Best of
Cultural-Studies

2015

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness


Simone Browne - 2015
    She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.

The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America


D. Watkins - 2015
    And then seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and then Baltimore blew up; and then gunfire shattered a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly the entire country awakened to a stark fact: African Americans—particularly young black men—are an endangered species.Now the country’s urban war zone is brought powerfully to life by a rising young literary talent, D. Watkins. The author fought his way up on the east side (the “beast side”) of Baltimore, Maryland—or “Bodymore, Murderland,” as his friends call it—surviving murderous business rivals in the drug trade and equally predatory lawmen. Throughout it all, he pursued his education, earning a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, while staying rooted in his community.When black residents of Baltimore finally decided they had had enough—after the brutal killing of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody—Watkins was on the streets when the city erupted. He writes about his bleeding hometown with the razor-sharp insights of someone who bleeds along with it. Here are true dispatches from the other side of America.

Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality


Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 2015
    Anzaldúa's mature thought and the most comprehensive presentation of her philosophy. Throughout, Anzaldúa weaves personal narratives into deeply engaging theoretical readings to comment on numerous contemporary issues—including the September 11 attacks, neocolonial practices in the art world, and coalitional politics. She valorizes subaltern forms and methods of knowing, being, and creating that have been marginalized by Western thought, and theorizes her writing process as a fully embodied artistic and political practice. Resituating Anzaldúa's work within Continental philosophy and new materialism, Light in the Dark takes Anzaldúan scholarship in new directions.

The Intimacies of Four Continents


Lisa Lowe - 2015
    Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.

Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel


Francesca Woodman - 2015
    Typical of Woodman's work in the way they cast the female body as simultaneously physical and immaterial, these photographs and the evocative title they share are apt choices to encapsulate the work of an artist whose legacy has been unavoidably colored by her tragic personal biography and her death, at age 22, by suicide. In less than a decade, Woodman produced a fascinating body of work--in black and white and in color--exploring gender, representation, sexuality and the body through the photographing of her own body and those of her friends. Since her death, Woodman's influence continues to grow: her work has been the subject of numerous in-depth studies and exhibitions in recent years, and her photographs have inspired artists all over the world. Published to accompany a travelling exhibition of Woodman's work, Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel offers a comprehensive overview of Woodman's oeuvre, organized chronologically, with texts by Anna Tellgren, Anna-Karin Palm and the artist's father, George Woodman. Francesca Woodman (1958-81) was born in Denver, Colorado, to an artistic family and began experimenting with photography as a teenager. In 1975 she attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1979 she moved to New York to attempt to build a career in photography. Woodman's working career was intense but brief, cut short by her death in 1981.

Mot: A Memoir


Sarah Einstein - 2015
    In the wake of an attempted sexual assault, she must come to terms with the facts that she is not tough enough for her job managing a local drop-in center for adults with mental illness and that her new marriage is already faltering. Just as she reaches her breaking point, she meets Mot, a homeless veteran who lives a life dictated by frightening delusion. She is drawn to the brilliant ways he has found to lead his own difficult life; traveling to Romania to get his teeth fixed because the United States doesn’t offer dental care to the indigent, teaching himself to use computers in public libraries, and even taking university classes while living out of doors.Mot: A Memoir is the story of their unlikely friendship and explores what we can, and cannot, do for a person we love. In unsparing prose and with a sharp eye for detail, Einstein brings the reader into the world of Mot’s delusions and illuminates a life that would otherwise be hidden from us.

Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice


David Pilgrim - 2015
    Understanding Jim Crow introduces readers to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, a collection of more than 10,000 contemptible collectibles that are used to engage visitors in intense and intelligent discussions about race, race relations, and racism. The items are offensive and they were meant to be offensive. The items in the Jim Crow Museum served to dehumanize Blacks and legitimized patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. Using racist objects as teaching tools seems counterintuitive—and, quite frankly, needlessly risky. Many Americans are already apprehensive discussing race relations, especially in settings where their ideas are challenged. The museum and this book exist to help overcome our collective trepidation and reluctance to talk about race. Fully illustrated, and with context provided by the museum's founder and director David Pilgrim, Understanding Jim Crow is both a grisly tour through America’s past and an auspicious starting point for racial understanding and healing.

Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship


Aimee Meredith Cox - 2015
    Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran


Laura Secor - 2015
      In 1979, seemingly overnight—moving at a clip some thirty years faster than the rest of the world—Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has been largely a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon. But inside Iran, a breathtaking drama has unfolded since then, as religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists, and activists have imagined and reimagined what Iran should be. They have drawn as deeply on the traditions of the West as of the East and have acted upon their beliefs with urgency and passion, frequently staking their lives for them.   With more than a decade of experience reporting on, researching, and writing about Iran, Laura Secor narrates this unprecedented history as a story of individuals caught up in the slipstream of their time, seizing and wielding ideas powerful enough to shift its course as they wrestle with their country’s apparatus of violent repression as well as its rich and often tragic history. Essential reading at this moment when the fates of our countries have never been more entwined, Children of Paradise will stand as a classic of political reporting; an indelible portrait of a nation and its people striving for change.

Hatred in the Belly: Politics Behind the Appropriation of Dr. Ambedkar's Writings


Ambedkar Age Collective - 2015
    The speech, included in this volume, aptly summarises the deep-seated hostility of Brahminic India towards the Dalit Bahujan. Similarly, the other essays and speeches collected in this volume, written and delivered by a number of writers, academics, students, and activists (referred to as the Ambedkar Age Collective in this book), unfurl before you a critical tapestry dissecting the hegemonic brahminic discourse which works towards delegitimizing the radical legacy of Amebdkarite thought. The most stark example of these efforts, from the 'left' and the 'right' of the Indian political spectrum, is the Navayana edition of Babasaheb's AoC with an 'introduction' by Arundhati Roy. The works collected here emerged as spontaneous reactions to the Roy-Navayana project from multiple locations and in multiple languages. The varied interventions, which began online, and the discursive terrains it opened up offer us a glimpse of the ways through which the marginalised resist continued attempts made at hegemonising their knowledge and lives by the brahminic oppressors irrespective of their political leanings. Authors include: Anu Ramdas, Kuffir, Gurinder Azad, Bojja Tharakam Adv. Dr. Suresh Mane, Anoop Kumar, U. Sambashiva Rao, Shakyamuni, Dr Sangeeta Pawar, Sunny Kapicadu, O.K. Santhosh, Dr B. Ravichandran, Dalit Camera: Through Un-Touchable Eyes, Karthik Navayan, Joopaka Subhadra Dr. K Satyanarayana, Vaibhav Wasnik, Nilesh Kumar, Asha Kowtal, Nidhin Shobhana, Gee Imaan Semmalar, Syam Sundar, Murali Shanmugavelan, Praveena Thaali, Dr Karthick RM, Huma Dar, Joby Mathew, James Michael, Akshay Pathak, Vinay Bhat, Yogesh Maitreya, Thongam Bipin, K K Baburaj, Sruthi Herbert, Gaurav Somwanshi, Kadhiravan, Rahul Gaikwad, Joe D'Cruz

So Many Africas: Six Years in a Zambian Village


Jill Kandel - 2015
    She was a bride of six weeks, married to a blue-eyed boy from the Netherlands. Amidst international crises and famine, she gave birth to two children, bridged a cultural divide with her Dutch husband, and was devastated by a car accident that took the life of a twelve-year-old Zambian child. She stayed six years. After returning home, Kandel struggled to find her voice and herself. This is the story of how she found her way home. For more information, or to buy a signed copy directly from the author visit her website: jillkandel (dot) com.

Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire


R.J. Snell - 2015
    Sloth is not mere laziness, however, but a disgust with reality, a loathing of our call to be friends with God, and a spiteful hatred of place and life itself. As described by Josef Pieper, the slothful person does not "want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally is." Sloth is a hellish despair. Our own culture is deeply infected, choosing a destructive freedom rather than the good work for which God created us. Acedia and its Discontents resists despair, calling us to reconfigure our imaginations and practices in deep love of the life and work given by God.

St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street


Ada Calhoun - 2015
    Marks Place in New York City has spawned countless artistic and political movements. Here Frank O’Hara caroused, Emma Goldman plotted, and the Velvet Underground wailed. But every generation of miscreant denizens believes that their era, and no other, marked the street’s apex. This idiosyncratic work of reportage tells the many layered history of the street—from its beginnings as Colonial Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant’s pear orchard to today’s hipster playground—organized around those pivotal moments when critics declared “St. Marks is dead.”In a narrative enriched by hundreds of interviews and dozens of rare images, St. Marks native Ada Calhoun profiles iconic characters from W. H. Auden to Abbie Hoffman, from Keith Haring to the Beastie Boys, among many others. She argues that St. Marks has variously been an elite address, an immigrants’ haven, a mafia warzone, a hippie paradise, and a backdrop to the film Kids—but it has always been a place that outsiders call home. This idiosyncratic work offers a bold new perspective on gentrification, urban nostalgia, and the evolution of a community.

Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America


Roberto G. Gonzales - 2015
    I have grown up but I feel like I’m moving backward. And I can’t do anything about it.” –Esperanza Over two million of the nation’s eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.

The True Source of Healing: How the Ancient Tibetan Practice of Soul Retrieval Can Transform and Enrich Your Life


Tenzin Wangyal - 2015
    Imagine that it is possible for you to feel that way not only now and then but most of the time.”      In The True Source of Healing, meditation teacher Tenzin Wangyal introduces powerful practices to help you connect deeply with your authentic nature and heal your soul, so you can lead a more joyful and fulfilling life. Drawing on traditional soul-retrieval teachings of Tibetan Bön Buddhism, Tenzin Wangyal offers practical guidance for overcoming feelings of disconnection and dissatisfaction, and reawakening your inherent creativity, playfulness, and sense of ease. Done daily, these transformative practices can help you: ·         Overcome difficult life challenges ·         Clear negative emotions and cultivate positive qualities ·         Revitalize your personal and professional relationships ·         Feel more engaged and productive at work ·         Experience healing on all levels—physical, emotional, energetic ·         Bring happiness and well-being to others      Using the meditations and informal practices in the book, you’ll learn how to tap into the healing power of nature as well as your own capacity for self-healing.

Learn American Sign Language: Everything You Need to Start Signing * Complete Beginner's Guide * 800+ signs


Russell Scott Rosen - 2015
    Current with the latest additions to ASL and filled with thousands of brand new photographs by Deaf actors, Learn American Sign Language is the most comprehensive guide of its kind.- Learn more than 800 signs, including signs for school, the workplace, around the house, out and about, food and drink, nature, emotions, small talk, and more.- Unlock the storytelling possibilities of ASL with classifiers, easy ways to modify signs that can turn "fishing" into "catching a big fish" and "walking" into "walking with a group."- Find out how to make sentences with signs, use the proper facial expressions with your signs, and other vital tips.

$pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution


Rachel Aimee - 2015
    This collection features enduring essays about sex work around the world, first-person stories that range from deeply traumatic to totally hilarious, analysis of media and culture, and fantastic illustrations and photos produced just for the magazine. The book also features the previously untold story of $pread and how it has built a wider audience in its posthumous years. What started as a community tool and trade magazine for the sex industry quickly emerged as the essential guide for people curious about sex work, for independent magazine enthusiasts, and for labor and civil rights activists.

Ferguson and Faith: Sparking Leadership and Awakening Community


Leah Gunning Francis - 2015
    Louis-area clergy stepping up to support the emerging young leaders of today's Civil Rights Movement. Seminary professor Leah Gunning Francis was among the activists, and her interviews with more than two dozen faith leaders and with the new movement's organizers take us behind the scenes of the continuing protests. Ferguson and Faith demonstrates that being called to lead a faithful life can take us to places we never expected to go, with people who never expected us to join hands with them. Ferguson and Faith: Sparking Leadership and Awakening Community is the first book from the partnership of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) and Chalice Press.

Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s


Kier-la JanisseLeslie Hatton - 2015
    Everywhere you turned, there were warnings about a widespread evil conspiracy to indoctrinate the vulnerable through the media they consumed. This percolating cultural hysteria, now known as the “Satanic Panic,” not only sought to convince us of devils lurking behind the dials of our TVs and radios and the hellfire that awaited on book and video store shelves, it also created its own fascinating cultural legacy of Satan-battling VHS tapes, audio cassettes and literature. The second book by Canadian micro-publisher Spectacular Optical, Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s, offers an unprecedented and in-depth exploration of how a controversial culture war played out during the decade, from the publication of the memoir Michelle Remembers in 1980 to the end of the McMartin “Satanic Ritual Abuse” Trial in 1990. This new anthology, expected to be released in summer 2015, follows on the success of KID POWER!, Spectacular Optical’s inaugural book about cool, tough and sassy kids in cult film and television.Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s features new essays and interviews by 20 emerging and established writers who address the ways the widespread fear of a Satanic conspiracy was both illuminated and propagated through almost every pop culture pathway in the 1980s, from heavy metal music to Dungeons & Dragons role playing games, Christian comics, direct-to-VHS scare films, pulp paperbacks, Saturday morning cartoons, TV talk shows and even home computers. The book also features case studies on McMartin, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth and Long Island “acid king” killer Ricky Kasso. From con artists to pranksters and moralists to martyrs, the book aims to capture the untold story of the how the Satanic Panic was fought on the pop culture frontlines and the serious consequences it had for many involved.Satanic Panic features essays and interviews by authors and media critics including Adam Parfrey (Apocalypse Culture), Gavin Baddeley (Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship and Rock n’ Roll), Liisa Ladouceur (Encyclopedia Gothica), David Flint (Sheer Filth!), Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Rape Revenge Films: A Critical Study), Adrian Mack (The Georgia Straight), Forrest Jackson (Cosmic Suicide: The Tragedy and Transcendence of Heaven’s Gate), Alison Nastasi (Flavorwire), Leslie Hatton (Popshifter), David Canfield (Twitch), David Bertrand (Fangoria; Spectacular Optical), Alison Lang (Rue Morgue, Broken Pencil), Kevin L. Ferguson (Eighties People), Wm Conley (Deathwound), Kurt Halfyard (Twitch), Samm Deighan (Satanic Pandemonium), Stacey Rusnak (The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction), Ralph Elawani (C’est complet au royaume des morts), Gil Nault (Liturgie apocryphe), one-man band John Schooley and Joshua Benjamin Graham, alongside co-editors Kier-La Janisse (House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films) and Paul Corupe (Canuxploitation). The book also features comic art by Rick Trembles (Motion Picture Purgatory) and original illustrations by Toronto artist Mike McDonnell.

¡Cuéntamelo!: Oral Histories by LGBT Latino Immigrants


Juliana Delgado Lopera - 2015
    ¡Cuéntamelo! began as a cover story for SF Weekly, and, eventually in 2014 with local grant support, Juliana Delgado Lopera was able to publish a limited first edition of 300. Aunt Lute is pleased to bring this title back into circulation. In addition to beautiful black and white drawings of the contributors by artist Laura Cerón Melo, this edition features a number of candid earlier photographs of several of the contributors, as well as a new introduction from Juliana. ¡Cuéntamelo! is “[a] stunning collection of bilingual oral histories and illustrations by LGBT Latinx immigrants who arrived in the U.S. during the 80s and 90s. Stories of repression in underground Havana in the 60s; coming out trans in Catholic Puerto Rico in the 80s; Scarface, female impersonators, Miami and the 'boat people'; San Francisco’s underground Latinx scene during the 90s and more.”¡Cuéntamelo! is bilingual. All stories in this book have both an English and Spanish version.

Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial


Kenji Yoshino - 2015
    Advocates for marriage equality were outraged. Still, major gay-rights groups opposed a federal challenge to the law, warning that it would be dangerously premature. A loss could set the movement back for decades. A small group of activists, however, refused to wait. They turned to corporate lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies—best known for arguing opposite sides of Bush v. Gore—who filed a groundbreaking federal suit against the law.A distinguished constitutional law scholar, Kenji Yoshino was also a newly married gay man who at first felt ambivalent about the suit. Nonetheless, he recognized that Chief Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to hold a trial in the case was momentous. Boies and Olson rose to the occasion, deftly deploying arguments that LGBT advocates had honed through years of litigation and debate. Reading the 3,000-page transcript, Yoshino discovered a shining civil rights document—the most rigorous and compelling exploration he had seen of the nature of marriage, the political status of gays and lesbians, the ideal circumstances for raising children, and the inability of direct democracy to protect fundamental rights. After that tense twelve-day trial, Walker issued a resounding and historic ruling: California’s exclusion of same-sex couples from civil marriage violated the U.S. Constitution. In June 2013, the United States Supreme Court denied the final appeal in Hollingsworth v. Perry, leaving same-sex couples in California free to marry.Drawing on interviews with lawyers and witnesses on both sides of the case, Yoshino takes us deep inside the trial. He brings the legal arguments to life, not only through his account of the case, but also by sharing his own story of finding love, marrying, and having children. Vivid, compassionate, and beautifully written, Speak Now is both a nuanced and authoritative account of a landmark trial, and a testament to how the clash of proofs in our judicial process can force debates to the ultimate level of clarity.

Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City


Javier Auyero - 2015
    But as in many American cities, poverty and penury are booming along with wealth and material abundance in contemporary Austin. Rich and poor residents lead increasingly separate lives as growing socioeconomic inequality underscores residential, class, racial, and ethnic segregation.In Invisible in Austin, the award-winning sociologist Javier Auyero and a team of graduate students explore the lives of those working at the bottom of the social order: house cleaners, office-machine repairers, cab drivers, restaurant cooks and dishwashers, exotic dancers, musicians, and roofers, among others. Recounting their subjects’ life stories with empathy and sociological insight, the authors show us how these lives are driven by a complex mix of individual and social forces. These poignant stories compel us to see how poor people who provide indispensable services for all city residents struggle daily with substandard housing, inadequate public services and schools, and environmental risks. Timely and essential reading, Invisible in Austin makes visible the growing gap between rich and poor that is reconfiguring the cityscape of one of America’s most dynamic places, as low-wage workers are forced to the social and symbolic margins.

addicted.pregnant.poor


Kelly Ray Knight - 2015
    In this stunning ethnography Kelly Ray Knight presents these women in all their complex humanity and asks what kinds of futures are possible for them given their seemingly hopeless situation. During her four years of fieldwork Knight documented women’s struggles as they traveled from the street to the clinic, jail, and family court, and back to the hotels. She approaches addicted pregnancy as an everyday phenomenon in these women's lives and describes how they must navigate the tension between pregnancy's demands to stay clean and the pull of addiction and poverty toward drug use and sex work. By creating the space for addicted women's own narratives and examining addicted pregnancy from medical, policy, and social science perspectives, Knight forces us to confront and reconsider the ways we think about addiction, trauma, health, criminality, and responsibility.

CCCP Cook Book: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine


Olga Syutkin - 2015
    The stories and recipes contained in the CCCP Cook Book reflect these turbulent times: from basic subsistence meals consumed by the average citizen (like okroshka, a cold soup made with the fermented beverage kvass) to extravagant banquets held by the political elite (suckling pig with buckwheat), with a scattering of classics (beef stroganoff) in between. Each recipe is introduced with a historical story or anecdote from the period, and illustrated using images sourced from original Soviet recipe books collected by the authors, food historians Olga and Pavel Syutkin.Many of the sometimes extraordinary-looking pictures depict dishes whose recipes used unobtainable ingredients, placing them firmly in the realm of "aspirational" fantasy for the average Soviet household. In their content and presentation, the recipes and illustrations act as windows into the cuisine and culture of the era. CCCP Cook Book offers an illustrated history of Soviet cuisine told through the stories and popular recipes from the period. The book contains 60 recipes from the Soviet period, including such delicacies as aspic, borscht, caviar and herring, by way of bird's milk cake and pelmeni.

Before the Court of Heaven


Jack Mayer - 2015
    Winner of 13 book awards.2017 Independent Press Award - Winner - Historical Fiction 2017 Independent Press Award - Winner - General Fiction 2016 IndieReader Discovery Award - 1st Place - Fiction2015 Nautilus Book Award Winner - Fiction - Silver medal2016 Readers' Favorite Book Award - Gold Medal - Fiction -Social Issues2016 Finalist - Grand Prize (Eric Hoffer Award) - Fiction2016 Honorable Mention (Eric Hoffer Award) - Commercial Fiction 2016 Finalist - First Horizon Award (Eric Hoffer Award) - Fiction 2015 Finalist - Foreword Reviews INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award -Historical              Fiction2015 Mom's Choice Award - Gold Medal - Historical Fiction2015 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award - Best Novel Fall 20152015 Beverly Hills Book Awards - Finalist- "Faction" - fiction based on true stories.A Best Indie Book of 2015 - IndieReader (5-stars) Shelf Unbound - Notable Indie -2015 Best Indie Books.Germany, after World War I.  Ernst Techow, son of a magistrate, a child of privilege, joins the violent right-wing response to Germany's defeat. As a member of the para-military Free Corps and the murderous Organization C, he is recruited into a clandestine assassination network trying to bring down Germany's fledgling Weimar democracy.  These are the seeds of the Third Reich.  Ernst participates in the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, the highest-ranking Jew in the Weimar Republic.While on trial for his life, Ernst receives an unfathomable offer of forgiveness that jolts his surety in the fascist cause and sets him on a complex and harrowing journey of redemption.  Throughout, he pursues his childhood sweetheart, Lisa.  They are star-crossed lovers, their passion inextinguishable, buffeted by the rising storm of Nazi ascendance.Before the Court of Heaven, though fiction, is populated by historical figures and accurately depicts events as they unfolded in Germany and beyond.  Animated as historical fiction, Before the Court of Heaven is an immunization against recurrence.

Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World


David Vine - 2015
    More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. still stations its troops at nearly a thousand locations in foreign lands. These bases are usually taken for granted or overlooked entirely, a little-noticed part of the Pentagon’s vast operations. But in an eye-opening account, Base Nation shows that the worldwide network of bases brings with it a panoply of ills—and actually makes the nation less safe in the long run.As David Vine demonstrates, the overseas bases raise geopolitical tensions and provoke widespread antipathy towards the United States. They also undermine American democratic ideals, pushing the U.S. into partnerships with dictators and perpetuating a system of second-class citizenship in territories like Guam. They breed sexual violence, destroy the environment, and damage local economies. And their financial cost is staggering: though the Pentagon underplays the numbers, Vine’s accounting proves that the bill approaches $100 billion per year.For many decades, the need for overseas bases has been a quasi-religious dictum of U.S. foreign policy. But in recent years, a bipartisan coalition has finally started to question this conventional wisdom. With the U.S. withdrawing from Afghanistan and ending thirteen years of war, there is no better time to re-examine the tenets of our military strategy. Base Nation is an essential contribution to that debate.

Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside


Quincy Carroll - 2015
    The first, Thomas, is an entitled deadbeat, content to pass the rest of his days in Asia skating by on the fact that he's white, while the second, a recent college graduate named Daniel, is an idealist at heart. Over the course of the novel, these two characters fight to establish primacy in Ningyuan, a remote town in the south of Hunan, with one of their more overzealous students, Bella, caught in between. Quincy Carroll's cleverly written debut novel examines what we bring from one country to another.

Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism


Kathryn S. Olmsted - 2015
    Olmsted reexamines the explosive labor disputes in the agricultural fields of Depression-era California, the cauldron that inspired a generation of artists and writers and that triggered the intervention of FDR’s New Deal. Right Out of California tells how this brief moment of upheaval terrified business leaders into rethinking their relationship to American politics—a narrative that pits a ruthless generation of growers against a passionate cast of reformers, writers, and revolutionaries.Olmsted reveals how California’s businessmen learned the language of populism with the help of allies in the media and entertainment industries, and in the process created a new style of politics: corporate funding of grassroots groups, military-style intelligence gathering against political enemies, professional campaign consultants, and alliances between religious and economic conservatives. The business leaders who battled for the hearts and minds of Depression-era California, moreover, would go on to create the organizations that launched the careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. A riveting history in its own right, Right Out of California is also a vital chapter in our nation’s political transformation whose echoes are still felt today.

Poetics of the Flesh


Mayra Rivera - 2015
    She connects conversations about corporeality in theology, political theory, and continental philosophy to show the relationship between the ways ancient Christian thinkers and modern Western philosophers conceive of the "body" and "flesh.” Her readings of the biblical writings of John and Paul as well as the work of Tertullian illustrate how Christian ideas of flesh influenced the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault, and inform her readings of Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, and others. Rivera also furthers developments in new materialism by exploring the intersections among bodies, material elements, social arrangements, and discourses through body and flesh. By painting a complex picture of bodies, and by developing an account of how the social materializes in flesh, Rivera provides a new way to understand gender and race.

A Different Kind of Same: A Memoir


Kelley Clink - 2015
    Though he’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager and had attempted suicide once before, the news came as a shock—and it sent Kelley into a spiral of guilt and grief. After Matt’s death, a chasm opened between the brother Kelley had known and the brother she’d buried. She kept telling herself she couldn’t understand why he’d done it—but the truth was, she could. Several years before he’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she’d been diagnosed with depression. Several years before he first attempted suicide by overdose, she had attempted suicide by overdose. She’d blazed the trail he’d followed. If he couldn’t make it, what hope was there for her?A Different Kind of Same traces Kelley’s journey through grief, her investigation into the role her own depression played in her brother’s death, and, ultimately, her path toward acceptance, forgiveness, resilience, and love.

My Body Is Yours: A Memoir


Michael V. Smith - 2015
    Smith is a multi-talented force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his early years as an inadequate male—a fey kid growing up in a small town amid a blue-collar family; a sissy; an insecure teenager desperate to disappear; and an obsessive writer-performer, drawn to compulsions of alcohol, sex, reading, spending, work, and art as many means to cope and heal.Drawing on his work as an artist whose work focuses on our preconceived notions about the body, this disarming and intriguing memoir questions what it means to be human. Michael asks: How can we know what a man is? How might understanding gender as metaphor be a tool for a deeper understanding of identity? In coming to terms with his past failures at masculinity, Michael offers a new way of thinking about breaking out of gender norms, and breaking free of a hurtful past.Michael V. Smith won the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers from the Writers Trust of Canada for his first novel, Cumberland. He's since published two poetry books and a second novel, Progress. He teaches creative writing in the faculty of creative and critical studies at University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus.

Crossroads: Women Coming of Age in Today's Uganda


Christopher Conte - 2015
    Now you can read their own stories in their own words in what one African reader describes as "an intriguing collection of human experiences in a fantastic yet delicate basket...a cultural keepsake."What do you do when your education qualifies you for high-level professional work but your culture says you, as a woman, should kneel before men? When sex education stresses how girls should please men - even by making painful changes to their own bodies? Or when your family haggles with your fiance's family over how many cows you are worth?Similarly, how would you make sense of your life if you spent your childhood sleeping in the bush every night to avoid marauding rebel soldiers? If you were held and tortured in a secret prison on a vague suspicion that you were linked to an enemy of the government? If imported religions tell you to denounce your parents' and grandparents' faith? Or if western-trained doctors can't heal local afflictions but many of your peers dismiss traditional healers as quacks or witchdoctors?In describing these and other dilemmas, these African women writers will surprise you as they strike a balance between past and future. Their stories will make you laugh and cry, simultaneously demonstrating what makes Africa unique and celebrating what unites people across cultures. Ultimately, their life stories will leave you celebrating the enduring strength of the human spirit.

Paris at War: 1939-1944


David Drake - 2015
    Readers will relive the fearful exodus from the city as the German army neared the capital, the relief and disgust felt when the armistice was signed, and the hardships and deprivations under Occupation. David Drake contrasts the plight of working-class Parisians with the comparative comfort of the rich, exposes the activities of collaborationists, and traces the growth of the Resistance from producing leaflets to gunning down German soldiers. He details the intrigues and brutality of the occupying forces, and life in the notorious transit camp at nearby Drancy, along with three other less well known Jewish work camps within the city.The book gains its vitality from the diaries and reminiscences of people who endured these tumultuous years. Drake’s cast of characters comes from all walks of life and represents a diversity of political views and social attitudes. We hear from a retired schoolteacher, a celebrated economist, a Catholic teenager who wears a yellow star in solidarity with Parisian Jews, as well as Resistance fighters, collaborators, and many other witnesses.Drake enriches his account with details from police records, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and newsreels. From his chronology emerge the broad rhythms and shifting moods of the city. Above all, he explores the contingent lives of the people of Paris, who, unlike us, co­uld not know how the story would end.

Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate


Abdel Bari Atwan - 2015
    In this timely and important book, Abdel Bari Atwan draws on his unrivaled knowledge of the global jihadi movement and Middle Eastern geopolitics to reveal the origins and modus operandi of Islamic State. Based on extensive field research and exclusive interviews with IS insiders, Islamic State outlines the group's leadership structure, as well as its strategies, tactics, and diverse methods of recruitment. Atwan traces the Salafi-jihadi lineage of IS, its ideological differences with al Qaeda and the deadly rivalry that has emerged between their leaders. He also shows how the group's rapid growth has been facilitated by its masterful command of social media platforms, the "dark web," Hollywood blockbuster-style videos, and even jihadi computer games, producing a powerful paradox where the ambitions of the Middle Ages have reemerged in cyberspace. As Islamic State continues to dominate the world's media headlines with horrific acts of ruthless violence, Atwan considers the movement's chances of survival and expansion and offers indispensable insights on potential government responses to contain the IS threat.

See San Francisco: Through the Lens of SFGirlbyBay


Victoria Smith - 2015
    This gorgeously photographed lifestyle guide gives readers an insider's tour of the City by the Bay through Victoria Smith's unique lens. Organized by neighborhood, each chapter features enchanting photos of hidden corners, local color, landmarks, and hotspots, revealing why so many people—Victoria included—are falling head over heels for this amazing city. Brimming with original, dreamy photography and packaged as a gorgeous jacketed hardcover, this lovely book makes a perfect gift for photography fans, San Francisco dwellers, visitors to the city, or anyone who has left their heart in San Francisco.

Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World


Sharon H. Chang - 2015
    In the last decade, we have also seen a sudden massive shift in America s racial makeup with the majority of the current under-5 age population being children of color. Asian and multiracial are the fastest growing self-identified groups in the United States. More than 2 million people indicated being mixed race Asian on the 2010 Census.Yet young multiracial Asian children are vastly underrepresented in the literature on racial identity. Why? And what are these children learning about themselves in an era that tries to be ahistorical, believes the race problem has been solved, and believes that mixed-race people are proof of it? This book is drawn from extensive research and interviews with 68 parents of multiracial children. It is the first to examine the complex task of supporting our youngest around being 2 or more races and Asian while living amongst post-racial ideologies.

Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (New Black Studies Series)


L.H. Stallings - 2015
    It is multisensory and multidimensional philosophy used in conjunction with the erotic, eroticism, and black erotica. It is the affect that shapes film, performance, sound, food, technology, drugs, energy, time, and the seeds of revolutionary ideas for black movements. But funk is also an experience to feel, to hear, to touch and taste, and in Funk the Erotic , L. H. Stallings uses funk in all its iterations as an innovation in black studies. Stallings uses funk to highlight the importance of the erotic and eroticism in Black cultural and political movements, debunking "the truth of sex" and its histories. Brandishing funk as a theoretical tool, Stallings argues that Western theories of the erotic fail as universally applicable terms or philosophies, and thus lack utility in discussions of black bodies, subjects, and culture. In considering the Victorian concept of freak in black funk, Stallings proposes that black artists across all media have fashioned a tradition that embraces the superfreak, sexual guerrilla, sexual magic, mama's porn, black trans narratives, and sex work in a post-human subject position. Their goal: to ensure survival and evolution in a world that exploits black bodies in capitalist endeavors, imperialism, and colonization. Revitalizing and wide-ranging, Funk the Erotic offers a needed examination of black sexual cultures, a discursive evolution of black ideas about eroticism, a critique of work society, a reexamination of love, and an articulation of the body in black movements.

Warrior Nation: A History of the Red Lake Ojibwe


Anton Treuer - 2015
    Unlike every other reservation in Minnesota, Red Lake holds its land in common—and, consequently, the tribe retains its entire reservation land base. The people of Red Lake developed the first modern indigenous democratic governance system in the United States, decades before any other tribe, but they also maintained their system of hereditary chiefs. The tribe never surrendered to state jurisdiction over crimes committed on its reservation.  The reservation is also home to the highest number of Ojibwe-speaking people in the state.  Warrior Nation covers four centuries of the Red Lake Nation’s forceful and assertive tenure on its land. Ojibwe historian and linguist Anton Treuer conducted oral histories with elders across the Red Lake reservation, learning the stories carried by the people. And the Red Lake band has, for the first time, made available its archival collections, including the personal papers of Peter Graves, the brilliant political strategist and tribal leader of the first half of the twentieth century, which tell a startling story about the negotiations over reservation boundaries.   This fascinating history offers not only a chronicle of the Red Lake Nation but also a compelling perspective on a difficult piece of U.S. history. Anton Treuer, professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, is the author of Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask and twelve other books on Ojibwe history and language.

There Is Only the Earth: Images from The Armenian Diaspora Project


Scout Tufankjian - 2015
    For the past three thousand years, waves of migrants left their ancestral homes in Eastern Turkey and Northern Syria, following ancient trade and pilgrimage routes and fleeing countless revolutions, civil wars, and massacres. Despite these centuries of displacement, however, today's Armenian diaspora is strong and vibrant—with eight million Armenians living in over 85 countries across the globe. In The Is Only the Earth, photographer Scout Tufankjian creates a portrait of the global Armenian community as it exists today. Through nearly 200 breathtaking full-color images and short interviews with Armenians around the world, Tufankjian shows how Armenians have thrived—how they have rebuilt their communities, how their families have remained linked, and how they have maintained their identity despite the pressures of assimilation.

Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism


Michael Joseph McVicar - 2015
    Drawing on exclusive access to Rushdoony's personal papers and extensive correspondence, Michael J. McVicar demonstrates the considerable role Reconstructionism played in the development of the radical Christian Right and an American theocratic agenda. As a religious movement, Reconstructionism aims at nothing less than reconstructing individuals through a form of Christian governance that, if implemented in the lives of U.S. citizens, would fundamentally alter the shape of American society.McVicar examines Rushdoony's career and traces Reconstructionism as it grew from a grassroots, populist movement in the 1960s to its height of popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. He reveals the movement's galvanizing role in the development of political conspiracy theories and survivalism, libertarianism and antistatism, and educational reform and homeschooling. The book demonstrates how these issues have retained and in many cases gained potency for conservative Christians to the present day, despite the decline of the movement itself beginning in the 1990s. McVicar contends that Christian Reconstruction has contributed significantly to how certain forms of religiosity have become central, and now familiar, aspects of an often controversial conservative revolution in America.

The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes


Robert Hughes - 2015
    I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails . . . I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one . . . Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate.” Robert Hughes wrote with brutal honesty about art, architecture, culture, religion, and himself. He translated his passions—of which there were many, both positive and negative—brilliantly, convincingly, and with vitality and immediacy, always holding himself to the same rigorous standards of skill, authenticity, and significance that he did his subjects. There never was, and never will be again, a voice like this. In this volume, that voice rings clear through a gathering of some of his most unforgettable writings, culled from nine of his most widely read and important books. This selection shows his enormous range and gives us a uniquely cohesive view of both the critic and the man. Most revealing, and most thrilling for Hughes’s legions of fans, are the never-before-published pages from his unfinished second volume of memoirs. These last writings show Robert Hughes at the height of his powers and can be read only with pleasure and a tinge of sadness that his extraordinary voice is no longer here to educate us as well as to clarify and define our world.

A Prayer for World Peace


Jane Goodall - 2015
    She asks us all to rise above our dogmas, to bring a spirit of generosity to the living world around us, to pray for justice and for those who are suffering. Illustrated with rich and colorful artwork, this is prayer that’s both personal and universal and one that will speak to people of all ages from all backgrounds.

Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic Over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds


Joseph Laycock - 2015
    A coalition of moral entrepreneurs that included representatives from the Christian Right, the field of psychology, and law enforcement claimed that these games were not only psychologically dangerous but an occult religion masquerading as a game. Dangerous Games explores both the history and the sociological significance of this panic.Fantasy role-playing games do share several functions in common with religion. However, religion--as a socially constructed world of shared meaning--can also be compared to a fantasy role-playing game. In fact, the claims of the moral entrepreneurs, in which they presented themselves as heroes battling a dark conspiracy, often resembled the very games of imagination they condemned as evil. By attacking the imagination, they preserved the taken-for-granted status of their own socially constructed reality. Interpreted in this way, the panic over fantasy-role playing games yields new insights about how humans play and together construct and maintain meaningful worlds.Laycock's clear and accessible writing ensures that Dangerous Games will be required reading for those with an interest in religion, popular culture, and social behavior, both in the classroom and beyond.

The Quarry: Essays


Susan Howe - 2015
    A powerful selection of Susan Howe's previously uncollected essays, The Quarry moves backward chronologically, from her brand-new "Vagrancy in the Park" (about Wallace Stevens) through such essential texts as "The Disappearance Approach," "Personal Narrative," "Sorting Facts," "Frame Structures," and "Where Should the Commander Be," and ending with her seminal early criticism, "The End of Art." The essays of The Quarry map the intellectual territory of one of America's most important and vital avant-garde poets.

Campus Sex, Campus Security


Jennifer Doyle - 2015
    Sex has its own administrative unit. It is a bureaucratic progression. —from Campus Sex, Campus SecurityThe psychic life of the university campus is ugly. The idyllic green quad is framed by paranoid cops and an anxious risk-management team. A student is beaten, another is soaked with pepper spray. A professor is thrown to the ground and arrested, charged with felony assault. As the campus is fiscally strip-mined, the country is seized by a crisis of conscience: the student makes headlines now as rape victim and rapist. An administrator writes a report. The crisis is managed.Campus Sex, Campus Security is Jennifer Doyle's clear-eyed critique of collegiate jurisprudence, in the era of campus corporatization, “less-lethal” weaponry, ubiquitous rape discourse, and litigious anxiety. Today's university administrator rides a wave of institutional insecurity, as the process of administering student protests and sexual-assault complaints rolls along a Möbius strip of shifting legality. One thing (a crime) flips into another (a violation) and back again. On campus, the criminal and civil converge, usually in the form of a hearing that mimics the rituals of a military court, with its secret committees and secret reports, and its sanctions and appeals.What is the university campus in this world? Who is it for? What sort of psychic space does it simultaneously produce and police? What is it that we want, really, when we call campus security?

Venom Doc: The Edgiest, Darkest, Strangest Natural History Memoir Ever


Bryan Grieg Fry - 2015
    He’s been bitten by twenty-six venomous snakes, been stung by three stingrays, and survived a near-fatal scorpion sting while deep in the Amazon jungle. He’s received more than four hundred stitches and broken twenty-three bones, including breaking his back in three places, and had to learn how to walk again. But when you research only the venom you yourself have collected, the adventures—and danger—never stop.Imagine a three-week-long first date in Siberia catching venomous water shrews with the daughter of a Russian war hero; a wedding attended by Eastern European prime ministers and their machine-gun-wielding bodyguards and snakes; or leading a team to Antarctica that results in the discovery of four new species of venomous octopi. Bryan’s discoveries have radically reshaped views on venom evolution and contributed to the creation of venom-based life-saving medications. In pursuit of venom, he has traveled the world collecting samples from Indonesia to Mexico, Germany, and Brazil. He’s encountered venomous creatures of all kinds, including the Malaysian king cobra, the Komodo dragon, and the brush-footed trapdoor spider. Bryan recounts his lifelong passion for studying the world’s most venomous creatures in this outlandish, captivating memoir, where he and danger are never far apart.

Microgroove: Forays into Other Music


John Corbett - 2015
    Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience, is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, P.J. Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann; and among other topics, he discusses recording formats, investigates the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry, and with Terri Kapsalis, analyzes the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to “other” music, and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing.

The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto's First Immigrant Neighbourhood


John Lorinc - 2015
    But the City considered it a slum, and bulldozed the area in the late 1950s to make way for a new civic square.The Ward finally tells the diverse stories of this extraordinary and resilient neighbourhood through archival photos and contributions from a wide array of voices, including historians, politicians, architects, story­­tellers, journalists and descendants of Ward residents. Their perspectives on playgrounds, tuberculosis, sex workers, newsies and even bathing bring The Ward to life and, in the process, raise important questions about how contemporary cities handle immigration, poverty and the geography of difference.

The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism


Liisa H. Malkki - 2015
    Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from aid recipients to aid workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world "out there," led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound neediness—the need for aid workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit "trauma teddies" and "aid bunnies" for "needy children," the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian aid often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an aid to sociality and to the imagination of the world.

The Billionth Monkey


Richard Kaczynski - 2015
    Professor Niels Belanger is having the week from hell. The chair of his department has quit. The cute waitress at Cafe du Monde won't speak to him. And now one of his students is trying to kill him. Belanger has stumbled into the deadly fantasy world of Nicholas Young, a partying frat boy whose unhealthy obsession with acting out urban legends has gone just a teensy bit over to the dark side. Everything changes when Belanger encounters the most unusual woman he has ever met: a wildly nonconformist goth who technically shouldn't exist. Yet the fact that she does forces him to accept that something much bigger and stranger is warping the shopworn fabric of reality. But are the two of them enough to stop a Millennial under-achiever from impossibly destroying the world?

Tehran Street Style


Hoda Katebi - 2015
    Actively challenging mainstream Western notions of Iran and fashion as well as domestic government clothing regulations, this book provides a visual introduction to the Iranian underground fashion industry and the young people who are making up the rules as they go.This photography book aims to not only serve as an inspirational guide for alternative dressing and style, but also to send the reader to explore a part of the world that has been hidden, misrepresented, and misunderstood in much of Western media. Fashion is a very powerful tool of self-expression and communication; it is a language that is universally spoken with endless possibilities to build bridges and inspire understanding and peace. And this book aims to do just that.Barnes and Noble

One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium: LGBT Educators Speak Out About What's Gotten Better . . . and What Hasn't


Kevin Jennings - 2015
    This all-new edition brings together stories from across America—and around the world—resulting in a rich tapestry of varied experiences. From a teacher who feels he must remain closeted in the comparative safety of New York City public schools to teachers who are out in places as far afield as South Africa and China, the teachers and school administrators in One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium prove that LGBT educators are as diverse and complex as humanity itself. Voices largely absent from the first two editions—including transgender people, people of color, teachers working in rural districts, and educators from outside the United States—feature prominently in this new collection, providing a fuller and deeper understanding of the triumphs and challenges of being an LGBT teacher today.

Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form


Paul K. Saint-Amour - 2015
    But can the anticipation of violence be a form of violence as well? Tense Future argues that it can-that twentieth-century war technologies and practices, particularly the aerial bombing of population centers, introduced non-combatants to acoercive and traumatizing expectation. During wartime, civilians braced for the next raid; during peacetime they braced for the next war. The pre-traumatic stress they experienced permeates the century's public debates and cultural works. In a series of groundbreaking readings, Saint-Amourillustrates how air war prophets theorized the wounding power of anticipation, how archive theory changed course in war's shadow, and how speculative fiction conjured visions of a civilizational collapse that would end literacy itself. And in this book's central chapters, he shows us how Ford MadoxFord, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and other interwar modernist writers faced the memory of one war and the prospect of another, some by pitting their fictions' encyclopedic scale and formal turbulence against total war, others by conceding war's inevitability while refusing to longfor a politically regressive peace.Total war: a conflict that exempts no one, disregarding any difference between soldier and civilian. Tense Future forever alters our understanding of the concept of total war by tracing its emergence during the First World War, its incubation in air power theory between the wars, and above all itsprofound partiality. For total war, during most of the twentieth century, meant conflict between imperial nation states; it did not include the violence those states routinely visited on colonial subjects during peacetime. Tacking back and forth between metropole and colony, between world war andpolice action, Saint-Amour describes the interwar refashioning of a world system of violence-production, one that remains largely intact in our own moment of perpetual interwar.

Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know®


Serhy Yekelchyk - 2015
    

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance


Uri McMillan - 2015
    In doing so, these artists raised new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment. McMillan reframes the concept of the avatar in the service of black performance art, describing black women performers’ skillful manipulation of synthetic selves and adroit projection of their performances into other representational mediums.A bold rethinking of performance art, Embodied Avatars analyzes daring performances of alterity staged by “ancient negress” Joice Heth and fugitive slave Ellen Craft, seminal artists Adrian Piper and Howardena Pindell, and contemporary visual and music artists Simone Leigh and Nicki Minaj. Fusing performance studies with literary analysis and visual culture studies, McMillan offers astute readings of performances staged in theatrical and quotidian locales, from freak shows to the streets of 1970s New York; in literary texts, from artists’ writings to slave narratives; and in visual and digital mediums, including engravings, photography, and video art. Throughout, McMillan reveals how these performers manipulated the dimensions of objecthood, black performance art, and avatars in a powerful re-scripting of their bodies while enacting artful forms of social misbehavior.

Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture


Allison McCracken - 2015
    Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.

You Can Leave Anytime


Rob Dinsmoor - 2015
    For 3 months, he enters a strange new world of controlling therapists, burnt-out orderlies, and young junkies, many of whom are fresh out of jail. He navigates this new world of suburban gangstas and bizarre rules without judgment. A great network of friends, a Zen outlook, and a very dry sense of humor get him through his day. As he sobers up and gets his head glued on straight, he faces his biggest challenge of all--getting out.

The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present


Michael Billington - 2015
    In this provocative and challenging new book, he offers his highly personal selection of the 100 greatest plays ranging from the Greeks to the present-day.But his book is no mere list. Billington justifies his choices in extended essays- and even occasional dialogues- that put the plays in context, explain their significance and trace their performance history. In the end, it's a book that poses an infinite number of questions. What makes a great play? Does the definition change with time and circumstance? Or are certain common factors visible down the ages? It's safe to say that it's a book that, in revising the accepted canon, is bound to stimulate passionate argument and debate.Everyone will have strong views on Billington's chosen hundred and will be inspired to make their own selections. But, coming from Britain's longest-serving theatre critic, these essays are the product of a lifetime spent watching and reading plays and record the adventures of a soul amongst masterpieces.

Pope Francis: The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism


Paul Vallely - 2015
    With a series of potent gestures, he declared a mission to restore authenticity and integrity to a Catholic Church bedeviled by sex abuse and secrecy, intrigue and infighting, ambition and arrogance. He declared it should be “a poor Church, for the poor.”Paul Vallely reexamines the complex past of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, recording many untold stories that explain his paradoxical presence. Francis has consistently shown a willingness to discuss issues previously considered taboo, his liberal instincts outraging traditionalists in the Vatican and especially in the Church hierarchy in the United States. At the same time, many of his statements have reassured conservative elements. “Pope Francis,” writes Vallely, “has not just demonstrated a different way of being a pope. He has shown the world a different way of being a Catholic.”

Feminist Surveillance Studies


Rachel E. Dubrofsky - 2015
    The contributors to this field-defining collection take up these questions, and in so doing provide new directions for analyzing surveillance. They use feminist theory to expose the ways in which surveillance practices and technologies are tied to systemic forms of discrimination that serve to normalize whiteness, able-bodiedness, capitalism, and heterosexuality. The essays discuss the implications of, among others, patriarchal surveillance in colonial North America, surveillance aimed at curbing the trafficking of women and sex work, women presented as having agency in the creation of the images that display their bodies via social media, full-body airport scanners, and mainstream news media discussion of honor killings in Canada and the concomitant surveillance of Muslim bodies. Rather than rehashing arguments as to whether or not surveillance keeps the state safe, the contributors investigate what constitutes surveillance, who is scrutinized, why, and at what cost. The work fills a gap in feminist scholarship and shows that gender, race, class, and sexuality should be central to any study of surveillance.Contributors. Seantel Anaïs, Mark Andrejevic, Paisley Currah, Sayantani DasGupta, Shamita Das Dasgupta, Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Lisa Jean Moore, Yasmin Jiwani, Ummni Khan, Shoshana Amielle Magnet, Kelli Moore, Lisa Nakamura, Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Smith, Kevin Walby, Megan M. Wood, Laura Hyun Yi Kang

Love Not Given Lightly: Profiles from the Edge of Sex


Tina Horn - 2015
    In her vast experience in sexual undergrounds, Tina has befriended pro-dommes, porn stars, kinky fetishists, rent boys, and more. Instead of writing a sex worker memoir, she opted to tell the stories of the people she met along the way. Illuminating human issues of desire, gender, beauty, and ultimately friendship, the stories in this book will do no less than alter the way you think about modern sexuality in America.Tina Horn is a writer, educator, and interdisciplinary media-maker. She co-created, produced, and directed QueerPorn.Tv, which has won two Feminist Porn Awards and was nominated for an AVN. Her writing has appeared in several Cleis Press anthologies, including Best Sex Writing 2015. She has blogged for Vice, Nerve, and Fleshbot and published articles in the Believer, AORTA, Up and Coming, and Whore! magazines. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction rriting from Sarah Lawrence College. Originally from Northern California, Tina now lives in Manhattan.

Question Bridge: Black Males in America


Deborah Willis - 2015
    The questions range from the comic to the sublimely philosophical: from "Am I the only one who has problems eating chicken, watermelon and bananas in front of white people?" to "Why is it so difficult for black American men in this culture to be themselves, their essential selves, and remain who they truly are?" The answers tackle the issues that continue to surround black male identity today in a uniquely honest, no-holds-barred manner.While the ostensible subject is black men, the conversation that evolves in these pages is ultimately about the nature of living in a post-Obama, post-Ferguson, post-Voting Rights Act America. "Question Bridge: Black Males in America" is about who we are and what we mean to one another. Most critically, it asks: how can we start to dismantle the myths and misconceptions that have evolved around race and gender in America--how can we reset the narrative about ourselves?The project's founding artists, along with contributions from Andrew Young, Jesse Williams, Rashid Shabazz and Delroy Lindo, contextualize the body of the work and provide closing remarks on our current and future social climate.

She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves


Hannah Priest - 2015
    The book includes contributors from various disciplines, and offers a cross-period, interdisciplinary exploration of a perennially popular cultural production. The essays in this collection explore the particular challenges female werewolves pose - to gender construction, to ideals of femininity and corporeality, to racial and sexual norms, and to our concepts of 'human' and 'monster'. The book's historical scope is broad, covering material from the Middle Ages to the present day. With chapters on folklore, history, witch trials, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and gaming, the contributors offer a variety of critical approaches to the figure of the female werewolf. Considering issues such as religious and social contexts, colonialism, constructions of racial and gendered identities, corporeality and subjectivity - as well as female body hair, sexuality and violence - She-wolf reveals the varied ways in which the female werewolf is a manifestation of deep-rooted and complex cultural anxieties, as well as a site of continued fascination. For scholars of popular culture, cultural history and gender studies, this is an essential study of a complex and multifaceted creation.

Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline


Dora Apel - 2015
    In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films.   Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom


Sylvester A. Johnson - 2015
    It examines the intersection of Black religion and colonialism over several centuries to explain the relationship between empire and democratic freedom. Rather than treating freedom and its others (colonialism, slavery and racism) as opposites, Sylvester A. Johnson interprets multiple periods of Black religious history to discern how Atlantic empires (particularly that of the United States) simultaneously enabled the emergence of particular forms of religious experience and freedom movements as well as disturbing patterns of violent domination. Johnson explains theories of matter and spirit that shaped early indigenous religious movements in Africa, Black political religion responding to the American racial state, the creation of Liberia, and FBI repression of Black religious movements in the twentieth century. By combining historical methods with theoretical analysis, Johnson explains the seeming contradictions that have shaped Black religions in the modern era.

Way of the Bushman: Spiritual Teachings and Practices of the Kalahari Ju/'hoansi


Bradford P. Keeney - 2015
    Translated by Beesa Boo, a Bushman, and interspersed with detailed commentary from Bradford and Hillary Keeney, this book presents the core teachings of the Kalahari Bushmen as told by the tribal elders themselves. Decades in the making, it constitutes the first comprehensive work on the world’s oldest tradition of healing and spiritual experience. Told in their own words, these teachings reveal how the Bushmen are able to receive direct transmissions of God’s love in the form of the universal life force, n/om. The individuals who are filled with this force describe it as an awakened, energized feeling of love that inspires a spontaneous and heightened ecstatic awareness that opens mystical perception. Having your heart transfixed by this force enables true healing and spiritual growth to occur. Experiencing the force in your entire being, through a vision of “God’s egg”, awakens deep spiritual wisdom and extraordinary healing gifts. Those who “own the egg” are blessed with the ability to have direct communication with the Divine, a “rope to God,” and can communicate with others for all “ropes” are connected. Conveying the deep love that is the dominant emotion of Bushman spirituality, the book explores tribal legends and teaching tales, the importance of dreams and encounters with animals, the origins of their dances, such as the giraffe dance, and specific rituals and ceremonies, including puberty rites for boys and girls. “As the elder teachers of the Ju’/hoan Bushman (San) people, we hold the most enduring traditional wisdom concerning healing and spiritual experience. This book is a testimony of our ecstatic ways. We happily share our basic teachings about spirituality and healing with those whose hearts are sincerely open.”

One Nation Under God (DP): A Christian Hope for American Politics


Bruce Ashford - 2015
    Many Christians desire to relate their faith to politics but simply don’t know how. This book exists to equip the reader to apply Christianity to politics with both grace and truth, with both boldness and humility.   Politics is not an evil arena to be avoided. Neither is it our only avenue for impacting society. The reality is much more complex and, oddly enough, much more promising.

At Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz


David Spalding - 2015
    In an astonishing new large-scale project, he turns his attention to Alcatraz—a place he cannot visit because he is not permitted to leave China, but that stands as a world-famous symbol of both incarceration and protest. This book showcases a major exhibition of site-specific, multimedia installations and sculptures Ai Weiwei has created for the island, on view from the fall of 2014 through the spring of 2015. Featuring beautiful photographs and thought-provoking text, At Large is the essential document of this remarkable happening from one of today's most celebrated artists.

Animals Helping to Detect Diseases


Susan H. Gray - 2015
    "Learn how animals can be trained to detect diseases in humans."--

The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death


Sarah J. Lauro - 2015
    The Transatlantic Zombie provides a more complete history of the zombie than has ever been told, explaining how the myth’s migration to the New World was facilitated by the transatlantic slave trade, and reveals the real-world import of storytelling, reminding us of the power of myths and mythmaking, and the high stakes of appropriation and homage.  Beginning with an account of a probable ancestor of the zombie found in the Kongolese and Angolan regions of seventeenth-century Africa and ending with a description of the way, in contemporary culture, new media are used to facilitate zombie-themed events, Sarah Juliet Lauro plots the zombie’s cultural significance through Caribbean literature, Haitian folklore, and American literature, film, and the visual arts. The zombie entered US consciousness through the American occupation of Haiti, the site of an eighteenth-century slave rebellion that became a war for independence, thus making the figuration of living death inseparable from its resonances with both slavery and rebellion. Lauro bridges African mythology and US mainstream culture by articulating the ethical complications of the zombie as a cultural conquest that was rebranded for the American cinema. As The Transatlantic Zombie shows, the zombie is not merely a bogeyman representing the ills of modern society, but a battleground over which a cultural war has been fought between the imperial urge to absorb exotic, threatening elements, and the originary, Afro-diasporic culture’s preservation through a strategy of mythic combat.

White Nights, Black Paradise


Sikivu Hutchinson - 2015
    Fatally bonded by fear of racist annihilation, the community's greatest symbol of crisis was the White Night; a rehearsal of revolutionary mass suicide that eventually led to the deaths of over 900 church members of all ages, genders and sexual orientations. White Nights, Black Paradise focuses on three fictional black women characters who were part of the Peoples Temple movement but took radically different paths to Jonestown: Hy, a drifter and a spiritual seeker, her sister Taryn, an atheist with an inside line on the church's money trail and Ida Lassiter, an activist whose watchdog journalism exposes the rot of corruption, sexual abuse, racism and violence in the church, fueling its exodus to Guyana. White Nights, Black Paradise is a riveting story of complicity and resistance; loyalty and betrayal; black struggle and black sacrifice. It locates Peoples Temple and Jonestown in the shadow of the civil rights movement, Black Power, Second Wave feminism and the Great Migration. Recapturing black women's voices, White Nights, Black Paradise explores their elusive quest for social justice, home and utopia. In so doing, the novel provides a complex window onto the epic flameout of a movement that was not only an indictment of religious faith but of American democracy.

Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution


Michael Denning - 2015
    Between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern times unfolded in a series of obscure recording sessions, as hundreds of unknown musicians entered makeshift studios to record the melodies and rhythms of urban streets and dancehalls. The musical styles and idioms etched onto shellac disks reverberated around the globe: among them Havana’s son, Rio’s samba, New Orleans’ jazz, Buenos Aires’ tango, Seville’s flamenco, Cairo’s tarab, Johannesburg’s marabi, Jakarta’s kroncong, and Honolulu’s hula. They triggered the first great battle over popular music and became the soundtrack to decolonization.

Hillary Rodham Clinton Presidential Playset: Includes Ten Paper Dolls, Three Rooms of Fun, Fashion Accessories, and More!


Caitlin Kuhwald - 2015
    Be HRC’s chief of staff as she takes questions at the press podium, hashes out tough negotiations in the Situation Room, or even consults with the ghost of Abe Lincoln. Complete with a pop-up cast of characters and accouterments (Bill comes with a lawn mower to keep him busy), this fun and feminist-friendly playset is perfect for Hillary fans young and old.

enGendered: God’s Gift of Gender Difference in Relationship


Sam A. Andreades - 2015
    It concludes that the more distinction is embraced, the closer a man and woman become. Thus gender, rightly understood, is a tool for intimacy. Written in a compassionate tone and winsome style, the volume speaks to Christians who want to know what the Bible says about gender differences and why. This theology of gender is also of value for people who struggle with same-sex attraction but want to follow Christ.

How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth


David Clarke - 2015
    The book will also explore the overlaps between UFO belief and religion and superstition.

Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness


Miya Tokumitsu - 2015
    Our ideas of what the "virtues" of pursuing success in capitalism have changed dramatically over time. In the past, we believed that work undertaken with an ethos of industriousness promised financial stability and basic comfort and security for our families. Now, our working life is conflated with the pursuit of pleasure. Fantastically successful—and popular—entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey command us. "You've got to love what you do," Jobs tells an audience of college grads about to enter the workforce, while Winfrey exhorts her audience to "live your best life." The promises made to today's workers seem so much larger and nobler than those of previous generations. Why settle for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage and a perfectly functional eight-year-old car when you can get rich becoming your "best" self and have a blast along the way?But workers today are doing more and more for less and less. This reality is frighteningly palpable in eroding paychecks and benefits, the rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few, and workers' loss of control over their labor conditions. But where is the protest and anger from workers against a system that tells them to love their work and asks them to do it for less? While winner-take-all capitalism grows ever more ruthless, the rhetoric of passion for labor proliferates.In Do What You Love, Tokumitsu articulates and examines the sacrifices people make for a chance at loveable, self-actualizing, and, of course, wealth-generating work and the conditions facilitated by this pursuit. This book continues the conversation sparked by the author's earlier Slate article and provides a devastating look at the state of modern America's labor and workforce.

The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971


Nayanika Mookherjee - 2015
    Nayanika Mookherjee demonstrates that while this celebration of birangonas as heroes keeps them in the public memory, they exist in the public consciousness as what Mookherjee calls a spectral wound. Dominant representations of birangonas as dehumanized victims with disheveled hair, a vacant look, and rejected by their communities create this wound, the effects of which flatten the diversity of their experiences through which birangonas have lived with the violence of wartime rape. In critically examining the pervasiveness of the birangona construction, Mookherjee opens the possibility for a more politico-economic, ethical, and nuanced inquiry into the sexuality of war.

Splat!: The Most Exciting Artists of All Time


Mary Richards - 2015
    Organized by artist and covering both key events and major movements such as the Renaissance and Impressionism to Surrealism and contemporary art, it is a valuable resource for young people curious about art.Each artist is introduced with bulleted facts including their country of origin, most famous works, the greatest challenges they faced in creating their art, background information, the movement they belonged to, and techniques they employed. This overview is expanded with further insight into who these artists were and how they changed the course of art. Here are Michelangelo and the High Renaissance; Bruegel and his paintings of everyday peasant life; Manet and the shock of Impressionism; and Duchamp and the Dada revolution. Children can also read the real-life stories of artists, such as Caravaggio, Jan Vermeer, Henri Rousseau, Vincent van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, and Frida Kahlo, who dared to imagine new ways of depicting the world.

Pop Grenade From Public Enemy to Pussy Riot – Dispatches from Musical Frontlines


Matthew Collin - 2015
    Based on first-hand, personal reportage from raves, riots and rebellions, it explores how music has been used as a weapon in struggles for liberation and attempts to create temporary paradises. From Berlin’s anarchic techno scene after the fall of the Wall to outlaw sound systems in wartime Bosnia, from Moscow during the crackdown on Pussy Riot to New York in the militant early years of hip-hop, it tells the extraordinary stories of some of the world’s most audacious musical freedom fighters, disco visionaries and rock’n’roll rebels with a cause.

Surviving Images: Cinema, War, and Cultural Memory in the Middle East


Kamran Rastegar - 2015
    It does so through a study of three historical eras: the colonial period, the national-independence struggle, and the postcolonial. Beginning with a study of British colonial cinema on the Sudan, then exploring anti-colonial cinema in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, followed by case studies of films emerging from postcolonial contexts in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, this work aims to fill a gap in the critical literature on both Middle Eastern cinemas, and to contribute more broadly to scholarship on social trauma and cultural memory in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This work treats the concept of trauma critically, however, and posits that social trauma must be understood as a framework for producing social and political meaning out of these historical events. Social trauma thus sets out a productive process of historical interpretation, and cultural texts such as cinematic works both illuminate and contribute to this process. Through these discussions, Surviving Images illustrates cinema's productive role in contributing to the changing dynamics of cultural memory of war and social conflict in the modern world.

Bourdieu: The Next Generation: The Development of Bourdieu's Intellectual Heritage in Contemporary UK Sociology


Jenny Thatcher - 2015
    It will provide a discussion of the working mechanisms of thinking through and/or with Bourdieu when analysing data. In each chapter, individual authors discuss and reflect upon their own research and the ways in which they put Bourdieu to work. The aim of this book is not to just to provide examples of the development of Bourdieusian research, but for each author to reflect on the ways in which they came across Bourdieu's work, why it speaks to them (including a reflexive consideration of their own background), and the way in which it is thus useful in their thinking. Many of the authors were introduced to Bourdieu's works after his death. The research problems which the individual authors tackle are contextualised in a different time and space to the one Bourdieu occupied when he was developing his conceptual framework. This book will demonstrate how his concepts can be applied as "thinking tools" to understand contemporary social reality. Throughout Bourdieu's career, he argued that sociologists need to create an epistemological break, to abandon our common sense - or as much as we can - and to formulate findings from our results. In essence, we are putting Bourdieu to work to provide a structural constructivist approach to social reality anchored through empirical reflexivity.

A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America


Keith P. Feldman - 2015
    arms agreement with Israel in 1962, John F. Kennedy assured Golda Meir that the United States had “a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East,” comparable only to that of the United States with Britain. After more than five decades such a statement might seem incontrovertible—and yet its meaning has been fiercely contested from the start. A Shadow over Palestine brings a new, deeply informed, and transnational perspective to the decades and the cultural forces that have shaped sharply differing ideas of Israel’s standing with the United States—right up to the violent divisions of today. Focusing on the period from 1960 to 1985, author Keith P. Feldman reveals the centrality of Israel and Palestine in postwar U.S. imperial culture. Some representations of the region were used to manufacture “commonsense” racial ideologies underwriting the conviction that liberal democracy must coexist with racialized conditions of segregation, border policing, poverty, and the repression of dissent. Others animated vital critiques of these conditions, often forging robust if historically obscured border-crossing alternatives. In this rich cultural history of the period, Feldman deftly analyzes how artists, intellectuals, and organizations—from the United Nations, the Black Panther Party, and the Association of Arab American University Graduates to James Baldwin, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Edward Said, and June Jordan—linked the unfulfilled promise of liberal democracy in the United States with the perpetuation of settler democracy in Israel and the possibility of Palestine’s decolonization.In one of his last essays, published in 2003, Edward Said wrote, “In America, Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not foreign policy, matters.” A Shadow over Palestine maps this jagged terrain on which this came to be, amid a wealth of robust alternatives, and the undeterred violence at home and abroad unleashed as a result of this special relationship.

Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino


Adilifu Nama - 2015
    Consequently, there is an uncomfortable and often awkward frankness associated with virtually all of Tarantino’s films, particularly when it comes to race and blackness. Yet beyond the debate over whether Tarantino is or is not racist is the fact that his films effectively articulate racial anxieties circulating in American society as they engage longstanding racial discourses and hint at emerging trends. This radical racial politics—always present in Tarantino’s films but kept very much on the quiet—is the subject of Race on the QT.Adilifu Nama concisely deconstructs and reassembles the racial dynamics woven into Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained, as they relate to historical and current racial issues in America. Nama’s eclectic fusion of cultural criticism and film analysis looks beyond the director’s personal racial attitudes and focuses on what Tarantino’s filmic body of work has said and is saying about race in America symbolically, metaphorically, literally, impolitely, cynically, sarcastically, crudely, controversially, and brilliantly.

Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet


Janet Gyatso - 2015
    It further studies the adaptation of Buddhist concepts and values to medical concerns and suggests important dimensions of Buddhism's role in the development of Asian and global civilization.Through its unique focus and sophisticated reading of source materials, Being Human adds a crucial chapter in the larger historiography of science and religion. The book opens with the bold achievements in Tibetan medical illustration, commentary, and institution building during the period of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, then looks back to the work of earlier thinkers, tracing a strategically astute dialectic between scriptural and empirical authority on questions of history and the nature of human anatomy. It follows key differences between medicine and Buddhism in attitudes toward gender and sex and the moral character of the physician, who had to serve both the patient's and the practitioner's well-being. Being Human in a Buddhist World ultimately finds that Tibetan medical scholars absorbed ethical and epistemological categories from Buddhism yet shied away from ideal systems and absolutes, instead embracing the imperfectability of the human condition.

Pillars of Cloud and Fire: The Politics of Exodus in African American Biblical Interpretation


Herbert Robinson Marbury - 2015
    Denied civil access to the basic rights granted to others, African Americans have developed their own sacred traditions and their own civil discourses. As part of this effort, African American intellectuals offered interpretations of the Bible which were radically different and often fundamentally oppositional to those of many of their white counterparts. By imagining a freedom unconstrained, their work charted a broader and, perhaps, a more genuinely American identity. In Pillars of Cloud and Fire, Herbert Robinson Marbury offers a comprehensive survey of African American biblical interpretation.Each chapter in this compelling volume moves chronologically, from the antebellum period and the Civil War through to the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Obama era, to offer a historical context for the interpretative activity of that time and to analyze its effect in transforming black social reality. For African American thinkers such as Absalom Jones, David Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Frances E. W. Harper, Adam Clayton Powell, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the exodus story became the language-world through which freedom both in its sacred resonance and its civil formation found expression. This tradition, Marbury argues, has much to teach us in a world where fundamentalisms have become synonymous with "authentic" religious expression and American identity. For African American biblical interpreters, to be American and to be Christian was always to be open and oriented toward freedom.

Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital Volume 1


Christian Fuchs - 2015
    Through a range of international, current-day examples, Fuchs emphasises the continued importance of Marx and his work in a time when transnational media companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook play an increasingly important role in global capitalism. Discussion questions and exercises at the end of each chapter help readers to further apply Marx's work to a modern-day context.

Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature


Aaron S. Allen - 2015
    Twenty-two authors provide a range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical chapters representing disciplines such as anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental studies, ethnomusicology, history, literature, musicology, performance studies, and psychology. They bring their specialized training to bear on interdisciplinary topics, both individually and in collaboration. Emerging from the whole is a view of ecomusicology as a field, a place where many disciplines come together. The topics addressed in this volume-contemporary composers and traditional musics, acoustic ecology and politicized soundscapes, material sustainability and environmental crisis, familiar and unfamiliar sounds, local places and global warming, birds and mice, hearing and listening, biomusic and soundscape ecology, and more-engage with conversations in the various realms of music study as well as in environmental studies and cultural studies. As with any healthy ecosystem, the field of ecomusicology is dynamic, but this edited collection provides a snapshot of it in a formative period. Each chapter is short, designed to be accessible to the nonspecialist, and includes extensive bibliographies; some chapters also provide further materials on a companion website: http: //www.ecomusicology.info/cde/. An introduction and interspersed editorial summaries help guide readers through four current directions-ecological, fieldwork, critical, and textual-in the field of ecomusicology.

!Feliz Navidad!: Celebrating a Mexican Christmas


World Book, Inc. - 2015
    Also includes crafts, recipes, and carols.

A Nation of Nations: A Story of America After the 1965 Immigration Law


Tom Gjelten - 2015
    Significantly, these immigrants are not coming from Europe, as was the case before 1965, but from all corners of the globe.In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was ninety percent white, ten percent African American, with a little more than one hundred families who were "other." Currently the African American percentage of the population is about the same, but the Anglo white population is less than fifty percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the county. A Nation of Nations follows the lives of a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually "Americanize." Hailing from Korea, Bolivia, and Libya, these families have stories that illustrate common immigrant themes: friction, economic competition and entrepreneurship, and racial and cultural stereotyping.It's been half a century since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act changed the landscape of America, and no book has assessed the impact or importance of this law as this one does, with its brilliant combination of personal stories and larger demographic and political issues.

Colors of Israel


Rachel Raz - 2015
    Includes the English, Hebrew and transliterated words for all the colors.

Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance


Anthea Kraut - 2015
    dance-makers' investment in intellectual property rights. Stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs efforts to win copyright protection for choreography and teases outtheir raced and gendered politics, showing how dancers have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power.A number of the artists featured in the book are well-known in the history of American dance, including Loie Fuller, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, and George Balanchine. But the book also uncovers a host of marginalized figures--from the South Asian dancer Mohammed Ismail, to theAfrican American pantomimist Johnny Hudgins, to the African American blues singer Alberta Hunter, to the white burlesque dancer Faith Dane--who were equally interested in positioning themselves as subjects rather than objects of property.Drawing on critical race and feminist theories and on cultural studies of copyright, Choreographing Copyright offers fresh insight into the raced and gendered hierarchies that govern the theatrical marketplace, white women's historically contingent relationship to property rights, legacies ofownership of black bodies and appropriation of non-white labor, and the tension between dance's ephemerality and its reproducibility.

After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction


Renata Adler - 2015
    In her essays and long-form journalism, she has captured the cultural zeitgeist, distrusted the accepted wisdom, and written stories that would otherwise go untold. As a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1963 to 2001, Adler reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama; on the war in Biafra, the Six-Day War, and the Vietnam War; on the Nixon impeachment inquiry and Congress; on cultural life in Cuba. She has also written about cultural matters in the United States, films (as chief film critic for The New York Times), books, politics, television, and pop music. Like many journalists, she has put herself in harm’s way in order to give us the news, not the “news” we have become accustomed to—celebrity journalism, conventional wisdom, received ideas—but the actual story, an account unfettered by ideology or consensus. She has been unafraid to speak up when too many other writers have joined the pack. In this sense, Adler is one of the few independent journalists writing in America today.This collection of Adler’s nonfiction draws on Toward a Radical Middle (a selection of her earliest New Yorker pieces), A Year in the Dark (her film reviews), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (a selection of essays on politics and media), and also includes uncollected work from the past two decades. The more recent pieces are concerned with, in her words, “misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and, to a degree, the journalist’s role in it.” With a brilliant literary and legal mind, Adler parses power by analyzing language: the language of courts, of journalists, of political figures, of the man on the street. In doing so, she unravels the tangled narratives that pass for the resolution of scandal and finds the threads that others miss, the ones that explain what really is going on here—from the Watergate scandal, to the “preposterous” Kenneth Starr report submitted to the House during the Clinton impeachment inquiry, to the plagiarism and fabrication scandal of the former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. And she writes extensively about the Supreme Court and the power of its rulings, including its fateful decision in Bush v. Gore.

Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology


Michelle M. Wright - 2015
    Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.”By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it.Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.

Waste


Brian Thill - 2015
    Whatever else an object is, it's also waste-or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Wielding Words Like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995–2005


Ward Churchill - 2015
    Beginning with a foreword by Seneca historian Barbara Alice Mann describing sustained efforts by police and intelligence agencies as well as university administrators and other academic adversaries to discredit or otherwise “neutralize” both the man and his work, the book includes material illustrating the range of formats Churchill has adopted in stating his case, from sharply framed book reviews and review essays, to equally pointed polemics and op-eds, and formal essays designed to reach both scholarly and popular audiences. The items selected, several of them previously unpublished, also reflect the broad range of topics addressed in Churchill’s scholarship, from the fallacies of archeological/anthropological orthodoxy like the Bering Strait migration hypothesis and the insistence of “cannibologists” that American Indians were traditionally man-eaters, to cinematic degradations of native people by Hollywood, the historical and ongoing genocide of North America’s native peoples, questions of American Indian identity, and the systematic distortion of political and legal history by reactionary scholars as a means of denying the realities of U.S.–Indian relations. Also included are both the initial “stream-of-consciousness” version of Churchill’s famous—or notorious—“little Eichmanns” opinion piece analyzing the causes of the attacks on 9/11, as well as the counterpart essay in which his argument was fully developed and garnered honorable mention for the 2004 Gustavus Myers Award for best writing on human rights. Less typical of Churchill’s oeuvre is an essay commemorating the passing of Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas, and another on that of Yankton Sioux legal scholar and theologian Vine Deloria Jr., to each of whom he acknowledges a deep intellectual debt. More unusual still is his moving and profoundly personal effort to come to grips with the life and death of his late wife, Leah Renae Kelly, thereby illuminating in very human terms the grim and lasting effects of Canada’s residential schools upon the country’s indigenous peoples.

Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913


Victor Román Mendoza - 2015
    imperial incursions into the Philippines enabled the growth of unprecedented social and sexual intimacies between native Philippine and U.S. subjects. The real and imagined intimacies—whether expressed through friendship, love, or eroticism—threatened U.S. gender and sexuality norms. To codify U.S. heteronormative behavior, the colonial government prohibited anything loosely defined as perverse, which along with popular representations of Filipinos, regulated colonial subjects and depicted them as sexually available, diseased, and degenerate. Mendoza analyzes laws, military records, the writing of Philippine students in the United States, and popular representations of Philippine colonial subjects to show how their lives, bodies, and desires became the very battleground for the consolidation of repressive legal, economic, and political institutions and practices of the U.S. colonial state. By highlighting the importance of racial and gendered violence in maintaining control at home and abroad, Mendoza demonstrates that studies of U.S. sexuality must take into account the reach and impact of U.S. imperialism.

Methods of Critical Discourse Studies


Ruth Wodak - 2015
    With international examples and an interdisciplinary approach, readers gain a rich understanding of the many angles into critical discourse analysis, the fundamentals of how analysis works and examples from written texts, online data and images. This new edition: expands coverage of multimodality adds two new chapters on social media and analysis of online data supports learning with a guided introduction to each chapter includes a new and extended glossary Clearly written, practical and rigorous in its approach, this book is the ideal companion when embarking on research that focuses on discourse and meaning-making.

Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era


Ellen C. Scott - 2015
    Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the “N-word.” This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers.Cinema Civil Rights presents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards.Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched, Cinema Civil Rights presents us with an in-depth look at the film industry’s role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.

Little Nemo's Big New Dreams


Josh O'Neill - 2015
    From the original broadsheet-sized edition, we have selected more than thirty glorious, unforgettable, or even silly dreams. Join Nemo on his journey out of 1905 and, dream by dream, explore the wild and wonderful world of today's most imaginative dreamers!

The Big Gay Alphabet Coloring Book


Jacinta Bunnell - 2015
    Each unique page, made up of inked and framed line drawings with beautiful typography, is reminiscent of a handsomely designed, vintage children’s alphabet book and aims to bring greater understanding of gender fluidity, gender diversity, and sexual orientation.