Search results for ""Fordham University Press""

Governor Mario Cuomo formed the New York State Commission on Government Integrity in 1987. Acting under an extraordinary mandate, the Commission of seven private citizens pursued a wide-ranging agenda of subjects from campaign financing and judicial selection to ethics training and whistleblowing protection. In many publicized hearings, it exposed abuses and legal loopholes in the system and documented the need for a major overhaul of state laws, regulations, and procedures.

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A passionate exhortation to expand the ways we talk about human sex, sexuality, and gender. Twenty-five years ago, Mark D. Jordan published his landmark book on the invention and early history of the category “sodomy,” one that helped to decriminalize certain sexual acts in the United States and to remove the word sodomy from the updated version of a standard English translation of the Christian Bible. In Queer Callings, Jordan extends the same kind of illuminating critical analysis to present uses of “identity” with regard to sexual difference. While the stakes might not seem as high, he acknowledges, his newest history of sexuality is just as vital to a better present and future. Shaking up current conversations that focus on “identity language,” this essential new book seeks to restore queer languages of desire by inviting readers to consider how understandings of “sexual identity” have shifted—and continue to shift—over time. Queer Callings re-reads texts in various genres—literary and political, religious and autobiographical—that have been preoccupied with naming sex/gender diversity beyond a scheme of LGBTQ+ identities. Engaging a wide range of literary and critical works concerned with sex/gender self-understanding in relation to “spirituality,” Jordan takes up the writings of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Djuna Barnes, Samuel R. Delany, Audre Lorde, Geoff Mains, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maggie Nelson, and others. Before it’s possible to perceive sexual identities differently, Jordan argues, current habits for classifying them have to be disrupted. In this way, Queer Callings asks us to reach beyond identity language and invites us to re-perform a selection of alternate languages—some from before the invention of phrases like “sexual identity,” others more recent. Tracing a partial genealogy for “sexual identity” and allied phrases, Jordan reveals that the terms are newer than we might imagine. Many queer folk now counted as literary or political ancestors didn’t claim a sexual or gender identity: They didn’t know they were supposed to have one. Finally, Queer Callings joins the writers it has evoked to resist any remaining confidence that it’s possible to give neatly contained accounts of human desire. Reaching into the past to open our eyes to extraordinary opportunities in our present and future, Queer Callings is a generatively destabilizing and essential read.

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In this new work, renowned feminist filmmaker and postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha offers a lyrical, philosophical meditation on the global state of endless war and the violence inflicted by the imperial need to claim victory. She discusses the rise of the police state as linked, for example, to U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to China’s occupation of Tibet, examining legacies of earlier campaigns and the residual effects of the war on terror. She also takes up the shifting dynamics of peoples’ resistance to acts of militarism and surveillance as well as social media and its capacity to inform and mobilize citizens around the world. At once an engaging treatise and a creative gesture, Lovecidal probes the physical and psychic conditions of the world and shows us a society that is profoundly heartsick. Taking up with those who march both as and for the oppressed—who walk with the disappeared to help carry them forward—Trinh T. Minh-ha engages the spiritual and affective dimensions of a civilization organized around the rubrics of nonstop governmental subjugation, economic austerity, and highly technologized military conflict. In doing so, she clears a path for us to walk upon. Along with our every step, the world of the disappeared lives on.

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What does it mean to lead a moral life? In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. Butler takes as her starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I’ who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?” Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory. In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought. Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn’t an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves? In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures” to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.

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What becomes of life, experience, and truth in the hyperconsumeristic culture of the twenty-first century? What happens to the phenomenological call to go “back to the things themselves” when these things, to an ever greater degree, involve a televised life that is not ours to live, celebrities who are utterly like us yet infinitely untouchable, and uncannily pluripotent electronic gadgets? Combining sustained philosophical inquiry with fragmentary and experimental theoretical interventions, Anthony Curtis Adler rethinks Marxist materialism and the Heideggerian project in terms of the singular experiences of late capitalism. In doing so, he reveals how the disarticulation of life via the commodity fetish demands at once a new notion of phenomenological method and an ontology oriented toward the radical contingency of being itself as transcendental ground.

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The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the “end of things,” one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism—and romantic studies—within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.

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This book is a celebratory history, marking 25 years since the founding of the Center for International Humanitarian Cooperation (CIHC); the completion of 50 of our premier training course; the highly intensive, month-long International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance (IDHA); the offering of dozens of other specialized courses; the publication of books, conference proceedings, and Occasional Papers, many translated into other languages and used in academic centers all over the world; the development of a Master of Arts in International Humanitarian Action (MIHA); the creation of an undergraduate major in Humanitarian Studies, one of only four such programs offered in any university anywhere; and the establishment of an independent Institute of Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA) at Fordham University in New York. These are but some of the milestones we commemorate here, so that future generations entering the evolving profession of humanitarian assistance might appreciate the challenges faced by earlier pilgrims on a journey that embraced the spiritual as well as the practical elements of this noble, multidimensional discipline.

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The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor traces the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century notion of digital organisms. Step by step—from Jacques de Vaucanson and his Digesting Duck, through Karl Marx’s Capital, Hermann von Helmholtz’s social thermodynamics, Albert Speer’s Beauty of Labor program in Nazi Germany, and on to the post-Fordist workplace, Rabinbach shows how society, the body, and labor utopias dreamt up future societies and worked to bring them about. This masterful follow-up to The Human Motor, Rabinbach’s brilliant study of the European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. It shows the intellectual and policy reasons as to how a utopia of the body as motor won wide acceptance and moved beyond the “man as machine” model before tracing its steep decline after 1945—and along with it the eclipse of the great hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.

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Intercarnations is an outstanding collection of provocative, elegantly written essays—many available in print for the first time—by renowned theologian Catherine Keller. Affirmations of body, flesh, and matter pervade current theology and inevitably echo with the doctrine of the incarnation. Yet, in practice, materialism remains contested ground—between Marxist and capitalist, reductive and postmodern iterations. Current theological explorations of our material ecologies cannot elude the tug or drag of the doctrine of “the incarnation.” But what if we were to redistribute, rather than repress, that singular body? Might we free it—along with the bodies in which it is boundlessly entangled—from a troubling history of Christian exceptionalism? In these immensely significant, highly original essays, theologian Catherine Keller proposes to liberate the notion of the divine made flesh from the exclusivity of orthodox Christian theology’s Jesus of Nazareth. Throughout eleven scintillating essays, she attends to bodies diversely religious, irreligious, social, animal, female, queer, cosmopolitan, and cosmic, highlighting the intermittencies and interdependencies of intra-world relations. According to Keller, when God is cast on the waters of a polydoxical indeterminacy, s/he/it returns manifold. For the many for whom theos has become impossible, Intercarnations exercises new theological possibilities through the diffraction of contextually diverse multiplicities. A groundbreaking work that pulls together a wide range of intersecting topics and methodologies, Intercarnations enriches and challenges current theological thinking. The essays reach back into feminist, process, and postcolonial discourses, and further back into messianic and mystical potentialities. They reach out into Asian as well as inter-Abrahamic comparison and forward toward a political theology of the Earth, queerly entangling climate catastrophe in materializations resistant to every economic, social, and anthropic exceptionalism. According to Keller, Intercarnations offers itself as a transient trope for the mattering of our entangled difference, meaning to stir up practices of a better planetarity. In Intercarnations, with Catherine Keller as their erudite guide, readers gain access to new worlds of theological possibility and perception.

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Drawing on records of about 5,500 soldiers and veterans, Shades of Green traces the organization of Irish regiments from the perspective of local communities in Connecticut, Illinois, and Wisconsin and the relationships between soldiers and the home front. Research on the impact of the Civil War on Irish Americans has traditionally fallen into one of two tracks, arguing that the Civil War either further alienated Irish immigrants from American society or that military service in defense of the Union offered these men a means of assimilation. In this study of Irish American service, Ryan W. Keating argues that neither paradigm really holds, because many Irish Americans during this time already considered themselves to be assimilated members of American society. This comprehensive study argues that the local community was often more important to ethnic soldiers than the imagined ethnic community, especially in terms of political, social, and economic relationships. An analysis of the Civil War era from this perspective provides a much clearer understanding of immigrant place and identity during the nineteenth century. With a focus on three regiments not traditionally studied, the author provides a fine-grained analysis revealing that ethnic communities, like other types of communities, are not monolithic on a national scale. Examining lesser-studied communities, rather than the usual those of New York City and Boston, Keating brings the local back into the story of Irish American participation in the Civil War, thus adding something new and valuable to the study of the immigrant experience in America’s bloodiest conflict. Throughout this rich and groundbreaking study, Keating supports his argument through advanced quantitative analysis of military-service records and an exhaustive review of a massive wealth of raw data; his use of quantitative methods on a large dataset is an unusual and exciting development in Civil War studies. Shades of Green is sure to “shake up” several fields of study that rely on ethnicity as a useful category for analysis; its impressive research provides a significant contribution to scholarship.

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The writer Gabriel Audisio once called the Mediterranean a “liquid continent.” Taking up the challenge issued by Audisio’s phrase, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev insists that we understand the region on both sides of the Mediterranean through a “transcontinental” heuristic. Rather than merely read the Maghreb in the context of its European colonizers from across the Mediterranean, Talbayev compellingly argues for a transmaritime deployment of the Maghreb across the multiple Mediterranean sites to which it has been materially and culturally bound for millennia. The Transcontinental Maghreb reveals these Mediterranean imaginaries to intersect with Maghrebi claims to an inclusive, democratic national ideal yet to be realized. Through a sustained reflection on allegory and critical melancholia, the book shows how the Mediterranean decenters postcolonial nation-building projects and mediates the nomadic subject’s reinsertion into a national collective respectful of heterogeneity. In engaging the space of the sea, the hybridity it produces, and the way it has shaped such historical dynamics as globalization, imperialism, decolonization, and nationalism, the book rethinks the very nature of postcolonial histories and identities along its shores.

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Contemporary publishing, e-media, and writing owe much to an unsung hero who worked in the trenches of the culture industry (for pulp magazines, Hollywood films, and advertising) and caroused and collaborated with the avant-garde throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Robert Carlton Brown (1886–1959) turned up in the midst of virtually every significant American literary, artistic, political, and popular or countercultural movement of his time—from Chicago’s Cliff Dweller’s Club to Greenwich Village’s bohemians and the Imagist poets; from the American vanguard expatriate groups in Europe to the Beats. Bob Brown churned out pulp fiction and populist cookbooks, created the first movie tie-ins, and invented a surreal reading machine more than seventy-five years ahead of e-books. He was a real-life Zelig of modern culture. With The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown, Craig Saper disentangles, for the first time, the many lives and careers of the intriguing figure behind so much of twentieth-century culture. Saper’s lively and engaging yet erudite and subtly experimental style offers a bold new approach to biography that perfectly complements his multidimensional subject. Readers are brought along on a spirited journey with Bob and the Brown clan—Cora (his mother), Rose (his wife), and Bob, a creative team who sometimes went by the name of CoRoBo—through globetrotting, fortune-making and fortune-spending, culture-creating and culture-exploring adventures. Along the way, readers meet many of the most important cultural figures and movements of the era and are witness to the astonishingly prescient vision Brown held of the future of American cultural life in the digital age. Although Brown traveled and lived all around the world, he took Manhattan with him, and his New York City had boroughs around the world.

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Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the “device”—core ideas of modern literary theory—were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts—starting with Homer and the Bible—had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian “techniques of the body” as belonging to the domain of Derridean “arche-writing,” Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices.

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This book examines Samuel Beckett’s unique lesson in courage in the wake of humanism’s postwar crisis—the courage to go on living even after experiencing life as a series of catastrophes. Rabaté, a former president of the Samuel Beckett Society and a leading scholar of modernism, explores the whole range of Beckett’s plays, novels, and essays. He places Beckett in a vital philosophical conversation that runs from Bataille to Adorno, from Kant and Sade to Badiou. At the same time, he stresses Beckett’s inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy. Foregrounding Beckett’s decision to write in French, Rabaté inscribes him in a continental context marked by a “writing degree zero” while showing the prescience and ethical import of Beckett’s tendency to subvert the “human” through the theme of the animal. Beckett’s “declaration of inhuman rights,” he argues, offers the funniest mode of expression available to us today.

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It has often been said that nowhere in the United States can one find a greater collection of magnificent and historic synagogues than on New York’s Lower East Side. As the ultimate destination for millions of immigrant eastern European Jews during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it became the new homeland and hoped-for goldene medinah (promised land) for immigrants fleeing persecution, poverty, and oppression, while struggling to live a new and productive life. Yet to many visitors and students today these synagogues are shrouded in mystery, as documentary information on them tends to be dispersed and difficult to find. With The Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side, Gerard R. Wolfe fills that void, giving readers unparalleled access to the story of how the Jewish community took root on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Using archival photographs taken by Jo Renee Fine and contemporary shots taken by Norman Borden alongside his text, Wolfe focuses on the synagogues built or acquired by eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants during the great era of mass immigration, painting vivid portraits of the individual congregations and the new and vital culture that was emerging. For many, the Lower East Side became the portal to America and the stepping-stone to a new and better life. Today, the synagogues in which these immigrants worshiped remain as a poignant visual reminder of what had become the largest Jewish community in the world. Originally published in 1978, The Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side became the authoritative study of the subject. Now completely revised and updated with new text, photographs, and maps, along with an invaluable glossary, Wolfe’s book is an essential and accessible source for those who want to understand the varied and rich history of New York’s Lower East Side and its Jewish population. Its readable and illuminating view into the diversity of synagogues—large and small, past and present—and their people makes this book ideal for teachers, students, museum educators, and general readers alike.

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It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The Ploy of Instinct ties this paradox to instinct’s deployment in conceptualizing governmentality. Instinct’s domain, Frederickson argues, extended well beyond the women, workers, and “savages” to whom it was so often ascribed. The concept of instinct helped to gloss over contradictions in British liberal ideology made palpable as turn-of-the-century writers grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. For elite European men, instinct became both an agent of “progress” and a force that, in contrast to desire, offered a plenitude in answer to the alienation of self-consciousness. This shift in instinct’s appeal to privileged European men modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book traces these changes through parliamentary papers, pornographic fiction, accounts of Aboriginal Australians, suffragette memoirs, and scientific texts in evolutionary theory, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.

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This book proposes a theory of the reject, a more adequate figure than the subject for thinking friendship, love, community, democracy, the postsecular, and the posthuman. Through close readings of Nancy, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Clement, Bataille, Balibar, Ranciere, and Badiou, Goh shows how the reject has always been nascent in contemporary French thought. The recent turn to animals and bare life, as well as the rise of the Occupy movement, he argues, presents a special urgency to think the reject today. Thinking the reject most importantly helps to advance our commitment to affirm others without acculturating their differences. But the reject also offers, Goh proposes, a response finally commensurate with the radical horizon of Nancy’s question of who comes after the subject.

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The essays in this book explore the critical possibilities that have been opened by Veena Das’s work. Taking off from her writing on pain as a call for acknowledgment, several essays explore how social sciences render pain, suffering, and the claims of the other as part of an ethics of responsibility. They search for disciplinary resources to contest the implicit division between those whose pain receives attention and those whose pain is seen as out of sync with the times and hence written out of the historical record. Another theme is the co-constitution of the event and the everyday, especially in the context of violence. Das’s groundbreaking formulation of the everyday provides a frame for understanding how both violence and healing might grow out of it. Drawing on notions of life and voice and the struggle to write one’s own narrative, the contributors provide rich ethnographies of what it is to inhabit a devastated world. Ethics as a form of attentiveness to the other, especially in the context of poverty, deprivation, and the corrosion of everyday life, appears in several of the essays. They take up the classic themes of kinship and obligation but give them entirely new meaning. Finally, anthropology’s affinities with the literary are reflected in a final set of essays that show how forms of knowing in art and in anthropology are related through work with painters, performance artists, and writers.

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Imagined Sovereignties argues that the Romantics reconceived not just the nature of aesthetic imagination but also the conditions in which a specific form of political sovereignty could be realized through it. Articulating the link between the poetic imagination and secularized sovereignty requires more than simply replacing God with the subjective imagination and thereby ratifying the bourgeois liberal subject. Through close readings of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, the author elucidates how Romanticism’s reassertion of poetic power in place of the divine sovereign articulates an alternative understanding of secularization in forms of sovereignty that are no longer modeled on transcendence, divine or human. These readings ask us to reexamine not only the political significance of Romanticism but also its place within the development of modern politics. Certain aspects of Romanticism still provide an important resource for rethinking the limits of the political in our own time. This book will be a crucial source for those interested in the political legacy of Romanticism, as well as for anyone concerned with critical theoretical approaches to politics in the present.

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For more than fifty years, Dr. Cahill has been helping to heal the world, as a leading specialist in tropical medicine and as a driving force in humanitarian assistance and relief efforts around the globe. In this revised and expanded edition, he chronicles extraordinary achievements of compassion and commitment. Bringing together a rich selection of writings, he crafts a fascinating memoir of a life devoted to others. The book includes front-line reports from places under siege—Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Nicaragua, Gaza, and Ireland; there are also visionary essays from the origins of the AIDS epidemic and landmine crises, and no less passionate concerns of his own experiences of pain and suffering—as well as of joy and beauty—in the worlds in which he has traveled. As the distinguished neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, M.D., notes in his endorsement, “These essays, by turns elegiac, lyrical, funny, tender, nostalgic, and vehemently impassioned, come together in an ongoing tapestry, a portrait of a dedicated physician who has dared to make a difference.”

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The essays collected here, by both eminent and emerging scholars, engage interlocutors from Machiavelli to Arendt. Individually, they contribute compelling readings of important political thinkers and add fresh insights to debates in areas such as environmentalism and human rights. Together, the volume issues a call to think anew about nature, not only as a traditional concept that should be deconstructed or affirmed but also as a site of human political activity and struggle worthy of sustained theoretical attention.

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Materialist, feminist, queer, hybrid—channeling the sensibilities of Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosario Castellanos, Mary Kelly, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña, Patssi Valdez, Bernadette Mayer—Carroll’s second collection of prose poems and wordimages contemplates the cost of living in an era of “cruel optimism.” Procedurally formalizing self-editing and indecision, Carroll undocuments the quotidian’s shades of gray/grey, the contingencies of post-Fordist relationality in the pre-Occupy window of time between September 11, 2001, and the 2008 recession. “Cognative dissonance” meets “the rite to be a citizen.” “What is the difference between neoliberalism and globalization?” tempers the countercultural question “And, me?” In Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post–9/11 Pornography, Carroll muses, “Like Sammy and Rosie, Fannie and Freddie got laid.” Off-grid, she mixes metaphors, criss-crossing the borders erected between the lyric and the conceptual “I.” She crosses out the dividing lines elected to maintain performance art, visual culture, and poetry as discrete, clairvoyant media of social engagement. She layers jokes, puns, riddles, platitudes, hackneyed phrases, adages, boilerplate, buzzwords, mottos, proverbs, rubber-stamp rhetoric, slogans, threadbare phrases, trite remarks, and truisms over one another to provide a portrait of the contemporary American landscape as experienced by working- and middle-class Americans. Carroll offers an elaborate palimpsest of text and images—text that is often shaded, crossed out, or printed over other text or images. Claudia Rankine, who chose the volume for Fordham University’s 2011–12 Poets Out Loud Prize, succinctly sings its praises: “The intelligence, compassion, and dimensionality of this collection place it in a category all its own—it belongs to and is crafted out of the psychic anxieties of the twenty-first century. I, for one, was both exhilarated and humbled by Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post–9/11 Pornography.”

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If life in time is imminent and means an always open future, what role remains for the past? If time originates from that relationship to the future, then the past can only be a fictitious beginning, a necessary phantom of a starting point, a retroactively generated chronological period of "before." Advanced in philosophical thought of the last two centuries, this view of the past permeated the study on the Talmud as well, resulting in application of modern philosophical categories of the "thinking subject", subjectivity, and time to thinking about thinking displayed in the texts of the Talmud. This book challenges that application. Departing from the hitherto prevalent view of thinking in the Talmud in terms of anonymous thinking subjects, called "redactors" or "designer" of Talmudic discussions, the book reconsiders the modern reduction of the past to a chronological period in time, and reclaims the originary power (and authority) the past exerts in thinking and remembering displayed both in the conversations the characters in the Talmud have, and in the literary design of these conversations. Central for that task of reclaiming the radical role of the past are contrasting medieval notions of the virtual and their modern appropriations, thinking subject among them, which serve as both a bridging point and a demarcation between the practices of thinking of, and remembering, the past in the Talmud vis-a-vis other rhetorical and/or philosophical school and disciplines of thought. The Open Past suggests the possibility of understanding the conversations and the design of these conversations in the Talmud in terms of thinking in no time. This no time has several layers of meaning. In its weakest formulation, it means “in no single time” in the sense that the Talmudic conversations happen in no historically “real” time. More strongly put, it means, borrowing the language from film theory, that the Talmud requires a never consolidated difference between diegetical time, and the time of montage; which creates a no-one's time and place that in turn creates time and place for everyone else. Even more strongly, it means that performance of the conversations in the Talmud is constantly driven by, and towards, an always open past -- a power of that past is radically different from the power of either futuristic or chronological time.

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In Loaded Words the inimitable literary and cultural critic Marjorie Garber invites readers to join her in a rigorous and exuberant exploration of language. What links the pieces included in this vibrant new collection is the author’s contention that all words are inescapably loaded—that is, highly charged, explosive, substantial, intoxicating, fruitful, and overbrimming—and that such loading is what makes language matter. Garber casts her keen eye on terms from knowledge, belief, madness, interruption, genius, and celebrity to humanities, general education, and academia. Included here are an array of stirring essays, from the title piece, with its demonstration of the importance of language to our thinking about the world; to the superb “Mad Lib,” on the concept of madness from Mad magazine to debates between Foucault and Derrida; to pieces on Shakespeare, “the most culturally loaded name of our time,” and the Renaissance. With its wide range of cultural references and engaging style coupled with fresh intellectual inquiry, Loaded Words will draw in and enchant scholars, students, and general readers alike.

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The history of tropical medicine is as dramatic as the story of humankind. It has its own myths and legends, including tales of epidemics that destroyed whole civilizations. Today, with silent stealth, tropical diseases still claim more lives than all the current wars combined. Having had the privilege of working throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as in the great medical centers of Europe and the United States, the author presents the details essential for understanding pathogenesis, clinical manifestations, therapy, and prevention of the major tropical diseases. The text, now in its eighth edition, has been used for half a century by medical students, practicing physicians, and public health workers around the world. This fascinating book should also be of interest to a broad, nonmedical readership interested in world affairs. All royalties from the sale of this book go to the training of humanitarian workers.

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The rollicking, folk-based tales of Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha have been winning awards in India since the 1970s. Only recently, however, have they been available in English translation. Detha has a gift for selecting the most provocative tales he hears from his fellow villagers and re-creating them in a literary form as engaging and daring as his oral sources. In one tale a ghost uses his powers to change a woman’s sex so that she can stay married to the woman she loves. In another—re-created in film by Mani Kaul in the early 1970s as Duvidha and more recently by Bollywood director Amol Palekar as the wildly successful Paheli—a ghost falls in love with a young bride and assumes her husband’s form so convincingly even her in-laws are fooled. In the title story of this collection, a group of Bania merchants engage in battle to the death with a group of nomadic Banjaras over a misplaced fleck of straw. These stories pose riddles that fi nd new relevance across languages and eras: Who has the right to tell us whom to marry? What counts as truth when it comes to protecting someone we love? How do the epic stories we hear encourage us to repeat scenes of ethnic violence? Detha’s tales combine the local Rajasthani storytelling idiom with narrative technique from the modern short story to set a new standard for contemporary writing in India. Translator Christi A. Merrill has worked with the author and his Hindi translator Kailash Kabir to craft a style that allows these stories to come alive in English with equal inventiveness and vibrancy.

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Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox is an extraordinary foray into what apple has convinced us is “the soundtrack of our lives.” How does music come to inhabit us, to possess and haunt us? What does it mean that a piece of music can insert itself—Szendy’s term for this, borrowed from German, is the earworm—into our ears and minds? In this book, Peter Szendy probes the ever-growing and ever more global phenomenon of the hit song. Hits is the culmination of years of singular attentiveness to the unheard, the unheard-of, and the overheard, as well as of listening as it occurs when one pays anything but attention. Szendy takes us through our musical bodies, by way of members and instruments, playing and governing apparatuses, psychic and cinematic doublings, political and economic musings. The hit song, Szendy concludes, functions like a myth, a force of repetition that grows by force of repetition. In the repetition generated by the song’s relation to itself, Szendy locates its production as a fetishized commodity, a self-producing structure, and a self-desiring machine. Like a Deleuzian machine, then, the hit song is a technology of the self, or better, a technology of rule, a bio-melo-technology. After reading this book, one can no longer avoid realizing that music is more than a soundtrack: It is the condition of our lives. We are all melomaniacs, Szendy tells us in his unique style of writing and of thought. We are melo-obsessive subjects, not so much driven to a frenzy by a music we hardly have time to listen to as governed and ruled by it.

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The Catholic Studies Reader is a rare book in an emerging field that has neither a documented history nor a consensus as to what should be a normative methodology. Dividing this volume into five interrelated themes central to the practice and theory of Catholic Studies—“Sources and Contexts,” “Traditions and Methods,” “Pedagogy and Practice,” “Ethnicity, Race, and Catholic Studies,” and “The Catholic Imagination”—the editors provide readers with the opportunity to understand the great diversity within this area of study. Readers will find informative essays on the Catholic intellectual tradition and Catholic social teaching, as well as reflections on the arts and literature. This provocative and enriching collection is valuable not only for scholars but also for lay and religious Catholics working in Catholic education in universities, high schools, and parish schools.

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Just outside downtown Newark, New Jersey, sits an abbey and school. For more than 150 years Benedictine monks have lived, worked, and prayed on High Street, a once-grand thoroughfare that became Newark’s Skid Row and a focal point of the 1967 riots. St. Benedict’s today has become a model of a successful inner-city school, with 95 percent of its graduates—mainly African American and Latino boys—going on to college. Miracle on High Street is the story of how the monks of St. Benedict’s transformed their venerable yet outdated school to become a thriving part of the community that helped save a faltering city. In the 1960s, after a trinity of woes—massive deindustrialization, high-speed suburbanization, and racial violence—caused an exodus from Newark, St. Benedict’s struggled to remain open. Enrollment in general dwindled, and fewer students enrolled from the surrounding community. The monks watched the violence of the 1967 riots from the school’s rooftop along High Street. In the riot’s aftermath more families fled what some called “the worst city in America.” The school closed in 1972, in what seemed to be just another funeral for an urban Catholic school. A few monks, inspired by the Benedictine virtues of stability and adaptability, reopened St. Benedict’s only one year later with a bare-bones staff . Their new mission was to bring to young African American and Latino males the same opportunities that German and Irish immigrants had had 150 years before. More than thirty years later, St. Benedict’s is one of the most unusual schools in the country. Its remarkable success shows that American education can bridge the achievement gap between white and black, as well as that between rich and poor. The story of St. Benedict’s is about an institution’s rise and fall, resurrection and renaissance. It also provides valuable insights into American religious, immigration, educational, and metropolitan history. By staying true to their historical values amid a continually changing city, the downtown monks, in resurrecting its prep school, helped save an American city. Some have even called it the miracle on High Street.

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Things That No Longer Delight Me is a collection of poems about family and memory. This book is filled with objects. The author writes: I like objects for company, to decorate the plainest spaces, decorum and I amass details, jade bracelet, her animal-print dresses, an oval coral cameo. How do objects counter loneliness, she asks, and speak to us of how to behave? In Things That No Longer Delight Me, lyric is driven by a compulsion or need to collect, in order to make sense of the past and stay connected to it. And what if that connection were to be lost? Confronting loss, the book pieces together a family history from stories fragmented and overheard. It asks: What is hearsay and what is history? It seeks to embody story, or historical detail, in lyric form. Resisting nostalgia, its poems respect what is diminished by grief or loss yet reveal details that hold sway over us and give us continuing pleasure.

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Best known for his pioneering work in theories of self-organization and complexity, the biophysicist and philosopher Henri Atlan has during the past thirty years been a major voice in contemporary European philosophical and bioethical debates. In a massive oeuvre that ranges from biology and neural network theory to Spinoza’s thought and the history of philosophy, and from artificial intelligence and information theory to Jewish mysticism and contemporary medical ethics, Atlan has come to offer an exceptionally powerful philosophical argumentation that is as hostile to scientism as it is attentive to biology’s conceptual and experimental rigor, as careful with concepts of rationality as it is committed to rethinking the human place in a radically determined yet forever changing world. This is the first volume to bring together the major strands of Atlan’s work for an English-language audience. It is an indispensable compendium for those seeking to clarify the joint stakes and shared import of philosophy and science for questions of life and the living—today and tomorrow.

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In this moving memoir a young man comes of age in an age of violence, brutality, and war. Recounting his experiences during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, this account brings to life the shocking day-to-day conditions in a Japanese labor camp and provides an intimate look at the collapse of Dutch colonial rule. As a boy growing up on the island of Java, John Stutterheim spent hours exploring his exotic surroundings, taking walks with his younger brother and dachshund along winding jungle roads. His father, a government accountant, would grumble at the pro-German newspaper and from time to time entertain the family with his singing. It was a fairly typical life for a colonial family in the Dutch East Indies, and a peaceful and happy childhood for young John. But at the age of 14 it would all be irrevocably shattered by the Japanese invasion. With the surrender of Java in 1942, John’s father was taken prisoner. For over three years the family would not know if he was alive or dead. Soon thereafter, John, his younger brother, and his mother were imprisoned. A year later he and his brother were moved to a forced labor camp for boys, where they toiled under the fierce sun while disease and starvation slowly took their toll, all the while suspecting they would soon be killed. Throughout all of these travails, John kept a secret diary hidden in his handmade mattress, and his memories now offer a unique perspective on an often overlooked episode of World War II. What emerges is a compelling story of a young man caught up in the machinations of a global war—struggling to survive in the face of horrible brutality, struggling to care for his disease-wracked brother, and struggling to put his family back together. It is a story that must not be forgotten.

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Encarnación takes a new look at identity. Following the contemporary movement away from the fixed categories of identity politics toward a more fluid conception of the intersections between identities and communities, this book analyzes the ways in which literature and philosophy draw boundaries around identity. The works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Ana Castillo, in particular, enable us to examine how identities shift and intersect with others through processes of “incarnation.” Since the 1980s, critics have come to equate these writers with Chicana feminist identity politics. This critical trend, however, has been unable to account for these writers’ increasing emphasis on bodies that are sick, disabled, permeable, and, oftentimes, mystical. Encarnación thus turns our attention to aspects of these writers’ work that are usually ignored—Anzaldúa’s autobiographical writings about diabetes, Moraga’s narrative about her premature baby’s medical treatments, and Castillo’s figure of a polio-afflicted flamenco dancer—to explore the political and cultural dimensions of illness. Concerned equally with the medical-surgical interventions available in our postmodern age and with the ways of understanding bodies in the Native American and Catholic traditions these writers invoke, Encarnación develops a model for identity that expands beyond the boundaries of individual bodies. The book argues that this model has greater utility for feminism than identity politics because it values human variability, sensation, and openness to others. The methodology of the study is as permeable as the bodies and identities it analyzes. The book brings together discourses as disparate as Mesoamerican anthropology, art history, feminist spirituality, feminist biology, phenomenology, postmodern theory, disability studies, and autobiographical narrative in order to expand our thinking beyond what disciplinary boundaries allow.

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Jean-Luc Nancy's On the Commerce of Thinking concerns the particular communication of thoughts that takes place by means of the business of writing, producing, and selling books. His reflection is born out of his relation to the bookstore, in the first place his neighborhood one, but beyond that any such "perfumery, rotisserie, patisserie," as he calls them, dispensaries "of scents and flavors through which something like a fragrance or bouquet of the book is divined, presumed, sensed." On the Commerce of Thinking is thus not only something of a semiology of the specific cultural practice that begins with the unique character of the writer's voice and culminates in a customer crossing the bookstore threshold, package under arm, on the way home to a comfortable chair, but also an understated yet persuasive plea in favor of an endangered species. In evoking the peddler who, in times past, plied the streets with books and pamphlets literally hanging off him, Nancy emphasizes the sensuality of this commerce and reminds us that this form of consumerism is like no other, one that ends in an experience-reading-that is the beginning of a limitless dispersion, metamorphosis, and dissemination of ideas. Making, selling, and buying books has all the elements of the exchange economy that Marx analyzed--from commodification to fetishism--yet each book retains throughout an absolute and unique value, that of its subject. With reading, it gets repeatedly reprinted and rebound. For Nancy, the book thus functions only if it remains at the same time open and shut, like some Moebius strip. Closed, it represents the Idea and takes its place in a canon by means of its monumental form and the title and author's name displayed on its spine. But it also opens itself to us, indeed consents to being shaken to its core, in being read each time anew.

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“An invaluable window on how New York self-consciously and very publicly transformed itself from a city that was merely ‘the largest’ to an undisputed world-class metropolis. . . . A rich historical record of newspapers, manuscripts, artifacts, photographs, and graphics . . . offers a new lens to examine identity, industry, and environment.”—Kenneth T. Jackson, from the Foreword For two weeks in the fall of 1909, New York City threw itself the biggest party it had ever seen—attracting millions of people to a sprawling festival 150 miles long, from Brooklyn up the Hudson River to Albany. This extraordinary event, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, was officially meant to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the river bearing his name and the centennial of Robert Fulton’s first successful run of his steamship Clermont. But in an era of grand world’s fairs, the Celebration was really created to showcase New York’s coming of age as a world metropolis. On city sidewalks and along the river, millions enjoyed a nonstop circus of fireworks, concerts, museum exhibitions, children’s festivals, and military and naval parades, each designed to link past glories to present challenges and future progress. And to show the world that its biggest city worked. For city leaders, the Celebration was to be a gaudy catalyst for change—technological, commercial, cultural, and political. There were great flotillas of the world’s navies. New, glittering electric lights illuminated bridges and skyscrapers. Jawdropping flyovers by Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss introduced New Yorkers to the airplane. The Queensboro Bridge had just been built, as had new subway lines. Thousands of children in ethnic costumes marched to celebrate the new American melting pot. No one had seen anything like it. This fascinating book commemorates that commemoration. With a rich selection of full-color images—photographs, graphics, memorabilia, paintings, and much more—it tells the story of what those two weeks meant to four million New Yorkers and one million out-of-town guests. Johnson brings back a city feverishly at work and play, from the grand schemes of the planners to the way the Celebration put the city and its people on a world stage.

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Who or what comes after God? In the wake of God, as the last fifty years of philosophy has shown, God comes back again, otherwise: Heidegger's last God, Levinas's God of Infinity, Derrida's and Caputo's tout autre, Marion's God without Being, Kearney's God who may be.

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The Glazier’s Country is a book of history and ethics. The poems follow the life of a survivor of Eastern European pogroms, but the theme is larger: notions of victimhood as an identity, moral certitude, and the differences between justice and revenge are questioned and explored. The poems’ formal qualities mirror the fractured lives of the people in them: seemingly disparate voices break in, words are scattered across the page. But the ultimate message of The Glazier’s Country is an insistence that we can choose wholeness, “choose good / solo & each day / over faith / over clan or country / it is an art / & each day again.”

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Meyer ("Mike") Berger was one of the greatest journalists of this century. A reporter and columnist for The New York Times for thirty years, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for his account of the murder of thirteen people by a deranged war veteran in Camden, New Jersey. Berger is best known for his "About New York" column, which appeared regularly in the Times from 1939 to 1940 and from 1953 until his death in 1959. Through lovingly detailed snapshots of ordinary New Yorkers and far corners of the city, Berger's writing deeply influenced the next generation of writers, including Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. Originally published in 1960 and long out of print, Meyer Berger's New York is a rich collection of extraordinary journalism, selected by Berger himself, which captures the buzz, bravado, and heartbreak of New York in the fifties in the words of the best-loved reporter of his time. "Mike Berger was one of the great reporters of our day . . . he was a master of the color story, the descriptive narrative of sights and sounds-of a parade, an eclipse, a homicidal maniac running amok . . . or just a thunderstorm that broke a summer heat wave . . . ."-The New York Times, obituary, February 6, 1959 "Dip into Meyer Berger's New York, at any point, and you will find things you never knew or dreamed of knowing. . . . It has a heart, a soul, and a beauty all its own." -Phillip Hamburger, The New York Times Book Review

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Winner of the 2001 Poets Out Loud Prize, Door to Door ranges from the wry romance of “Changing the Oil” (“You make love the way you change the oil in your Oldsmobile”) to the salesman in the title poem who sees “what the glacier sees in the onslaught of spring.” The poems stand at the crossroads of mystery and love, hoping to trade their soul for Federico García Lorca’s guitar, or perhaps Jimi Hendrix’.

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Marked sharply by its time and place (Paris in the 1970s), this early theological text by Jean-Luc Marion nevertheless maintains a strikingly deep resonance with his most recent, groundbreaking, and ever more widely discussed phenomenology. And while Marion will want to insist on a clear distinction between the theological and phenomenological projects, to read each in light of the other can prove illuminating for both the theological and the philosophical reader - and perhaps above all for the reader who wants to read in both directions at once, the reader concerned with those points of interplay and undecidability where theology and philosophy inform, provoke, and challenge one another in endlessly complex ways." "In both his theological and his phenomenological projects Marion's central effort to free the absolute or unconditional (be it theology's God or phenomenology's phenomenon) from the various limits and preconditions of human thought and language will imply a thoroughgoing critique of all metaphysics, and above all of the modern metaphysics centered on the active, spontaneous subject who occupies modern philosophy from Descartes through Hegel and Nietzsche.

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The port of New York, Manhattan Harbor, is always bustling; any resident of or visitor to New York is quick to recognize the integral part the port plays in the life of the city, but the vessels that keep it alive are rarely focused on. In these six stories, Brian Cudahy provides us with a unique and wonderful tour of the port of New York through the 20th century. From the Iron Steamboat Company to the Norwiegan Cruise lines, Around Manhattan Island is a treasure for all with an interest in maritime history, and for all who love New York.

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The Metaphysics of Experience styles itself as "a Sherpa guide to Process and Reality, whose function is to assist the serious reader in grasping the meaning of the text and to prevent falls into misinterpretation." Although originally published in 1925, Process and Reality has perhaps even more relevance to the contemporary scene in physics, biology, psychology, and the social sciences than it had in the mid-twenties. Hence its internal difficulty, its quasi-inaccessibility, is all the more tragic, since, unlike most metaphysical endeavors, it is capable of interpreting and unifying theories in the above sciences in terms of an organic world view, instead of selecting one theory as the paradigm and reducing all others to it. Because Alfred North Whitehead is so crucial to modern philosophy, The Metaphysics of Experience plays an important role in making Process and Reality accessible to a wider readership. The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead's Process and Reality is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

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A Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures. Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means Jewish and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In contrast, this book calls attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means German. By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. In time, when the word shifted to a verb, taytshn, it came to mean the act of translation. To write or speak in Yiddish is thus to render into taytsh and inhabit the gap between languages.

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One of the enduring claims in the Christian tradition is that creation is good. Given the diversity of experience and the abundance of suffering in the world, however, such an affirmation is not always straightforward. The Play of Goodness provides a phenomenology of creation's goodness that clarifies the ongoing relevance of the doctrine today. It argues that what is good about creation is not synonymous with a confession of faith and does not require an overly optimistic disposition, but instead appears within diverse and often surprising circumstances.Alongside original contributions to French phenomenology and creation theology, The Play of Goodness counterbalances a tendency in continental philosophy to focus on negative phenomena. By developing the philosophical concept of a prelinguistic experience of goodness, the book identifies a quality of goodness that is integral to the place in which we find ourselves. It also articulates shared points of contact am

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A moving journey through the shadows of queer suicide and a tribute to lives marked by struggle and beautyThe Lamentations explores the struggles and resilience within the queer community, offering a unique blend of historical analysis and emotional tribute to those affected. Author Patrick Anderson examines the phenomenon of queer suicide across various art forms such as film, theatre, and literature, tracing its evolution from the twentieth century to today.Anderson brings to light the personal stories of individuals in the queer community who have ended their lives, compiling narratives from sources like newspaper articles, obituaries, and case studies. The book confronts the harsh realities of loneliness, shame, and oppression faced by many LGBTQ+ individuals, providing a poignant reflection on the societal challenges they face.The Lamentations is more than a meditation on death; it's a narrative of survival, mourning, and healing. Sharing

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The neglected histories of 19th-century NYC’s maligned working-class fortune tellers and the man who set out to discredit them Under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., humor writer Mortimer Thomson went undercover to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City’s tenements and slums. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified. In Mortimer and the Witches, author Marie Carter examines the lives of these marginalized fortune tellers while also detailing Mortimer Thomson’s peculiar and complicated biography. Living primarily in the poor section of the Lower East Side, nineteenth-century fortune tellers offered their clients answers to all questions in astrology, love, and law matters. They promised to cure ailments. They spoke of loved ones from beyond the grave. Yet Doesticks saw them as the worst of the worst evil-doers. His investigative reporting aimed to stop unsuspecting young women from seeking the corrupt soothsaying advice of these so-called clairvoyants and to expose the absurd and woefully inaccurate predictions of these “witches.” Marie Carter views these stories of working-class, immigrant women with more depth than Doesticks’s mocking articles would allow. In her analysis and discussion, she presents them as three-dimensional figures rather than the caricatures Doesticks made them out to be. What other professions at that time allowed women the kind of autonomy afforded by fortune-telling? Their eager customers, many of whom were newly arrived immigrants trying to navigate life in a new country, weren’t as naive and gullible as Doesticks made them out to be. They were often in need of guidance, seeking out the advice of someone who had life experience to offer or simply enjoying the entertainment and attention. Mortimer and the Witches offers new insight into the neglected histories of working-class fortune tellers and the creative ways that they tried to make a living when options were limited for them.

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Exploring Latin@ theologies and the power of revelation. The Word Became Culture enacts a preferential option for culture, retrieving experiences and expressions from across latinidad as sources of theologizing and acts of resistance to marginalization. Each author in this edited volume demonstrates the many ways in which Latin@ theologies are disruptive, generative, and creative spaces rooted in the richness, struggles, texts, and rituals found at the intersections of faith and culture. With a foreword by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Culture, this book situates Latin@ theologies in the ongoing search for and recognition of the “Word becoming” within the particularities of diverse cultural experiences.

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Catastrophic Historicism unsettles the historicist constitution of Julia de Burgos (1914–53), Puerto Rico’s most iconic writer—a critical task that necessitates redefining the concept of historicism. Through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, Mendoza-de Jesús shows that historicism grounds historical objectivity in the historian’s capacity to compose totalizing narratives that domesticate the contingency of the past. While critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, the book insists that reading the text of history requires an attunement to danger—a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation. After desedimenting the monumental tradition that has reduced de Burgos to a totemic figure, Catastrophic Historicism reads the poet’s first collection, Poema en 20 surcos (1938). Mendoza-de Jesús argues that the historicity of Poema crystallizes in the lyrical speaker’s self-institution as an embodied ipseity, which requires producing racialized/gendered allegorical figures—the bearers of an abject flesh—that lack any ontological resistance to modern alienation. Rather than treating de Burgos’s poetics of selfhood as the ideal image of Puerto Rican sovereignty, Mendoza-de Jesús endangers this idealization by drawing attention to the abjection that sustains our attachments to ipseity as the form of a truly sovereign life. In this way, Catastrophic Historicism not only resets the terms of ongoing critiques of historicism in the humanities—it also intervenes in Puerto Rican historicity for the sake of its transformation.

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