Search results for ""author morris"

A radical defense of a solitary life What single person hasn't suffered? Everyone, it seems, must be (or must want to be) in a couple. To exist outside of the couple is to assume an antisocial position that is ruthlessly discouraged because being in a couple is the way most people bind themselves to the social. Singles might just be the single most reviled sexual minorities today. Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled offers a polemic account of this supremacy of the couple form, and how that supremacy blocks our understanding of the single. Michael Cobb reads the figurative language surrounding singleness as it traverses an eclectic set of literary, cultural, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and popular culture objects from Plato, Freud, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Barack Obama, Emily Dickinson, Morrissey, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Hannah Arendt to the Bible, Sex and the City, Bridget Jones' Diary, Beyoncé's “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” and HBO's Big Love. Within these flights of fancy, poetry, fiction, strange moments in film and video, paintings made in the desert, bits of song, and memoirs of hiking in national parks, Cobb offers an inspired, eloquent rumination on the single, which is guaranteed to spark conversation and consideration.

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A radical defense of a solitary life What single person hasn't suffered? Everyone, it seems, must be (or must want to be) in a couple. To exist outside of the couple is to assume an antisocial position that is ruthlessly discouraged because being in a couple is the way most people bind themselves to the social. Singles might just be the single most reviled sexual minorities today. Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled offers a polemic account of this supremacy of the couple form, and how that supremacy blocks our understanding of the single. Michael Cobb reads the figurative language surrounding singleness as it traverses an eclectic set of literary, cultural, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and popular culture objects from Plato, Freud, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Barack Obama, Emily Dickinson, Morrissey, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Hannah Arendt to the Bible, Sex and the City, Bridget Jones' Diary, Beyoncé's “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” and HBO's Big Love. Within these flights of fancy, poetry, fiction, strange moments in film and video, paintings made in the desert, bits of song, and memoirs of hiking in national parks, Cobb offers an inspired, eloquent rumination on the single, which is guaranteed to spark conversation and consideration.

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The first in-depth biography of one of music's most fascinating, colourful and innovative characters. This book is the most comprehensive history yet of the life, music and cultural significance of the last of the great black music pioneers and the era which spawned him. Clinton stands alongside James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone as one of the most influential black artists of all time who, along with his vast P-Funk army took black funk into the US charts and sold out stadiums by the mid 1970s with his mind-blowing shows and legendary Mothership extravaganzas. The book contains first hand interview material with Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Jerome "Bigfoot" Brailey, Junie Morrison, Bobby Gillespie, Afrika Bambaataa, Jalal Nuriddin (Last Poets), Juan Atkins, John Sinclair, Rob Tyner (MC5), Ed Sanders (The Fugs), Chip Monck ("The Voice of Woodstock") plus other P-Funk associates and friends. The book presents an insiders' view of the rise of Parliament and Funkadelic from the doowop era and LSD-crazed early shows through to P-Funk's huge rise, the era of the Mothership and beyond.

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A FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTIONPalmares hails the return of a major voice in literature - 'the best American novelist whose name you may not know' (Atlantic). Gayl Jones was first discovered and edited by Toni Morrison, and her talent was praised by writers including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin and John Updike. After a handful of acclaimed novels, she withdrew from the publishing world. Now Jones returns with her first new novel in over two decades.AN EPIC TALE OF LOVE AND LIBERATION SET IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY COLONIAL BRAZILFrom plantation to plantation, Almeyda, a young slave girl, hears whispers, rumours of Palmares, a hidden settlement where fugitive slaves live free. But can this promised land exist? And what price is paid for 'freedom'?In Palmares, Gayl Jones brings to life a world full of unforgettable characters, reimagining extraordinary historical events and combining them with mythology and magic. The result is a sweeping saga spanning a quarter of a century. Of Gayl Jones, the New Yorker noted, '[Her] great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.' Like nothing else before it, Palmares embodies this gift.

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The legal texts and aspirational ideals of human rights are usually understood and applied in a global context with little bearing on the legal discourse, domestic political struggles, or social justice concerns within the United States. In Writing Human Rights, Crystal Parikh uses the international human rights regime to read works by contemporary American writers of color—Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, Ana Castillo, Aimee Phan, and others—to explore the conditions under which new norms, more capacious formulations of rights, and alternative kinds of political communities emerge.Parikh contends that unlike humanitarianism, which views its objects as victims, human rights provide avenues for the creation of political subjects. Pairing the ethical deliberations in such works as Beloved and A Gesture Life with human rights texts like the United Nations Convention Against Torture, she considers why principles articulated as rights in international conventions and treaties—such as the right to self-determination or the right to family—are too often disregarded at home. Human rights concepts instead provide writers of color with a deeply meaningful method for political and moral imagining in their literature.Affiliating transnational works of American literature with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, this book illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights and freedoms that have been globalized in the twenty-first century. In the absence of domestic human rights enforcement, these literatures provide a considerable repository for those ways of life and subjects of rights made otherwise impossible in the present antidemocratic moment.

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The legal texts and aspirational ideals of human rights are usually understood and applied in a global context with little bearing on the legal discourse, domestic political struggles, or social justice concerns within the United States. In Writing Human Rights, Crystal Parikh uses the international human rights regime to read works by contemporary American writers of color—Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, Ana Castillo, Aimee Phan, and others—to explore the conditions under which new norms, more capacious formulations of rights, and alternative kinds of political communities emerge.Parikh contends that unlike humanitarianism, which views its objects as victims, human rights provide avenues for the creation of political subjects. Pairing the ethical deliberations in such works as Beloved and A Gesture Life with human rights texts like the United Nations Convention Against Torture, she considers why principles articulated as rights in international conventions and treaties—such as the right to self-determination or the right to family—are too often disregarded at home. Human rights concepts instead provide writers of color with a deeply meaningful method for political and moral imagining in their literature.Affiliating transnational works of American literature with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, this book illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights and freedoms that have been globalized in the twenty-first century. In the absence of domestic human rights enforcement, these literatures provide a considerable repository for those ways of life and subjects of rights made otherwise impossible in the present antidemocratic moment.

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NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING VIOLA DAVIS AND CHADWICK BOSEMAN *Two stunning, intensely powerful modern classics about race in 20th century America from the legendary Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright August Wilson*In Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, the great blues diva Ma Rainey is due to arrive at a run-down Chicago recording studio with her entourage to cut new sides of old favourites. Waiting for her are the black musicians in her band - and the white owners of the record company. A tense, searing account of racism in jazz-era America that the New Yorker called 'a genuine work of art'.Fences centres on Troy Maxson, a garbage collector, an embittered former baseball player and a proud, dominating father, in 1950s Pittsburgh. When college athletic recruiters scout his teenage son, Troy struggles against his young son's ambition, his wife, who he understands less and less, and his own frustrated dreams. 'A prolific and successful playwright who confines his themes to African American culture... The level of his achievement is high. This comes powerfully into view when the play is read, an activity for me that is equal to, and in some ways more fruitful than, seeing its stage production.' Toni Morrison'In his work, August Wilson depicted the struggles of Black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that give vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life' New York Times 'August Wilson has established himself as the richest theatrical voice to emerge in the U.S. since Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller' Time

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Private Lives, Proper Relations begins with the question of why contemporary African American literature—particularly that produced by black women—is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety. Candice M. Jenkins argues that this preoccupation has its origins in recurrent ideologies about African American sexuality, and that it expresses a fundamental aspect of the racial self—an often unarticulated link between the intimate and the political in black culture. In a counterpoint to her paradigmatic reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jenkins’s analysis of black women’s narratives—including Ann Petry’s The Street, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Paradise, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man—offers a theory of black subjectivity. Here Jenkins describes middle-class attempts to rescue the black community from accusations of sexual and domestic deviance by embracing bourgeois respectability, and asserts that behind those efforts there is the “doubled vulnerability” of the black intimate subject. Rather than reflecting a DuBoisian tension between race and nation, to Jenkins this vulnerability signifies for the African American an opposition between two poles of potential exposure: racial scrutiny and the proximity of human intimacy. Scholars of African American culture acknowledge that intimacy and sexuality are taboo subjects among African Americans precisely because black intimate character has been pathologized. Private Lives, Proper Relations is a powerful contribution to the crucial effort to end the distortion still surrounding black intimacy in the United States. Candice M. Jenkins is associate professor of English at Hunter College, City University o

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A preliminary to Dick’s masterwork, Valis, in which Phil appears as an explicitly named autobiographical character for the first time. Soon to be a major new film. As America gasps in the stranglehold of a skull-crushing totalitarian regime, a supernatural intelligence speaks from the stars… ARAMCHEK… the word scratched in the sidewalk of the President’s childhood home. ARAMCHEK… the name of the subversive society ‘with no official membership’ whose sole purpose is to overthrow the American government. ARAMCHEK… the word printed on a book which contains the President’s signature – a book in the hands of a Communist Party organiser. ARAMCHEK… the name of a woman who may hold the key – and who has only weeks to live. Will the agents of the omniscient Valis succeed in their mission of liberation? Or will the seek-and-destroy tactics of President Ferris F. Freemont extend the mind-numbing grip of the Antagonist across the parameters of the free world? In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer. This prophetic novel of social control and political oppression is now to be turned into a major new movie starring Alanis Morrissette, which promises a provocative and edgy antidote to the summer blockbusters.

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No longer content with accepting whiteness as the norm, critical scholars have turned their attention to whiteness itself. In Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, numerous thinkers, including Toni Morrison, Eric Foner, Peggy McIntosh, Andrew Hacker, Ruth Frankenberg, John Howard Griffin, David Roediger, Kathleen Heal Cleaver, Noel Ignatiev, Cherrie Moraga, and Reginald Horsman, attack such questions as: *How was whiteness invented, and why? *How has the category whiteness changed over time? *Why did some immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Jews, start out as nonwhite and later became white? *Can some individual people be both white and nonwhite at different times, and what does it mean to \u0022pass for white\u0022? *At what point does pride in being white cross the line into white power or white supremacy? *What can whites concerned over racial inequity or white privilege do about it? Science and pseudoscience are presented side by side to demonstrate how our views on whiteness often reflect preconception, not fact. For example, most scientists hold that race is not a valid scientific category -- genetic differences between races are insignificant compared to those within them. Yet, the \u0022one drop\u0022 rule, whereby those with any nonwhite heritage are classified as nonwhite, persists even today. As the bell curve controversy shows, race concepts die hard, especially when power and prestige lie behind them. A sweeping portrait of the emerging field of whiteness studies, Critical White Studies presents, for the first time, the best work from sociology, law, history, cultural studies, and literature. Delgado and Stefancic expressly offer critical white studies as the next step in critical race theory. In focusing on whiteness, not only do they ask nonwhites to investigate more closely for what it means for others to be white, but also they invite whites to examine themselves more searchingly and to \u0022look behind the mirror.\u0022

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Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy. From the country’s founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present.Intertwining history, literature, ethics, and the deeply personal, Mura looks back to foundational narratives of white supremacy (Jefferson’s defense of slavery, Lincoln’s frequently minimized racism, and the establishment of Jim Crow) to show how white identity is based on shared belief in the pernicious myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictions that allow whites to deny their culpability in past atrocities and current inequities. White supremacy always insists white knowledge is superior to Black knowledge, Mura argues, and this belief dismisses the truths embodied in Black narratives.Mura turns to literature, comparing the white savior portrayal of the film Amistad to the novelization of its script by the Black novelist Alexs Pate, which focuses on its African protagonists; depictions of slavery in Faulkner and Morrison; and race’s absence in the fiction of Jonathan Franzen and its inescapable presence in works by ZZ Packer, tracing the construction of Whiteness to willfully distorted portraits of race in America. In James Baldwin’s essays, Mura finds a response to this racial distortion and a way for Blacks and other BIPOC people to heal from the wounds of racism.Taking readers beyond apology, contrition, or sadness, Mura attends to the persistent trauma racism has exacted and lays bare how deeply we need to change our racial narratives—what white people must do—to dissolve the myth of Whiteness and fully acknowledge the stories and experiences of Black Americans.

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Shakesqueer puts the most exciting queer theorists in conversation with the complete works of William Shakespeare. Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard’s plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that Shakespeare can be queered but also the many ways that Shakespeare can enrich queer theory. This innovative anthology reveals an early modern playwright insistently returning to questions of language, identity, and temporality, themes central to contemporary queer theory. Since many of the contributors do not study early modern literature, Shakesqueer takes queer theory back and brings Shakespeare forward, challenging the chronological confinement of queer theory to the last two hundred years. The book also challenges conceptual certainties that have narrowly equated queerness with homosexuality. Chasing all manner of stray desires through every one of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the contributors cross temporal, animal, theoretical, and sexual boundaries with abandon. Claiming adherence to no one school of thought, the essays consider The Winter’s Tale alongside network TV, Hamlet in relation to the death drive, King John as a history of queer theory, and Much Ado About Nothing in tune with a Sondheim musical. Together they expand the reach of queerness and queer critique across chronologies, methodologies, and bodies.Contributors. Matt Bell, Amanda Berry, Daniel Boyarin, Judith Brown, Steven Bruhm, Peter Coviello, Julie Crawford, Drew Daniel, Mario DiGangi, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Aranye Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Daniel Juan Gil, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, Stephen Guy-Bray, Ellis Hanson, Sharon Holland, Cary Howie, Lynne Huffer, Barbara Johnson, Hector Kollias, James Kuzner , Arthur L. Little Jr., Philip Lorenz, Heather Love, Jeffrey Masten, Robert McRuer , Madhavi Menon, Michael Moon, Paul Morrison, Andrew Nicholls, Kevin Ohi, Patrick R. O’Malley, Ann Pellegrini, Richard Rambuss, Valerie Rohy, Bethany Schneider, Kathryn Schwarz, Laurie Shannon, Ashley T. Shelden, Alan Sinfield, Bruce Smith, Karl Steel, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Amy Villarejo, Julian Yates

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A vital contribution to environmental humanities that explores artistic responses to the plastic age Since at least the 1960s, plastics have been a defining feature of contemporary life. They are undeniably utopian—wondrously innovative, cheap, malleable, durable, and convenient. Yet our proliferating use of plastics has also triggered catastrophic environmental consequences. Plastics are piling up in landfills, floating in oceans, and contributing to climate change and cancer clusters. They are derived from petrochemicals and enmeshed with the global oil economy, and they permeate our consumer goods and their packaging, our clothing and buildings, our bodies and minds. Plastic reshapes our cultural and social imaginaries. With impressive breadth and compelling urgency, the essays in Life in Plastic examine the arts and literature of the plastic age. Focusing mainly on post-1960s North America, the collection spans a wide variety of genres, including graphic novels, superhero comics, utopic and dystopic science fiction, poetry, and satirical prose, as well as vinyl records and visual arts. Essays by a remarkable lineup of cultural theorists interrogate how plastic—as material and concept—has affected human sensibilities and expression. The collection reveals the place of plastic in reshaping how we perceive, relate to, represent, and re-imagine bodies, senses, environment, scale, mortality, and collective well-being.Ultimately, the contributors to Life in Plastic think through plastic with an eye to imagining our way out of plastic, moving toward a postplastic future.Contributors: Crystal Bartolovich, Syracuse U; Maurizia Boscagli, U of California, Santa Barbara; Christopher Breu, Illinois State U; Loren Glass, U of Iowa; Sean Grattan, U of Kent; Nayoung Kim, Brandeis U; Jane Kuenz, U of Southern Maine; Paul Morrison, Brandeis U; W. Dana Phillips, Towson U in Maryland and Rhodes U in Grahamstown, South Africa; Margaret Ronda, UC-Davis; Lisa Swanstrom, U of Utah; Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Pennsylvania State U; Phillip E. Wegner, U of Florida; Daniel Worden, Rochester Institute of Technology.

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NPR Best Books of 2017In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR’s acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race.In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America’s primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orleans through dance-crazed Jazz Age New York to the teen scream years of mid-twentieth century rock-and-roll to the cutting-edge adventures of today’s web-based pop stars. Drawing on her deep knowledge and insights on gender and sexuality, Powers recounts stories of forbidden lovers, wild shimmy-shakers, orgasmic gospel singers, countercultural perverts, soft-rock sensitivos, punk Puritans, and the cyborg known as Britney Spears to illuminate how eroticism—not merely sex, but love, bodily freedom, and liberating joy—became entwined within the rhythms and melodies of American song. This cohesion, she reveals, touches the heart of America's anxieties and hopes about race, feminism, marriage, youth, and freedom. In a survey that spans more than a century of music, Powers both heralds little known artists such as Florence Mills, a contemporary of Josephine Baker, and gospel queen Dorothy Love Coates, and sheds new light on artists we think we know well, from the Beatles and Jim Morrison to Madonna and Beyoncé. In telling the history of how American popular music and sexuality intersect—a magnum opus over two decades in the making—Powers offers new insights into our nation psyche and our soul.

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Enterprise law represents the entire range of private contracts and public regulations governing the relationship of different capital providers. Enterprise Law comparatively analyses the way these fundamental legal frameworks complement each other in the United States and Japan.In this collection of essays edited by Professor Zenichi Shishido, a wide range of leading scholars examine the firm as an incentive mechanism and show how law the whole legal system affect the incentive bargain between the firm's major players, positively with markets and social norms. They establish that enterprise law is not always effective in its attempt to affect the incentive bargain of the firm by itself, but instead works by interacting complementarily with markets and social norms.Demonstrating the dynamic relationship between parts and the whole of enterprise law, this exceptional book will be of special interest to comparative law, and law and economics scholars and students.Contributors: K.M. Ayotte, K.G. Dau-Schmidt, T. Eguchi, B.C. Ellis, D. Gamage, M.P. Gergen, G. Goto, B.E. Hermalin, Y. Higashi, A. Hoshi, H. Iida, H. Itoh, H.E. Jackson, T. Kitagawa, C.J. Milhaupt, H. Miyajima, E.R. Morrison, S. Osaki, K. Osugi, J.M. Ramseyer, S. Rana, R. Romano, K. Sekiguchi, Z. Shishido, W. Tanaka, A. Tokutsu, G. Triantis, J.H. Verkerke, T. Watanabe, N. Yanagawa

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Considering Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector’s literature as a case study and a source of theory, Writing by Ear presents an aural theory of the novel based on readings of Near to the Wild Heart (1943), The Besieged City (1949), The Passion According to G.H. (1964), Agua Viva (1973), The Hour of the Star (1977), and A Breath of Life (1978). What is the specific aesthetic for which listening-in-writing calls? What is the relation that listening-in-writing establishes with silence, echo, and the sounds of the world? How are we to understand authorship when writers present themselves as objects of reception rather than subjects of production? In which ways does the robust oral and aural culture of Brazil shape literary genres and forms? In addressing these questions, Writing by Ear works in dialogue with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sound studies to contemplate the relationship between orality and writing. Citing writers such as Machado de Assis, Oswald de Andrade and João Guimarães Rosa, as well as Mia Couto and Toni Morrison, Writing By Ear opens up a broader dialogue on listening and literature, considering the aesthetic, ethical, and ecological reverberations of the imaginary. Writing by Ear is concerned at once with shedding light on the narrative representation of listening and with a broader reconceptualization of fiction through listening, considering it an auditory practice that transcends the dichotomy of speech and writing.

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107 with treatments that affect the arousal of the animals is also implied on the basis of the behavioral changes induced in the lesioned animals by amphetamine administration and by changes in the motivational circumstances under which the animals are tested. Studies of the effects of cingulate lesions in the rat have involved the production of midline cortical damage. Unfortunately, as reported in the previous chapter, the midline cortex of the rat is not comparable to the midline cortex of other animals as defined on the basis of the fibers it receives from the thalamus. In addition, lesions of the midline cortex, whether in the rat or in other species, are likely to interfere with fibers of the neural systems in or near it. These include the cingulum bundle and the supracallosal fibers of the fornix. Norepi­ nephrine-containing fibers also pass through this region in or near the cingulum bundle. These fibers ascend through the anterior dor­ solateral septal area and turn up and back to pass through the midline regions and innervate the entire medial cortex (Morrison, Molliver, & Grzanna, 1979). Lesions in this area reduce the norepinephrine distribution throughout the rostrocaudal extent of the medial cortex. A similar problem results from destruction to the anterior cortical regions. Lesions in that region could reduce the norepinephrine sup­ plies of the entire dorsolateral cortex.

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Brian Norman uncovers a curious phenomenon in American literature: dead women who nonetheless talk. These characters appear in works by such classic American writers as Poe, Dickinson, and Faulkner, as well as in more recent works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and others. These figures are also emerging in contemporary culture, from the film and best-selling novel "The Lovely Bones" to the hit television drama "Desperate Housewives". "Dead Women Talking" demonstrates that the dead, especially women, have been speaking out in American literature since well before it was fashionable. Norman argues that they voice concerns that a community may wish to consign to the past, raising questions about gender, violence, sexuality, class, racial injustice, and national identity. When these women insert themselves into the story, they do not enter precisely as ghosts but rather as something potentially more disrupting: posthumous citizens. The community must ask itself whether it can or should recognize such a character as one of its own. The prospect of posthumous citizenship bears important implications for debates over the legal rights of the dead, social histories of burial customs and famous cadavers, and the political theory of citizenship and social death.

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Life and death are commonly seen as representing the starkest of binaries: Death is the ultimate adversary of all that lives. Beatrice Marovich argues that such understandings of mortality have been deeply influenced by a strain of Christian political theology that has left its mark on both religious and secular narratives. Adapting the figure of “Sister Death” from Saint Francis of Assisi, she calls for recognizing that life and death are family.Drawing on a wide range of sources—from Toni Morrison to Jacques Derrida, psychoanalysis to grassroots “death positive” movements—Marovich critiques a racialized political theology that pits life and death against each other in a state of endless war. In a time of extinctions, it is necessary to disrupt this dominant story in order to apprehend death as a collective, multispecies event. Sister Death proposes an alternative view in which life and death are not mortal enemies destined for mutual destruction. Instead, they are engaged in a contested, tense, and sometimes mutually empowering form of connection—a sisterhood.Eloquent and approachable, this book deftly integrates the insights of a number of disciplines to provide a profound reconsideration of the relations between life and death. Sister Death also features a series of original works by the artist Krista Dragomer that stage an ongoing conceptual conversation with the text.

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One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'A worldwide bestseller and the first part of Achebe's African Trilogy, Things Fall Apart is the compelling story of one man's battle to protect his community against the forces of changeOkonkwo is the greatest wrestler and warrior alive, and his fame spreads throughout West Africa like a bush-fire in the harmattan. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in the village. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy. First published in 1958, Chinua Achebe's stark, coolly ironic novel reshaped both African and world literature, and has sold over ten million copies in forty-five languages. This arresting parable of a proud but powerless man witnessing the ruin of his people begins Achebe's landmark trilogy of works chronicling the fate of one African community, continued in Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease.'His courage and generosity are made manifest in the work' Toni Morrison'The writer in whose company the prison walls fell down' Nelson Mandela'A great book, that bespeaks a great, brave, kind, human spirit' John UpdikeWith an Introduction by Biyi Bandele

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In Hope Draped in Black Joseph R. Winters responds to the enduring belief that America follows a constant trajectory of racial progress. Such notions—like those that suggested the passage into a postracial era following Barack Obama's election—gloss over the history of racial violence and oppression to create an imaginary and self-congratulatory world where painful memories are conveniently forgotten. In place of these narratives, Winters advocates for an idea of hope that is predicated on a continuous engagement with loss and melancholy. Signaling a heightened sensitivity to the suffering of others, melancholy disconcerts us and allows us to cut against dominant narratives and identities. Winters identifies a black literary and aesthetic tradition in the work of intellectuals, writers, and artists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Charles Burnett that often underscores melancholy, remembrance, loss, and tragedy in ways that gesture toward such a conception of hope. Winters also draws on Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to highlight how remembering and mourning the uncomfortable dimensions of American social life can provide alternate sources for hope and imagination that might lead to building a better world.

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From the esteemed President of Hampton University, an insider account that reveals the secret to HBCU graduates’ remarkable success—a distinguished honor roll which includes Vice President Kamala Harris, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Oprah Winfrey, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ruth Carter, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and many others.In his more-than-four-decade tenure as the President of Hampton University—one of 107 Historically Black Colleges and Universities in America—Dr. William R. Harvey has been a champion of the cultural impact and value of HBCUs, demonstrated by the achievements of their numerous notable alumni. Their success is no coincidence. It is the result of a faultless formula that sets HBCUs apart and helps their students thrive—a formula built on core tenets, including displaying moral and wholesome values at all times, continuously pursuing character growth, and embracing communal responsibilities whenever possible.The mission of Dr. Harvey is to represent Blackness to its highest degree at every opportunity. He is a passionate believer in the remarkability of the Black diaspora in all its complexity and beauty. That conviction drives the timeless lessons he’s adhered to and has instilled in his students: the power of dress to establish respect; the importance of integrity; financial accountability; reverence for elders. It is these tried-and-true lessons and others that have uniquely prepared and propelled HBCU students to success for generations. The Historically Black Colleges and Universities' Guide to Excellence is a thoughtful and knowledgeable account of what it truly takes to successfully navigate a white world as a Black person while retaining one’s core Blackness. Practical and proven, it lays the groundwork for individual and communal Black prosperity.

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DesignPOP is a survey of trends in contemporary furniture and products that reveals how design is not only changing with the times-it is inventing the future. The game-changing projects that compose DesignPOP push the boundaries of our expectations and show us new ideas, new possibilities, and ultimately new products that enrich our lives. The bar has been permanently raised as we enter the next century, and the proliferation of innovative designs continues. New materials and processes are being invented, convention and traditions are constantly being challenged, and sustainability and social responsibility are influencing new directions. Even the definition of designer is changing as the lines between disciplines begin to blur, with new technology from companies like Apple and Dyson radically altering both form and function. Historic boundaries disappear, designers innovate their way through roadblocks, and the twenty-first century is experiencing a design renaissance unparalleled in history. This book showcases a broad variety of these examples: from designs that pioneer a new material or a new production process, or reinvent the use for an existing one, to those that alter our expectations about the way something should look and create a whole new typology, or a thoughtful design added to products that traditionally were only considered for their functionality. It presents work from stars in the field, including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson, Marcel Wanders, Yves Behar, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, the Campana brothers, Hella Jongerius, Tord Boontje, Philippe Starck, Karim Rashid, Ron Arad, Ross Lovegrove, Dror Benshetrit, Tokujin Yoshioka, Jasper Morrison, James Dyson, and Jonathan Ive.

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CONTENTS:Preface by Pamela O'NeillCelts in the Material Record??The image of a Celtic society: medieval West Highland sculpture by David H Caldwell, Fiona M McGibbon, Suzanne Miller and Nigel A RuckleyJust what did a nemeton look like anyway? By Kristen ErskineCelts, Romans and Germans in the Rhineland by Michael NelsonThe ancient Celts: classical perceptions and modern definitions by David Sheehan'Celts in the Gobi desert': a linguistico-archaeological mess by Aedeen CreminCelts in History??Gendering the foundation myths of Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Michelle SmithEdmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft's Irish education by Mary SpongbergEamhain Mhacha in this world and in the otherworld by Penny PollardMyth and legend in the landscape of the Rhondda Valley, south Wales, as a source of cultural identity by Graham Aubrey'And anyway she was always going about with the Mother of God': the Brigid and Mary stories in Gaelic culture by Mary O'ConnellCelts in Law??The idea of continuation and extinguishment of 'Welsh' customary land law in the face of Norman-English conquest and legal regime change by Michael StuckeyThe Welsh laws of women by Gwenyth RichardsThe Scottish Highlands and the conscience of the nation, 1886 to 2003 by Ewen A CameronCelts in Literature??Irish myths: fantastic nonsense or a real record of astronomical catastrophes? by Patrick McCaffertyImperial Roman elements in the architecture of the city in Saltair na Rann by Tessa MorrisonFiction, feminism and the 'Celtic Church': the Sister Fidelma novels of Peter Tremayne by Carole CusackMorgan le Fay: Celtic origins and literary images by Dominique Beth WilsonWicca in Eileanan and the problems of history by Lauren BernauerCelts in the Diaspora??Irish and Scottish child migrants at Pinjarra: maintaining a Celtic identity by Paula-Lee M MageeThe Irish language in Australia: survey of a community language by Dymphna Lonergan'A class equal to any for making prosperous colonists...': Ulster Protestant migrants in the Antipodes by Brad Patterson'Migrant fairies': an anthropological investigation of contemporary Celtic identity in the Australian setting as endorsed by mythical symbolism by Jeffrey ParkerCompeting Celticities: Cornish and Irish constructions of Australia by Philip Payton

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Blazing hot meets icy cool in a momentous year in US historyOn New Year’s Day in 1967, the 200 million Americans who lived in the United States were about to experience a fascinating, exciting, and sometimes bewildering twelve months that for many formed an iconic portion of their lives. Despite the fact that the coming year produced no Black Friday, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11 attack, the nation still underwent dramatic changes in everything from support for the Vietnam War to approval of candidates for the 1968 presidential election to attitudes toward sex with strangers and what constitutes the status quo.Almost without significant forewarning, Americans in 1967 witnessed a simultaneous cooling of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union while the war in Vietnam exploded into a white-hot conflict that inflicted nearly two hundred American battle deaths a week. Meanwhile, young people at home were alternately listening to the “cool” sound of the Beatle’s new “Sgt. Pepper” album and Jim Morrison’s plea to get ever higher in “Light my Fire.” On television an emotional, passionate James T. Kirk shared an Enterprise bridge with the cool and logical Mr. Spock.Victor Brooks explores what happened—and in some cases, did not happen—to these two hundred million Americans in a national roller coaster ride that was the year 1967. He chronicles a society that proportionally had far more young people than was the case five decades later, with a widely publicized generation gap that produced more arguments, tension, and anguish between young and old Americans than any 21st century counterpart. 1967 is a fascinating, wide-ranging exploration including topics ranging from the first Super Bowl, the beginning of the 1968 presidential campaign, the social impact of the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, and the American combat experience in an expanding war in Vietnam. The book represents a reunion of sorts for Baby Boomers as well as a guidebook for younger readers on how their elders coped with one of the definitive years of a pivotal decade.

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'Today's questions regarding foreign aid centre around aid allocation dynamics, the impact on trade and growth for receivers as well as donors, and, quite frequently, on aid effectiveness. The inter-relationship between aid and politics are also topics of high interest. These are precisely the issues that the Handbook edited by B. Mak Arvin and Byron Lew deals with. In more than 30 contributions, some highly renowned development scholars use the theoretical state of the art combined with empirically based econometric approaches to analyse various issues in the foreign aid field. It is a great pleasure for science-oriented readers to find a wealth of findings derived from hard data and rigorous analytical methods. The book is an excellent contribution to the current foreign aid discussion.'- Siegfried Schönherr, Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Germany'A title like Handbook on the Economics of Foreign Aid is ambitious; it promises coverage of literature that spans from theory to empirics, from macro to micro levels of analysis, from positive to normative economics. This Handbook fulfills this ambition 100 percent. It will be the single place that people will go to get a state-of-the-art survey of a particular issue. Some chapters are written by established experts in the area, others by newcomers that bring a fresh view on the issues involved. All in all, a book that future researchers in foreign aid must consult.'- Pascalis Raimondos, Copenhagen Business School, DenmarkIt would be fair to say that foreign aid today is one of the most important factors in international relations and in the national economy of many countries - as well as one of the most researched fields in economics. Although much has been written on the subject of foreign aid, this book contributes by taking stock of knowledge in the field, with chapters summarizing long-standing debates as well as the latest advances.Several contributions provide new analytical insights or empirical evidence on different aspects of aid, including how aid may be linked to trade and the motives for aid giving. As a whole, the book demonstrates how researchers have dealt with increasingly complex issues over time - both theoretical and empirical - on the allocation, impact, and efficacy of aid, with aid policies placed at the center of the discussion. In addition to students, academics, researchers, and policymakers involved in development economics and foreign aid, this Handbook will appeal to all those interested in development issues and international policies.Contributors: E. Aguayo, E. Alvi, B.M. Arvin, S.A. Asongu, E. Bland, C. Boussalis, J. Brambila-Macias, S. Brown, R. Calleja, L. Chauvet, A. Das, H. Doucouliagos, V.Z. Eichenauer, G.S. Epstein, P. Exposito, S. Feeny, D. Fielding, I.N. Gang, F. Gibson, R. Gounder, P. Guillaumont, M.-C. Guisan, N. Hermes, P. Hühne, A.L. Islam, A. Isopi, S. Kablan, C. Kilby, A. Kumar, S. Lahiri, R. Lensink, B. Lew, I. Martinez-Zarzoso, I. Massa, G. Mavrotas, M. McGillivray, B. Meyer, K. Michaelowa, O. Morrissey, D. Mukherjee, P. Nunnenkamp, M. Paldam, C. Peiffer, R. Pradhan, M.G. Quibria, B. Reinsberg, D. Rowlands, M. Salois, J. Serieux, D. Sogge, S. Torrance, S. Tezanos Vázquez, L. Wagner

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Drawing on sources as diverse as Supreme Court decisions, nightclub comedy, congressional records, and cultural theory, Obscene Gestures explores the many contradictory vectors of twentieth-century moralist controversies surrounding literary and artistic works from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, 2 Live Crew, Tony Kushner, and others. Patrick S. Lawrence dives into notorious obscenity debates to reconsider the divergent afterlives of artworks that were challenged or banned over their taboo sexual content to reveal how these controversies affected their critical reception and commercial success in ways that were often determined at least in part by racial, gender, or sexual stereotypes and pernicious ethnographic reading practices. Starting with early postwar touchstone cases and continuing through the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements, Lawrence demonstrates on one level that breaking sexual taboos in literary and cultural works often comes with cultural cachet and increased sales. At the same time, these benefits are distributed unequally, leading to the persistence of exclusive hierarchies and inequalities. Obscene Gestures takes its bearings from recent studies of the role of obscenity in literary history and canon formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extending their insights into the postwar period when broad legal latitude for obscenity was established but when charges of obscenity still carried immense symbolic and political weight. Moreover, the rise of social justice movements around this time provides necessary context for understanding the application of legal precedents, changes in the publishing industry, and the diversification of the canon of American letters. Obscene Gestures, therefore, advances the study of obscenity to include recent developments in the understanding of race, gender, and sexuality while refining our understanding of late-twentieth-century American literature and political culture.

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'Beautifully judged account of the Manchester scene . . . There is something of the fairy tale about Dave Haslam's sage joyful testament to the kind of life that nobody could ever plan, a happy aligning of a cultural moment and a young man who instinctively knew that it was his once upon a time' Victoria Segal, Sunday Times'Witty, sometimes dark, revealing, insightful, everything one could hope for from one of those folk without whom independent music simply wouldn't exist' Classic RockSonic Youth Slept on My Floor is writer and DJ Dave Haslam's wonderfully evocative memoir. It is a masterful insider account of the Hacienda, the rise of Madchester and birth of the rave era, and how music has sound-tracked a life and a generation.In the late 1970s Dave Haslam was a teenage John Peel listener and Joy Division fan, his face pressed against a 'window', looking in at a world of music, books and ideas. Four decades later, he finds himself in the middle of that world, collaborating with New Order on a series of five shows in Manchester. Into the story of those intervening decades, Haslam weaves a definitive portrait of Manchester as a music city and the impact of a number of life-changing events, such as the nightmare of the Yorkshire Ripper to the shock of the Manchester Arena terror attack.The cast of Haslam's life reads like a who's who of '70s, '80s and '90s popular culture: Tony Wilson, Nile Rodgers, Terry Hall, Neneh Cherry, Tracey Thorn, John Lydon, Johnny Marr, Ian Brown, Laurent Garnier and David Byrne. From having Morrissey to tea and meeting writers such as Raymond Carver and Jonathan Franzen to discussing masturbation with Viv Albertine and ecstasy with Roisin Murphy, via having a gun pulled on him at the Hacienda and a drug dealer threatening to slit his throat, this is not your usual memoir.

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No part of the country was more contested during the American Revolution than New York City, the Hudson River, and the surrounding counties. Political and military leaders on both sides viewed the Hudson River Valley as the American jugular, which, if cut, would quickly bleed the rebellion to death. So in 1776, King George III sent the largest amphibious force ever assembled to seize Manhattan and use it as a base from which to push up the Hudson River Valley for a grand rendezvous at Albany with an impressive army driving down from Canada. George Washington and every other patriot leader shared the king’s fixation with the Hudson. Generations of American and British historians have held the same view. In fact, one of the few things that scholars have agreed upon is that the British strategy, though disastrously executed, should have been swift and effective. Until now, no one has argued that this plan of action was lunacy from the beginning. Revolution on the Hudson makes the bold new argument that Britain’s attempt to cut off New England never would have worked, and that doggedly pursuing dominance of the Hudson ultimately cost the crown her colonies. It unpacks intricate military maneuvers on land and sea, introduces the personalities presiding over each side’s strategy, and reinterprets the vagaries of colonial politics to offer a thrilling response to one of our most vexing historical questions: How could a fledgling nation have defeated the most powerful war machine of the era? George C. Daughan—winner of the prestigious Samuel Eliot Morrison Award for Naval Literature—integrates the war’s naval elements with its political, military, economic, and social dimensions to create a major new study of the American Revolution. Revolution on the Hudson offers a much clearer understanding of our founding conflict, and how it transformed a rebellion that Britain should have crushed into a war they could never win.

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Winner, 2023 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book AwardFinalist, 2023 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, African American Intellectual History SocietyShortlisted, Historical Nonfiction Legacy Award, Hurston / Wright FoundationRalph Ellison famously characterized ensemble jazz improvisation as “antagonistic cooperation.” Both collaborative and competitive, musicians play with and against one another to create art and community. In Antagonistic Cooperation, Robert G. O’Meally shows how this idea runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics.From the collages of Romare Bearden and paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, O’Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another. He argues that these artists drew on the improvisatory nature of jazz and the techniques of collage not as a way to depict a fractured or broken sense of Blackness but rather to see the Black self as beautifully layered and complex. They developed a shared set of methods and motives driven by the belief that art must involve a sense of community. O’Meally’s readings of these artists and their work emphasize how they have not only contributed to understanding of Black history and culture but also provided hope for fulfilling the broken promises of American democracy.

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THE MORE YOU IGNORE ME IS NOW A MAJOR NEW FILM STARRING SHERIDAN SMITH, SHEILA HANCOCK, RICKY TOMLINSON AND ELLA HUNT. Jo Brand's life-affirming novel The More You Ignore Me addresses mental health issues and their impact on a family in an honest, hilarious and heartwarming way. This film tie-in edition contains a new foreword by Jo Brand about the film and an exclusive extract of the film script. For Alice, the big bad monster wasn't green and hiding under the bed, it sat in the kitchen saying 'bollocks' a lot. Prone to psychotic episodes, or 'on the road to bonkersville' as Alice's dad would say, Alice's mum Gina isn't easy to live with. Her unpredictable outbursts make life in their Hereford cottage eventful. As 'family' means a mentally ill mother, a hippy father and grandparents who enjoy a drink or five, Alice needs someone to help her through. Unfortunately, Alice's special someone is Morrissey of The Smiths, and the closest she's got to him so far is watching him on Top of the Pops. Now that could all be about to change . . .Praise for Jo Brand's The More You Ignore Me:'A sweet, touching, tender novel' Independent'The book is littered with endearing characters . . . The last line moved me to tears' Daily Express'The most enjoyable piece of fiction I have had the pleasure of reading this year . . . Superb stuff' Now

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A selection of essential writings to understand the radical feminism movement of the 1960s and 1970s The second wave of feminism was one of the most significant political and cultural developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the role radical feminism played within the women's movement remains hotly contested. For some, radical feminism has made a lasting contribution to our understanding of male privilege, and the ways the power imbalance between men and women affects the everyday fabric of women's lives. For others, radical feminism represents a reflexive hostility toward men, sex, and heterosexuality, and thus is best ignored or forgotten. Rather than have the movement be interpreted by others, Radical Feminism permits the original work of radical feminists to speak for itself. Comprised of pivotal documents written by U.S. radical feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, Radical Feminism combines both unpublished and previously published manifestos, position papers, minutes of meetings, and newsletters essential to an understanding of radical feminism. Consisting of documents unavailable to the general public, and others in danger of being lost altogether, this panoramic collection is organized around the key issues of sex and sexuality, race, children, lesbianism, separatism, and class. Barbara A. Crow rescues the groundbreaking original work of such groups as The Furies, Redstockings, Cell 16, and the Women's Liberation Movement. Contributors include Kate Millet, Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone, Rosalyn Baxandall, Toni Morrison, Ellen Willis, Anne Koett, and Vivan Gornick. Gathered for the first time in one volume, these primary sources of radical feminism fill a major gap in the literature on feminism and feminist thought. Radical Feminism is an indispensable resource for future generations of feminists, scholars, and activists.

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From Betty White to Toni Morrison, we’re surrounded by examples of women working well past the traditional retirement age. In fact, the fastest growing segment of the workforce is women age sixty-five and older. Women Still at Work tells the everyday stories of hard-working women and the reasons they’re still on the job, with a focus on women in the professional workforce. The book is filled with profiles of real women, working in settings from academia to drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers, from business to the arts, talking about the many reasons why they still work and the impact work has on their lives. Women Still at Work draws on national survey data and in-depth interviews, showing not only the big picture of older women advancing their careers despite tough economic conditions, but also providing the personal insights of everyday working women from all parts of the country. Their stories showcase some of the key themes women choose to stay at work—including job satisfaction, diminishing retirement savings, the need to support children or parents longer in life, exercising the hard-won right to work, and more. Women Still at Work shows employment to be a positive and rewarding part of life for many women well beyond the expected retirement age.

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A deeply researched and poignant reflection on the practice of forgiveness in an unforgiving world “Broad in its philosophical sweep and fine in its literary analysis, this work redefines forgiveness as the modest yet heroic ability to hold pain and anger together with hope and nonviolence.”—Joie Szu-Chiao Chen, Lion’s Roar Matthew Ichihashi Potts explores the complex moral terrain of forgiveness, which he claims has too often served as a salve to the conscience of power rather than as an instrument of healing or justice. Though forgiveness is often linked with reconciliation or the abatement of anger, Potts resists these associations, asserting instead that forgiveness is simply the refusal of retaliatory violence through practices of penitence and grief. It is an act of mourning irrevocable wrong, of refusing the false promises of violent redemption, and of living in and with the losses we cannot recover. Drawing on novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, and on texts from the early Christian to the postmodern, Potts diagnoses the real dangers of forgiveness yet insists upon its enduring promise. Sensitive to the twenty-first-century realities of economic inequality, colonial devastation, and racial strife, and considering the role of forgiveness in the New Testament, the Christian tradition, philosophy, and contemporary literature, this book heralds the arrival of a new and creative theological voice.

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From the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist and the Northern Writer's Award Winner comes. . .REMEMBERED 'Compares with Toni Morrison's Beloved' Guardian 'Powerful, unapologetic, revealing' The Herald'This book feels vital for our time' Irish Times 'It's haunting and militant and very visceral and compassionate' Diana Evans'Some books both break your heart and set you free. Remembered will change you' Rachel EdwardsIt is 1910 and Philadelphia is burning . . . The last place Spring wants to be is in the rundown, coloured section of a hospital surrounded by the groans of sick people and the ghost of her dead sister. But as her son Edward lays dying, she has no other choice.There're whispers that Edward drove a streetcar into a shop window. Some people think it was an accident, others claim that it was his fault, the police are certain that he was part of a darker agenda. Is he guilty? Can they find the truth?All Spring knows is that time is running out. She has to tell him the story of how he came to be. With the help of her dead sister, newspaper clippings and reconstructed memories, she must find a way to get through to him. To shatter the silences that governed her life, she will do everything she can to lead him home.

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First Place Winner in Non-Fiction from the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Part literary history, part personal memoir, Alice Brittan's beautifully written The Art of Astonishment explores the rich intellectual, religious, and philosophical history of the gift and tells the interconnected story of grace: where it comes from and what it is believed to accomplish. Covering a remarkable range of materials—from The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the tragedies of Classical Greece, through the brothers Grimm and Montaigne, to C. S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Jhumpa Lahiri—Brittan moves with ease from personal story to myth, to theology, to literature and analysis, examining the nature of social and communal obligation, the role of the intellectual in times of crisis, and the pleasures of reading. In the 21st century, we might imagine grace as a striking and refined quality that is pleasurable to encounter but certainly not fundamental to anyone’s existence or to the beliefs and practices that hold us together or drive us apart. For millennia, though, it has been recognized as essential to the vitality of inner life, as well as to the large-scale shifts in perspective and legislation that improve the way we live as a society. Grace is also astonishing—always—as the enormously insightful readings in The Art of Astonishment show. Brittan reveals the concept’s breadth as sacred and secular, ancient and recent, lived and literary. And in so doing, she shows us how the act of reading is like grace—social but personal, pleasurable and essential.

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A biting, funny, up-to-the-minute collection of essays by a major political thinker that gets to the heart of what feminist criticism can do in the face of everyday politics. Stormy Daniels offered a #metoo moment, and Anderson Cooper missed it. Conservatives don’t believe that gender is fluid, except when they’re feminizing James Comey. “Gaslighting” is our word for male domination but a gaslight also lights the way for a woman’s survival. Across two dozen trenchant, witty reflections, Bonnie Honig offers a biting feminist account of politics since Trump. In today’s shock politics, Honig traces the continuing work of patriarchy, as powerful, mediocre men gaslight their way across the landscape of democratic institutions. But amid the plundering and patriarchy, feminist criticism finds ways to demand justice. Shell-Shocked shows how women have talked back, acted out, and built anew, exposing the practices and policies of feminization that have historically been aimed not just at women but also at racial and ethnic minorities. The task of feminist criticism—and this is what makes it particularly well-suited to this moment—is to respond to shock politics by resensitizing us to its injustices and honing the empathy needed for living with others in the world as equals. Feminist criticism’s penchant for the particular and the idiosyncratic is part of its power. It is drawn to the loose threads of psychological and collective life, not to the well-worn fabrics with which communities and nations hide their shortcomings and deflect critical scrutiny of their injustices. Taking literary models such as Homer’s Penelope and Toni Morrison’s Cee, Honig draws out the loose threads from the fabric of shock politics’ domination and begins unraveling them. Honig’s damning, funny, and razor sharp essays take on popular culture, national politics, and political theory alike as texts for resensitizing through a feminist lens. Here are insightful readings of film and television, from Gaslight to Bombshell, Unbelievable to Stranger Things, Rambo to the Kavanaugh hearings. In seeking out the details that might break the spell of shock, this groundbreaking book illustrates alternative ways of living and writing in a time of public violence, plunder, and—hopefully—democratic renewal.

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A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture The sociology of race relations in America typically describes an intersection of poverty, race, and economic discrimination. But what is missing from the picture—sexual difference—can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology—Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson—has measured African Americans’s unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans’s culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality.Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology’s regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories—the narrative of capital’s emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture—works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story—one in which people who presumably manifest the dysfunctions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery—a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way that complicates and illuminates Ellison’s project.Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson’s work introduces a new mode of discourse—which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis—that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology.

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Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series 2011 Winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award presented by the Modern Language Association Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation. Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we’re racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power—indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, “power” assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form. In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter–intuitive power—as a resource for the political present—found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.

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Oh, the humanity!" Radio reporter Herbert Morrison's words on witnessing the destruction of the Hindenburg are etched in our collective memory. Yet, while the Hindenburg ,like the Titanic ,is a symbol of the technological hubris of a bygone era, we seem to have forgotten the lessons that can be learned from the infamous 1937 zeppelin disaster.Zeppelins were steerable balloons of highly flammable, explosive gas, but the sheer magic of seeing one of these behemoths afloat in the sky cast an irresistible spell over all those who saw them. In Monsters , Ed Regis explores the question of how a technology now so completely invalidated (and so fundamentally unsafe) ever managed to reach the high-risk level of development that it did. Through the story of the zeppelin's development, Regis examines the perils of what he calls pathological technologies",inventions whose sizeable risks are routinely minimized as a result of their almost mystical allure.Such foolishness is not limited to the industrial age: newer examples of pathological technologies include the US government's planned use of hydrogen bombs for large-scale geoengineering projects the phenomenally risky, expensive, and ultimately abandoned Superconducting Super Collider and the exotic interstellar propulsion systems proposed for DARPA's present-day 100 Year Starship project. In case after case, the romantic appeal of foolishly ambitious technologies has blinded us to their shortcomings, dangers, and costs.Both a history of technological folly and a powerful cautionary tale for future technologies and other grandiose schemes, Monsters is essential reading for experts and citizens hoping to see new technologies through clear eyes.

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Popular music culture serves as an arena for debates on English and British national identity in this lively discussion of English popular music of the 1980s and 1990s. Against the background of his own upbringing as a Pakistani Brit, Nabeel Zuberi deftly combines a detailed account of the development of this music with a sophisticated assessment of its relation to the politics of cultural identity in Britain. Zuberi looks at how the sounds, images, and lyrics of English popular music generate and critique ideas of national belonging, recasting the social and even the physical landscapes of cities like Manchester and London. The Smiths and Morrissey play on romanticized notions of the (white) English working class, while the Pet Shop Boys map a "queer urban Britain" in the AIDS era. The techno-culture of raves and dance clubs incorporates both an anti-institutional do-it-yourself politics and emergent leisure practices, while the potent mix of technology and creativity in British black music includes local conditions as well as a sense of global diaspora. British Asian musicians, drawing on Afrodiasporic and South Asian traditions, seek a sense of place in Britain as commercial interests try to pin down an image of them to market. Sounds English shows how popular music complicates cherished notions of Englishness as it activates cultural outsiders and taps into a sense of not belonging. Alert and readable, Zuberi's wide-ranging discussion includes the performers Oasis, Blur, Tricky, Massive Attack, Goldie, A Guy Called Gerald, Roni Size, Bally Sagoo, Funˆdaˆmental, Echobelly, Cornershop, Talvin Singh, and others.

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'A fascinating story of courage, doubt and defiance across three generations' SARAH WATERS'Heartfelt and upfront... A grieving daughter rediscovers her mother's political past' BLAKE MORRISON, Guardian'A compelling reconstruction of her mother's life as a young anti-nuclear activist defying her suburban parents' CATHERINE TAYLOR, Financial Times'Eloquent, piercing, gloriously humane' PHILIPPE SANDSAfter the sudden death of her mother at age 75, Natasha Walter was thrown into a time of bewilderment and sadness. It was only when she began to search back through Ruth's history, that she began to understand how her life led to death by her own hand. She learns that Ruth had been brought up to be a conventional young woman, but chose to take huge risks and even break the law for her beliefs in the nuclear disarmament movement of the 1960s. Reaching further back she explores the history of Ruth's parents, and the story of her grandfather who, as part of the anti-Nazi resistance in the 1930s in Germany, was imprisoned for three years and then went on the run across Europe, finally finding safety in England.Honest about loss, this memoir also searches for what is valuable in the legacy of a family who lived through some of the great crises of the twentieth century. Without false hope, and with honest passion, Natasha Walter shows us why, even when success is far from assured, it is always important to stand up for what you believe.

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FEATURED ON BARACK OBAMA'S 2019 READING LIST SHORTLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 'SPECTACULAR' Guardian'A WONDER' Daily Mail'SPARKLING' The Times'EXQUISITE' Observer'MAGNIFICENT' TLS'EPIC' Entertainment Weekly'A TRIUMPH' LitHub'INFECTIOUS' Financial Times'A MASTERPIECE' Sunday Express Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life, biding her time with her youngest son - who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home - and her husband's seventeen-year-old cousin, who communes with spirits. Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West. Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history. It showcases all of Téa Obreht's talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely - and unforgettably - her own.NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Guardian, Time, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, The New York Public Library 'Should have been on the Booker longlist' Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times'Magnificent... Brings to mind Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Toni Morrison's Beloved' Times Literary Supplement'Exquisite ... The historical detail is immaculate, the landscape exquisitely drawn; the prose is hard, muscular, more convincingly Cormac McCarthy than McCarthy himself' Alex Preston, Observer

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'An epic tale of one woman's determination to follow her dreams' People's FriendSet in 1920s Scotland, this beautifully written and satisfying saga follows the fate of a shipyard owner's daughter as she is faced with an impossible decision . . . Perfect for fans of Diney Costeloe, Rita Bradshaw and Nadine Dorries.5-star reader reviews for The Shipbuilder's Daughter'Beautifully written with a great deal of empathy, very satisfying plot. Lovely mix of old Glasgow and the western Isles''A definite must-buy''A lovely read''Fabulous reading'Glasgow, 1928. Margaret Bannatyne lost both of her brothers in the Great War and is now the last remaining child of wealthy and powerful shipyard owner William Bannatyne. Without a male heir to carry on the family business, William expects his daughter to do her duty, marry well and provide him with a grandson to inherit his business.Margaret cares deeply for her father but she has ambitions of her own: after witnessing a horrific accident when she was sixteen, she's determined to become a doctor. Her father, convinced she will never practise medicine, permits Margaret to complete her training. But he doesn't count on her falling in love with Alasdair Morrison.Alasdair, a union man at the shipyard, has been a thorn in William's side for years, and he didn't become one of the richest men in Glasgow only for Alasdair to take it all away - even if it means destroying his only daughter's happiness by forcing her to make a heartbreaking and impossible choice . . .

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Every American knows that Thomas Alva Edison's most famous invention was the light bulb, but who invented the pregnancy test? How was the airbag invented? How was the first computer patented? Stephen van Dulken examines the way inventions and patents such as these have helped to create the "American Dream." Between 1911 and 1999, the number of registered U.S. patents rose from 1 million to 6 million. Showcasing dozens of those original patent drawings from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, American Inventions shows how trends in the history of the United States are reflected in the patent records. For example, the invention of the Frisbee dates back to 1920 when a Yale University student recalled throwing around the pie tins of the nearby Frisbie Baking Company, but it was not until 1948 that Fred Morrison and Warren Francioni capitalized on Americans' new-found fascination with flying saucers by applying for a patent on a plastic flying disk. Van Dulken surveys the inventions and patents of the workplace, the home, the kitchen, the open road, and the beauty parlor, to name a few, to find the compelling stories and eureka moments in American history. From bobby pins to in-line skates, from the jukebox to the fax machine, American Inventions is a captivating catalog of the famous and not-so-famous contraptions that have shaped the American way of life.

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For anyone who listens reverentially in the half-light to Robert Johnson, Nick Drake, or Morrisey, who wait anxiously for new albums from The Cure, Leonard Cohen, or The Blue Nile, who buy up catalogs of Nina Simone, Johnny Cash, or Scott Walker, who search the Web for rarities by Radiohead, Elliot Smith, and Miles Davis, this is the book they've been waiting for. "This Will End in Tears" is both a compendium of the greatest sad songs and artists of the modern era and a collection of essays that attempts to explain what exactly draws us to sad music, and how sad music actually makes us happy. Adam also makes an argument, based partly on the structure of operating systems and popular sites like Pandora, for the existence of a miserablist genre, one that's becoming increasingly more important than traditional genres such as blues, rock, country, etc., one that's organized around the rather more amorphous principle of cosmic grief. Specifically, "This Will End in Tears" will include an A-Z list of entries of the masters of melancholy (from Samuel Barber to Patsy Cline, George Jone to Joy Division, Nico to Hank Williams), a top-100 list of the saddest songs of all time, essays explaining the power of particular songs and artists, and essays explaining particular types of sad music and their effects on the listener. There will also be recommended playlists throughout.

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Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase “read until you understand,” a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life. Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students. Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Winter in America”. Griffin entwines memoir, history and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.

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What are the future prospects for literary knowledge now that literary texts—and the material remains of authorship, publishing, and reading—are reduced to bitstreams, strings of digital ones and zeros? What are the opportunities and obligations for book history, textual criticism, and bibliography when literary texts are distributed across digital platforms, devices, formats, and networks? Indeed, what is textual scholarship when the "text" of our everyday speech is a verb as often as it is a noun? These are the questions that motivate Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in Bitstreams, a distillation of twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives. With an intimate narrative style that belies the cold technics of computing, Kirschenbaum takes the reader into the library where all access to Toni Morrison's "papers" is mediated by digital technology; to the bitmapped fonts of Kamau Brathwaite's Macintosh; to the process of recovering and restoring fourteen lost "HyperPoems" by the noted poet William Dickey; and finally, into the offices of Melcher Media, a small boutique design studio reimagining the future of the codex. A persistent theme is that bits—the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing—are never self-identical, but always inflected by the material realities of particular systems, platforms, and protocols. These materialities are not liabilities: they are the very bulwark on which we stake the enterprise for preserving the future of literary heritage.

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