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After the Bloodbath
Is Healing Possible in the Wake of Rampage Shootings?
James D. Diamond
Michigan State University Press, 2019
As violence in the United States seems to become increasingly more commonplace, the question of how communities reset after unprecedented violence also grows in significance. After the Bloodbath examines this quandary, producing insights linking rampage shootings and communal responses in the United States. Diamond, who was a leading attorney in the community where the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy occurred, focuses on three well-known shootings and a fourth shooting that occurred on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. The book looks to the roots of Indigenous approaches to crime, identifying an institutional weakness in the Anglo judicial model, and explores adapting Indigenous practices that contribute to healing following heinous criminal behavior. Emerging from the history of Indigenous dispute resolution is a spotlight turned on to restorative justice, a subject no author has discussed to date in the context of mass shootings. Diamond ultimately leads the reader to a positive road forward focusing on insightful steps people can take after a rampage shooting to help their wounded communities heal.
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After the Whale
Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick
Clark Davis
University of Alabama Press, 1995
Examines Herman Melville’s short fiction and poetry in the context of popular 1850s fiction
 
The study focuses on Melville’s vision of the purpose and function of language from Moby-Dick through Billy Budd with a special emphasis on how language—in function and form—follows and depends on the function and form of the body, how Melville’s attitude toward words echoes his attitude toward fish. Davis begins by locating and describing the fundamental dialectic formulated in Moby-Dick in the characters of Ahab and Ishmael. This dialectic produces two visions of bodily reality and two corresponding visions of language: Ahab’s, in which language is both weapon and substitute body, and Ishmael’s, in which language is an extension of the body—a medium of explanation, conversation, and play. These two forms of language provide a key to understanding the difficult relationships and formal changes in Melville’s writings after Moby-Dick.
 
By following each work’s attitude toward the dialectic, we can see the contours of the later career more clearly and so begin a movement away from weakly contextualized readings of individual novels and short stories to a more complete consideration of Melville’s career. Since the rediscovery of Herman Melville in the early decades of this century, criticism has been limited to the prose in general and to a few major works in particular.
 
Those who have given significant attention to the short fiction and poetry have done so frequently out of context, that is, in multi-author works devoted exclusively to these genres. The result has been a criticism with large gaps, most especially for works from Melville’s later career. The relative lack of interest in the poetry has left us with little understanding of how Melville’s later voices developed, of how the novels evolved into tales, the tales into poetry, and the poetry back into prose. In short, the development of Melville’s art during the final three decades of his life remains a subject of which we have been afforded only glimpses, rarely a continuous attention. After the Whale provides a new, more comprehensive understanding of Melville’s growth as a writer.
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Amazigh Politics in the Wake of the Arab Spring
Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
University of Texas Press, 2022

On television, the Arab Spring took place in Cairo, Tunis, and the city-states of the Persian Gulf. Yet the drama of 2010, and the decade of subsequent activism, extended beyond the cities—indeed, beyond Arabs. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman brings to light the sustained post–Arab Spring political movement of North Africa’s Amazigh people.

The Amazigh movement did not begin with the Arab Spring, but it has changed significantly since then. Amazigh Politics in the Wake of the Arab Spring details the increasingly material goals of Amazigh activism, as protest has shifted from the arena of ethnocultural recognition to that of legal and socioeconomic equality. Amazigh communities responded to the struggles for freedom around them by pressing territorial and constitutional claims while rejecting official discrimination and neglect. Arab activists, steeped in postcolonial nationalism and protective of their hegemonic position, largely refused their support, yet flailing regimes were forced to respond to sharpening Amazigh demands or else jeopardize their threadbare legitimacy. Today the Amazigh question looms larger than ever, as North African governments find they can no longer ignore the movement’s interests.

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Angry Public Rhetorics
Global Relations and Emotion in the Wake of 9/11
Celeste Michelle Condit
University of Michigan Press, 2018
In Angry Public Rhetorics, Celeste Condit explores emotions as motivators and organizers of collective action—a theory that treats humans as “symbol-using animals” to understand the patterns of leadership in global affairs—to account for the way in which anger produced similar rhetorics in three ideologically diverse voices surrounding 9/11: Osama bin Laden, President George W. Bush, and Susan Sontag.

These voices show that anger is more effective for producing some collective actions, such as rallying supporters, reifying existing worldviews, motivating attack, enforcing shared norms, or threatening from positions of power; and less effective for others, like broadening thought, attracting new allies, adjudicating justice across cultural norms, or threatening from positions of weakness. Because social anger requires shared norms, collectivized anger cannot serve social justice. In order for anger to be a force for global justice, the world’s peoples must develop shared norms to direct discussion of international relations. Angry Public Rhetorics provides guidance for such public forums.
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The Avant-Postman
Experiment in Anglophone and Francophone Fiction in the Wake of James Joyce
David Vichnar
Karolinum Press, 2022
A new look at the development of innovative postwar writing in France, Britain, and the United States.
 

The Avant-Postman explores a broad range of innovative postwar writing from France, Britain, and the United States. Taking James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a joint starting point, David Vichnar draws genealogical lines from there through the work of more than fifty writers up to very recent years, including William Burroughs, B. S. Johnson, Ian Sinclair, Kathy Acker, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace, and many others. Centering the exploration around five strategies employed by Joyce—narrative parallax, stylistic metempsychosis, concrete writing, forgery, and neologizing the logos—the book reveals the striking continuities and developments from Joyce’s day to our own.
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Black Food Matters
Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice
Hanna Garth
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

An in-depth look at Black food and the challenges it faces today

For Black Americans, the food system is broken. When it comes to nutrition, Black consumers experience an unjust and inequitable distribution of resources. Black Food Matters examines these issues through in-depth essays that analyze how Blackness is contested through food, differing ideas of what makes our sustenance “healthy,” and Black individuals’ own beliefs about what their cuisine should be.

Primarily written by nonwhite scholars, and framed through a focus on Black agency instead of deprivation, the essays here showcase Black communities fighting for the survival of their food culture. The book takes readers into the real world of Black sustenance, examining animal husbandry practices in South Carolina, the work done by the Black Panthers to ensure food equality, and Black women who are pioneering urban agriculture. These essays also explore individual and community values, the influence of history, and the ongoing struggle to meet needs and affirm Black life.

A comprehensive look at Black food culture and the various forms of violence that threaten the future of this cuisine, Black Food Matters centers Blackness in a field that has too often framed Black issues through a white-centric lens, offering new ways to think about access, privilege, equity, and justice.

Contributors: Adam Bledsoe, U of Minnesota; Billy Hall; Analena Hope Hassberg, California State Polytechnic U, Pomona; Yuson Jung, Wayne State U; Kimberly Kasper, Rhodes College; Tyler McCreary, Florida State U; Andrew Newman, Wayne State U; Gillian Richards-Greaves, Coastal Carolina U; Monica M. White, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Brian Williams, Mississippi State U; Judith Williams, Florida International U; Psyche Williams-Forson, U of Maryland, College Park; Willie J. Wright, Rutgers U.

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Bloomsbury Scientists
Science and Art in the Wake of Darwin
Michael Boulter
University College London, 2017
The Bloomsbury group is famous for its contributions to literature and art. What’s less well-known is that the milieu also included scientists. This book tells the story of the network of scientists living amid the writers and artists in that single square mile of London immediately before and after World War I. Michael Boulter weaves together Bloomsbury’s multidisciplinary narratives of genetics, ecology, postimpressionism, and literature, and draws intricate connections through the friendships, grievances, quarrels, and affections of the movement’s key players. Bloomsbury Scientists offers a fresh perspective on this history at a time when the complex relationship between science and art continues to be debated.
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The Cherokees and Their Chiefs
In the Wake of Empire
Stan Hoig
University of Arkansas Press, 1999
In this newly researched and synthesized history of the Cherokees, Hoig traces the displacement of the tribe and the Trail of Tears, the great trauma of the Civil War, the destruction of tribal autonomy, and the Cherokee people's phoenix-like rise in political and social stature during the twentieth century.
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Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina
Amy Koritz and George J. Sanchez, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2009

"Civic engagement has been underrated and overlooked. Koritz and Sanchez illuminate the power of what community engagement through art and culture revitalization can do to give voice to the voiceless and a sense of being to those displaced."
---Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Wesleyan University

"This profound and eloquent collection describes and assesses the new coalitions bringing a city back to life. It's a powerful call to expand our notions of culture, social justice, and engaged scholarship. I'd put this on my 'must read' list."
---Nancy Cantor, Syracuse University

"Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina is a rich and compelling text for thinking about universities and the arts amid social crisis. Americans need to hear the voices of colleagues who were caught in Katrina's wake and who responded with commitment, creativity, and skill."
---Peter Levine, CIRCLE (The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement)

This collection of essays documents the ways in which educational institutions and the arts community responded to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. While firmly rooted in concrete projects, Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina also addresses the larger issues raised by committed public scholarship. How can higher education institutions engage with their surrounding communities? What are the pros and cons of "asset-based" and "outreach" models of civic engagement? Is it appropriate for the private sector to play a direct role in promoting civic engagement? How does public scholarship impact traditional standards of academic evaluation? Throughout the volume, this diverse collection of essays paints a remarkably consistent and persuasive account of arts-based initiatives' ability to foster social and civic renewal.

Amy Koritz is Director of the Center for Civic Engagement and Professor of English at Drew University.

George J. Sanchez is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California.

Front and rear cover designs, photographs, and satellite imagery processing by Richard Campanella.

digitalculturebooks is 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.

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The Fiume Crisis
Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire
Dominique Kirchner Reill
Harvard University Press, 2020

Recasting the birth of fascism, nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I, Dominique Kirchner Reill recounts how the people of Fiume tried to recreate empire in the guise of the nation.

The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis.

In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver’s seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a “ghost state” set adrift by the fall of the empire. D’Annunzio’s ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire.

Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below.

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In the Wake of Chaos
Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems
Stephen H. Kellert
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Chaos theory has captured scientific and popular attention. What began as the discovery of randomness in simple physical systems has become a widespread fascination with "chaotic" models of everything from business cycles to brainwaves to heart attacks. But what exactly does this explosion of new research into chaotic phenomena mean for our understanding of the world? In this timely book, Stephen Kellert takes the first sustained look at the broad intellectual and philosophical questions raised by recent advances in chaos theory—its implications for science as a source of knowledge and for the very meaning of that knowledge itself.
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In the Wake of Disaster
Religious Responses to Terrorism and Catastrophe
Harold G Koenig
Templeton Press, 2006

In a timely book with a powerful and persuasive message, Dr. Harold G. Koenig addresses federal, state, and local government policy leaders, urging them to more fully integrate religious organizations into the formal disaster response system, and he then provides recommendations on how this can effectively be done. Koenig also advocates faith communities and organizations to learn more about the role they can play in responding to disasters and terrorism.

The chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina made extraordinarily clear the gaps in the United States' disaster policies. At the same time, the contributions of organized faith communities were highlights amidst the bungled federal, state, and local responses. One example is the New York Times, September 9, 2005, headline: "A New Meaning for 'Organized Religion': It Helps the Needy Quickly." But as faith-based organizations look for ways to help, there are few, if any, guidelines for them.
 
This book provides information on the psychological, social, and spiritual responses to trauma. It addresses how the emergency response system works, and the role that religious communities can play in disaster response and recovery in terms of providing emotional and spiritual care for victims. It advocates integrating mental health into emergency response systems directed at those affected by hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and terrorism. "The aim is to help victims of disaster to better cope with the stresses they face, as well as help direct care workers (firefighters, police, health care providers, etc.) to deal better emotionally with the trauma to which they are exposed so they can remain effective and functional on the job," explains Dr. Koenig, whose research on the healing power of faith has been published worldwide.
 
Increasing the resiliency of our communities in the face of disaster is crucial. Religious communities have tremendous potential to contribute to this. Here are guidelines on how to do that more effectively, alongside data on how to facilitate the integration of these contributions with the formal disaster-response system.

 

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In the Wake of the Mongols
The Making of a New Social Order in North China, 1200–1600
Jinping Wang
Harvard University Press, 2018

The Mongol conquest of north China between 1211 and 1234 inflicted terrible wartime destruction, wiping out more than one-third of the population and dismantling the existing social order. In the Wake of the Mongols recounts the riveting story of how northern Chinese men and women adapted to these trying circumstances and interacted with their alien Mongol conquerors to create a drastically new social order. To construct this story, the book uses a previously unknown source of inscriptions recorded on stone tablets.

Jinping Wang explores a north China where Mongol patrons, Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, and sometimes single women—rather than Confucian gentry—exercised power and shaped events, a portrait that upends the conventional view of imperial Chinese society. Setting the stage by portraying the late Jin and closing by tracing the Mongol period’s legacy during the Ming dynasty, she delineates the changing social dynamics over four centuries in the northern province of Shanxi, still a poorly understood region.

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In the Wake of the Sun
Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy
J. Christopher Walsh
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

Dr. Chris Walsh’s scholarship has resulted in a new study on one of America’s leading authors. In the Wake of the Sun: Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy offers close textual analysis of all of McCarthy’s Southern works along with an overview of the notable critical responses to them. The book is designed for use by scholars, teachers, and students at all levels.

McCarthy’s works set in the desert Southwest have received substantial critical and commercial acclaim. However, his Appalachian texts—which include two short stories written as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, five novels (including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Road), a play, and a screenplay—rival the Southwestern works in terms of their aesthetic achievement and complexity. In the Wake of the Sun introduces readers, scholars, and students to the pertinent themes in each text while also walking them through the most significant critical dialogues surrounding the texts.

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In the Wake of Violence
Image & Social Reform
Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp
Michigan State University Press, 2008

How acts of violence are rhetorically "managed" by social movements: In the Wake of Violence explores the immediate and longer term aftermath of violence committed by independent radicals involved in single-issue movements. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp explores several specific incidents in recent history—the arson of a Vail ski resort by environmentalists, the murder of Dr. John Britton by an antiabortion activist, and the torching of a University of California research laboratory by animal rights activists among them—to discover how the perpetrators of the violence and the majority of reformers involved in their movements rhetorically framed the violent act for a potentially outraged public. 
     In the Wake of Violence, claims Jorgensen-Earp, the perpetrators are often forthcoming with both explanations for and a defense of their actions, casting themselves as righteous actors or martyrs for a cause. However, ardent reformers within the same cause might look with genuine revulsion at the actions of their own radical wing. This study claims that the nonviolent majority in single-issue reform movements employs a predictable constellation of rhetorical strategies to manage the impact of radical fringe violence. The primary goal of this rhetoric is to avoid a backlash against the larger movement by a public alienated by violent acts.
     In examining specific rhetorical responses by the nonviolent majority in antiabortion, animal welfare, environmental reform, abolition, and women’s suffrage movements, Jorgensen-Earp considers a wide range of discourse types—from newspaper articles, interviews, and editorials to private letters; from editorial cartoons to the homemade signs of movement activists; and from speeches to modern Internet sites. She discovers that the image restoration techniques brought to bear for a reform cause are similar to those employed by a corporation accused of wrongdoing. Ultimately, she finds that the majority of proponents of the causes she examines believe that the violence can or will be condoned and that it must be rhetorically mitigated.

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In the Wake
On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe
Duke University Press, 2016
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.
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Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima
Perspectives on Nuclear Disasters
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
In the ongoing aftermath of the nuclear accident in 2011, filmmakers have continued to issue warnings about the state of Japanese society and politics, which remain mired in refusal to change. Nearly a decade in the making, Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima is based on in-person interviews with countless filmmakers, as well as continuous dialogue with them and their work. Author Wada-Marciano has expanded these dialogues to include students, audiences at screenings, critics, and researchers, and her observations are based on down-to-earth-exchange of ideas engaged in over a long period of time. Filmmakers and artists are in the vanguard of those who grapple with what should be done regarding the struggle against fear of the invisible blight—radiation exposure. Rather than blindly following the mass media and public opinion, they have chosen to think and act independently. While repeatedly viewing and reviewing the film works from the post-Fukushima period, Wada-Marciano felt the unwavering message that emanates from them: “There must be no more nuclear weapons.” “There must be no more nuclear power generation.” The book is dedicated to convincing readers of the clarity of their message.
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Mourning the Nation
Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition
Bhaskar Sarkar
Duke University Press, 2009
What remains of the “national” when the nation unravels at the birth of the independent state? The political truncation of India at the end of British colonial rule in 1947 led to a social cataclysm in which roughly one million people died and ten to twelve million were displaced. Combining film studies, trauma theory, and South Asian cultural history, Bhaskar Sarkar follows the shifting traces of this event in Indian cinema over the next six decades. He argues that Partition remains a wound in the collective psyche of South Asia and that its representation on screen enables forms of historical engagement that are largely opaque to standard historiography.

Sarkar tracks the initial reticence to engage with the trauma of 1947 and the subsequent emergence of a strong Partition discourse, revealing both the silence and the eventual “return of the repressed” as strands of one complex process. Connecting the relative silence of the early decades after Partition to a project of postcolonial nation-building and to trauma’s disjunctive temporal structure, Sarkar develops an allegorical reading of the silence as a form of mourning. He relates the proliferation of explicit Partition narratives in films made since the mid-1980s to disillusionment with post-independence achievements, and he discusses how current cinematic memorializations of 1947 are influenced by economic liberalization and the rise of a Hindu-chauvinist nationalism. Traversing Hindi and Bengali commercial cinema, art cinema, and television, Sarkar provides a history of Indian cinema that interrogates the national (a central category organizing cinema studies) and participates in a wider process of mourning the modernist promises of the nation form.

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Non-Sovereign Futures
French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment
Yarimar Bonilla
University of Chicago Press, 2015
As an overseas department of France, Guadeloupe is one of a handful of non-independent societies in the Caribbean that seem like political exceptions—or even paradoxes—in our current postcolonial era. In Non-Sovereign Futures, Yarimar Bonilla wrestles with the conceptual arsenal of political modernity—challenging contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, nationalism, and revolution—in order to recast Guadeloupe not as a problematically non-sovereign site but as a place that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself.
           
Through a deep ethnography of Guadeloupean labor activism, Bonilla examines how Caribbean political actors navigate the conflicting norms and desires produced by the modernist project of postcolonial sovereignty. Exploring the political and historical imaginaries of activist communities, she examines their attempts to forge new visions for the future by reconfiguring narratives of the past, especially the histories of colonialism and slavery. Drawing from nearly a decade of ethnographic research, she shows that political participation—even in failed movements—has social impacts beyond simple material or economic gains. Ultimately, she uses the cases of Guadeloupe and the Caribbean at large to offer a more sophisticated conception of the possibilities of sovereignty in the postcolonial era. 
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Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation
Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair
Deborah A. Thomas
Duke University Press, 2019
In 2010, Jamaican police and military forces entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States on gun and drug-running charges. By the time Coke was detained, somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred civilians had been killed. In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Deborah A. Thomas uses the incursion as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and in post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. She places affect at the center of sovereignty to destabilize disembodied narratives of liberalism and progress and to raise questions about recognition, repair, and accountability. In tying theories of politics, colonialism, race, and affect together with Jamaica's history, Thomas presents a robust framework for understanding what it means to be human in the plantation's wake.
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Political Mourning
Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy
Heather Pool
Temple University Press, 2021

What leads us to respond politically to the deaths of some citizens and not others? This is one of the critical questions Heather Pool asks in Political Mourning. Born out of her personal experiences with the trauma of 9/11, Pool’s astute book looks at how death becomes political, and how it can mobilize everyday citizens to argue for political change. 

Pool examines four tragedies in American history—the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the lynching of Emmett Till, the September 11 attacks, and the Black Lives Matter movement—that offered opportunities to tilt toward justice and democratic inclusion. Some of these opportunities were taken, some were not. However, these watershed moments show, historically, how political identity and political responsibility intersect and how racial identity shapes who is mourned. Political Mourning helps explain why Americans recognize the names of Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland; activists took those cases public while many similar victims have been ignored by the news media. 

Concluding with an afterword on the coronavirus, Pool emphasizes the importance of collective responsibility for justice and why we ought to respond to tragedy in ways that are more politically inclusive.

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Queer Constellations
Subcultural Space In The Wake Of The City
Dianne Chisholm
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Discovers parallels between modern gay and lesbian views of urban life and Benjamin’s Paris, “the capital of the nineteenth century”

Queer Constellations investigates the dreams and catastrophes of recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of inner-city life. The “gay village,” “gay mecca,” “gai Paris,” the “lesbian flaneur,” the “lesbian bohème”—these and other urban phantasmagoria feature paradoxically in this volume as figures of revolutionary utopia and commodity spectacle, as fossilized archetypes of social transformation and ruins of haunting cultural potential.

Dianne Chisholm introduces readers to new practices of walking, seeing, citing, and remembering the city in works by Neil Bartlett, Samuel R. Delany, Robert Glück, Alan Hollinghurst, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, Edmund White, and David Wojnarowicz. Reading these authors with reference to the history, sociology, geography, and philosophy of space, particularly to the everyday avant-garde production and practice of urban space, Chisholm reveals how—and how effectively—queer narrative documentary resembles and reassembles Walter Benjamin’s constellations of Paris, “capital of the nineteenth century.” Considering experimental queer writing in critical conjunction with Benjamin’s city writing, the book shows how a queer perspective on inner-city reality exposes contradictions otherwise obscured by mythic narratives of progress.If Benjamin regards the Paris arcade as a microcosm of high capitalism, wherein the (un)making of industrial society is perceived retrospectively, in contemporary queer narrative we see the sexually charged and commodity-entranced space of the gay bathhouse as a microcosm of late capitalism and as an exemplary site for excavating the contradictions of mass sex. In Chisholm’s book we discover how, looking back on the ruins of queer mecca, queer authors return to Benjamin to advance his “dialectics of seeing;” how they cruise the paradoxes of market capital, blasting a queer era out of the homogeneous course of history.
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Reimagining Environmental History
Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change
Christian Knoeller
University of Nevada Press, 2017
Christian Knoeller presents a radical reinterpretation of environmental history set in the heartland of America. In an excellent model of narrative-based scholarship, this book dynamically reimagines American environmentalism across generations of writers, artists, and scientists. Knoeller starts out with Audubon, and cites Thoreau’s journals in the 1850s as he assesses an early 17th century account of New England’s natural resources by William Wood, showing the epic decline in game and bird populations in Concord. This reading of environmental history is replicated throughout with a gallery of novelists, poets, essayists, and other commentators as they explore ecological memory and environmental destruction. In apt discussions of Matthiessen, Lopez, Wendell Berry, William Stafford and many others, Knoeller offers vibrant insights into literary history. He also cites his own memoir of perpetual development on his family’s farm in Indiana, enriching the scholarship and making an urgent plea for the healing aesthetics of the imagination.
 
Reading across centuries and genres, Knoeller gives us a vibrant new appraisal of Midwestern/North American interior literary traditions and makes clear how vital environmental writing is to this region. To date, no one has written such an eloquent and comprehensive cross-genre analysis of Midwestern environmental literature.
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Sea Drift
Rafting Adventures in the Wake of Kon-Tiki
Capelotti, P. J
Rutgers University Press, 2001

It was the original Survivor series, only without the omnipresent cameras, paramedics, and faux tribal rituals. Between the spring of 1947 and the summer of the year 2000, more than forty expeditions sought to drift across the oceans of the world on rafts made from straw, from bamboo, and from the same kinds of wood that children use to make model airplanes. These audacious raft voyages began with the legendary Kon-Tiki expedition, under the leadership of the renowned Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. The Kon-Tiki balsa wood raft drifted more than four thousand miles from Peru to Polynesia, and remained afloat months after experts predicted it would sink to the bottom of the Pacific. Heyerdahl’s radical thesis of a prehistoric world where ancient mariners drifted between continents on ocean currents electrified the postwar world. His Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft sold twenty million copies in sixty-five languages.

Sea Drift is the first and only book to document all of the transoceanic raft expeditions that were organized and carried out in the half century after Kon-Tiki. But it is much more than a simple history of exploration. Readers learn of the Mormon who drifted to Hawaii to prove that wise men from Israel had colonized America, and the Frenchman who squeezed fresh water from the entrails of fish as he drifted alone across the Atlantic in a rubber boat. Then there was the anthropologist who put five men and six women on a raft to see who would make love to whom first.

Spanning more than fifty years and recounting more than forty expeditions, Sea Drift is a riveting chronicle of human daring, endurance, and folly.

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Secular Scriptures
Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante
William Franke
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
With Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante, William Franke reexamines the role that literature plays in theological revelation. In the modern world, secularism typically means the exclusion of God from the world. Yet Franke, recognizing that secularity itself is built into religion and revelation, argues that theologically sensitive poetry has driven secularization throughout the modern period. The essays in this volume construct a trajectory through modern poetic literature as it struggled with the sense of a loss of the very possibility of theological revelation. Can literature replace religion? Can it do so triumphantly or only mournfully? Is this literary transmogrification of revelation the death of religion or its rebirth in a vital new form?
Secular Scriptures examines, through its own original speculative outlook, some of the most compelling exemplars of religious-poetic revelation in modern Western literature. The essays taken as an ensemble revolve around and are bookended by Dante, but they also explore the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Dickinson, and Yeats. Looking both backward and forward from the vantage of Dante, Franke explores the roots of secularized religious vision in antiquity and the Middle Ages, even as he also looks forward toward its fruits in modern poetry and poetics. Ultimately, Franke’s analyses demonstrate the possibilities opened by understanding literature as secularized religious revelation.
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Seeking Peace in the Wake of War
Europe, 1943-1947
Edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Sandrine Kott, Peter Romijn, and Olivier Wieviorka
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
When the Second World War ended, Europe was in ruins. Yet, politically and socially, the years between 1943 and 1947 were a time of dramatic reconfigurations, which proved to be foundational for the making of today's Europe. This volume hones in on the crucial period from the beginning of the end of Nazi rule in Europe to the advent of the Cold War. Through a series of interrelated case studies that span the entire continent, it demonstrates how the everyday experiences of Europeans during these five years shaped the transition of their societies from war to peace. The authors explore these reconfigurations on different scales and levels -the local and regional, the ethnic and national, and the international - with the purpose of enhancing our understanding of how wars end.
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The Suicide Archive
Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire
Doyle D. Calhoun
Duke University Press, 2024
Throughout the French empire, from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to West and North Africa, men, women, and children responded to enslavement, colonization, and oppression through acts of suicide. In The Suicide Archive, Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Noting that suicide was either obscured in or occluded from French colonial archives, Calhoun turns to literature and film to show how aesthetic forms and narrative accounts can keep alive the silenced histories of suicide as a political language. Drawing on scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings alongside contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean novels, film, and Senegalese oral history, Calhoun outlines how such aesthetic works rewrite histories of resistance and loss. Consequently, Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.
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To Wake the Nations
Race in the Making of American Literature
Eric J. Sundquist
Harvard University Press, 1993

This powerful book argues that white culture in America does not exist apart from black culture. The revolution of the rights of man that established this country collided long ago with the system of slavery, and we have been trying to reestablish a steady course for ourselves ever since. To Wake the Nations is urgent and rousing: we have integrated our buses, schools, and factories, but not the canon of American literature. That is the task Eric Sundquist has assumed in a book that ranges from politics to literature, from Uncle Remus to African American spirituals. But the hallmark of this volume is a sweeping reevaluation of the glory years of American literature—from 1830 to 1930—that shows how white literature and black literature form a single interwoven tradition.

By examining African America’s contested relation to the intellectual and literary forms of white culture, Sundquist reconstructs the main lines of American literary tradition from the decades before the Civil War through the early twentieth century. An opening discussion of Nat Turner’s “Confessions,” recorded by a white man, Thomas Gray, establishes a paradigm for the complexity of meanings that Sundquist uncovers in American literary texts. Focusing on Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical books, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or the Huts of America, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Charles Chesnutt’s fiction, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, Sundquist considers each text against a rich background of history, law, literature, politics, religion, folklore, music, and dance. These readings lead to insights into components of the culture at large: slavery as it intersected with postcolonial revolutionary ideology; literary representations of the legal and political foundations of segregation; and the transformation of elements of African and antebellum folk consciousness into the public forms of American literature.

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Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11
Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation
Aaron Michael Kerner
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Saw, Hostel, The Devil’s Rejects: this wave of horror movies has been classed under the disparaging label “torture porn.” Since David Edelstein coined the term for a New York magazine article a few years after 9/11, many critics have speculated that these movies simply reflect iconic images, anxieties, and sadistic fantasies that have emerged from the War on Terror. In this timely new study, Aaron Kerner challenges that interpretation, arguing that “torture porn” must be understood in a much broader context, as part of a phenomenon that spans multiple media genres and is rooted in a long tradition of American violence. 
 
Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11 tackles a series of tough philosophical, historical, and aesthetic questions: What does it mean to call a film “sadistic,” and how has this term been used to shut down critical debate? In what sense does torture porn respond to current events, and in what ways does it draw from much older tropes? How has torture porn been influenced by earlier horror film cycles, from slasher movies to J-horror? And in what ways has the torture porn aesthetic gone mainstream, popping up in everything from the television thriller Dexter to the reality show Hell’s Kitchen
 
Reflecting a deep knowledge and appreciation for the genre, Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11 is sure to resonate with horror fans. Yet Kerner’s arguments should also strike a chord in anyone with an interest in the history of American violence and its current and future ramifications for the War on Terror. 
 
 
 
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Wake
Bin Ramke
University of Iowa Press, 1999
Throughout Bin Ramke's book of poems, certain elements recur insistently: birds and boyhood, betrayal and longings that careen between flesh and faith.
Ramke refuses to distinguish between scientific and poetic approaches to knowing the world. In Wake, the poet does not pretend to offer wisdom but instead offers words, and the words are given as much freedom as possible. The title itself resonates with all its presumptive meanings: an alternative to dreaming, a ceremony binding the living to the dead, and the pattern left briefly in water by boats—handwriting as turbulence in a fluid medium.
Elements of the world at large are woven into the language of these poems, resulting in a conversation among transcripts from the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer, passages from the notebooks of John James Audubon, a meditation on the Book of Daniel, whole epic sentences out of Milton, and the modest observations of the struggling poet himself.
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The Wake of the General Bliss
A Novel of World War II
Edward Lueders
University of Utah Press, 2008
Set aboard a ship carrying troops home from India at the end of World War II, Edward Lueders’ autobiographical novel opens with the dramatic events that ensue when the call goes out, 'Man overboard!' As the vessel drifts, engines stopped, in search of the lost man, the story begins to delve deeper into the paradox at the center of our lives, as irreducible isolation is juxtaposed with inevitable coexistence.

The ship becomes a complex metaphor for the thousands of men aboard and, by extension, for all of us who exist both as individuals and as parts of the human community. These motifs are developed through the interplay of three men aboard ship, Staff Sgt. LeRoy Warner, Sgt. Mark Reiter, and Sgt. Stanley Norman, who entertain troops as a jazz trio. These GI musicians improvise through solo sections in which each reflects hauntingly on his past and dreams of his future. As they search for meaning beyond subjectivism, beyond suffering and randomness, their music is about the possibilities for harmony.

Although miscues, counterbeats, and dissonance apparently mock our efforts to break out of ourselves, sometimes, however fleetingly, everything falls into place. Then the prose of our lives turns unexpectedly to poetry and we experience an exhilarating unity.
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The Wake of the Unseen Object
Travels through Alaska's Native Landscapes
Tom Kizzia
University of Alaska Press, 2020
A  journey to Alaska’s remote roadless villages, during a time of great historical transition, brings us this enduring portrait of a place and its people. Alutiiq, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Athabascan subjects reveal themselves as entirely contemporary individuals with deep longings and connection to the land and to their past. Tom Kizzia’s account of his travels off the Alaska road system, first published in 1991, has endured with a sterling reputation for its thoughtful, poetic, unflinching engagement with the complexity of Alaska’s rural communities. Wake of the Unseen Object is now considered some of the finest nonfiction writing about Alaska. This new edition includes an updated introduction by the author, looking at what remains the same after thirty years and what is different—both in Alaska, and in the expectations placed on a reporter visiting from another world.
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The Wake of the Whale
Hunter Societies in the Caribbean and North Atlantic
Russell Fielding
Harvard University Press, 2018

Despite declining stocks worldwide and increasing health risks, artisanal whaling remains a cultural practice tied to nature’s rhythms. The Wake of the Whale presents the art, history, and challenge of whaling in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, based on a decade of award-winning fieldwork.

Sightings of pilot whales in the frigid Nordic waters have drawn residents of the Faroe Islands to their boats and beaches for nearly a thousand years. Down in the tropics, around the islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, artisanal whaling is a younger trade, shaped by the legacies of slavery and colonialism but no less important to the local population. Each culture, Russell Fielding shows, has developed a distinct approach to whaling that preserves key traditions while adapting to threats of scarcity, the requirements of regulation, and a growing awareness of the humane treatment of animals.

Yet these strategies struggle to account for the risks of regularly eating meat contaminated with methylmercury and other environmental pollutants introduced from abroad. Fielding considers how these and other factors may change whaling cultures forever, perhaps even bringing an end to this way of life.

A rare mix of scientific and social insight, The Wake of the Whale raises compelling questions about the place of cultural traditions in the contemporary world and the sacrifices we must make for sustainability.

Publication of this book was supported, in part, by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

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The Wake of Wellington
Englishness in 1852
Peter W. Sinnema
Ohio University Press, 2006

Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the duke’s death.

The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington’s spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented.

Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times’s celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington “was the very type and model of an Englishman.” The dead duke, as Sinnema demonstrates, was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation.

The Wake of Wellington provides a unique view of how in death Wellington and his career were promoted as the consummation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself, and with what it meant to be English at midcentury.

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Wake the Town and Tell the People
Dancehall Culture in Jamaica
Norman C. Stolzoff
Duke University Press, 2000
Jamaican dancehall has long been one of the most vital and influential cultural and artistic forces within contemporary global music. Wake the Town and Tell the People presents, for the first time, a lively, nuanced, and comprehensive view of this musical and cultural phenomenon: its growth and historical role within Jamaican society, its economy of star making, its technology of production, its performative practices, and its capacity to channel political beliefs through popular culture in ways that are urgent, tangible, and lasting.
Norman C. Stolzoff brings a fan’s enthusiasm to his broad perspective on dancehall, providing extensive interviews, original photographs, and anthropological analysis from eighteen months of fieldwork in Kingston. Stolzoff argues that this enormously popular musical genre expresses deep conflicts within Jamaican society, not only along lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion but also between different factions struggling to gain control of the island nation’s political culture. Dancehall culture thus remains a key arena where the future of this volatile nation is shaped. As his argument unfolds, Stolzoff traces the history of Jamaican music from its roots in the late eighteenth century to 1945, from the addition of sound systems and technology during the mid-forties to early sixties, and finally through the post-independence years from the early sixties to the present.
Wake the Town and Tell the People offers a general introduction for those interested in dancehall music and culture. For the fan or musicologist, it will serve as a comprehensive reference book.
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Wake
Why the Battle over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters
Karey Alison Harwood
Rutgers University Press, 2024
The Wake County Public School System was once described as a beacon of hope for American school districts. It was both academically successful and successfully integrated. It accomplished these goals through the hard work of teachers and administrators, and through a student assignment policy that made sure no school in the countywide district became a high poverty school. Although most students attended their closest school, the “diversity policy” modified where some students were assigned to make sure no school had more than 40% of its students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch or more than 25% performing below grade level. When the school board election of 2009 swept into office a majority who favored “neighborhood schools,” the diversity policy that had governed student assignment for years was eliminated. Wake: Why the Battle Over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters tells the story of the aftermath of that election, including the fierce public debate that ensued during school board meetings and in the pages of the local newspaper, and the groundswell of community support that voted in a pro-diversity school board in 2011. What was at stake in those years was the fundamental direction of the largest school district in North Carolina and the 14th largest in the U.S. Would it maintain a commitment to diverse schools, and if so, how would it balance that commitment with various competing interests and demands? Through hundreds of published opinion articles and several in depth interviews with community leaders, Wake examines the substance of that debate and explores the community’s vision for public education. Wake also explores the importance of knowing the history of a place, including the history of school segregation. Wake County’s example still resonates, and the battle over diverse public schools still matters, because owning responsibility for the problem of segregated schools (or not) will shape the direction of America’s future.
 
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Watsuji on Nature
Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger
David W. Johnson
Northwestern University Press, 2019
In the first study of its kind, David W. Johnson’s Watsuji on Nature reconstructs the astonishing philosophy of nature of Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960). Johnson situates Watsuji’s philosophy in relation to his reception of the thought of Heidegger and to his renewal of core ontological positions in classical Confucian and Buddhist philosophy. He shows that for Watsuji we have our being in the lived experience of nature, one in which nature and culture compose a tightly interwoven texture called fūdo(<風土). By fully unfolding Watsuji’s novel and radical claim that this is a setting that is neither fully external to human subjectivity nor merely a product of it, this book also sets out what still remains unthought in this concept, as well as in the relational structure that underwrites it. Johnson argues that what remains unarticulated is nothing less than the recovery of a reenchanted conception of nature and an elucidation of the wide-ranging implications of a relational conception of the self for questions about the disclosive character of experience, the distinction between fact and value, and the possibility of a place-based ecological ethics.
 
In an engagingly lucid and deft analysis, Watsuji on Nature radically expands our appreciation of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy and shows what it has to offer to a global philosophical conversation.
 
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