18284 books match the query 'United States' and 3764 start with t
Warren, Joyce W
Rutgers University Press, 1993
The American literary canon has been the subject of debate and change for at least a decade. As women writers and writers of color are being rediscovered and acclaimed, the question of whether they are worthy of inclusion remains open.
The (Other) American Traditions brings together for the first time in one place, essays on individual writers and traditions that begin to ask the harder questions. How do we talk about these writers once we get beyond the historical issues? How is their work related to their male counterparts? How is it similar: how is it different? Are differences related to gender or race or class? How has the selection of books in the literary canon (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and James) led to a definition of the American tradition that was calculated to exclude women? Do we need a new critical vocabulary to discuss these works? Should we stop talking about a tradition and begin to talk about many traditions? How did black American women writers develop strategies for speaking out when they were doubly in jeopardy of being ignored as blacks and as women? The volume offers irrefutable proof that the writers, the critics who work on their texts, all these questions, and the expansion of the canon matter very much indeed.
Contributors: Nina Baym, Deborah Carlin, Joanne Dobson, Josephine Donovan, Judith Fetterley, Frances Smith Foster, Susan K. Harris, Karla F.C. Holloway, Paul Lauter, Diane Lichtenstein, Carla L. Peterson, Carol J. Singley, Jane Tompkins, Joyce W. Warren and Sandra A. Zagarell.
Kim Crawford
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Stephen C. LeSueur
University of Missouri Press, 1990
In the summer and fall of 1838, animosity between Mormons and their neighbors in western Missouri erupted into an armed conflict known as the Mormon War. The conflict continued until early November, when the outnumbered Mormons surrendered and agreed to leave the state.
In this major new interpretation of those events, LeSueur argues that while a number of prejudices and fears stimulated the opposition of Missourians to their Mormon neighbors, Mormon militancy contributed greatly to the animosity between them. Prejudice and poor judgment characterized leaders on both sides of the struggle. In addition, LeSueur views the conflict as an expression of attitudes and beliefs that have fostered a vigilante tradition in the United States. The willingness of both Missourians and Mormons to adopt extralegal measures to protect and enforce community values led to the breakdown of civil control and to open warfare in northwestern Missouri.
Cheryl R. Ganz
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Chicago's 1933 world's fair set a new direction for international expositions. Earlier fairs had exhibited technological advances, but Chicago's fair organizers used the very idea of progress to buoy national optimism during the Depression's darkest years. Orchestrated by business leaders and engineers, almost all former military men, the fair reflected a business-military-engineering model that envisioned a promising future through science and technology's application to everyday life. Fair organizers, together with corporate leaders, believed that progress rides on the tide of technological innovation and consumerism.
But not all those who struggled for a voice at Chicago's 1933 exposition had abandoned the traditional notions of progress that entailed social justice and equality, recognition of ethnic and gender-related accomplishments, and personal freedom and expression. The stark pronouncement of the fair's motto, "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms," was challenged by iconoclasts such as Sally Rand, whose provocative fan dance became a persistent symbol of the fair, as well as a handful of others, including African Americans, ethnic populations and foreign nationals, groups of working women, and even well-heeled socialites. They all met obstacles but ultimately introduced personal, social definitions of "progress" and thereby influenced the ways the fair took shape.
In this engaging social and cultural history, Cheryl R. Ganz examines Chicago's second world's fair through the lenses of technology, ethnicity, and gender. The book also features eighty-six photographs--nearly half of which are full color--of key locations, exhibits, and people, as well as authentic ticket stubs, postcards, pamphlets, posters, and other items. From fan dancers to fan belts, The 1933 Chicago World's Fair: A Century of Progress offers the compelling, untold stories of fair planners and participants who showcased education, industry, and entertainment to sell optimism during the depths of the Great Depression.
Arthur A. Hansen
University Press of Colorado, 2026
This transcribed and edited wartime diary of Robert L. Brown—a trained journalist who served as public relations staff and assistant director at the Manzanar concentration camp—reveals the thoughts and perspective of the jailer, providing a window into the views of the local population around the presence and experience of a concentration camp for Japanese Americans in their community. In addition to the heavily footnoted diary, the book includes a prologue, introduction, and epilogue from Arthur A. Hansen, providing context for the journal as well as how Hansen came to transcribe the work with Brown’s blessing.
A departure from the typical recovered narratives from incarcerees, Brown’s diary is a historically significant primary source that provides insight into camp administration and local community relationships with Manzanar and a rich primary source for specialists in the field of Japanese American incarceration.
Martin N. Bertera
Michigan State University Press, 2010
This fascinating narrative tells the story of a remarkable regiment at the center of Civil War history. The real-life adventure emerges from accounts of scores of soldiers who served in the 4th Michigan Infantry, gleaned from their diaries, letters, and memoirs; the reports of their officers and commanders; the stories by journalists who covered them; and the recollections of the Confederates who fought against them. The book includes tales of life in camp, portraying the Michigan soldiers as everyday people—recounting their practical jokes, illnesses, political views, personality conflicts, comradeship, and courage.
The book also tells the true story of what happened to Colonel Harrison Jeffords and the 4th Michigan when the regiment marched into John Rose's wheat field on a sweltering early July evening at Gettysburg. Beyond the myths and romanticized newspaper stories, this account presents the historical evidence of Jeffords's heroic, yet tragic, hand-to-hand struggle for his regiment's U.S. flag.

Chris Dubbs
University of North Texas Press, 2018
Jeffrey T. Darbee
Ohio University Press, 2008
Columbus, the largest city in Ohio, has, since its founding in 1812, been home to many impressive architectural landmarks. The AIA Guide to Columbus, produced by the Columbus Architecture Foundation, highlights the significant buildings and neighborhoods in the Columbus metropolitan area. Skillfully blending architectural interest with historic significance, The AIA Guide to Columbus documents approximately 160 buildings and building groups and is organized geographically. Each chapter provides an opportunity to explore a special area of Columbus' built environment.
The Columbus Architecture Foundation has been affiliated with the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Columbus Chapter, for more than thirty years. Its first book project was Architecture Columbus, published in 1976. This new companion volume updates coverage of the buildings and provides a portable, accessible guide to the city's architectural history.
The AIA Guide to Columbus identifies buildings designated as historic and those that have won awards, and includes information on architectural styles, excellent photographs, maps, a glossary, and an index. The focus is on easy touring, whether the reader is walking or driving. Students, visitors, and residents with a penchant for knowing more about their city will enjoy discovering the rich heritage of Columbus' downtown, special districts, and neighborhoods.

Nancy Kalikow Maxwell
American Library Association, 2014
John V. Clune
Vanderbilt University Press, 2017

Bryce Nelson
American Library Association, 2014
A. Leigh DeNeef and Craufurd D. Goodwin, eds.
Duke University Press, 2006
Faculty members, administrators, and professionals with experience at all levels of higher education offer candid, practical advice to help beginning academics understand matters including:
— The different kinds of institutions of higher learning and expectations of faculty at each.
— The advantages and disadvantages of teaching at four-year colleges instead of research universities.
— The ins and outs of the job market.
— Alternatives to tenure-track, research-oriented positions.
— Salary and benefits.
— The tenure system.
— Pedagogy in both large lecture courses and small, discussion-based seminars.
— The difficulties facing women and minorities within academia.
— Corporations, foundations, and the federal government as potential sources of research funds.
— The challenges of faculty mentoring.
— The impact of technology on contemporary teaching and learning.
— Different types of publishers and the publishing process at university presses.
— The modern research library.
— The structure of university governance.
— The role of departments within the university.
With the inclusion of eight new chapters, this edition of The Academic’s Handbook is designed to ease the transition from graduate school to a well-rounded and rewarding career.
Contributors. Judith K. Argon, Louis J. Budd, Ronald R. Butters, Norman L. Christensen, Joel Colton, Paul L. Conway, John G. Cross, Fred E. Crossland, Cathy N. Davidson, A. Leigh DeNeef, Beth A. Eastlick, Matthew W. Finkin, Jerry G. Gaff, Edie N. Goldenberg, Craufurd D. Goodwin, Stanley M. Hauerwas, Deborah L. Jakubs, L. Gregory Jones, Nellie Y. McKay, Patrick M. Murphy, Elizabeth Studley Nathans, A. Kenneth Pye, Zachary B. Robbins, Anne Firor Scott, Sudhir Shetty, Samuel Schuman, Philip Stewart, Boyd R. Strain, Emily Toth, P. Aarne Vesilind, Judith S. White, Henry M. Wilbur, Ken Wissoker
Lori A. Flores and Jocelyn H. Olcott, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
Bruce Davis
Brandeis University Press, 2026
Molly A. McCarthy
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Jessi Streib
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard
West Virginia University Press, 2025
Robert L. Stephenson, Alice L. L. Ferguson and Henry G. Ferguson
University of Michigan Press, 1963
Paul Rabinow
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Edited by Helena Simonett
University of Illinois Press, 2012
This rich collection considers the accordion and its myriad forms, from the concertina, button accordion, and piano accordion familiar in European and North American music to the exotic-sounding South American bandoneon and the sanfoninha. Capturing the instrument's spread and adaptation to many different cultures in North and South America, contributors illuminate how the accordion factored into power struggles over aesthetic values between elites and working-class people who often were members of immigrant and/or marginalized ethnic communities. Specific histories and cultural contexts discussed include the accordion in Brazil, Argentine tango, accordion traditions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, cross-border accordion culture between Mexico and Texas, Cajun and Creole identity, working-class culture near Lake Superior, the virtuoso Italian-American and Klezmer accordions, Native American dance music, and American avant-garde.
Contributors are María Susana Azzi, Egberto Bermúdez, Mark DeWitt, Joshua Horowitz, Sydney Hutchinson, Marion Jacobson, James P. Leary, Megwen Loveless, Richard March, Cathy Ragland, Helena Simonett, Jared Snyder, Janet L. Sturman, and Christine F. Zinni.
Christa Clarke
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Published by the Newark Museum. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
“After twenty-eight years of desire and determination, I have visited Africa, the land of my forefathers.” So wrote Lida Clanton Broner (1895–1982), an African American housekeeper and hairstylist from Newark, New Jersey, upon her return from an extraordinary nine-month journey to South Africa in 1938. This epic trip was motivated not only by Broner’s sense of ancestral heritage, but also a grassroots resolve to connect the socio-political concerns of African Americans with those of black South Africans under the segregationist policies of the time. During her travels, this woman of modest means circulated among South Africa’s Black intellectual elite, including many leaders of South Africa’s freedom struggle. Her lectures at Black schools on “race consciousness and race pride” had a decidedly political bent, even as she was presented as an “American beauty specialist.”
How did Broner—a working class mother—come to be a globally connected activist? What were her experiences as an African American woman in segregated South Africa and how did she further her work after her return? Broner’s remarkable story is the subject of this book, which draws upon a deep visual and documentary record now held in the collection of the Newark Museum of Art. This extraordinary archive includes more than one hundred and fifty objects, ranging from beadwork and pottery to mission school crafts, acquired by Broner in South Africa, along with her diary, correspondence, scrapbooks, and hundreds of photographs with handwritten notations.
Linda Adler-Kassner
Utah State University Press, 2008
Davison, Richard A
Rutgers University Press, 2001
Stephen Skowronek
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Has American democracy outstripped its constitutional accommodations?
Faith in the resilience and adaptability of the US Constitution rests on a long history of finding new ways to make the system work. In The Adaptability Paradox, political scientist Stephen Skowronek examines the rearrangements that regenerated the American government in the past and brings that experience to bear on our current predicament. He shows how a constitution framed in writing some 230 years ago can run into serious difficulties directly related to its long and impressive history of adaptation.
Skowronek connects questions about the Constitution’s adaptability to the challenges of democratization. For most of American history, serial rearrangements of constitutional relationships widened the government’s purview as a national democracy without giving either nationalism or democracy free rein. Skowronek argues that the politics of adaptation shifted fundamentally with the “Rights Revolution” of the 1960s and `70s when American national democracy approached the inclusion of all its citizens on equal footing. Since then, power and authority have been reconfigured in ways that have steadily magnified conflicts over the essentials of good order. Conservatives aim to dismantle a Constitution that progressives are intent on building upon, and the consensus necessary for a constitutional democracy to function effectively has all but evaporated. No longer a socially bound framework for national action, the Constitution has become an abstract matrix of possibilities, a disembodied opportunity structure open to starkly different, mutually unacceptable futures.
Rather than being liberated by this unbound Constitution, the American people now appear entrapped by it. Is it possible that the development of American democracy has exhausted the adaptive capacities of the Constitution? A timely reminder that constitutional democracies do not survive on faith alone, The Adaptability Paradox is a sober appraisal of the unfamiliar ground on which we now tread.
Edited by Nathaniel Norment Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 2008
Herb Childress
University of Chicago Press, 2019
By Decimus et Ultimus Barziza. Edited by R. Henderson Shuffler
University of Texas Press, 1964
This journal is the exciting personal narrative of a Texan who was a prisoner of the Union Army during the Civil War, escaped to Canada, and finally made his way back into the Confederacy through the blockade. It was written while the war was still in progress.
The journal was issued anonymously in Houston early in 1865. Its author, Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, was a colorful, competent, truly remarkable Texan—well educated, well traveled, and sophisticated as an observer. Barziza came to Texas from Virginia in 1857. He left a growing law practice at Owensville to enter Confederate service as first lieutenant of the “Robertson Five-Shooters,” an infantry company which was one of the original units of the Fourth Texas Infantry, Hood’s Brigade. After fighting in many battles, he was wounded at Gettysburg and left lying on the field. The Yankees picked him up and imprisoned him at Johnson’s Island.
A year later, as Barziza was being shipped to another prison, he escaped by diving through a window of the moving train at midnight. Making his way across Pennsylvania to New York, he took a train for Canada. There he became one of the first beneficiaries of an underground system which eventually returned him to North Carolina. Too ill from his wounds and the hardships of his escape to return to active duty, he spent the next few months writing his memoirs. They cover the period from the drive for Gettysburg to Barziza’s return to the Confederacy.
Before the original publication of this book, only two copies of The Adventures of a Prisoner of War were known to exist. R. Henderson Shuffler, then director of the Texana program of the University of Texas, felt that it was intriguing and important enough to merit editing for republication. The journal has the further attraction of describing the then little-known machinery which was set up in Canada to help Rebel soldiers who had escaped Northern prisons make their way back to the Confederacy by way of Nova Scotia and Bermuda.
Shuffler supplements the narrative with limited yet helpful documentation, providing introductory sections explaining Barziza’s background and his career as a Texas legislator and lawyer, as well as carrying the war story up to the sequence where Barziza’s account begins.
Chris Crofton
Vanderbilt University Press, 2022
R S Gwynn
University of Arkansas Press, 1996
Craig L. Wilkins
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Architecture is often thought to be a diary of a society, filled with symbolic representations of specific cultural moments. However, as Craig L. Wilkins observes, that diary includes far too few narratives of the diverse cultures in U.S. society. Wilkins states that the discipline of architecture has a resistance to African Americans at every level, from the startlingly small number of architecture students to the paltry number of registered architects in the United States today.
Working to understand how ideologies are formed, transmitted, and embedded in the built environment, Wilkins deconstructs how the marginalization of African Americans is authorized within the field of architecture. He then outlines how activist forms of expression shape and sustain communities, fashioning an architectural theory around the site of environmental conflict constructed by hip-hop culture.
Wilkins places his concerns in a historical context, and also offers practical solutions to address them. In doing so, he reveals new possibilities for an architecture that acknowledges its current shortcomings and replies to the needs of multicultural constituencies.
Craig L. Wilkins, a registered architect, teaches architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan.
Britt Rusert
Duke University Press, 2026
Patrick S. Washburn
Northwestern University Press, 2006
Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds.
Duke University Press, 2010
While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view.
Contributors: Afro–Puerto Rican Testimonies Project, Josefina Baéz, Ejima Baker, Luis Barrios, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Adrian Burgos Jr., Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Adrián Castro, Jesús Colón, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen, William A. Darity Jr., Milca Esdaille, Sandra María Esteves, María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Carlos Flores, Juan Flores, Jack D. Forbes, David F. Garcia, Ruth Glasser, Virginia Meecham Gould, Susan D. Greenbaum, Evelio Grillo, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Tanya K. Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Lisa Hoppenjans, Vielka Cecilia Hoy, Alan J. Hughes, María Rosario Jackson, James Jennings, Miriam Jiménez Román, Angela Jorge, David Lamb, Aida Lambert, Ana M. Lara, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tato Laviera, John Logan, Antonio López, Felipe Luciano, Louis Pancho McFarland, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wayne Marshall, Marianela Medrano, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Yvette Modestin, Ed Morales, Jairo Moreno, Marta Moreno Vega, Willie Perdomo, Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez, Sofia Quintero, Ted Richardson, Louis Reyes Rivera, Pedro R. Rivera , Raquel Z. Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, Mark Q. Sawyer, Piri Thomas, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nilaja Sun, Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso, Peter H. Wood
Alys Eve Weinbaum
Duke University Press, 2019

Rooney, Monique
University of Iowa Press, 2026
Connecting literary studies, media theory, and cultural criticism, The Afterlife of Taste Hierarchies in Contemporary U.S. Art and Literature offers a fresh vocabulary for understanding how we evaluate art and each other in an age of digital mediation. Drawing on works and artifacts ranging from Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Andrea Long Chu’s “China Brain” to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the viral Bernie Sanders mittens meme, Monique Rooney traces how aspirations to refinement and gestures of condescension—once associated with high-, middle-, and lowbrow culture—continue to define aesthetic experience. This book moves between literary and popular forms, attending as closely to the meme’s dispersed creativity as to the novel’s intentional aesthetics.
Lindsay Tuggle
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Jean-Paul Sartre
Seagull Books, 2008
Laurence Senelick
University of Iowa Press, 1999
Peter Zavodnyik
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
Thomas S. Helling
Westholme Publishing, 2024
John J. Dwyer
Duke University Press, 2008
Dwyer weaves together elite and subaltern history and highlights the intricate relationship between domestic and international affairs. Through detailed studies of land redistribution in Baja California and Sonora, he demonstrates that peasant agency influenced the local application of Cárdenas’s agrarian reform program, his regional state-building projects, and his relations with the United States. Dwyer draws on a broad array of official, popular, and corporate sources to illuminate the motives of those who contributed to the agrarian dispute, including landless fieldworkers, indigenous groups, small landowners, multinational corporations, labor leaders, state-level officials, federal policymakers, and diplomats. Taking all of them into account, Dwyer explores the circumstances that spurred agrarista mobilization, the rationale behind Cárdenas’s rural policies, the Roosevelt administration’s reaction to the loss of American-owned land, and the diplomatic tactics employed by Mexican officials to resolve the international conflict.

Kenneth S. Lynn
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Dominick A. Pisano, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2003
By Timothy M. Matovina
University of Texas Press, 1995
As Mexican soldiers fought the mostly Anglo-American colonists and volunteers at the Alamo in 1836, San Antonio's Tejano population was caught in the crossfire, both literally and symbolically. Though their origins were in Mexico, the Tejanos had put down lasting roots in Texas and did not automatically identify with the Mexican cause. Indeed, as the accounts in this new collection demonstrate, their strongest allegiance was to their fellow San Antonians, with whom they shared a common history and a common plight as war raged in their hometown.
Timothy M. Matovina here gathers all known Tejano accounts of the Battle of the Alamo. These accounts consist of first reports of the battle, including Juan N. Seguín's funeral oration at the interment ceremony of the Alamo defenders, conversations with local Tejanos, unpublished petitions and depositions, and published accounts from newspapers and other sources. This communal response to the legendary battle deepens our understanding of the formation of Mexican American consciousness and identity.
Maria Shaa Tláa Williams, ed.
Duke University Press, 2009
The Alaska Native Reader describes indigenous worldviews, languages, arts, and other cultural traditions as well as contemporary efforts to preserve them. Several pieces examine Alaska Natives’ experiences of and resistance to Russian and American colonialism; some of these address land claims, self-determination, and sovereignty. Some essays discuss contemporary Alaska Native literature, indigenous philosophical and spiritual tenets, and the ways that Native peoples are represented in the media. Others take up such diverse topics as the use of digital technologies to document Native cultures, planning systems that have enabled indigenous communities to survive in the Arctic for thousands of years, and a project to accurately represent Dena’ina heritage in and around Anchorage. Fourteen of the volume’s many illustrations appear in color, including work by the contemporary artists Subhankar Banerjee, Perry Eaton, Erica Lord, and Larry McNeil.
Peter Markoe
Westholme Publishing, 2008
An Important Book in America’s Early Encounter with the Arab World
“A pungent satire on American affairs.” —Samuel Eliot Morison
In 1787, while American sailors languished in a Barbary prison, delegates debated the Constitution in Philadelphia. Despite America’s desire to respond to the crisis, without a central government, the new republic had no means to create a naval force. Enter an anonymously published book, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania: or, Letters Written by a Native of Algiers on the Affairs of the United States in America, which began circulating among the delegates. Consisting of a series of letters ostensibly written by an Algerian agent “Mehmet” back to his leader, the spy predicted that the former colonies would never be able to resolve their differences and be “ruined by disunion.” The book created a sensation and it helped tip the balance for those in favor of adopting the new Constitution. Following the Constitution’s final ratification in 1789, the United States created a navy and began asserting its power overseas. With its commentary about men and women, business and pleasure, and historical and religious comparisons between nations, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania provides both a contemporary snapshot of early American life and the political ideas of the period. Never before reprinted, and recently rated one of the five best works in the history of America’s encounter with the Arab world, this new edition is edited by historian Timothy Marr, who reconsiders the importance of this early work in the political and literary history of the United States.
James A. Tyner
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
A timely and provocative discussion of alienation as an intersectional category of life under racial capitalism and white supremacy
From the divisiveness of the Trump era to the Covid-19 pandemic, alienation has become an all-too-familiar contemporary concept. In this groundbreaking book, James A. Tyner offers a novel framework for understanding the alienated subject, situating it within racial capitalism and white supremacy. Directly addressing current economic trends and their rhetoric of xenophobia, discrimination, and violence, The Alienated Subject exposes the universal whitewashing of alienation.
Drawing insight from a variety of sources, including Marxism, feminism, existentialism, and critical race theory, Tyner develops a critique of both the liberal subject and the alienated subject. Through an engagement with the recent pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, he demonstrates how the alienated subject is capable of both compassion and cruelty; it is a sadomasochist. Tyner goes on to emphasize the importance of the particular places we find the alienated subject and how the revolutionary transformation of alienation is inherently a spatial struggle. Returning to key interlocutors from Sartre to Fromm, he examines political notions of distance and the spatial practices of everyday life as well as the capitalist conditions that give rise to the alienated subject.
For Tyner, the alienated subject is not the iconic, romanticized image of Marx’s proletariat. Here he calls for an affirmation of love as a revolutionary concept, necessary for the transformation of a society marred by capitalism into an emancipated, caring society conditioned by socially just relations.
Spencer Dew
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Michael Barone, Chuck McCutcheon, Sean Trende, and Josh Kraushaar
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Tavia Nyong’o
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Does racial hybridity offer a future beyond racial difference?
At a time when the idea of a postracial society has entered public discourse, The Amalgamation Waltz investigates the practices that conjoined blackness and whiteness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scrutinizing widely diverse texts—archival, musical, visual, and theatrical—Tavia Nyong’o traces the genealogy of racial hybridity, analyzing how key events in the nineteenth century spawned a debate about interracialism that lives on today.
Deeply interested in how discussions of racial hybridity have portrayed the hybrid as the recurring hope for a distant raceless future, Nyong’o is concerned with the ways this discourse deploys the figure of the racial hybrid as an alibi for a nationalism that reinvents the racist logics it claims to have broken with. As Nyong’o demonstrates, the rise of a pervasive image of racially anomalous bodies responded to the appearance of an independent black public sphere and organized politics of black uplift. This newfound mobility was apprehended in the political imaginary as a bodily and sexual scandal, and the resultant amalgamation discourse, he argues, must be recognized as one of the earliest and most enduring national dialogues on sex and sexuality. Nyong’o tracks the emergence of the concept of the racial hybrid as an ideological modernization of the older concept of the mongrel and shows how this revision brought race-thinking in line with new understandings of sex and gender, providing a racial context for the shift toward modern heterosexuality, the discourse on which postracial metaphors so frequently rely. A timely rebuttal to our contemporary fascination with racial hybridity, The Amalgamation Waltz questions the vision of a national future without racial difference or conflict.