Results by title

Unraveling the hidden influence of the paranormal on science, literature, and belief
 

Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and telekinesis: these attributes of the paranormal mind are widely dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of such pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultural thought? In Parascientific Revolutions, Derek Lee traces the evolution of psi epistemologies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to uncover how these ideas have migrated into scientific fields such as quantum physics and neurology, as well as diverse literary genres including science fiction, ethnic literature, and even government training manuals.

Lee introduces the groundbreaking concept of “parascience,” a dynamic cultural space where ideas rejected by the scientific establishment blend with alternative strains of literary, mythic, and philosophical thought to regenerate and return to mainstream discourse. From early modernist works by James Joyce to postwar speculative fiction by Philip K. Dick to ethnofuturist narratives by Ruth Ozeki, Parascientific Revolutions demonstrates how cultural and intellectual currents reshape paranormal ideas over time. Examining psychic surveillance programs like Project Stargate and bizarre particles of extrasensory perception such as the psitron, Lee illustrates the ways paranormal concepts persist and evolve to influence culture.

Presenting pseudoscience as an inevitable by-product of the scientific process, Parascientific Revolutions offers fresh insight into how the paranormal mind continually challenges our understanding of knowledge and belief. It invites readers to reconsider the boundaries between science and the unknown, revealing a world where speculative thought and empirical investigation are deeply intertwined.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

With a new preface Bill V. Mullen updates his dynamic reappraisal of a critical moment in American cultural history. Mullen's study includes reassessments of the politics of Richard Wright's critical reputation and a provocative reading of class struggle in Gwendolyn Brooks' A Street in Bronzeville. He also takes an in-depth look at the institutions that comprised Chicago's black popular front: the Chicago Defender, the period's leading black newspaper; Negro Story, the first magazine devoted to publishing short stories by and about African Americans; and the WPA-sponsored South Side Community Art Center.

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans “heard” rather than “read” national history. They absorbed lessons from the past more readily by attending Patriots' Day orations and anniversary commemorations than by reading expensive, multivolume works of patrician historians. By the 1840s, however, innovations in publishing led to the marketing of inexpensive, mass-produced “popular” histories that had a profound influence on historical literacy and learning in the United States. In this book, Gregory M. Pfitzer charts the rise and fall of this genre, demonstrating how and why it was born, flourished, and then became unpopular over time.

Pfitzer begins by exploring how the emergence of a new literary marketplace in the mid-nineteenth century affected the study of history in America. Publishers of popular works hoped to benefit from economies of scale by selling large numbers of inexpensive books at small profit. They hired authors with substantial literary reputations to make the past accessible to middle-class readers. The ability to write effectively for wide audiences was the only qualification for those who dominated this field. Privileging narration and effusive literary style over dispassionate prose, these artists adapted their favorite fictional and poetic conventions with an ease that suggests the degree to which history was viewed as literary art in the nineteenth century.

Beginning as a small cottage industry, popular histories sold in the hundreds of thousands by the 1890s. In an effort to illuminate the cultural conditions for this boom, Pfitzer focuses on the business of book making and book promotion. He analyzes the subscription sales techniques of book agents as well as the aggressive prepublication advertising campaigns of the publishers, including the pictorial embellishments they employed as marketing devices.

He also examines the reactions of professional historians who rejected the fictionalizing and poetic tendencies of popular history, which they equated with loose and undisciplined scholarship. Pfitzer explains how and why these professionals succeeded in challenging the authority of popular histories, and what the subsequent “unpopularity of popular history” meant for book culture and the study of history in the twentieth century.

In recent decades, Chicana/o literary and cultural productions have dramatically shifted from a nationalist movement that emphasized unity to one that openly celebrates diverse experiences. Charting this transformation, Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture looks to the late 1970s, during a resurgence of global culture, as a crucial turning point whose reverberations in twenty-first-century late capitalism have been profound.

Arguing for a postnationalism that documents the radical politics and aesthetic processes of the past while embracing contemporary cultural and sociopolitical expressions among Chicana/o peoples, Hernández links the multiple forces at play in these interactions. Reconfiguring text-based analysis, she looks at the comparative development of movements within women's rights and LGBTQI activist circles. Incorporating economic influences, this unique trajectory leads to a new conception of border studies as well, rethinking the effects of a restructured masculinity as a symbol of national cultural transformation. Ultimately positing that globalization has enhanced the emergence of new Chicana/o identities, Hernández cultivates important new understandings of borderlands identities and postnationalism itself.

From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. An energetic exploration of the struggles and complexities of African American print culture, this collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts. Publishing Blackness aims to project African Americanist scholarship into the discourse of textual scholarship, provoking further work in a vital area of literary study.

Publishing Latinidad brings to light the overlooked contributions of early Latinx writers and intellectuals, offering a fresh perspective on their roles in shaping American literary and cultural landscapes.

Jose O. Fernandez meticulously examines the works of notable figures like José Martí, Arturo Schomburg, Jesús Colón, José de la Luz Sáenz, Adela Sloss-Vento, and Américo Paredes, illuminating their innovative approaches to circumventing exclusionary practices in the publishing world. He demonstrates how these writers and intellectuals entered literary, cultural, and intellectual discourses through alternative modes of literary production: crónicas, translations, paratexts, bibliographies, archival practices, sketches, diaries, biographies, unpublished fiction, and scholarly monographs. Through these examples, Fernandez situates Latinx literary production in this time period within the broader context of racial and ethnic solidarity movements in the United States.

Publishing Latinidad is essential reading for anyone interested in the social and cultural underpinnings of Latinx literature and intellectual thought. It challenges traditional narratives and enriches our appreciation of the diverse voices that have long been instrumental in the fight for justice.