When she's itty bitty and blond, wearing ribbons and curls and an aura of money, she's adorable and vulnerable, the tiny, innocent heart of our culture. But when the little girl comes from the working class, she's something else. Just what, and why so little is said about it, are the questions Valerie Walkerdine asks in Daddy's Girl, a book about how we see young girls, how they see themselves, and how popular culture mediates the view.
Walkerdine's study looks at little girls on television and in the movies, in advertisements and popular songs. In figures from Annie to Shirley Temple in any number of her plucky poor girl roles, she shows us little orphans saddled with the task of representing the self-sufficient working class on the one hand and the loveable object of middle class charity on the other. The real working class girl, whose fantasies feed on a strange mix of these images and the rest of what popular culture offers, with all its glamorized sex and violence, is also the object of Walkerdine's attention. Reflecting on her own working class roots and taking us into the homes and the confidence of working class girls today as they watch television and movies and listen to popular songs, she gives us a sense, at once troubling and poignant, of the portrayal and manipulation of little girls as a canny part of the production of civilized femininity.
At the center of this work is the issue of how girl children are taught to think of themselves and how their depiction puts them in their place. This concern leads Walkerdine to questions about television and parental control, about Freud's seduction theory and the origins of fantasy, about the political and erotic meaning of the ubiquitous gaze our culture trains on the little girl, and about academics' approach to the subject.
On street corners throughout the country, men stand or sit together patiently while they wait for someone looking to hire un buen trabajador (a good worker). These day laborers are visible symbols of the changing nature of work—and the demographics of workers—in the United States.
Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky spent nearly three years visiting with African American men and Latino immigrant men who looked for work as day laborers at a Brooklyn street intersection. Her fascinating ethnography, Daily Labors, considers these immigrants and citizens as active participants in their social and economic life. They not only work for wages but also labor daily to institute change, create knowledge, and contribute new meanings to shape their social world.
Daily Labors reveals how ideologies about race, gender, nation, and legal status operate on the corner and the vulnerabilities, discrimination, and exploitation workers face in this labor market. Pinedo-Turnovsky shows how workers market themselves to conform to employers’ preconceptions of a “good worker” and how this performance paradoxically leads to a more precarious workplace experience. Ultimately, she sheds light on belonging, community, and what a “good day laborer” for these workers really is.
How do women living with genital herpes and/or HPV (human papilloma virus) infections see themselves as sexual beings, and what choices do they make about sexual health issues? Adina Nack, a medical sociologist who specializes in sexual health and social psychology, conducted in-depth interviews with 43 women about their identities and sexuality in regards to chronic illness. The result is a fascinating book about an issue that affects over 15 million Americans, but is all too little discussed.
Damaged Goods adds to our knowledge of how women are affected by living with chronic STDs and reveals the stages of their sexual- self transformation. From the anxiety of being diagnosed with an STD to issues of blame and shame, Nack-herself diagnosed with a cervical HPV infection-shows why these women feeling that they are "damaged goods," question future relationships, marriage, and their ability to have healthy children.
With its focus on dangerous, determined femmes fatales, hardboiled detectives, and crimes that almost-but-never-quite succeed, film noir has long been popular with moviegoers and film critics alike. Film noir was a staple of classical Hollywood filmmaking during the years 1941-1958 and has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since the 1990s. Dames in the Driver's Seat offers new views of both classical-era and contemporary noirs through the lenses of gender, class, and race. Jans Wager analyzes how changes in film noir's representation of women's and men's roles, class status, and racial identities mirror changes in a culture that is now often referred to as postmodern and postfeminist.
Following introductory chapters that establish the theoretical basis of her arguments, Wager engages in close readings of the classic noirs The Killers, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly and the contemporary noirs L. A. Confidential, Mulholland Falls, Fight Club, Twilight, Fargo, and Jackie Brown. Wager divides recent films into retro-noirs (made in the present, but set in the 1940s and 1950s) and neo-noirs (made and set in the present but referring to classic noir narratively or stylistically). Going beyond previous studies of noir, her perceptive readings of these films reveal that retro-noirs fulfill a reactionary social function, looking back nostalgically to outdated gender roles and racial relations, while neo-noirs often offer more revisionary representations of women, though not necessarily of people of color.
Carolyn Wilkins grew up defending her racial identity. Because of her light complexion and wavy hair, she spent years struggling to convince others that she was black. Her family’s prominence set Carolyn’s experiences even further apart from those of the average African American. Her father and uncle were well-known lawyers who had graduated from Harvard Law School. Another uncle had been a child prodigy and protégé of Albert Einstein. And her grandfather had been America's first black assistant secretary of labor.
Carolyn's parents insisted she follow the color-conscious rituals of Chicago's elite black bourgeoisie—experiences Carolyn recalls as some of the most miserable of her entire life. Only in the company of her mischievous Aunt Marjory, a woman who refused to let the conventions of “proper” black society limit her, does Carolyn feel a true connection to her family's African American heritage.
When Aunt Marjory passes away, Carolyn inherits ten bulging scrapbooks filled with family history and memories. What she finds in these photo albums inspires her to discover the truth about her ancestors—a quest that will eventually involve years of research, thousands of miles of travel, and much soul-searching.
Carolyn learns that her great-grandfather John Bird Wilkins was born into slavery and went on to become a teacher, inventor, newspaperman, renegade Baptist minister, and a bigamist who abandoned five children. And when she discovers that her grandfather J. Ernest Wilkins may have been forced to resign from his labor department post by members of the Eisenhower administration, Carolyn must confront the bittersweet fruits of her family's generations-long quest for status and approval.
Damn Near White is an insider’s portrait of an unusual American family. Readers will be drawn into Carolyn’s journey as she struggles to redefine herself in light of the long-buried secrets she uncovers. Tackling issues of class, color, and caste, Wilkins reflects on the changes of African American life in U.S. history through her dedicated search to discover her family’s powerful story.
Until the recent recognition of Deaf culture and the legitimacy of signed languages, majority societies around the world have classified Deaf people as “disabled,” a term that separates all persons so designated from the mainstream in a disparaging way. Damned for Their Difference offers a well-founded explanation of how this discrimination came to be through a discursive exploration of the cultural, social, and historical contexts of these attitudes and behavior toward deaf people, especially in Great Britain.
Authors Jan Branson and Don Miller examine the orientation toward and treatment of deaf people as it developed from the 17th century through the 20th century. Their wide-ranging study explores the varied constructions of the definition of “disabled,” a term whose meaning hinges upon constant negotiation between parties, ensuring that no finite meaning is ever established. Damned for Their Difference provides a sociological understanding of disabling practices in a way that has never been seen before.
From ballet to burlesque, from the frontier jig to the jitterbug, Americans have always loved watching dance, whether in grand ballrooms, on Mississippi riverboats, or in the streets. Dance and American Art is an innovative look at the elusive, evocative nature of dance and the American visual artists who captured it through their paintings, sculpture, photography, and prints from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The scores of artists discussed include many icons of American art: Winslow Homer, George Caleb Bingham, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Edward Steichen, David Smith, and others.
As a subject for visual artists, dance has given new meaning to America’s perennial myths, cherished identities, and most powerful dreams. Their portrayals of dance and dancers, from the anonymous to the famous—Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, Josephine Baker, Martha Graham—have testified to the enduring importance of spatial organization, physical pattern, and rhythmic motion in creating aesthetic form.
Through extensive research, sparkling prose, and beautiful color reproductions, art historian Sharyn R. Udall draws attention to the ways that artists’ portrayals of dance have defined the visual character of the modern world and have embodied culturally specific ideas about order and meaning, about the human body, and about the diverse fusions that comprise American culture.
This anthology brings together the late Barry A. Crouch's most important articles on the African American experience in Texas during Reconstruction. Grouped topically, the essays explore what freedom meant to the newly emancipated, how white Texans reacted to the freed slaves, and how Freedmen's Bureau agents and African American politicians worked to improve the lot of ordinary African American Texans. The volume also contains Crouch's seminal review of Reconstruction historiography, "Unmanacling Texas Reconstruction: A Twenty-Year Perspective." The introductory pieces by Arnoldo De Leon and Larry Madaras recapitulate Barry Crouch's scholarly career and pay tribute to his stature in the field of Reconstruction history.
Contributors are Norma E. Cantú, Susan Cashion, María Teresa Ceseña, Xóchitl C. Chávez, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Renée de la Torre Castellanos, Peter J. García, Rudy F. García, Chris Goertzen, Martha González, Elisa Diana Huerta, Sydney Hutchinson, Marie "Keta" Miranda, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Shakina Nayfack, Russell Rodríguez, Brenda M. Romero, Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, José Sánchez Jiménez, and Alberto Zárate Rosales.
An innovative exploration of understanding through dance, Dancing across the Page draws on the frameworks of phenomenology, feminism, and postmodernism to offer readers an understanding of performance studies that is grounded in personal narrative and lived experience. Through accounts of contemporary dance making, improvisation, and dance education, Karen Barbour explores a diversity of themes, including power; activism; and cultural, gendered, and personal identity. An intimate yet rigorous investigation of creativity in dance, Dancing across the Page emphasizes embodied knowledge and imagination as a basis for creative action in the world.
As the nomadic hunters and gatherers of the ancient Near East turned to agriculture for their livelihood and settled into villages, religious ceremonies involving dancing became their primary means for bonding individuals into communities and households into villages. So important was dance that scenes of dancing are among the oldest and most persistent themes in Near Eastern prehistoric art, and these depictions of dance accompanied the spread of agriculture into surrounding regions of Europe and Africa.
In this pathfinding book, Yosef Garfinkel analyzes depictions of dancing found on archaeological objects from the Near East, southeastern Europe, and Egypt to offer the first comprehensive look at the role of dance in these Neolithic (7000-4000 BC) societies. In the first part of the book, Garfinkel examines the structure of dance, its functional roles in the community (with comparisons to dance in modern pre-state societies), and its cognitive, or symbolic, aspects. This analysis leads him to assert that scenes of dancing depict real community rituals linked to the agricultural cycle and that dance was essential for maintaining these calendrical rituals and passing them on to succeeding generations. In the concluding section of the book, Garfinkel presents and discusses the extensive archaeological data—some 400 depictions of dance—on which his study is based.
Dancing Bahia is an edited collection that draws together the work of leading scholars, artists, and dance activists from Brazil, Canada, and the United States to examine the particular ways in which dance has responded to socio-political notions of race and community, resisting stereotypes, and redefining African Diaspora and Afro-Brazilian traditions.
Using the Brazilian city of Salvador da Bahia as its focal point, this volume brings to the fore questions of citizenship, human rights, and community building. The essays within are informed by both theory and practice, as well as black activism that inspires and grounds the research, teaching, and creative output of dance professionals from, or deeply connected to, Bahia.
A significant and innovative contribution to Austin studies. How did an Illinois Methodist homesteader in the West come to create one of the most significant cosmological syntheses in American literature? In this study, Hoyer draws on his own knowledge of biblical religion and Native American cultures to explore Austin's creation of the "mythology of the American continent" she so valued. Austin lived in and wrote about "the land of little rain," semiarid and arid parts of California and Nevada that were home to the Northern Paiute, Shoshone, Interior Chumash, and Yokut peoples. Hoyer makes new and provocative connections between Austin and spiritual figures like Wovoka, the prophet of the Ghost Dance religion, and writers like Zitkala-sa and Mourning Dove, and he provides a particularly fine reading of Cogowea.
Detroit in the 1960s was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin Luther King, Jr., dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas, and facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA.
As Suzanne Smith traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas. Smith shows how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign.
Against a background of events on the national scene--featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X--Dancing in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively and vital history. It's peopled with a host of major and minor figures in black politics, culture, and the arts, and full of the passions of a momentous era. It offers a critical new perspective on the role of popular culture in the process of political change.
The vital role of dance in enacting the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples
In Dancing Indigenous Worlds, Jacqueline Shea Murphy brings contemporary Indigenous dance makers into the spotlight, putting critical dance studies and Indigenous studies in conversation with one another in fresh and exciting new ways. Exploring Indigenous dance from North America and Aotearoa (New Zealand), she shows how dance artists communicate Indigenous ways of being, as well as generate a political force, engaging Indigenous understandings and histories.
Following specific dance works over time, Shea Murphy interweaves analysis, personal narrative, and written contributions from multiple dance artists, demonstrating dance’s crucial work in asserting and enacting Indigenous worldviews and the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples. As Shea Murphy asserts, these dance-making practices can not only disrupt the structures that European colonization feeds upon and strives to maintain, but they can also recalibrate contemporary dance.
Based on more than twenty years of relationship building and research, Shea Murphy’s work contributes to growing, and largely underreported, discourses on decolonizing dance studies, and the geopolitical, gendered, racial, and relational meanings that dance theorizes and negotiates. She also includes discussions about the ethics of writing about Indigenous knowledge and peoples as a non-Indigenous scholar, and models approaches for doing so within structures of ongoing reciprocal, respectful, responsible action.
Dancing Revolution presents richly diverse case studies to illuminate these patterns of movement and influence in movement and sound in the history of American public life. Christopher J. Smith spans centuries, geographies, and cultural identities as he delves into a wide range of historical moments. These include the God-intoxicated public demonstrations of Shakers and Ghost Dancers in the First and Second Great Awakenings; creolized antebellum dance in cities from New Orleans to Bristol; the modernism and racial integration that imbued twentieth-century African American popular dance; the revolutionary connotations behind images of dance from Josephine Baker to the Marx Brothers; and public movement's contributions to hip hop, antihegemonic protest, and other contemporary transgressive communities’ physical expressions of dissent and solidarity.
Multidisciplinary and wide-ranging, Dancing Revolution examines how Americans turned the rhythms of history into the movement behind the movements.
On many Sundays, Black New Orleanians dance through city streets in Second Lines. These processions invite would-be spectators to join in, grooving to an ambulatory brass band for several hours. Though an increasingly popular attraction for tourists, parading provides the second liners themselves with a potent public expression of Black resistance.
Rachel Carrico examines the parading bodies in motion as a form of negotiating and understanding power. Seeing pleasure as a bodily experience, Carrico reveals how second liners’ moves link joy and liberation, self and communal identities, play and dissent, and reclamations of place. As she shows, dancers’ choices allow them to access the pleasure of reclaiming self and city through motion and rhythm while expanding a sense of the possible in the present and for the future.
In-depth and empathetic, Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line blends analysis with a chorus of Black voices to reveal an indelible facet of Black culture in the Crescent City.
Combining shrewd applications of current cultural theory with compelling autobiography and elegant prose, José E. Limón works at the intersection of anthropology, folklore, popular culture, history, and literary criticism. A native of South Texas, he renders a historical and ethnographic account of its rich Mexican-American folk culture. This folk culture, he shows—whether expressed through male joking rituals, ballroom polka dances, folk healing, or eating and drinking traditions—metaphorically dances with the devil, both resisting and accommodating the dominant culture of Texas.
Critiquing the work of his precursors— John Gregory Bourke, J. Frank Dobie, Jovita Gonzalez, and Americo Paredes—Limón deftly demonstrates that their accounts of Mexican-Americans in South Texas contain race, class, and gender contradictions, revealed most clearly in their accounts of the folkloric figure of the devil. Limón's own field-based ethnography follows, and again the devil appears as a recurrent motif, signaling the ideological contradictions of folk practices in a South Texas on the verge of postmodernity.
Immigration of Danes and Icelanders to Michigan began in the 1850s and continued well into the twentieth century. Beginning with their origins, this book takes a detailed look at their arrival and settlement in Michigan, answering some key questions: What brought Danes and Icelanders to Michigan? What challenges did they face? How did they adjust and survive here? Where did they settle? What kind of lasting impact have they had on Michigan’s economic and cultural landscape? Extensively researched, this book examines the public and private lives of Danish and Icelandic immigrants in Michigan, drawing from both individual and institutional histories. Shedding new light on the livelihood, traditions, religion, social life, civic organizations, and mutual benefit societies, this thorough, insightful book highlights a small but important population within Michigan’s borders.
Both film noir and the Weimar street film hold a continuing fascination for film spectators and film theorists alike. The female characters, especially the alluring femmes fatales, remain a focus for critical and popular attention. In the tradition of such attention, Dangerous Dames focuses on the femme fatale and her antithesis, the femme attrapée.
Unlike most theorists, Jans Wager examines these archetypes from the perspective of the female spectator and rejects the persistence of vision that allows a reading of these female characters only as representations of unstable postwar masculinity. Professor Wager suggests that the woman in the audience has always seen and understood these characters as representations of a complex aspect of her existence.
Dangerous Dames looks at the Weimar street films The Street, Variety, Asphalt, and M and the film noir movies The Maltese Falcon, Gun Crazy, and The Big Heat. This book opens the doors to spectators and theorists alike, suggesting cinematic pleasures outside the bounds of accepted readings and beyond the narrow categorization of film noir and the Weimar street film as masculine forms.
Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., offer a new examination of the impact of northern philanthropy on southern black education, giving special attention to the "Ogden movement," the General Education Board, the Rosenwald Fund, and the Episcopal American Church Institute for Negroes. Anderson and Moss present significant reinterpretations of key figures in African American education, including Booker T. Washington, William H. Baldwin, Jr., George Foster Peabody, and Thomas Jesse Jones.
Dangerous Donations explores both the great influence of the philanthropic foundations and the important limitations on their power. White racial radicals were suspicious that the northern agencies sought to undermine the southern system of race relations, "training negroes in the vain hope of social equality with whites." This criticism forced the philanthropists and their agents to move cautiously, seeking white southern cooperation whenever possible. Despite repeated compromises, northern philanthropists maintained a vision of race relations and black potential significantly different from that held by the South’s white majority.
Blacks challenged the foundations, expressing their own educational agendas in a variety of ways, including demands for black teachers, resistance to any distinctive racial curricula, and, in some cases, support for independent black schools. The millions of dollars in self-help philanthropy contributed by African Americans also indicated their refusal to give complete control of their schools to either the white South or distant philanthropists in the North.
No other scholars, according to Louis R. Harlan, "have examined the controversial role of philanthropy with the same coolness, analytical skill, and persistent search for the truth as Eric Anderson and Alfred Moss... [they] have made an outstanding contribution to the history of education for both races in the segregated South of 1900 to 1930."
Strikingly, scant attention has focused on the victimization of women who want to leave their hostile partners. This groundbreaking work challenges the perception that rural communities are safe havens from the brutality of urban living. Identifying hidden crimes of economic blackmail and psychological mistreatment, and the complex relationship between patriarchy and abuse, Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz propose concrete and effective solutions, giving voice to women who have often suffered in silence.
Deianeira sends her husband Herakles a poisoned robe. Eriphyle trades the life of her husband Amphiaraos for a golden necklace. Atreus’s wife Aerope gives away the token of his sovereignty, a lamb with a golden fleece, to his brother Thyestes, who has seduced her. Gifts and exchanges always involve a certain risk in any culture, but in the ancient Greek imagination, women and gifts appear to be a particularly deadly combination.
This book explores the role of gender in exchange as represented in ancient Greek culture, including Homeric epic and tragedy, non-literary texts, and iconographic and historical evidence of various kinds. Using extensive insights from anthropological work on marriage, kinship, and exchange, as well as ethnographic parallels from other traditional societies, Deborah Lyons probes the gendered division of labor among both gods and mortals, the role of marriage (and its failure) in transforming women from objects to agents of exchange, the equivocal nature of women as exchange-partners, and the importance of the sister-brother bond in understanding the economic and social place of women in ancient Greece. Her findings not only enlarge our understanding of social attitudes and practices in Greek antiquity but also demonstrate the applicability of ethnographic techniques and anthropological theory to the study of ancient societies.
In the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, as the southern white elite reclaimed power, “racial mixing” was the central concern of segregationists who strove to maintain “racial purity.” Segregation—and race itself—was based on the idea that interracial sex posed a biological threat to the white race. In this groundbreaking study, Charles Robinson examines how white southerners enforced anti-miscegenation laws. His findings challenge conventional wisdom, documenting a pattern of selective prosecution under which interracial domestic relationships were punished even more harshly than transient sexual encounters. Robinson shows that the real crime was to suggest that black and white individuals might be equals, a notion which undermined the legitimacy of the economic, political, and social structure of white male supremacy.
Robinson examines legal cases from across the South, considering both criminal prosecutions brought by states and civil disputes over marital and family assets. He also looks at U.S. Supreme Court decisions, debates in state legislatures, comments in the U.S. Congressional Record, and newspaper editorials. He not only shows the hardening of racial categories but assesses the attitudes of African Americans about anti-miscegenation laws and intermarriage. The epilogue concerns “The Demise of Anti-miscegenation Law” including the case of Richard and Mildred Loving.
Dangerous Liaisons vividly documents the regulation of intimacy and its fundamental role in the construction of race.
Older people negotiating dance routines, intimacy, and racialized differences provide a focal point for an ethnography of danzón in Veracruz, the Mexican city closely associated with the music-dance genre. Hettie Malcomson draws upon on-site research with semi-professional musicians and amateur dancers to reveal how danzón connects, and does not connect, to blackness, joyousness, nostalgia, ageing, and romance. Challenging pervasive utopian views of danzón, Malcomson uses the idea of ambivalence to explore the frictions and opportunities created by seemingly contrary sentiments, ideas, sensations, and impulses. Interspersed with experimental ethnographic vignettes, her account takes readers into black and mestizo elements of local identity in Veracruz, nostalgic and newer styles of music and dance, and the friendships, romances, and rivalries at the heart of regular danzón performance and its complex social world.
Fine-grained and evocative, Danzón Days journeys to one of the genre’s essential cities to provide new perspectives on aging and romance and new explorations of nostalgia and ambivalence.
A fur trader in the Michigan Territory and confidant of both the U.S. government and local Indian tribes, Jacob Smith could have stepped out of a James Fenimore Cooper novel. Controversial, mysterious, and bold during his lifetime, in death Smith has not, until now, received the attention he deserves as a pivotal figure in Michigan’s American period and the War of 1812. This is the exciting and unlikely story of a man at the frontier’s edge, whose missions during both war and peace laid the groundwork for Michigan to accommodate settlers and farmers moving west. The book investigates Smith’s many pursuits, including his role as an advisor to the Indians, from whom the federal government would gradually gain millions of acres of land, due in large part to Smith’s work as an agent of influence. Crawford paints a colorful portrait of a complicated man during a dynamic period of change in Michigan’s history.
Khanna traces the colonial backgrounds of psychoanalysis from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up to the present. Illuminating Freud’s debt to the languages of archaeology and anthropology throughout his career, Khanna describes how Freud altered his theories of the ego as his own political status shifted from Habsburg loyalist to Nazi victim. Dark Continents explores how psychoanalytic theory was taken up in Europe and its colonies in the period of decolonization following World War II, focusing on its use by a range of writers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Octave Mannoni, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Wulf Sachs, and Ellen Hellman. Given the multiple gendered and colonial contexts of many of these writings, Khanna argues for the necessity of a postcolonial, feminist critique of
decolonization and postcoloniality.
Beginning with a new introduction in which Wallace reflects on her life and career, this volume includes other autobiographical essays; articles focused on popular culture, the arts, and literary theory; and explorations of issues in black visual culture. Wallace discusses growing up in Harlem; how she dealt with the media attention and criticism she received for Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, which was published when she was just twenty-seven years old; and her relationship with her family, especially her mother, the well-known artist Faith Ringgold. The many articles devoted to black visual culture range from the historical tragedy of the Hottentot Venus, an African woman displayed as a curiosity in nineteenth-century Europe, to films that sexualize the black body—such as Watermelon Woman, Gone with the Wind, and Paris Is Burning. Whether writing about the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, rap music, the Million Man March, Toshi Reagon, multiculturalism, Marlon Riggs, or a nativity play in Bedford Stuyvesant, Wallace is a bold, incisive critic. Dark Designs and Visual Culture brings the scope of her career and thought into sharp focus.
Winner of the Spitz Prize, Conference for the Study of Political Thought
Winner of the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award
Why do American ghettos persist? Scholars and commentators often identify some factor—such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime—as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to “fix” ghettos or “help” their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor as moral agents responding to injustice.
“Provocative…[Shelby] doesn’t lay out a jobs program or a housing initiative. Indeed, as he freely admits, he offers ‘no new political strategies or policy proposals.’ What he aims to do instead is both more abstract and more radical: to challenge the assumption, common to liberals and conservatives alike, that ghettos are ‘problems’ best addressed with narrowly targeted government programs or civic interventions. For Shelby, ghettos are something more troubling and less tractable: symptoms of the ‘systemic injustice’ of the United States. They represent not aberrant dysfunction but the natural workings of a deeply unfair scheme. The only real solution, in this way of thinking, is the ‘fundamental reform of the basic structure of our society.’”
—James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review
In A Dark Pathway: Precontact Native American Mud Glyphs from 1st Unnamed Cave, Tennessee, Jan Simek and his colleagues present two decades of research at a precontact dark zone cave art site in East Tennessee. Discovered in 1994, 1st Unnamed Cave ushered in an extensive and systematic effort to research precontact cave art sites in the Eastern Woodlands, where the tradition of cave art production was widespread among ancient peoples. Indeed, when a preliminary report about 1st Unnamed Cave was first published in 1997, there were only seven known cave art sites across the Southeast; today, that number exceeds ninety.
From the tale of the cave’s discovery in chapter 1 to descriptions of its art in later chapters, A Dark Pathway boasts nearly one hundred maps, high-resolution photographs, and illustrations that bring the story of one of North America’s premier cave art sites to life. Importantly, Simek and his colleagues also orient 1st Unnamed Cave within the broader context of cave art sites across the Southeast, elevating them as a whole to the notable prominence they deserve. Yet his analysis does more than present and situate the discovery of 1st Unnamed Cave within the greater realm of regional cave art site studies; it also calls for the protection and preservation of these fragile sites and for the acknowledgment of the still-vibrant indigenous cultures that produced them.
With a foreword by Russell Townsend, tribal historic preservation officer for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, A Dark Pathway is a long-awaited volume more than twenty years in the making. Even as he delivers a comprehensive archaeological analysis, Simek’s clear presentation makes for accessible and thrilling reading not only for students of archaeology, anthropology, and Native American studies, but for interested readers as well.
Dark Victorians illuminates the cross-cultural influences between white Britons and black Americans during the Victorian age. In carefully analyzing literature and travel narratives by Ida B. Wells, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, Vanessa D. Dickerson reveals the profound political, racial, and rhetorical exchanges between the groups. From the nineteenth-century black nationalist David Walker, who urged emigrating African Americans to turn to England, to the twentieth-century writer Maya Angelou, who recalls how those she knew in her childhood aspired to Victorian ideas of conduct, black Americans have consistently embraced Victorian England. At a time when scholars of black studies are exploring the relations between diasporic blacks, and postcolonialists are taking imperialism to task, Dickerson considers how Britons negotiated their support of African Americans with the controlling policies they used to govern a growing empire of often dark-skinned peoples, and how philanthropic and abolitionist Victorian discourses influenced black identity, prejudice, and racism in America.
Paul Gilroy seeks to awaken a new understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois’s intellectual and political legacy. At a time of economic crisis, environmental degradation, ongoing warfare, and heated debate over human rights, how should we reassess the changing place of black culture?
Gilroy considers the ways that consumerism has diverted African Americans’ political and social aspirations. Luxury goods and branded items, especially the automobile—rich in symbolic value and the promise of individual freedom—have restratified society, weakened citizenship, and diminished the collective spirit. Jazz, blues, soul, reggae, and hip hop are now seen as generically American, yet artists like Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, and Bob Marley, who questioned the allure of mobility and speed, are not understood by people who have drained their music of its moral power.
Gilroy explores the way in which objects and technologies can become dynamic social forces, ensuring black culture’s global reach while undermining the drive for equality and justice. Drawing on the work of a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, and Frantz Fanon, he examines the ethical dimensions of living in a society that celebrates the object. What are the implications for our notions of freedom?
With his brilliant, provocative analysis and astonishing range of reference, Gilroy revitalizes the study of African American culture. He traces the shifting character of black intellectual and social movements, and shows how we can construct an account of moral progress that reflects today’s complex realities.
Of paramount importance to the natural sciences, the principles of Darwinism, which involve variation, inheritance, and selection, are increasingly of interest to social scientists as well. But no one has provided a truly rigorous account of how the principles apply to the evolution of human society—until now.
In Darwin’s Conjecture, Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen reveal how the British naturalist’s core concepts apply to a wide range of phenomena, including business practices, legal systems, technology, and even science itself. They also critique some prominent objections to applying Darwin to social science, arguing that ultimately Darwinism functions as a general theoretical framework for stimulating further inquiry. Social scientists who adopt a Darwinian approach, they contend, can then use it to frame and help develop new explanatory theories and predictive models.
This truly pathbreaking workat long last makes the powerful conceptual tools of Darwin available to the social sciences and will be welcomed by scholars and students from a range of disciplines.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press