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A merger of expert scholarship and eyewitness experience, Mongolian Sound Worlds illuminates a diverse and ever-changing musical culture.

Contributors: Bayarsaikhan Badamsuren, Otgonbaayar Chuulunbaatar, Andrew Colwell, Johanni Curtet, Charlotte D’Evelyn, Tamir Hargana, Peter K. Marsh, K. Oktyabr, Rebekah Plueckhahn, Jennifer C. Post, D. Tserendavaa, and Sunmin Yoon

A surprising evaluation of the role of the physical body in the construction of British identity

Eighteenth-century medicine used the word “monstrosities” to describe physically deformed bodies—those irreducible to the “proper body” in their singular, sometimes startling difference. Considering British society in confrontation with such monstrosities, Paul Youngquist reveals the cultural politics of embodiment in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the histories of medicine, economics, liberalism, and nationalism, his work shows that bodies are not simply born but rather built by cultural practices directed toward particular social ends.

Radical Black feminist refusal through the works of mid-twentieth-century African American women writers
 

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American women’s writings in the 1930s–1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women’s satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging. 

Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers’ dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black women’s capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal.

While racial integration may satisfy the national idea of equality and inclusion, it has not met the long-term needs of Black people’s quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these mid-century women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women’s completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.

How Africa was perceived in the early modern imaginary

In this first book to study Portuguese texts about Africa, Moorings brings an important but little-known body of European writings to bear on contemporary colonial thought. Images of Africa as monstrous, dangerous, and lush were created in early Portuguese imperial writings and dominated its representation in European literature. Moorings establishes these key works in their proper place: foundational to Western imperial discourse.

An expanded edition of revered theorist Michael Löwy's Morning Star: Marxism and Surrealism (previously published in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek), this masterwork collects the author's essays on the ways in which surrealism intersected with a variety of revolutionary political approaches, ranging from utopian ideals to Marxism and situationism. Taking its title from André Breton's essay "Arcane 17," which casts the star as the searing firebrand of rebellion, Löwy's provocative work spans many perspectives. These include surrealist artists who were deeply interested in Marxism and anarchism (Breton among them), as well as Marxists who were deeply interested in surrealism (Walter Benjamin in particular).

Probing the dialectics of innovation, diversity, continuity, and unity throughout surrealism's international presence, Morning Star also incorporates analyses of Claude Cahun, Guy Debord, Pierre Naville, José Carlos Mariátegui and others, accompanied by numerous reproductions of surrealist art. An extraordinarily rich collection, Morning Star promises to ignite new dialogues regarding the very nature of dissent.

A multifaceted exploration of memory, mothering, literature, and postcoloniality.

Blending the personal and the historical, the practical and the theoretical, Angelita Reyes draws on a wide range of texts from Africa and the African diaspora to establish mothering as a paradigm of progressive feminisms. Reyes creates a comparative dialogue among the fictions of five postcolonial women writers: Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Jean Rhys, and Mariama Bâ.

An oral history with the women of Parliament-Funkadelic, from forming the band to landing the mothership.

Parliament-Funkadelic is perhaps the greatest funk band ever assembled. Yet at the time of the group’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, none of the women who helped create the sound and performed in P-Funk were invited to the ceremony and their contributions have been largely overlooked.

Mothership Connected tells the story of Mallia Franklin, Lynn Mabry, Dawn Silva, Debbie Wright, and Shirley Hayden, all of whom were instrumental in making Parliament-Funkadelic, as well as the spin-off groups Parlet and the Brides of Funkenstein, into the legends they are today. Assembled by Seth Neblett, son of the “Queen of Funk” Mallia Franklin, and filled with the voices of funk icons like George Clinton, Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, and the women themselves, this oral history makes clear why these “architects” at the “core” of P-Funk were both essential—and erased. From Franklin introducing Bootsy Collins to Clinton, to the Brides’ top-10 hit “Disco to Go,” to the drugs that helped destroy the group, this book reveals the hidden lives and uncomfortable truths of life in P-Funk. More than sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Mothership Connected is about Black women navigating a tumultuous era and industry to become musical pioneers. Now, after decades in the shadows, these genre-defining women are finally telling their story.

An invaluable collection of rare archival sources, Movie Mavens reveals women's essential contribution to the creation of American film culture.

An old Indian woman comforts two young white children she finds lost in the woods and lovingly carries them back to their eager parents. A frontiersman sheds tears over the grave of a Mohican youth, holding hands with the mourning father. According to Laura L. Mielke, such emotionally charged scenes between whites and Indians paradoxically flourished in American literature from 1820 to 1850, a time when the United States government developed and applied a policy of Indian removal. 

Although these “moving encounters,” as Mielke terms them, often promoted the possibility of mutual sympathy between Native Americans and Euro-Americans, they also suggested that these emotional links were inherently unstable, potentially dangerous, and ultimately doomed. At the same time, the emphasis on Indian-white sympathy provided an opportunity for Indians and non-Native activists to voice an alternative to removal and acculturation, turning the language of a sentimental U.S. culture against its own imperial impulse. Mielke details not only how such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft forecast the inevitable demise of Indian-white sympathy, but also how authors like Lydia Maria Child and William Apess insisted that a language of feeling could be used to create shared community or defend American Indian sovereignty. In this way, Moving Encounters sheds new light on a wide range of texts concerning the “Indian Question” by emphasizing their engagement with popular sentimental forms and by challenging the commonly held belief that all Euro-American expressions of sympathy for American Indians in this period were fundamentally insincere. While portraits of Indian-white sympathy often prompted cynical rejoinders from parodists, many never lost faith in the power of emotion to overcome the greed and prejudice fueling the dispossession of American Indians.

Moving Islands reveals the international and intercultural connections within contemporary performance from Oceania, focusing on theater, performance art, art installations, dance, film, and activist performance in sites throughout Oceania and in Australia, Asia, North America, and Europe. Diana Looser’s study moves beyond a predictable country-specific or island-specific focus to encompass an entire region defined by diversity and global exchange, showing how performance operates to frame social, artistic, and political relationships across widely dispersed locations. The study also demonstrates how Oceanian performance contributes to international debates about diaspora, indigeneity, urbanization, and environmental sustainability. The author considers the region’s unique cultural and geographic dynamics as she brings forth the paradigm of transpasifika to suggest a way of understanding these intercultural exchanges and connections, with the aim to “rework the cartographic and disciplinary priorities of transpacific studies to privilege the activities of Islander peoples.”

Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle is the first comprehensive look at comic books by and about race and ethnicity. The thirteen essays tease out for the general reader the nuances of how such multicultural comics skillfully combine visual and verbal elements to tell richly compelling stories that gravitate around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality within and outside the U.S. comic book industry. Among the explorations of mainstream and independent comic books are discussions of the work of Adrian Tomine, Grant Morrison, and Jessica Abel as well as Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's The Tomb of Dracula; Native American Anishinaabe-related comics; mixed-media forms such as Kerry James Marshall's comic-book/community performance; DJ Spooky's visual remix of classic film; the role of comics in India; and race in the early Underground Comix movement. The collection includes a "one-stop shop" for multicultural comic book resources, such as archives, websites, and scholarly books. Each of the essays shows in a systematic, clear, and precise way how multicultural comic books work in and of themselves and also how they are interconnected with a worldwide tradition of comic-book storytelling.

The introduction to this study deftly situates Biron's work in relation to previous theoretical arguments on the social and political dimensions of Latin American writing. The five subsequent chapters offer superb analyses of the individual texts. Like their male protagonists who experiment with the psychological and legal extremes of gender division, these narratives risk nonconformity to the laws of genre in their quest for liberation from violent social and literary conventions. In combining elements of detective stories, crime narratives, psychological case studies, and magical or grotesque realism, they offer metafictional commentary on a network of discourses that confuses images of masculinity, national identity, and political autonomy in postcolonial Latin America.

Examining revenge narratives as a feminist response to slavery and settler colonialism

From Octavia Butler’s Kindred to The Round House by Louise Erdrich, themes of retribution resound throughout the work of renowned Black and Indigenous women and queer authors. Revealing how the Black Power Movement and the American Indian Movement influenced literature from the 1960s onward, Murderous Feeling explores how these writers have employed revenge narratives as a response to white supremacy and colonialism.

Chad Benito Infante shows how, rather than using retributive violence to cultivate a heroic, masculine ideal, Black and Native women and queer writers use revenge as a way to raise philosophical questions about justice and the reclamation of power in the face of white supremacy. Pairing canonical texts—including work by James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Craig Womack, Toni Morrison, and others—he demonstrates how this uniquely queer and feminist literary tradition, the “grammar of interrogation,” allows for generative ambivalence and curiosity about the possibilities and failures of violence.

In highlighting these narratives’ potential to steer anticolonial efforts, Murderous Feeling reconceptualizes literary violence not as an individualized act of cleansing but as a tool for revolutionary inquiry.

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Music Is My Life is the first comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong's autobiographical writings (including his books, essays, and letters) and their relation to his musical and visual performances. Combining approaches from autobiography theory, literary criticism, intermedia studies, cultural history, and musicology, Daniel Stein reconstructs Armstrong's performances of his life story across various media and for different audiences, complicating the monolithic and hagiographic views of the musician.

The book will appeal to academic readers with an interest in African American studies, jazz studies, musicology, and popular culture, as well as general readers interested in Armstrong's life and music, jazz, and twentieth-century entertainment. While not a biography, it provides a key to understanding Armstrong's oeuvre as well as his complicated place in American history and twentieth-century media culture.