Best of
Cultural-Studies

2017

Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion


Alan Sepinwall - 2017
    Created by Vince Gilligan, the series charts the transformation of high school science teacher Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) into a cold, calculating meth kingpin. Breaking Bad 101 collects esteemed critic Alan Sepinwall’s (Uproxx) popular Breaking Bad recaps in book form, featuring new, exclusive essays and completely revised and updated commentary—as well as insights from and interviews with the creative masterminds behind Breaking Bad. The ultimate critical companion for one of the greatest television dramas of all time, Breaking Bad 101 offers fans Sepinwall’s smart, funny, and incisive analysis of the psychology and filmmaking craft behind each episode and celebrates the series’ unique place in pop-culture history.

The Raincoats' The Raincoats


Jenn Pelly - 2017
    They had a violin player. They came from Portugal, Spain, and England. Their anarchy was poetic. Working with the iconic Rough Trade Records at its radical beginnings, they were the first group of punk women to actively call themselves feminists.In this short book—the first on The Raincoats—author Jenn Pelly tells the story of the group's audacious debut album, which Kurt Cobain once called “wonderfully classic scripture.” Pelly builds on rare archival materials and extensive interviews with members of The Raincoats, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Hole, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, and more. She draws formal inspiration from the collage-like The Raincoats itself to explore this album's magic, vulnerability, and strength.

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation


Michael Chabon - 2017
    Through these incisive, perceptive, and poignant essays, readers will gain unique insight into the narratives behind the litany of grim destruction broadcasted nightly on the news, as well as deeper understanding of the conflict as experienced by the people who live in the occupied territories. Together, these stories stand witness to the human cost of the occupation.

Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design


Beatriz Colomina - 2017
    Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Colomina's and Wigley's field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges. Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.

Strange Days: Life in the Spirit in a Time of Upheaval


Mark Sayers - 2017
    Weekly terrorist attacks. The refugee crisis. Transgender bathrooms. Academic safe spaces. Tensions with Russia. A perpetually uncertain economy. The list goes on. It’s enough to make us crazy… or want to put our heads in the sand.  But we can’t, because these are our times, and we must face them. So what many Christians are looking for is someone to communicate a way forward—someone who both understands culture and trusts the Bible. Mark Sayers is such a leader, one who “writes from the future.” He is a gifted cultural analysist who combines his biblical knowledge, curious mind, and pastoral heart to offer a guide to the times. Strange Days will help Christians slow down, get their bearings, and follow God with wisdom and tact in this wild world.“Take heart, for I have overcome the world,” Jesus said nearly 2,000 years ago. And that’s the message of Strange Days, the message the church needs today.

Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes


Diane Reay - 2017
    The book addresses the urgent question of why the working classes are still faring so much worse than the upper and middle classes in education, and vitally - what we can do to achieve a fairer system.

Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands


Stuart Hall - 2017
    Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingston's stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity. With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds.

Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility


Reina GossettMiss Major Griffin-Gracy - 2017
    Trans visibility is touted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with a political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people (especially trans women of color) and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law. Trap Door grapples with these contradictions. The essays, conversations, and dossiers gathered here delve into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered “doors”—entrances to visibility and recognition—that are actually “traps” accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms. The volume speculates about a third term, perhaps uniquely suited for our time: the trapdoor, neither entrance nor exit, but a secret passageway leading elsewhere. Trap Door begins a conversation that extends through and beyond trans culture, showing how these issues have relevance for anyone invested in the ethics of visual culture.

Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak


Leila Miller - 2017
    Most of the contributors--women and men, young and old, single and married--have never spoken of the pain and consequences of their parents' divorce until now. They have often never been asked, and they believe that no one really wants to know. Despite vastly different circumstances and details, the similarities in their testimonies are striking; as the reader will discover, the death of a child's family strikes the human heart in universal ways. (Coming in paperback in May; paperback not available for pre-sale.)

SIX WORDS FRESH OFF THE BOAT: Stories of Immigration, Identity, and Coming to America (ABC)


Larry Smith - 2017
    The book captures hundreds of takes on the immigration experience, from every-day people as well as world-famous celebrities including Aziz Ansari, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Julianne Moore, Mario Batali, George Takei, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Billy Collins, Junot Díaz, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta. This book will have you thinking in sixes and challenging others to share six words about their lives.

Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains


Victoria Broackes - 2017
    Lavishly illustrated throughout with material from the band’s archive, including never-before-seen photographs, ephemera, and more, this book examines what makes Pink Floyd unique, from the mythology underpinning their output  to their musicianship, epic staging, and performance impact. With a photographic section devoted to the band’s 15 albums, the book explores the lasting Pink Floyd phenomenon. Five essays address what has made Pink Floyd unique, and contextualize their continued impact: 1. “Lift Off”: Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd and the London undergroundJoe Boyd examines the character and musical legacy of Syd Barrett, as the mythologized founder of Pink Floyd and icon of late 1960s British counterculture, drawing on the author’s personal acquaintance with Syd Barrett.2. “What Have We Done to England?” Pink Floyd and the lure of the pastoralRob Young places Pink Floyd in a wider visual tradition, exploring their “British” appeal.3. A Long Term Prospect Jon Savage on how Pink Floyd negotiated a transition from single releases to concept albums between 1967 and 1970.4. “Painters, pipers, prisoners”: the musical legacy of Pink FloydHoward Goodall explains how Pink Floyd escaped the musical constraints of the three-minute single and exploited the potential of longer-form pieces in the mid-1970s, developing their signature sound and style in Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here and continuing to hone this over subsequent albums.  5. Great Gigs in the Sky: Pink Floyd on stageVictoria Broackes and Anna Landreth-Strong chart the band’s live acts, from the psychedelic light shows in 60s London to huge stadium concerts, with particular reference to their successful collaboration with architect and set designer Mark Fisher (1947–2013).Their Mortal Remains: The Studio Albums: A chronological, album-by-album history of the band, each album is introduced by Mark Blake and accompanied by insights from Aubrey “Po” Powell.

Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors: Stories from the Jim Crow Museum


David Pilgrim - 2017
    It features images from the Jim Crow Museum, the nation's largest publicly accessible collection of racist objects. These pictures document the social injustice that Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as a pus-filled boil “which must be exposed to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” Each chapter concludes with a story from the author's journey, challenging the integrity of racial narratives.

The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation


Stuart Hall - 2017
    As he untangles the power relations that permeate categories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood, Stuart Hall shows how old hierarchies of human identity in Western culture were forcefully broken apart when oppressed groups introduced new meanings to the representation of difference.From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the concept of race stressed distinctions of color as fixed and unchangeable. But for Hall, twentieth-century redefinitions of blackness reveal how identities and attitudes can be transformed through the medium of language itself. Like the “badge of color” W. E. B. Du Bois evoked in the anticolonial era, “black” became a sign of solidarity for Caribbean and South Asian migrants who fought discrimination in 1980s Britain. Hall sees such manifestations of “new ethnicities” as grounds for optimism in the face of worldwide fundamentalisms that respond with fear to social change.Migration was at the heart of Hall’s diagnosis of the global predicaments taking shape around him. Explaining more than two decades ago why migrants are the target of new nationalisms, Hall’s prescient vision helps us to understand today’s crisis of liberal democracy. As he challenges us to find sustainable ways of living with difference, Hall gives us the concept of diaspora as a metaphor with which to enact fresh possibilities for redefining nation, race, and identity in the twenty-first century.

The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945


Robert M. Citino - 2017
    Three quarters of a century later, the question persists: What kept the German army going in an increasingly hopeless situation? Where some historians have found explanations in the power of Hitler or the role of ideology, Robert M. Citino, the world’s leading scholar on the subject, posits a more straightforward solution: Bewegungskrieg, the way of war cultivated by the Germans over the course of history. In this gripping account of German military campaigns during the final phase of World War II, Citino charts the inevitable path by which Bewegungskrieg, or a “war of movement,” inexorably led to Nazi Germany’s defeat.The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand analyzes the German Totenritt, or “death ride,” from January 1944—with simultaneous Allied offensives at Anzio and Ukraine—until May 1945, the collapse of the Wehrmacht in the field, and the Soviet storming of Berlin. In clear and compelling prose, and bringing extensive reading of the German-language literature to bear, Citino focuses on the German view of these campaigns. Often very different from the Allied perspective, this approach allows for a more nuanced and far-reaching understanding of the last battles of the Wehrmacht than any now available. With Citino’s previous volumes, Death of the Wehrmacht and The Wehrmacht Retreats, The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand completes a uniquely comprehensive picture of the German army’s strategy, operations, and performance against the Allies in World War II.

Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer


John Lorinc - 2017
    Any Other Way is an eclectic and richly illustrated local history that reveals how these individuals and community networks have transformed Toronto from a place of churches and conservative mores into a city that has consistently led the way in queer activism, not just in Canada but internationally.From the earliest pioneers to the parades, pride and politics of the contemporary era, Any Other Way draws on a range of voices to explore how the residents of queer Toronto have shaped and reshaped one of the world’s most diverse cities.Any Other Way includes chapters on: Oscar Wilde’s trip to Toronto; early cruising areas and gay/lesbian bars; queer shared houses; a pioneering collective counter-archive project; bath house raids; LBGT-police conflicts; the Queen Street art/music/activist scene; and a profile of Jackie Shane, the trans R&B singer who performed in drag in both Toronto and Los Angeles, and gained international fame with her 1962 chart-topping single, ‘Any Other Way.’

Encyclopedia of Black Comics


Sheena C. Howard - 2017
    The book focuses on creators in the field of comics: inkers, illustrators, artists, writers, editors, Black comic historians, Black comic convention creators, website creators, archivists and academics—as well as individuals who may not fit into any category but have made notable achievements within and/or across Black comic culture.

About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America


Carol Sanger - 2017
    Protested at rallies and politicized in party platforms, terminating pregnancy is often characterized as a selfish decision by women who put their own interests above those of the fetus. This background of stigma and hostility has stifled women's willingness to talk about abortion, which in turn distorts public and political discussion. To pry open the silence surrounding this public issue, Sanger distinguishes between abortion privacy, a form of nondisclosure based on a woman's desire to control personal information, and abortion secrecy, a woman's defense against the many harms of disclosure.Laws regulating abortion patients and providers treat abortion not as an acceptable medical decision--let alone a right--but as something disreputable, immoral, and chosen by mistake. Exploiting the emotional power of fetal imagery, laws require women to undergo ultrasound, a practice welcomed in wanted pregnancies but commandeered for use against women with unwanted pregnancies. Sanger takes these prejudicial views of women's abortion decisions into the twenty-first century by uncovering new connections between abortion law and American culture and politics.New medical technologies, women's increasing willingness to talk online and off, and the prospect of tighter judicial reins on state legislatures are shaking up the practice of abortion. As talk becomes more transparent and acceptable, women's decisions about whether or not to become mothers will be treated more like those of other adults making significant personal choices.

So Pretty / Very Rotten: Comics and Essays on Lolita Fashion and Cute Culture


Jane Mai - 2017
    Empowering and beautiful, but also inescapably linked to consumerism, the Rococo-inspired fashion is indulgent and sublime, pretty and rotten.An Nguyen is a cartoonist and illustrator based in Ottawa, ON best known for her romantic comic series Open Spaces and Closed Places.Jane Mai is a freelance illustrator and comic artist from Brooklyn, NY.Novala Takemoto is a Japanese author, fashion designer and prominent promoter of the Lolita lifestyle.

Our Syria: Recipes from Home


Dina Mousawi - 2017
    Syria has always been the meeting point for the most delicious flavors from East and West, where spices and sweetness collide. Even now, in possibly the country's darkest hour, Syrian families in tiny apartments from Beirut to Berlin are searching out the best tomatoes, lemons, pomegranates, and parsley to evoke the memory of home, keeping their treasured food history alive across continents. Friends and passionate cooks Itab and Dina met Syrian women in the Middle East and Europe to collect together the very best recipes from one of the world's greatest food cultures. They spent months cooking with them, learning their recipes and listening to stories of home. Recipes like the following elicit vibrant images of an ancient culture:Hot Yogurt SoupFresh Thyme and Halloumi SaladLamb and Okra StewChicken Shawarma WrapsSemolina and Coconut CakeOur Syria is a delicious celebration of the unique taste, culture, and food of Syria-and a celebration of everything that food and memory can mean to an individual, to a family, and to a nation.

The Economization of Life


Michelle Murphy - 2017
    In The Economization of Life, Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.

PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire


John H. Wigger - 2017
    with half a dozen friends. By 1987 they stood at the center of a ministry empire that included their own satellite network, a 2300-acre theme park visited by six millionpeople a year, and millions of adoring fans. The Bakkers led a life of conspicuous consumption perfectly aligned with the prosperity gospel they preached. They bought vacation homes, traveled first-class with an entourage and proclaimed that God wanted everyone to be healthy and wealthy.When it all fell apart, after revelations of a sex scandal and massive financial mismanagement, all of America watched more than two years of federal investigation and trial as Jim was eventually convicted on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. He would go on to serve five years in federal prison.PTL is more than just the spectacular story of the rise and fall of the Bakkers, John Wigger traces their lives from humble beginnings to wealth, fame, and eventual disgrace. At its core, PTL is the story of a group of people committed to religious innovation, who pushed the boundaries ofevangelical religion's engagement with American culture.Drawing on trial transcripts, videotapes, newspaper articles, and interviews with key insiders, dissidents, and lawyers, Wigger reveals the power of religion to redirect American culture. This is the story of a grand vision gone wrong, of the power of big religion in American life and its limits.

Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives Are Surveilled and How to Work for Change


Angela J. Hattery - 2017
    

The Halifax Explosion: Canada's Worst Disaster


Ken Cuthbertson - 2017
    That accident sparked a fire and an apocalyptic explosion that was the largest man-made blast prior to the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Together with the killer tsunami that followed, the explosion devastated the entire city in the wink of an eye and instantly killed more than two thousand people.While much has been written about the disaster, there is still more to the story, including the investigation of the key figures involved, the histories of the ships that collided and the confluence of circumstances that brought these two vessels together to touch off one of the most tragic man-made disasters of the twentieth century.The Halifax Explosion is a fresh, revealing account that finally answers questions that have lingered for a century: Was the explosion a disaster triggered by simple human error? Was it caused by the negligence of the ships’ pilots or captains? Was it the result of shortcomings in harbour practices and protocols? Or was the blast—as many people at the time insisted—the result of sabotage carried out by wartime German agents?December 6, 2017, marks the centennial of the great Halifax explosion. The Halifax Explosion tells the gripping, as-yet untold story of Canada’s worst disaster—a haunting tale of survival, incredible courage and, ultimately, the triumph of the human spirit.

Father and Son


Erich Ohser Plauen - 2017
    Father and Son

A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation


Craig Harline - 2017
    At least, that's what the legend says. But with a figure like Martin Luther, who looms so large in the historical imagination, it's hard to separate the legend from the life, or even sometimes to separate assorted legends from each other. Over the centuries, Luther the man has given way to Luther the icon, a polished bronze figure on a pedestal.In A World Ablaze, Craig Harline introduces us to the flesh-and-blood Martin Luther. Harline tells the riveting story of the first crucial years of the accidental crusade that would make Luther a legendary figure. He didn't start out that way; Luther was a sometimes-cranky friar and professor who worried endlessly about the fate of his eternal soul. He sought answers in the Bible and the Church fathers, and what he found distressed him even more -- the way many in the Church had come to understand salvation was profoundly wrong, thought Luther, putting millions of souls, not least his own, at risk of damnation. His ideas would pit him against numerous scholars, priests, bishops, princes, and the Pope, even as others adopted or adapted his cause, ultimately dividing the Church against itself. A World Ablaze is a tale not just of religious debate but of political intrigue, of shifting alliances and daring escapes, with Luther often narrowly avoiding capture, which might have led to execution. The conflict would eventually encompass the whole of Christendom and served as the crucible in which a new world was forged.The Luther we find in these pages is not a statue to be admired but a complex figure -- brilliant and volatile, fretful and self-righteous, curious and stubborn. Harline brings out the immediacy, uncertainty, and drama of his story, giving readers a sense of what it felt like in the moment, when the ending was still very much in doubt. The result is a masterful recreation of a momentous turning point in the history of the world.

Pirates Magnified: With a 3x Magnifying Glass


David Long - 2017
    

Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, The Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin


Paul Hockenos - 2017
    It’s the story of a newly undivided Berlin when protest and punk rock, bohemia and direct democracy, techno and free theater were the order of the day.In a story stocked with fascinating characters from Berlin’s highly politicized undergrounds—including playwright Heiner Müller, cult figure Blixa Bargeld of the industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, the internationally known French Wall artist Thierry Noir, the American multimedia artist Danielle de Picciotto (founder of Love Parade), and David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust incarnation—Hockenos argues that the DIY energy and raw urban vibe of the early 1990s shaped the new Berlin and still pulses through the city today.Just as Mike Davis captured Los Angeles in his City of Quartz, Berlin Calling is a unique account of how Berlin became hip, and of why it continues to attract creative types from the world over.

New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration


Judith Weisenfeld - 2017
    Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions Shows how early 20th-century resistance to conventional racial categorization contributed to broader discussions in black America that still resonate todayWhen Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute "Ethiopian Hebrew." "God did not make us Negroes," declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century urban North. They insisted that so-called Negroes are, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or raceless children of God. Rejecting conventional American racial classification, many black southern migrants and immigrants from the Caribbean embraced these alternative visions of black history, racial identity, and collective future, thereby reshaping the black religious and racial landscape.Focusing on the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and a number of congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews, Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay not only in the new religious opportunities membership provided, but also in the novel ways they formulated a religio-racial identity. Arguing that members of these groups understood their religious and racial identities as divinely-ordained and inseparable, the book examines how this sense of self shaped their conceptions of their bodies, families, religious and social communities, space and place, and political sensibilities.Weisenfeld draws on extensive archival research and incorporates a rich array of sources to highlight the experiences of average members. The book demonstrates that the efforts by members of these movements to contest conventional racial categorization contributed to broader discussions in black America about the nature of racial identity and the collective future of black people that still resonate today.

Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX


Andrew Willard Jones - 2017
    Louis IX explores the “problem of Church and State” in thirteenth century France by taking a detailed look at the lives of two men, Gui Foucois (Pope Clement IV) and Louis IX and the institutions they helped build. It argues that the “problem” of Church and State did not exist in the thirteenth century. The spiritual and temporal powers existed, to be sure, but these were not parallel structures attempting to govern the same social space in a contest over sovereignty. Rather, the spiritual and the temporal powers were wrapped up together in a differentiated and sacramental world, and both included the other as aspects of their very identity. “Government” happened through networks of consilium et auxilium that cut across lay/clerical lines. These networks necessarily included both spiritual and temporal powers. During the reign of Louis IX the king’s network expanded to encompass the majority of the social space. This network had integral to it both the papal “fullness of power” and the royal “fullness of power” without any contradiction. The book reconstructs how such government actually happened and not simply the arguments that intellectuals had about how it ought to happen. This reconstruction is, furthermore, presented as a response to how modern historians and scholars of politics often suppose government to have happened. The book is, therefore, directly aimed at engaging and challenging the consensus of contemporary scholarship. What is more, it brings contemporary thought concerning the definition of “religion,” “secular,” and “politics” into the study of the Middle Ages, something that is long overdue. Up to this point, scholars interested in challenging modern conceptions of “religion” have, when treating the Middle Ages, had to rely largely on historical scholarship written from within the conventional paradigm. This book aims to provide these scholars with a methodologically and technically rigorous alternative. If the book’s thesis is widely accepted, it will call for the reconsideration of the accepted narrative of medieval Church and State.

Pattern Behavior: The Seamy Side of Fashion


Natalie Kossar - 2017
     Feeling nostalgic for your grandmother's old sewing patterns? Stitch some humor into your distant childhood with Pattern Behavior, featuring vintage covers from the McCall Pattern Company's archives. Based on the popular Tumblr blog, this droll comic collection brings the McCall's models back to life -- in a way you haven't seen before! Combining retro fashion and modern wit, Pattern Behavior shines a light on the outdated social ideals of yesteryear--all with a big dose of humor.

The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power


Fei-Ling Wang - 2017
    He argues that the Chinese ideation and tradition of political governance and world order--the China Order--is based on an imperial state of Confucian-Legalism as historically exemplified by the Qin-Han polity. Claiming a Mandate of Heaven to unify and govern the whole known world or tianxia (all under heaven), the China Order dominated Eastern Eurasia as a world empire for more than two millennia, until the late nineteenth century. Since 1949, the People's Republic of China has been a reincarnated Qin-Han polity without the traditional China Order, finding itself stuck in the endless struggle against the current world order and the ever-changing Chinese society for its regime survival and security. Wang also offers new discoveries and assessments about the true golden eras of Chinese civilization, explains the great East-West divergence between China and Europe, and analyzes the China Dream that drives much of current Chinese foreign policy.

San Francisco Noir: Photographs by Fred Lyon (San Francisco Photography Book in Black and White Film Noir Style)


Fred Lyon - 2017
    In this latest offering from the photographer of San Francisco: Portrait of a City 1940–1960, Lyon presents a darker tone, exploring the hidden corners of his native city. Images taken in the foggy night are illuminated only by neon signs, classic car headlights, apartment windows, or streetlights. Sharply dressed couples stroll out for evening shows, drivers travel down steep hills, and sailors work through the night at the old Fisherman's Wharf. Stylistically, many of the photographs are experimental the noir tone is enhanced by double exposures, elements of collage, and blurred motion. These strikingly evocative duotone images expose a view of San Francisco as only Fred Lyon could capture.

Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980


Iain McIntyre - 2017
    As the young created new styles in music, fashion, and culture, pulp fiction shadowed their every move, hyping and exploiting their behaviour, dress, and language for mass consumption and cheap thrills. From the juvenile delinquent gangs of the early 1950s through the beats and hippies, on to bikers, skinheads, and punks, pulp fiction left no trend untouched. With their lurid covers and wild, action-packed plots, these books reveal as much about society’s deepest desires and fears as they do about the subcultures themselves.Girl Gangs features approximately 400 full-color covers, many of them never reprinted before. With 70 in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, and previously unpublished articles from more than 20 popular culture critics and scholars from the US, UK, and Australia, the book goes behind the scenes to look at the authors and publishers, how they worked, where they drew their inspiration and—often overlooked—the actual words they wrote. Books by well-known authors such as Harlan Ellison and Lawrence Block are discussed alongside neglected obscurities and former bestsellers ripe for rediscovery. It is a must read for anyone interested in pulp fiction, lost literary history, retro and subcultural style, and the history of postwar youth culture.Contributors include Nicholas Tredell, Alwyn W. Turner, Mike Stax, Clinton Walker, Bill Osgerby, David Rife, J.F. Norris, Stewart Home, James Cockington, Joe Blevins, Brian Coffey, James Doig, David James Foster, Matthew Asprey Gear, Molly Grattan, Brian Greene, John Harrison, David Kiersh, Austin Matthews, and Robert Baker.

The Bob Ross Coloring Book


Bob Ross - 2017
    This exclusive authorized collection of art, derived directly from Bob Ross's own paintings, offers his legions of fans a contemplative, relaxing, and inspiring way to connect with the work and personality of the pop-culture icon. Featuring many of Ross's most famous quotes and catchphrases about happy little trees, friendly squirrels, and more, the book also includes a gallery of his original artwork. But as he would no doubt want, coloring fans of all ages are encouraged to make their own decisions, embrace their mistakes, and make each painting their own. Bob Ross is a cult figure around the world among varying age groups, especially Generation X. And everyone agrees he is about more than just painting. His fans--few of whom identify themselves as artists--agree that his quiet, nurturing disposition is a form of therapy, making his work the absolutely perfect subject of an adult coloring book. This coloring book presents more than seventy-five line drawings created from Ross's own artwork.

Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue


bell hooks - 2017
    In their fluid and honest dialogue they push and pull each other as well as the reader, and the result is a book that speaks to the power of conversation as a place of critical pedagogy.

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85: A Sourcebook


Catherine Janet Morris - 2017
    It showcases the work of black women artists such as Emma Amos, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, making it one of the first major exhibitions to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color. In so doing, it reorients conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period. The accompanying Sourcebook republishes an array of rare and little-known documents from the period by artists, writers, cultural critics, and art historians such as Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Lucy R. Lippard, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Lowery Stokes Sims, Alice Walker, and Michelle Wallace. These documents include articles, manifestos, and letters from significant publications as well as interviews, some of which are reproduced in facsimile form. The Sourcebook also includes archival materials, rare ephemera, and an art-historical overview essay. Helping readers to move beyond standard narratives of art history and feminism, this volume will ignite further scholarship while showing the true breadth and diversity of black women’s engagement with art, the art world, and politics from the 1960s to the 1980s.We Wanted a Revolution will also be on display at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from October 13, 2017 through January 14, 2018; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York from February 17, 2018 through May 27, 2018; and at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston from June 26, 2018 through September 30, 2018. Published by the Brooklyn Museum and distributed by Duke University Press

Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays


Stuart Hall - 2017
    Written between 1957 and 2011 and appearing in publications such as New Left Review and Marxism Today, these twenty essays span the whole of Hall's career, from his early involvement with the New Left, to his critique of Thatcherism, to his later focus on neoliberalism. Whether addressing economic decline and class struggle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the politics of empire, Hall's singular commentary and theorizations make this volume essential for anyone interested in the politics of the last sixty years.

Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press


Eddy Portnoy - 2017
    But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird-Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press.An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl-in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

Searching for Sycorax: Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror


Kinitra D. Brooks - 2017
    Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre’s historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory.Brooks examines the works of women across the African diaspora, from Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica, to England and the United States, looking at new and canonized horror texts by Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Gloria Naylor, and Chesya Burke. These Black women fiction writers take advantage of horror’s ability to highlight U.S. white dominant cultural anxieties by using Africana folklore to revise horror’s semiotics within their own imaginary.Ultimately, Brooks compares the legacy of Shakespeare’s Sycorax (of The Tempest) to Black women writers themselves, who, deprived of mainstream access to self-articulation, nevertheless influence the trajectory of horror criticism by forcing the genre to de-centralize whiteness and maleness.

The Ghost: A Cultural History


Susan Owens - 2017
    All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.” —Samuel Johnson   Ghosts are woven into the very fabric of life. In Britain, every town, village, and great house has a spectral resident, and their enduring popularity in literature, art, folklore, and film attests to their continuing power to fascinate, terrify, and inspire. Our conceptions of ghosts—the fears they provoke, the forms they take—are connected to the conventions and beliefs of each particular era, from the marauding undead of the Middle Ages to the psychologically charged presences of our own age. The ghost is no less than the mirror of the times.   Organized chronologically, this new cultural history features a dazzling range of artists and writers, including William Hogarth, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Susan Hiller and Jeremy Deller; John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Muriel Spark, Hilary Mantel, and Sarah Waters.

Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West


Gary Ferguson - 2017
    Land on Fire explores the fascinating science behind this phenomenon and the ongoing research to find a solution. This gripping narrative details how years of fire suppression and chronic drought have combined to make the situation so dire. Award-winning nature writer Gary Ferguson brings to life the extraordinary efforts of those responsible for fighting wildfires, and deftly explains how nature reacts in the aftermath of flames. Dramatic photographs reveal the terror and beauty of fire, as well as the staggering effect it has on the landscape.

Manhood: The Bare Reality


Laura Dodsworth - 2017
    These days we are all less bound by gender and traditional roles, but is there more confusion about what being a man means? From veteran to vicar, from porn addict to prostate cancer survivor, men from all walks of life share honest reflections about their bodies, sexuality, relationships, fatherhood, work and health in this pioneering and unique book. Just as Bare Reality: 100 women, their breasts, their stories presented the un-airbrushed truth about breasts for women, Manhood: The Bare Reality shows us the spectrum of 'normal', revealing men's penises and bodies in all their diversity and glory, dispelling body image anxiety and myths. Sensitive and compassionate, Manhood will surprise you and reassure you. It may even make you reconsider what you think you know about men, their bodies and masculinity.

Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction


Siva Vaidhyanathan - 2017
    We all use intellectual property. Intellectual property is the most pervasive yet least understood way we regulate expression. Despite its importance to so many aspects of the global economy and daily life, intellectual property policy remains a confusing and arcane subject. This engaging book clarifies both the basic terms and the major conflicts surrounding these fascinating areas of law, offering a layman's introduction to copyright, patents, trademarks, and other forms of knowledge falling under the purview of intellectual property rights. Using vivid examples, noted media expert Siva Vaidhyanathan illustrates the powers and limits of intellectual property, distilling with grace and wit the complex tangle of laws, policies, and values governing the dissemination of ideas, expressions, inventions, creativity, and data collection in the modern world.Vaidhyanathan explains that intellectual property exists as it does because powerful interests want it to exist. The strongest economies in the world have a keen interest in embedding rigid methods of control and enforcement over emerging economies to preserve the huge economic interests linked to their copyright industries-film, music, software, and publishing. For this reason, the fight over the global standardization of intellectual property has become one of the most important sites of tension in North-South global relations. Through compelling case studies, including those of Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Sony, Amazon, and Google Books, Vaidhyanathan shows that the modern intellectual property systems reflect three centuries of changes in politics, economics, technologies, and social values. Although it emerged from a desire to foster creativity while simultaneously protecting it, intellectual property today has fundamentally shifted to a political dimension.

Duke Kahanamoku: Ready-to-Read Level 3


Laurie Calkhoven - 2017
    Duke gained international fame for participating in four Olympics and won five medals in total. Fans began calling Duke “the human fish.” Wherever he went, Duke would demonstrate his surfing skills and in 1915, Duke introduced board surfing to Australia. Ten years later, he found another use for a surfboard—as a lifesaving device—using it to save eight people from a capsized boat in California! A special section at the back of the book includes extras like how to speak Hawaiian and a brief history of Hawaii and its culture. With the You Should Meet series, learning about historical figures has never been so fascinating!

Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers


Guenter Lewy - 2017
    More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." Primo Levi's words disclose a chilling truth: assigning blame to hideous political leaders, such as Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, is necessary but not sufficient to explain how the Holocaust could have happened. These leaders, in fact, relied on many thousands of ordinary men and women who made the Nazi machine work on a daily basis--members of the killing squads, guards accompanying the trains to the extermination camps, civilian employees of the SS, the drivers of gas trucks, and the personnel of death factories such as Auschwitz. Why did these ordinary people collaborate and willingly become mass murderers? In Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, Guenter Lewy tries to answer one of history's most disturbing questions. Lewy draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources, including letters and diaries of soldiers who served in Russia, the recollections of Jewish survivors, archival documents, and most importantly, the trial records of hundreds of Nazi functionaries. The result is a ghastly, extraordinarily detailed portrait of the Holocaust perpetrators, their mindset, and the motivations for their actions. Combining a rigorous historical analysis with psychological insight, the book explores the dynamics of participation in large-scale atrocities, offering a thought-provoking and timely reflection on individual responsibility for collective crimes. Lewy concludes that the perpetrators acted out of a variety of motives--a sense of duty, obedience to authority, thirst for career, and a blind faith in anti-Semitic ideology, among others. A witness to the 1938 Kristallnacht himself and the son of a concentration camp survivor, Lewy has searched for the reasons of the Holocaust out of far more than theoretical interest: it is a passionate attempt to illuminate a dismal chapter of his life--and of human history--that cannot be forgotten.

Held Hostage: Negotiating Life And Death For The Las Vegas Police Department


Dennis Flynn - 2017
    His goal? Bring ‘em out alive! A behind-the-scenes view of life-and-death situations that police negotiators face and how they were resolved one way or the other under the bright lights and glitter of Sin City.

Confederaphobia: An American Epidemic


Paul C. Graham - 2017
    Few people objected. After all, a third of the American people are descended from Confederate soldiers and Congress has officially and legally declared Confederates to be “American veterans.” That time has passed. There is an epidemic of hate and fear sweeping the land; a wave of hostility and intolerance that shows no sign of slowing or stopping; its fury is directed at Southern symbols—flags, monuments, and other displays—in fact everything Southern now appears to be a target. Paul C. Graham has courageously examined this case of mass hysteria; a condition he has aptly dubbed “Confederaphobia.” “It’s one thing,” writes Graham, “to acknowledge that the meaning of symbols is one of perspective. It’s quite another thing to have the meaning dictated by ideologues who are not participants in the cultural tradition . . . . Southern symbols mean to the Southerner exactly what they say that they do . . .speak for those people for whom Southern identity is a living reality.” Southern people are growing weary of the ongoing demonization; of being bullied and harassed; and have begun to realize that Confederaphobia is not a matter of monuments, but a campaign to expunge their identity. If you are a self-identified Southerner, you are a potential target! It’s not too late to inoculate yourself from the dangerous effects of this disease, but this is only possible if you recognize the problem. The problem is not Confederate flags, monuments, markers, belt-buckles, stickers, do-dads, knick-knacks, what-nots, or Dukes of Hazzard re-runs—the problem is Confederaphobia!

The Embrace of Buildings


Lee Hardy - 2017
    In a culture long enamored of the suburban ideal, Hardy invites his readers to reconsider the many advantages of living and working in walkable city neighborhoods--compact neighborhoods characterized by a fine network of pedestrian-friendly streets, mixed land uses, mixed housing types, and a full range of transit options. In addition, he investigates the role religion has played in defining American attitudes towards the city, and the difference church location makes in Christian ministry and mission.

Trying to Make the Personal Political: Feminism and Consciousness-Raising


Mariame Kaba - 2017
    It is expanded with a new forward by Mariame Kaba and an afterword by Jacqui Shine.There is much to consider about Consciousness-Raising (CR) as a political education strategy. There are questions about why CR mostly appealed to white middle class women. There are questions about whether CR laid a foundation for contemporary concerns about trigger warnings and the politics of identity. In the afterword of this booklet, writer and historian Jacqui Shine extends our knowledge about the social context in which CR emerged as a practice among certain feminists.In her forward, Mariame Kaba writes:"Published in 1975 by the Women’s Action Alliance, the “Consciousness-Raising Guidelines” in A Practical Guide to the Women’s Movement add to our understanding of how some women sought to liberate themselves from patriarchy at a particular historical moment in the U.S. As a historical document, these guidelines and questions are a window into second-wave (white) feminist organizing.As such, I decided that it would be both informative and useful to reprint this document in the 21st century. After a 2016 general election when the first woman nominee of a major party (Hillary Clinton) lost after being widely expected to win, this publication is particularly timely. Clinton came of age during the 1960s and is a product of (white) second wave feminism. The majority of white women voters in 2016 chose to cast their ballots for Donald Trump. White feminists have to account for this fact in their future organizing efforts."In addition to the main text, forward, and afterword, there is a section of Supplemental Guidelines for Black Women prepared by Lori Sharpe, and Supplemental Guidelines for Youth Women (14-19) prepared by Jane Ginsburg and Gail Gordon.Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, and curator. She is the founder of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is a founding member of Survived & Punished, a group focused on supporting criminalized survivors of violence. She is a feminist and an abolitionist. Her work has appeared in the Nation, In These Times, Truthout, the Guardian, and other publications.Jacqui Shine is a writer and historian. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Boston Review, The Believer, The Sun, Slate, the Journal of Social History, and other publications.

Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects


Mari Ruti - 2017
    How should we understand this stance? Is it the best foundation for queer theory? In The Ethics of Opting Out, Mari Ruti cautions queer theorists against turning antinormativity into a new norm while highlighting the ways in which opting out rewrites ethical theory and practice in genuinely transformative ways. She offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of queer theory, including debates about affect theory, subjectivity, negativity, defiance, agency, and bad feelings. In doing so, Ruti provides an accessible yet theoretically rigorous account of the political divisions that have animated the field over the last decade. The Ethics of Opting Out grapples with queer negativity, particularly in the work of Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Lynne Huffer, and with the rhetoric of bad feelings found in the work of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, David Eng, and Heather Love. In this wide-ranging and thoughtful book, Ruti maps the parameters of contemporary queer theory to rethink the foundational assumptions of the field.

Recombinant


Ching-In Chen - 2017
    Drafting and growing multiple discourses, this text urges the reader to investigate female and genderqueer lineages in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. Its syntactical utterances create a music that is masterful in these poems’ fractured words and experimental representation of page and praxis. Voices from various communities interact with each other to create what Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan calls an assertion of diasporan realities where multi-directional, heterogeneous modes of representation challenge conventional representation via photographs; newspaper articles; maps; city directories; records of immigration, birth and death; as well as scholarly research and archaeological records. recombinant is a work of insistence, a refusal of erasure, a proof of shared memory through the rewriting and remixing of historical remnant.

Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly


Safwan M Masri - 2017
    In a region beset by brutal repression, humanitarian disasters, and civil war, Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution alone gave way to a peaceful transition to a functioning democracy. Within four short years, Tunisians passed a progressive constitution, held fair parliamentary elections, and ushered in the country's first-ever democratically elected president. But did Tunisia simply avoid the misfortunes that befell its neighbors, or were there particular features that set the country apart and made it a special case?In Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly, Safwan M. Masri explores the factors that have shaped the country's exceptional experience. He traces Tunisia's history of reform in the realms of education, religion, and women's rights, arguing that the seeds for today's relatively liberal and democratic society were planted as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century. Masri argues that Tunisia stands out not as a model that can be replicated in other Arab countries, but rather as an anomaly, as its history of reformism set it on a separate trajectory from the rest of the region. The narrative explores notions of identity, the relationship between Islam and society, and the hegemonic role of religion in shaping educational, social, and political agendas across the Arab region. Based on interviews with dozens of experts, leaders, activists, and ordinary citizens, and a synthesis of a rich body of knowledge, Masri provides a sensitive, often personal, account that is critical for understanding not only Tunisia but also the broader Arab world.

Insights from African American Interpretation (Reading the Bible in the Twenty-First Century: Insights)


Mitzi J. Smith - 2017
    Accessible and appealing to today’s students, each Insight volume discusses how this method, approach, or strategy was first developed and how its application has changed over time; what current questions arise from its use; what enduring insights it has produced; and what questions remain for future scholarship.Mitzi J. Smith describes the distinctive African American experience of Scripture, from slavery to Black Liberation and beyond, and the unique angles of perception that an intentional African American interpretation brings to the text for a contemporary generation of scholars. Smith shows how questions of race, ethnicity, and the dynamics of “othering” have been developed in African American biblical scholarship, resulting in new reading of particular texts. Further, Smith describes challenges that scholarship raises for the future of biblical interpretation generally.

Ferlinghetti's Greatest Poems


Lawrence Ferlinghetti - 2017
    At last, just in time for his 99th birthday, a powerful overview of one of America's most beloved poets: New Directions is proud to present a swift, terrific chronological selection of Ferlinghetti's poems, spanning more than six decades of work and presenting one of modern poetry's greatest achievements.

Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos


Piers Vitebsky - 2017
    Every day, they negotiated their wellbeing  in heated arguments or in quiet reflections on their feelings of love, anger, and guilt.   Today, young Sora are rejecting the worldview of their ancestors and switching their allegiance to warring sects of fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism. Communion with ancestors is banned as sacred sites are demolished, female shamans are replaced by male priests, and debate with the dead gives way to prayer to gods. For some, this shift means liberation from jungle spirits through literacy, employment, and democratic politics; others despair for fear of being forgotten after death.   How can a society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and see the world in a totally different way? Over forty years, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans, pastors, ancestors, gods, policemen, missionaries, and alphabet worshippers, seeking explanations from social theory, psychoanalysis, and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare today’s crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical reform can bring new fulfillments—but also new torments and uncertainties.   Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as one for greater humanity: just as we have been losing our wildernesses, so we have been losing a diverse range of cultural and spiritual possibilities, tribe by tribe. From the award-winning author of The Reindeer People, this is a heartbreaking story of cultural change and the extinction of an irreplaceable world, even while new religious forms come into being to take its place.

Assigned: Life with Gender


Lisa Wade - 2017
    Selected from around the web by Lisa Wade, winner of the ASA's Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award, the essays in this book present a revealing picture of gender in the United States today: socially constructed, sometimes fun but almost always problematic, fluid but forced into binaries, deeply ingrained but often misunderstood. Topics range from parenting and sports to inequality and breasts (both men's and women's). Together, these diverse and engaging voices capture the depth and complexity of gender from the sociological perspective.

Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How To Listen to the World)


Dominic Pettman - 2017
    Arguing that our ears are far too narrowly attuned to our own species, the book explores four different types of voices: the cybernetic, the gendered, the creaturely, and the ecological. Through both a conceptual framework and a series of case studies, Dominic Pettman tracks some of the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. He demonstrates how intimacy is forged through the ear, perhaps even more than through any other sense, mode, or medium. The voice, then, is what creates intimacy, both fleeting and lasting, not only between people, but also between animals, machines, and even natural elements: those presumed not to have a voice in the first place. Taken together, the manifold, material, actual voices of the world, whether primarily natural or technological, are a complex cacophony that is desperately trying to tell us something about the rapidly failing health of the planet and its inhabitants. As Pettman cautions, we would do well to listen.

Japan (Follow Me Around)


Wiley Blevins - 2017
    state of California.Go on an in-depth tour of Japan with local guide Satchiko as she shows readers what life is like in her home country, from what foods people enjoy to how they spend their free time. Satchiko will also teach readers about Japanese history and culture, show them the country's most interesting places, and more.

Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange


Adam Scovell - 2017
    The furrows of Robin Hardy ('The Wicker Man'), Piers Haggard ('Blood on Satan's Claw'), and Michael Reeves ('Witchfinder General') have arisen again, most notably in the films of Ben Wheatley ('Kill List'), as has the Spirit of Dark of Lonely Water, Juganets, cursed Saxon crowns, spaceships hidden under ancient barrows, owls and flowers, time-warping stone circles, wicker men, the goat of Mendes, and malicious stone tapes.Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful And Things Strange charts the summoning of these esoteric arts within the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, using theories of psychogeography, hauntology, and topography to delve into the genre's output in film, television, and multimedia as its "sacred demon of ungovernableness" rises yet again in the twenty-first century.

Workshy


Dave Graney - 2017
    In his inimitable style, Graney veers from a feckless childhood in blue-collar South Australia, to the punk rock scene of 1980s London, and beer-soaked nights touring Australia where he worked very hard at not working at all.But in slacking off, Graney became one of the hardest working musicians in the industry, constantly evolving, reinventing, staying one step ahead of everyone – even himself. Workshy is half written by Dave Graney the consummate and tireless performer, and half-written by Dave Graney the bludge. The magic is that you’re never sure which is which.

Islamophobia and Racism in America


Erik Love - 2017
    As a result, the number of hate crimes committed against Middle Eastern Americans of all origins and religions have increased, and civil rights advocates struggle to confront this striking reality.In Islamophobia and Racism in America, Erik Love draws on in-depth interviews with Middle Eastern American advocates. He shows that, rather than using a well-worn civil rights strategy to advance reforms to protect a community affected by racism, many advocates are choosing to bolster universal civil liberties in the United States more generally, believing that these universal protections are reliable and strong enough to deal with social prejudice. In reality, Love reveals, civil rights protections are surprisingly weak, and do not offer enough avenues for justice, change, and community reassurance in the wake of hate crimes, discrimination, and social exclusion.A unique and timely study, Islamophobia and Racism in America wrestles with the disturbing implications of these findings for the persistence of racism-including Islamophobia-in the twenty-first century. As America becomes a "majority-minority" nation, this strategic shift in American civil rights advocacy signifies challenges in the decades ahead, making Love's findings essential for anyone interested in the future of universal civil rights in the United States.

Souls Against the Concrete


Khalik Allah - 2017
    His photography has been acclaimed by the New York Times, TIME Light Box, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Village Voice, the BBC, and the Boston Globe. Since 2012, Allah has been photographing people who frequent the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem. Shooting film at night with only the light pouring from storefront windows, street lights, cars, and flashing ambulances, he captures raw and intimate portraits of “souls against the concrete.”This volume presents a gallery of 105 portraits created with a Nikon F2 35mm camera and a photography predicated on reality. Inviting viewers to look deeply into the faces of people living amid poverty, drug addiction, and police brutality, but also leading everyday lives, Allah seeks to dispel fears, capture human dignity, and bring clarity to a world that outsiders rarely visit. This nuanced portrayal of nocturnal urban life offers a powerful and rare glimpse into the enduring spirit of a slowly gentrifying Harlem street corner and the great legacies of black history that live there.

The Statue of Liberty


Nancy Ohlin - 2017
    But why do we have that statue, and who is that woman anyway? This engaging nonfiction book, complete with black and white interior illustrations, will make readers feel like they've traveled back in time. It covers everything from how the statue was built to the history behind its creation and more. Find out interesting, little-known facts such as how it almost didn't get built and how the man who designed the Eiffel Tower designed the "spine" of the statue. The unique details along with the clever and humorous interior illustrations make this series stand out from the competition.

The Gang's All Queer: The Lives of Gay Gang Members


Vanessa R. Panfil - 2017
    In The Gang's All Queer, Vanessa Panfil introduces us to a different world. Meet gay gang members - sometimes referred to in popular culture as "homo thugs" - whose gay identity complicates criminology's portrayal and representation of gangs, gang members, and gang life. In vivid detail, Panfil provides an in-depth understanding of how gay gang members construct and negotiate both masculine and gay identities through crime and gang membership.The Gang's All Queer draws from interviews with over 50 gay gang- and crime-involved young men in Columbus, Ohio, the majority of whom are men of color in their late teens and early twenties, as well as on-the-ground ethnographic fieldwork with men who are in gay, hybrid, and straight gangs. Panfil provides an eye-opening portrait of how even members of straight gangs are connected to a same-sex oriented underground world.Most of these young men still present a traditionally masculine persona and voice deeply-held affection for their fellow gang members. They also fight with their enemies, many of whom are in rival gay gangs. Most come from impoverished, 'rough' neighborhoods, and seek to defy negative stereotypes of gay and Black men as deadbeats, though sometimes through illegal activity. Some are still closeted to their fellow gang members and families, yet others fight to defend members of the gay community, even those who they deem to be "fags," despite distaste for these flamboyant members of the community. And some perform in drag shows or sell sex to survive.The Gang's All Queer poignantly illustrates how these men both respond to and resist societal marginalization. Timely, powerful, and engaging, this book will challenge us to think differently about gangs, gay men, and urban life.

Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893


Michael J. Altman - 2017
    But before the twentieth century, Hinduism was unknown in the United States. But while Americans did not write about Hinduism, they speculated at length about heathenism, the religion of the Hindoos, and Brahmanism. In Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, Michael J. Altman argues that this is not a mere sematic distinction-a case of more politically correct terminology being accepted over time-but a way that Americans worked out their own identities. American representations of India said more about Americans than about Hindus. Cotton Mather, Hannah Adams, and Joseph Priestley engaged the larger European Enlightenment project of classifying and comparing religion in India. Evangelical missionaries used images of Hindoo heathenism to raise support at home. Unitarian Protestants found a kindred spirit in the writings ofBengali reformer Rammohun Roy. Popular magazines and common school books used the image of dark, heathen, despotic India to buttress Protestant, white, democratic American identity. Transcendentalists and Theosophists imagined the contemplative and esoteric religion of India as an alternative tomaterialist American Protestantism. Hindu delegates and American speakers at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions engaged in a protracted debate about the definition of religion in industrializing America. Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu is a groundbreaking analysis of American representations of religion in India before the turn of the twentieth century. Altman reorients American religious history and the history of Asian religions in America, showing how Americans of all sorts imagined India for their ownpurposes. The questions that animated descriptions of heathens, Hindoos, and Hindus in the past, he argues, still animate American debates today.

Stephanie Kwolek and Bulletproof Material (21st Century Junior Library: Women Innovators)


Ellen Labrecque - 2017
    Stephanie Kwolek and Bulletproof Material examines the life of this important woman and her contributions to the development of bulletproof material. Sidebars encourage readers to engage in the material by asking deeper questions or conducting individual research. Full color photos, a glossary, and a listing of additional resources all enhance the learning experience.

Traffic Systems of Pompeii


Eric E. Poehler - 2017
    Vesuvius in 79 CE-and its implications for urbanism in the Roman empire. Eric E. Poehler, an authority on Pompeii's uniquely preserved urban structure, distills over five hundred instances of street-level "wear and tear" to reveal for the first time the rules of the ancient road. Through a thorough, yet lively, investigation of every facet of the infrastructure, from the city's urban grid and the shape of the streets to the treatment of their surfaces and the individual elements of construction, the intricacies of the Pompeian traffic system and the changes to its operation over time emerge in vivid detail. Though archaeological expertise forms the backbone of this book, its findings have equally important historical and architectural implications. Later chapters probe how the street design and infrastructure affected social roles and hierarchies among property owners in Pompeii, illuminating the economic forces that push and pull upon the shape of urban space. The final chapters set the road system into its broader context as one major infrastructural and administrative artifact of the Roman empire's deeply urban culture. Where does Pompeii's system fit within the history of Roman traffic control? Is it unique for its innovation, or only for the preservation that permitted its discovery? Poehler marshals evidence from across the Roman world to examine these questions. His measured and thoroughly researched answers make The Traffic Systems of Pompeii a critical step forward in our understanding of infrastructure in the ancient world.

The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China's Cultural Revolution


Laikwan Pang - 2017
    When the Cultural Revolution officially began, this uniformity seemed to extend to the mind. From the outside, China had become a monotonous world, a place of endless repetition and imitation, but a closer look reveals a range of cultural experiences, which also provided individuals with an obscure sense of freedom. In The Art of Cloning, Pang Laikwan examines this period in Chinese history when ordinary citizens read widely, traveled extensively through the country, and engaged in a range of cultural and artistic activities. The freedom they experienced, argues Pang, differs from the freedom, under Western capitalism, to express individuality through a range of consumer products. But it was far from boring and was possessed of its own kind of diversity.

Street: New York City 70s, 80s, 90s


Carrie Boretz - 2017
    It is common knowledge that the city was on rocky ground for many of those years but these are not pictures filled with drama or strife. Instead Boretz was always more interested in the subtle and familiar moments of everyday life in the various neighborhoods where she lived, before much of the graffiti was scrubbed away and the city sanitized and reborn to what it has since become.For so many living in and visiting New York today, it is forgotten or altogether not known how different so many parts of the city were during that time. Many of these pictures show the reality of the streets then, where every day workers, the homeless, the affluent, and tourists all shared the common space, providing examples of how one of the greatest cities in the world was one often filled with contradictions. But there is also a timeless element to these images as children still play in the parks, streets, and schoolyards, commuters still face the elements daily as they wait, there are still regular demonstrations and parades, and the whole spectrum of the joys and pitfalls of humanity are still visible most anywhere a person looks.For Boretz nothing was scripted, it all played out right before her. As Patti Smith said, "You need no rationale, no schooling. It's love at first sight. You see something and you have to capture it. Instinctive, bang, you feel one with it." Indeed, Boretz doesn't have a philosophy about shooting other than trusting her instinct: she saw, she shot, she moved on, always looking for moments that made her heart beat faster. It was the continual rush of knowing that at any time she could come upon something real and beautiful. That is why and how she shot and why and how herSTREETis so special.

Rent FAQ: All That's Left to Know about Broadway's Blaze of Glory


Tom Rowan - 2017
    Rent FAQ includes biographical info on the musical's brilliant creator, Jonathan Larson, who tragically passed away at age 35 the night before the show began preview performances. Other chapters focus on the creative team and original cast; the development of the script and score from early drafts and workshop performances to the version we know and love today; the movie version, tours, and much more. The section "Rent Cultural Literacy" is a guide to all the titles and real people referenced in the show and the East Village and Alphabet City locations that Rent helped make famous; another chapter provides clues to the characters and tips for anyone thinking about auditioning for the musical, or putting on a production! A final chapter provides a rundown, with numerous photos, of revivals and local productions all over the country, including regional, community, and dinner theaters, and high school and college versions. Rent FAQ is a treasure trove of information, background, and fun facts for the show's devotees as well as anyone who might be lucky enough to be discovering the musical for the first time!

Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust


Evgeny Finkel - 2017
    Relying on rich archival material and hundreds of survivors' testimonies, Evgeny Finkel presents a new framework for understanding the survival strategies in which Jews engaged: cooperation and collaboration, coping and compliance, evasion, and resistance. Finkel compares Jews' behavior in three Jewish ghettos—Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok—and shows that Jews' responses to Nazi genocide varied based on their experiences with prewar policies that either promoted or discouraged their integration into non-Jewish society. Finkel demonstrates that while possible survival strategies were the same for everyone, individuals' choices varied across and within communities. In more cohesive and robust Jewish communities, coping—confronting the danger and trying to survive without leaving—was more organized and successful, while collaboration with the Nazis and attempts to escape the ghetto were minimal. In more heterogeneous Jewish communities, collaboration with the Nazis was more pervasive, while coping was disorganized. In localities with a history of peaceful interethnic relations, evasion was more widespread than in places where interethnic relations were hostile. State repression before WWII, to which local communities were subject, determined the viability of anti-Nazi Jewish resistance.Exploring the critical influences shaping the decisions made by Jews in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, Ordinary Jews sheds new light on the dynamics of collective violence and genocide.

Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary


Jennifer Malkowski - 2017
    Despite technological advances that allow for the easy creation and distribution of death footage, digital media often fail to live up to their promise to reveal the world in greater fidelity. Malkowski analyzes a wide range of death footage, from feature films about the terminally ill (Dying, Silverlake Life, Sick), to surreptitiously recorded suicides (The Bridge), to #BlackLivesMatter YouTube videos and their precursors. Contextualizing these recordings in the long history of attempts to capture the moment of death in American culture, Malkowski shows how digital media are unable to deliver death "in full detail," as its metaphysical truth remains beyond representation. Digital technology's capacity to record death does, however, provide the opportunity to politicize individual deaths through their representation. Exploring the relationships among technology, temporality, and the ethical and aesthetic debates about capturing death on video, Malkowski illuminates the key roles documentary death has played in twenty-first-century visual culture.

The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965–1975


Mat Callahan - 2017
    Author, musician, and native San Franciscan Mat Callahan explores the dynamic links between the Black Panthers and Sly and the Family Stone, the United Farmworkers and Santana, the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the New Left and the counterculture. Callahan’s meticulous, impassioned arguments both expose and reframe the political and social context for the San Francisco Sound and the vibrant subcultural uprisings with which it is associated. Using dozens of original interviews, primary sources, and personal experiences, the author shows how the intense interplay of artistic and political movements put San Francisco, briefly, in the forefront of a worldwide revolutionary upsurge. A must-read for any musician, historian, or person who "was there" (or longed to have been), this book is substantive and provocative, inviting us to reinvigorate our historical sense-making of an era that assumes a mythic role in the contemporary American zeitgeist.

The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the Twenty-First Century (American Made Music Series)


Ryan P. Harper - 2017
    Harper examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaither’s Homecoming video and concert series—a gospel music franchise that, since its beginning in 1991, has outperformed all Christian and much secular popular music on the American music market.The Homecomings represent “southern gospel.” Typically that means a musical style popular among white evangelical Christians in the American South and Midwest, and it sometimes overlaps in style, theme, and audience with country music. The Homecomings’ nostalgic orientation—their celebration of “traditional” kinds of American Christian life—harmonize well with southern gospel music, past and present. But amidst the backward gazes, the Homecomings also portend and manifest change. The Gaithers’ deliberate racial integration of their stages, their careful articulation of a relatively inclusive evangelical theology, and their experiments with an array of musical forms demonstrate that the Homecoming is neither simplistically nostalgic, nor solely “southern.”Harper reveals how the Gaithers negotiate a tension between traditional and changing community norms as they seek simultaneously to maintain and expand their audience as well as to initiate and respond to shifts within their fan base. Pulling from his field work at Homecoming concerts, behind the scenes with the Gaithers, and with numerous Homecoming fans, Harper reveals the Homecoming world to be a dynamic, complicated constellation in the formation of American religious identity.

Discovering the South: One Man's Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s


Jennifer Ritterhouse - 2017
    It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself.In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era.For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.

The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America


Jeannine Hill Fletcher - 2017
    In other words, Christian supremacy has historically lent itself to white supremacy, with disastrous consequences. Hill Fletcher proposes educational strategies to disentangle the two that will help us move forward toward racial healing in America.

Two Stories of Everything: The Competing Metanarratives of Islam and Christianity


Duane Alexander Miller - 2017
    But what if we set that approach aside and try something new? What if we look at the stories that Islam and Christianity tell? In this book we do exactly that: we go back to the beginning of the stories - Creation - and work our way forward to humanity, Israel, the founders (Jesus and Muhammad), why they founded their communities (the Church and the Umma), what those communities are doing in the world today, and then look down the road to the end of the two stories of everything with their different accounts of the final judgment. Approaching Islam and Christianity as two stories of everything, or metanarratives, produces fresh new insights relevant to any person - whether Christian, Muslim, or of no religion - concerned with the question of how Islam, Christianity, and modernity interact and sometimes clash with each other.

The English Teacher's Guide to the Hamilton Musical: Symbols, Allegory, Metafiction, and Clever Language


Valerie Estelle Frankel - 2017
    With such a barrage, it can be tough to sort them all out. Yet here's the list, from Absurdity to Zeugma, all defined through the clever wordplay of Hamilton. In fact, musicals use all the rhythm and rhyme patterns of history's top poets, and the literary skill of crafting characters and straddling genre. Further, the rap battles reveal a list of logical fallacies and top argumentation strategies that could empower lawyers or speech writers at the level of this famed Founding Father. Going deeper, the book lists the themes, motifs, allusions, and so on of the show, revealing sneaky foreshadowing and subtle symbols. For die-hard fans of the show, or those mastering rhetorical terms, logic, and the power of words, it's a delightful geek guide.

The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China's Global Marketplace


Gordon Mathews - 2017
    Today, it is a truly global city, a place where people from around the world go to make new lives, find themselves, or further their careers. A large number of these migrants are small-scale traders from Africa who deal in Chinese goods—often knockoffs or copies of high-end branded items—to send back to their home countries. In The World in Guangzhou, Gordon Mathews explores the question of how the city became a center of “low-end globalization” and shows what we can learn from that experience about similar transformations elsewhere in the world.   Through detailed ethnographic portraits, Mathews reveals a world of globalization based on informality, reputation, and trust rather than on formal contracts. How, he asks, can such informal relationships emerge between two groups—Chinese and sub-Saharan Africans—that don't share a common language, culture, or religion? And what happens when Africans move beyond their status as temporary residents and begin to put down roots and establish families?   Full of unforgettable characters, The World in Guangzhou presents a compelling account of globalization at ground level and offers a look into the future of urban life as transnational connections continue to remake cities around the world.

Designing Disability: Symbols, Space, and Society


Elizabeth Guffey - 2017
    The book draws on design history, material culture and recent critical disability studies to examine not only the development of a design icon, but also the cultural history surrounding it.Infirmity and illness may be seen as part of human experience, but 'disability' is a social construct, a way of thinking about and responding to a natural human condition. Elizabeth Guffey's highly original and wide-ranging study considers the period both before and after the introduction of the ISA, tracing the design history of the wheelchair, a product which revolutionised the mobility needs of many disabled people from the 1930s onwards. She also examines the rise of 'barrier-free architecture' in the reception of the ISA, and explores how the symbol became widely adopted and even a mark of identity for some, especially within the Disability Rights Movement.Yet despite the social progress which is inextricably linked to the ISA, a growing debate has unfurled around the symbol and its meanings. The most vigorous critiques today have involved guerrilla art, graffiti and studio practice, reflecting new challenges to the relationship between design and disability in the twenty-first century.

The Critical Surf Studies Reader


Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee - 2017
    As corporations have sought to promote surfing as a lifestyle and leisure enterprise, the sport has also narrated its own epic myths that place North America at the center of surf culture and relegate Hawai‘i and other indigenous surfing cultures to the margins. The Critical Surf Studies Reader brings together eighteen interdisciplinary essays that explore surfing’s history and development as a practice embedded in complex and sometimes oppositional social, political, economic, and cultural relations. Refocusing the history and culture of surfing, this volume pays particular attention to reclaiming the roles that women, indigenous peoples, and peoples of color have played in surfing. Contributors. Douglas Booth, Pete Brosius, Robin Canniford, Krista Comer, Kevin Dawson, Clifton Evers, Chris Gibson, Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee, Scott Laderman, Kristin Lawler, Lisa Hunter, Colleen McGloin, Patrick Moser, Tara Ruttenberg, Cori Schumacher, Alexander Sotelo Eastman, Glen Thompson, Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Andrew Warren, Belinda Wheaton, Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab's Saloon to Occupy Wall Street


Tom Goyens - 2017
    For 150 years, Gotham's cosmopolitan setting created a unique interplay between anarchism's human actors and an urban space that invites constant reinvention. Tom Goyens gathers essays that demonstrate anarchism's endurance as a political and cultural ideology and movement in New York from the 1870s to 2011. The authors cover the gamut of anarchy's emergence in and connection to the city. Some offer important new insights on German, Yiddish, Italian, and Spanish-speaking anarchists. Others explore anarchism's influence on religion, politics, and the visual and performing arts. A concluding essay looks at Occupy Wall Street's roots in New York City's anarchist tradition. Contributors: Allan Antliff, Marcella Bencivenni, Caitlin Casey, Christopher J. Castañeda, Andrew Cornell, Heather Gautney, Tom Goyens, Anne Klejment, Alan W. Moore, Erin Wallace, and Kenyon Zimmer.

The Hope of Another Spring: Takuichi Fujii, Artist and Wartime Witness


Barbara Johns - 2017
    When war broke out between the United States and Japan, he and his family were incarcerated along with the more than 100,000 ethnic Japanese located on the West Coast. Sent to detention camps at Puyallup, Washington, and then Minidoka in Idaho, Fujii documented his daily experiences in words and art. The Hope of Another Spring reveals the rare find of a large and heretofore unknown collection of art produced during World War II. The centerpiece of the collection is Fujii's illustrated diary that historian Roger Daniels has called "the most remarkable document created by a Japanese American prisoner during the wartime incarceration."Barbara Johns presents Takuichi Fujii's life story and his artistic achievements within the social and political context of the time. Sandy Kita, the artist's grandson, provides translations and an introduction to the diary. The Hope of Another Spring is a significant contribution to Asian American studies, American and regional history, and art history.

Manchester United


Mark Stewart - 2017
    Includes information about the team's history and culture, stadium, star players, and uniforms. Features include: photos, vintage trading card reproductions, maps, and records. Table of Contents, glossary, index and additional resources including a companion website"--

Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects and Legacies


Julian HenriquesJohn Clarke - 2017
    These essays evaluate the legacies of his particular brand of cultural studies and demonstrate how other scholars and activists have utilized his thinking in their own research. Throughout, Hall's colleagues and collaborators assess his theoretical and methodological standpoints, his commitment to the development of a flexible form of revisionist Marxism, and the contributions of his specific mode of analysis to public debates on Thatcherism, neoliberalism, and multiculturalism. In her contribution, Angela Davis argues that the model of politics, ideology, and race initially developed by Hall and his colleagues in England continues to resonate when applied to America's racialized policing. Other essays focus on Hall's contributions to contemporary political debate and questions of race, ethnicity, identity, migrancy, and diaspora, and discuss Hall's continuing involvement in issues of representation and aesthetics in the visual arts, particularly photography and film.With contributions from Britain, Europe, East Asia, and North and Latin America, the book provides a comprehensive look at how, under Hall's intellectual leadership, British cultural studies transformed itself from a form of “local” knowledge to the international field of study we know today.

The First Amendment: Freedom of Speech and Religion


John Micklos Jr. - 2017
    Readers will take a look at what caused the First Amendment to be born and what effects the amendment has had through history and today.

The Tiger in the Smoke: Visual Culture in Britain C. 1945-1960


Lynda Nead - 2017
    

Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come (Palgrave Studies in Sound)


Erik Steinskog - 2017
    Whereas Afrofuturism is often understood primarily in relation to science fiction and speculative fiction, it can also be examined from a sonic perspective. The sounds of Afrofuturism are deeply embedded in the speculative – demonstrated in mythmaking – in frameworks for songs and compositions, in the personas of the artists, and in how the sounds are produced. In highlighting the place of music within the lived experiences of African Americans, the author analyses how the perspectives of Black Sound Studies complement and overlap with the discussion of sonic Afrofuturism. Focusing upon blackness, technology, and sound, this unique text offers key insights in how music partakes in imagining and constructing the future. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of sound studies, musicology and African American studies.

Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression


Julian Yates - 2017
    The book opens and closes in the company of a Shakespearean character talking through his painful encounter with the skin of a lamb (in the form of parchment). This encounter stages a visceral awareness of what Julian Yates names a “multispecies impression,” the way all acts of writing are saturated with the “writing” of other beings. Yates then develops a multimodal reading strategy that traces a series of anthropo-zoo-genetic figures that derive from our comaking with sheep (keyed to the story of biopolitics), oranges (keyed to economy), and yeast (keyed to the notion of foundation or infrastructure). Working with an array of materials (published and archival), across disciplines and historical periods (Classical to postmodern), the book allows sheep, oranges, and yeast to dictate their own chronologies and plot their own stories. What emerges is a methodology that fundamentally alters what it means to read in the twenty-first century.

Rebellious Bodies: Stardom, Citizenship, and the New Body Politics


Russell Meeuf - 2017
    Plus-size and older actresses are rebelling against the cultural obsession with slender bodies and youth. Physically disabled actors and actresses are moving beyond the stock roles and stereotypes that once constrained their opportunities. Stars of various races and ethnicities are crafting new narratives about cultural belonging, while transgender performers are challenging our culture’s assumptions about gender and identity. But do these new players in contemporary entertainment media truly signal a new acceptance of body diversity in popular culture?Focusing on six key examples—Melissa McCarthy, Gabourey Sidibe, Peter Dinklage, Danny Trejo, Betty White, and Laverne Cox—Rebellious Bodies examines the new body politics of stardom, situating each star against a prominent cultural anxiety about bodies and inclusion, evoking issues ranging from the obesity epidemic and the rise of postracial rhetoric to disability rights, Latino/a immigration, an aging population, and transgender activism. Using a wide variety of sources featuring these celebrities—films, TV shows, entertainment journalism, and more—to analyze each one’s media persona, Russell Meeuf demonstrates that while these stars are promoted as examples of a supposedly more inclusive industry, the reality is far more complex. Revealing how their bodies have become sites for negotiating the still-contested boundaries of cultural citizenship, he uncovers the stark limitations of inclusion in a deeply unequal world.

Race and Upward Mobility: Seeking, Gatekeeping, and Other Class Strategies in Postwar America


Elda Maria Roman - 2017
    Yet the terms "middle class" and "upward mobility"-often associated with assimilation, selling out, or political conservatism-can hold negative connotations in literary and cultural studies. Surveying literature, film, and television from the 1940s to the 2000s, Elda Maria Roman brings forth these narratives, untangling how they present the intertwined effects of capitalism and white supremacy.Race and Upward Mobility examines how class and ethnicity serve as forms of currency in American literature, affording people of color material and symbolic wages as they traverse class divisions. Identifying four recurring character types-status seekers, conflicted artists, mediators, and gatekeepers-that appear across genres, Roman traces how each models a distinct strategy for negotiating race and class. Her comparative analysis sheds light on the overlaps and misalignments, the shared narrative strategies, and the historical trajectories of Mexican American and African American texts, bringing both groups' works into sharper relief. Her study advances both a new approach to ethnic literary studies and a more nuanced understanding of the class-based complexities of racial identity.

Utopia/Dystopia


Pedro Gadanho, João Laia, Susana Ventura - 2017
    It is not exactly an exhibition catalogue, but rather a reader containing previously unpublished essays on the ongoing transition from the five-hundred-year old literary notion of utopia, toward the pervasive, everyday imposition of its mirror image: dystopia.Edited by Pedro Gadanho with João Laia and Susana VenturaTexts by Franco Berardi, Rosi Braidotti, Keller Easterling, Pedro Gadanho, João Laia, Antoine Picon and Susana Ventura

We Demand: The University and Student Protests


Roderick A. Ferguson - 2017
    In student-led movements, women, minorities, immigrants, and indigenous people demanded that universities adapt to better serve the increasingly heterogeneous public and student bodies. The success of these movements had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: out of these efforts were born ethnic studies, women’s studies, and American studies.   In We Demand, Roderick A. Ferguson demonstrates that less than fifty years since this pivotal shift in the academy, the university is moving away from “the people” in all their diversity. Today the university is refortifying its commitment to the defense of the status quo off campus and the regulation of students, faculty, and staff on campus. The progressive forms of knowledge that the student-led movements demanded and helped to produce are being attacked on every front. Not only is this a reactionary move against the social advances since the ’60s and ’70s—it is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States.

Blackout


Nanni Balestrini - 2017
    Blackout is the first book of his poetry available in English. Written immediately after he was indicted by Italian authorities and forced to flee, it has at its center the great New York blackout of 1977, a moment of chaos and panic, but also of mutual aid and social solidarity. This comes to stand in for the years from 1968–1979 in Italy, when a more or less open civil war between popular militants and the state escalated from strikes and riots to armed struggle. At once documentary and visionary, it is a poem of heroic and daily struggles for freedom, captured in heroic and daily language. It is a poem of popular revolt being crushed, a poem for our era as well as his.Nanni Balestrini, born in Milan in 1935, was member of the avant-garde literary movement Gruppo 63 with Eduardo Sanguinetti and Umberto Eco. He is the author of numerous books, including the novels The Unseen and We Want Everything, and his history of the movement of '77, L'orda d'oro (written with Sergio Bianchi). He lives in Rome.Peter Valente is the author of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna (Punctum Books, 2014) and the translator of numerous works by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Antonin Artaud, and others. His translation of Artraud's late letters is forthcoming from City Lights.

Sex and Secularism


Joan Wallach Scott - 2017
    With Sex and Secularism, Scott challenges one of the central claims of the "clash of civilizations" polemic--the false notion that secularism is a guarantee of gender equality.Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term "secularism" when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women's subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism.Challenging the assertion that secularism has always been synonymous with equality between the sexes, Sex and Secularism reveals how this idea has been used to justify claims of white, Western, and Christian racial and religious superiority and has served to distract our attention from a persistent set of difficulties related to gender difference--ones shared by Western and non-Western cultures alike.

Nonbinary Gender Identities: History, Culture, Resources


Charlie McNabb - 2017
    Although there have always been people who identify outside the gender binary, only recently have they gained popular media attention. Despite some visibility, however, nonbinary gender identities are poorly understood by the general public.It is critically important for gender minorities to find themselves in the media that they consume. Just as important is the need for those outside the minority community to understand and appreciate them. Nonbinary gender identities are represented in books and other media, but these resources prove difficult to locate, as classification vocabulary doesn't evolve as quickly as community language. Reference sources identified include archives and special collections, theses and dissertations, key journals, and related organizations and associations.This timely resource--the first reference on nonbinary gender identities--offers an accessible entry into researching this topic. Written by a nonbinary scholar and librarian, this guide includes valuable appendixes that will aid every researcher and writer: a glossary of the rich vocabulary emerging from nonbinary communities; a guide to pronoun usage; a primer on sex, sexuality, and gender; and Library of Congress Classification information.