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55 books match the query 'Pease, Donald E.' and 3 start with m

cover of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In

Mariners, Renegades and Castaways

The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In

C. L. R. James

Brandeis University Press, 2025

A new edition of a major work of literary and cultural criticism restores C. L. R. James’s reflections about Moby Dick and political persecution. 
 
Political theorist and cultural critic, novelist, and cricket enthusiast, C. L. R. James (1901–89) was a brilliant polymath who was described by Edward Said as “a centrally important twentieth-century figure.” Through such landmark works as The Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary, and American Civilization, James’s thought continues to influence and inspire scholars in a variety of fields.
 
In this complete edition of his seminal work of literary and cultural criticism, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, James anticipated many of the concerns and ideas that have shaped the contemporary fields of American and postcolonial studies. In this provocative study of Moby Dick in which he challenged the prevailing Americanist interpretation that opposed a “totalitarian” Ahab and a “democratic, American” Ishmael, James offers instead a vision of a factory-like Pequod whose “captain of industry” leads the crew to their doom. In addition to demonstrating how such an interpretation supported the United States’ emerging national security state, he also related the narrative of Moby Dick to his own persecuted position at the height of McCarthyism. It is precisely this personal, deeply original material that was excised from the first edition of this book.
 
With a new foreword by Professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein—theoretical physicist, advocate for a just science, and James’s granddaughter—and an introduction by Professor Donald E. Pease at Dartmouth College that places the work in its critical and cultural context, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways is once again available in a new edition.
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cover of Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics

Materializing Democracy

Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics

Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, eds.

Duke University Press, 2002

For the most part, democracy is simply presumed to exist in the United States. It is viewed as a completed project rather than as a goal to be achieved. Fifteen leading scholars challenge that stasis in Materializing Democracy. They aim to reinvigorate the idea of democracy by placing it in the midst of a contentious political and cultural fray, which, the volume’s editors argue, is exactly where it belongs. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies, history, legal studies, and political theory, the essays collected here highlight competing definitions and practices of democracy—in politics, society, and, indeed, academia.

Covering topics ranging from rights discourse to Native American performance, from identity politics to gay marriage, and from rituals of public mourning to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the contributors seek to understand the practices, ideas, and material conditions that enable or foreclose democracy’s possibilities. Through readings of subjects as diverse as Will Rogers, Alexis de Tocqueville, slave narratives, interactions along the Texas-Mexico border, and liberal arts education, the contributors also explore ways of making democracy available for analysis. Materializing Democracy suggests that attention to disparate narratives is integral to the development of more complex, vibrant versions of democracy.

Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Chris Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Lisa Duggan, Richard R. Flores, Kevin Gaines, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Michael Moon, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, Donald E. Pease

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cover of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express

Morocco Bound

Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express

Brian T. Edwards

Duke University Press, 2005

Until attention shifted to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Americans turned most often toward the Maghreb—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and the Sahara—for their understanding of “the Arab.” In Morocco Bound, Brian T. Edwards examines American representations of the Maghreb during three pivotal decades—from 1942, when the United States entered the North African campaign of World War II, through 1973. He reveals how American film and literary, historical, journalistic, and anthropological accounts of the region imagined the role of the United States in a world it seemed to dominate at the same time that they displaced domestic social concerns—particularly about race relations—onto an “exotic” North Africa.

Edwards reads a broad range of texts to recuperate the disorienting possibilities for rethinking American empire. Examining work by William Burroughs, Jane Bowles, Ernie Pyle, A. J. Liebling, Jane Kramer, Alfred Hitchcock, Clifford Geertz, James Michener, Ornette Coleman, General George S. Patton, and others, he puts American texts in conversation with an archive of Maghrebi responses. Whether considering Warner Brothers’ marketing of the movie Casablanca in 1942, journalistic representations of Tangier as a city of excess and queerness, Paul Bowles’s collaboration with the Moroccan artist Mohammed Mrabet, the hippie communities in and around Marrakech in the 1960s and early 1970s, or the writings of young American anthropologists working nearby at the same time, Edwards illuminates the circulation of American texts, their relationship to Maghrebi history, and the ways they might be read so as to reimagine the role of American culture in the world.

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