queer handbook of running that she always wanted but could never find. For Freeman, running is full of joy, desire, and indulgence in the pleasure and weirdness of having a body. It allows for a space of freedom—to move and be moved. Through tender storytelling of a lifetime wearing running shoes, Freeman considers injury and recovery, what it means to run as a visibly queer person, and how the release found in running comes from a desire to touch something that cannot be accessed when still. Running invites us to run through life, legging it out the best we can with heart and style.

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

The moving body—pervasively occupied by fitness activities, intense training and dieting regimes, recreational practices, and high-profile sporting mega-events—holds a vital function in contemporary society. As the body moves—as it performs, sweats, runs, and jumps—it sets in motion an intricate web of scientific rationalities, spatial arrangements, corporate imperatives, and identity politics (i.e. politics of gender, race, social class, etc.). It represents vitality in its productive and physiological capacities, it drives a complex economy of experiences and products, and it is a meaningful site of cultural identities and politics.
 
Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body work from a simple premise: as it moves, the material body matters. Adding to the burgeoning fields of sport studies and body studies, the works featured here draw upon the traditions of feminist theory, posthumanism, actor network theory, and new materialism to reposition the physical, moving body as crucial to the cultural, political, environmental, and economic systems that it constitutes and within which is constituted. Once assembled, the book presents a study of bodies in motion—made to move in contexts where technique, performance, speed, strength, and vitality not only define the conduct therein, but provide the very reason for the body’s being within those economies and environments. In so doing, the contributors look to how the body moving for and about rational systems of science, medicine, markets, and geopolity shapes the social and material world in important and unexpected ways.
 
In Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body, contributors explore the extent to which the body, when moving about both ostensibly active body spaces (i.e., the gymnasium, the ball field, exercise laboratory, the track or running trail, the beach, or the sport stadium) and those places less often connected to physical activity (i.e. the home, the street, the classroom, the automobile), is bounded to technologies of life and living; and to the political arrangements that seek to capitalize upon such frames of biological vitality. To do so, the authors problematize the rise of active body science (i.e. kinesiology, sport and exercise sciences, performance biotechnology) and the effects these scientific interventions have on embodied, lived experience.
 
Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body will be engaging a range of new and emerging theoretical perspectives, including new materialist, political ecology, developmental systems theory, and new material feminist approaches, to examine the actors and assemblages of movement-based material, political, and economic production. In so doing, contributors will vividly and powerfully illustrate the extent to which a focus on the fleshed body and its material conditions can bring forth new insights or ontological and epistemological innovation to the sociology of sport and physical activity. They will also explore the agency of the body as and amongst things. Such a performative materialist approach explicates how complex assemblages of sport and physical activity—bringing into association everything from muscle fibers and dietary proteins to stadium concrete or regional aquifers—are not only meaningful, but ecological.
 
By focusing on the confluence of agentive materialities, disciplinary technologies, vibrant assemblages, speculative realities, and vital performativities, Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body promises to offer a groundbreaking departure from representationalist tendencies and orthodoxies brought about by the cultural turn in sport and physical cultural studies. It brings the moving body and its physics back into focus: recentering moving flesh and bones as locus of social order, environmental change, and the global political economy.
 

A scintillating invitation to enrich our culinary pursuits by understanding how our bodies turn a taste into flavor, emotion, and meaning.

Our foodscape has never been more adventurous, but fully experiencing the subtleties of complex cheeses, wines, or cocktails can be challenging. No longer! In Your Tasting Brain, bestselling food writer Randy Mosher assures us that we can all become master tasters by learning more about the brilliant ways our bodies translate smell, taste, and mouthfeel into flavor—without needing to know everything about terroir, varietals, or exotic ingredients.

In Your Tasting Brain, Mosher shares a road map to send us on our tasting journey, one that connects the worlds of science and art. Our bodies are more finely tuned tasting machines than we realize, Mosher explains. Even a simple grasp of how our senses interact with the world can enhance our culinary delight—and Mosher offers us a tantalizing framework, from how our brain processes, categorizes, and rewards (or punishes) encounters with chemicals in food, all the way to how aromas and flavors spur us to language, emotion, and creativity. Overflowing with scientific insight and practical advice, Your Tasting Brain is an appetizing guide for anyone looking to enhance the pleasures they find in food through attention, curiosity, and practice.