Results by title

Rethinking the theoretical and political deployment of madness in the late twentieth century through the critical work of black women novelists

Black Women Unhinged revisits the “black women’s literary renaissance” to offer new terms at the intersection of gender, race, and madness before and beyond its crystallization into discourses of mental health and disability. Reconstructing the cultural zeitgeist of the 1960s–1980s, when madness emerged as a radical position in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and David Cooper, and in the politics of feminists and Black Power activists, Black Women Unhinged reassesses black women’s overlooked contributions to this politics of madness. Megan Finch reads this renaissance’s catalogue of ostensibly mad literary characters—schizophrenic girls, infanticidal and drug-addicted mothers, castrating murderesses, and suicidal revolutionaries—beyond madness’s philosophical and political bounds.

Centering the relationship between Reason and the multiple forms of unReason central to modern politics, Finch traces the deployment of madness by the Black Power/Art’s movements and second-wave feminists to fortify black men’s and white women’s civic inclusion while dismissing black women’s politics as irremediable folly. Finch argues that black women’s novels of the period—including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Eva’s Man, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, and Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales—depict characters who exceed the category of madness and are unhinged from the curative politics of inclusion purchased through another’s abjection. Black Women Unhinged reckons with black women’s literary and theoretical contributions to the politics of madness and their attempts, past and present, to move beyond them to something akin to freedom.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

What is the relationship between work and family in a world where employment creates endless tensions for families and families create endless tensions for the workplace? This collection of reprinted and original articles broadens this discussion by addressing issues from the perspectives of often neglected populations: from white middle-class women with young children to people of color, to poor families, to the new sorts of families gays and lesbians are struggling to construct, to fathers, to older children.

To discuss work and family is also to discuss gender. Ranging from California's Silicon Valley to a remote fishing village in the northeast, part one shows how new work arrangements have created new expectations for what it means to be a woman or a man, and how slow and uneven the pace of change can be. Nowhere are the tensions of work and family more potent than around childcare. Part two takes up these tensions, showing how various "solutions" to caring for children of all ages (whether infants or teenagers) create new problems. Parts three and four turn outward to show how the new relationships between families and work are changing the relationships between families and the communities in which they live and generating new social policy dilemmas.

Moving freely between essay, close-reading, ekphrasis, memoir, travelogue, lecture notes, poetry, and even monologue, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds presents a series of “thinking-throughs” of formally innovative and politically oriented poets pushing the boundaries of what poetry can hold. Tracing a personal family history of immigration amidst larger concerns of diaspora, “unsayability,” and absence, Wendy Xu reads the work of poets including Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean Vuong, Liu Xia, giovanni singleton, Bei Dao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others. She explores existential and pedagogical questions in poetry from the point of view of a reader and a teacher. Why write? and why invite the paradoxes of a documentary approach into that writing? 

Not an overview or primer, least of all the final word, this free-ranging exploration of contemporary poetry considers larger questions of belonging, diaspora, the violence of language, the allure of the past, genre, witness, and form. It returns to memorable touchstone texts in the author’s life with renewed curiosity about their inner workings. Essays move with restless curiosity across topics, bringing them into conversation with poetry, from considering depictions of Christ in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, to the ecstatic illegible texts of Henri Michaux, discomfiting likenesses of agoraphobia and political imprisonment, and the epistolary trouble of fan-mail. Xu is drawn to poetry works of radical hybridity alongside personal experiences of formal intensity, as an immigrant daughter, a parentified child, an occasional agoraphobe, and a writer. Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds is a tour of poetic influences and the futures they’ve made possible.