Results by title

A harrowing account of Jewish refugees in the Philippines

With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s more than a thousand European Jews sought refuge in the Philippines, joining the small Jewish population of Manila. When the Japanese invaded the islands in 1941, the peaceful existence of the barely settled Jews filled with the kinds of uncertainties and oppression they thought they had left behind.

In this book Frank Ephraim, who fled to Manila with his parents, gathers the testimonies of thirty-six refugees, who describe the difficult journey to Manila, the lives they built there upon their arrival, and the events surrounding the Japanese invasion. Combining these accounts with historical and archival records, Manila newspapers, and U.S. government documents, Ephraim constructs a detailed account of this little-known chapter of world history.

Conspiracy theories have always been with us, but in the age of the Internet, twenty-four-hour news programs of varying reliability, and ever-more incendiary talk radio, the crop of rumors, bombshells, and shadowy secrets seems more extensive and potent than ever. How to Escape from the Diabolic Triangle? dives into those collective delusions to show what they mean to us as individuals and what role they play in society. Looking closely at nine cases of collective delusion, Jan Berting shows how they can help society articulate widespread fears, but that at the same time they can be wildly misleading, even dangerous.

This seminal scholarly work examines T. S. Eliot's literary development and philosophical outlook through the lens of modernist dialectics, exploring the tension between mastery and escape as central to understanding both his poetry and critical thought. Edited and written by acclaimed Eliot scholar Jewel Spears Brooker, this volume presents expert studies of key intellectual influences on Eliot's modernism—particularly Stéphane Mallarmé, Sir James George Frazer, F. H. Bradley, and T. E. Hulme—yielding fresh and original insights into how these thinkers shaped the poet's artistic vision.

Through careful textual analysis and intellectual history, Brooker investigates how Eliot grappled with fundamental modernist anxieties: the desire for artistic mastery and transcendence alongside the simultaneous impulse toward escape from the constraints of tradition, rationality, and conventional form. She demonstrates how Eliot's poetry and prose reflect a dialectical movement, a constant interplay between opposing forces, that defines both his modernist aesthetics and his philosophical positions.

 An essential resource for scholars seeking comprehensive understanding of modernism's philosophical foundations and poetic achievements, Brooker is devoted to tracing both dialectical movements and biographical developments in Eliot's career.

A meticulously researched book that collects twelve playscripts written by European Jews imprisoned in the Terezín ghetto during the Holocaust.
 
The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death. But amid this horrific period, there was also a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children’s drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners’ theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well.
 
Performing Captivity, Performing Escape collects twelve theatrical texts—cabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays, and a Purim play—written by Czech and Austrian Jews. Together these works reveal the wide range of ways in which the prisoners engaged with and escaped from life in the ghetto through performance. The anthology opens with an insightful prologue by novelist Ivan Klíma, who was interned in the ghetto as a child and contains a detailed introduction by editor Lisa Peschel about the pre-war theatrical influences and wartime conditions that inspired the theater of the ghetto. The array of theatrical forms collected in this anthology speaks of the prisoners’ persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be a moving read for students and scholars of the Holocaust.
 

Charles Le Brun’s drawing manual on human emotions has been used for centuries by artists and students as a model for depicting facial expressions. In David Schutter’s work, Le Brun’s manual is set to a different direction—a series of abstract drawings recalling vestiges of the human face animated by emotion. But Schutter’s drawings are neither copies nor portraiture. Rather, they are reflections on how Lebrun’s renderings were made.

Collected here, Schutter’s work recreates not the subject matter but the very values of Lebrun’s drawings—light, gesture, scale, and handling of materials. The cross-hatching in the original was used to make classical tone and volume, in Schutter’s hand the technique makes for unstable impressions of strained neck and deeply furrowed brow, or for drawing marks and scribbles unto themselves. As such, these drawings end up denying a neat closure—unlike their academic source material—and render unsettling states of mind that require repeated viewing. Accompanied by essays from art critic Barry Schwabsky and Neubauer Collegium curator Dieter Roelstraete, The Escape will appeal to students, critics, and admirers of seventeenth-century, modern, and contemporary art alike.

In The Only Way Out, Katherine Brewer Ball explores the American fascination with the escape story. Brewer Ball argues that escape is a key site for exploring American conceptions of freedom and constraint. Stories of escape are never told just once but become mythic in their episodic iterations, revealing the fantasies and desires of society, the storyteller, and the listener. While white escape narratives have typically been laden with Enlightenment fantasies of redemption where freedom is available to any individual willing to seize it, Brewer Ball explores how Black and queer escape offer forms of radical possibility. Drawing on Black studies, queer theory, and performance studies, she examines a range of works, from nineteenth-century American literature to contemporary queer of color art and writing by contemporary American artists including Wilmer Wilson IV, Tourmaline, Tony Kushner, Junot Díaz, Glenn Ligon, Toshi Reagon, and Sharon Hayes. Throughout, escape emerges as a story not of individuality but of collectivity and entanglement.