Search results for ""fordham university press""

This volume spotlights the unique suitability and situatedness of Filipinx American studies both as a site for reckoning with the work of historicizing U.S. empire in all of its entanglements, as well as a location for reclaiming and theorizing the interlocking histories and contemporary trajectories of global capitalism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. It encompasses an interrogation of the foundational status of empire in the interdiscipline; modes of labor analysis and other forms of knowledge production; meaning-making in relation to language, identities, time, and space; the critical contours of Filipinx American schooling and political activism; the indispensability of relational thinking in Filipinx American studies; and the disruptive possibilities of Filipinx American formations. A catalogue of key resources and a selected list of scholarship are also provided. Filipinx American Studies constitutes a coming-to-terms with not only the potentials and possibilities but also the disavowals, silences, and omissions that mark Filipinx American studies. It provides a reflective and critical space for thinking through the ways Filipinx American studies is uniquely and especially suited to the interrogation of the ongoing legacies of U.S. imperialism and the urgencies of the current period. Contributors: Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Angelica J. Allen, Gina Apostol, Nerissa S. Balce, Joi Barrios-Leblanc, Victor Bascara, Jody Blanco, Alana Bock, Sony Coráñez Bolton, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Richard T. Chu, Gary A. Colemnar, Kim Compoc, Denise Cruz, Reuben B. Deleon, Josen Masangkay Diaz, Robert Diaz, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Theodore S. Gonzalves, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Anna Romina Guevara, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Dina C. Maramba, Cynthia Marasigan, Edward Nadurata, JoAnna Poblete, Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, Dylan Rodríguez, Evelyn Ibatan Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, J. A. Ruanto-Ramirez, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Michael Schulze-Oechtering, Sarita Echavez See, Roy B. Taggueg Jr.

Read more less

The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation to reimagine Mormon eschatological hopes as near-future technological possibilities, they envision such current and possible advances as cryonic preservation, computer simulation, and quantum archeology as paving the way for the resurrection of the dead, the creation of worlds without end, and promise of undergoing theosis—of becoming a god. Addressing the role of speculation in the anthropology of religion, Machines for Making Gods undoes debates about secular transhumanism’s relation to religion by highlighting the differences an explicitly religious transhumanism makes. Charting the conflicts and resonances between secular transhumanism and Mormonism, Bialecki shows how religious speculation has opened up imaginative horizons to give birth to new forms of Mormonism, including a particular progressive branch of the faith and even such formations as queer polygamy. The book also reveals how the MTA’s speculative account of God and technology together has helped to forestall some of the social pressure that comes with apostasy in much of the Mormon Intermountain West. A fascinating ethnography of a group with much to say about crucial junctures of modern culture, Machines for Making Gods illustrates how the scientific imagination can be better understood when viewed through anthropological accounts of myth.

Read more less

The diary of radio correspondent James Cassidy presents a unique view of World War II as this reporter followed the Allied armies into Nazi Germany. James Joseph Cassidy was one of 362 American journalists accredited to cover the European Theater of Operations between June 7, 1944, and the war’s end. Radio was relatively new, and World War II was its first war. Among the difficulties facing historians examining radio reporters during that period is that many potential primary documents—their live broadcasts—were not recorded. In NBC Goes to War, Cassidy’s censored scripts alongside his personal diary capture a front-line view during some of the nastiest fighting in World War II as told by a seasoned NBC reporter. James Cassidy was ambitious and young, and his coverage of World War II for the NBC radio network notched some notable firsts, including being the first to broadcast live from German soil and arranging the broadcast of a live Jewish religious service from inside Nazi Germany while incoming mortar and artillery shells fell 200 yards away. His diary describes how he gathered news, how it was censored, and how it was sent from the battle zone to the United States. As radio had no pictures, reporters quickly developed a descriptive visual style to augment dry facts. All of Cassidy’s stories, from the panic he felt while being targeted by German planes to his shock at the deaths of colleagues, he told with grace and a reporter’s lean and engaging prose. Providing valuable eyewitness material not previously available to historians, NBC Goes to War tells a “bottom-up” narrative that provides insight into war as fought and chronicled by ordinary men and women. Cassidy skillfully placed listeners alongside him in the ruins of Aachen, on icy back roads crawling with spies, and in a Belgian bar where a little girl wailed “Les Américains partent!” when Allied troops retreated to safety, leaving the town open to German re-occupation. With a journalistic eye for detail, NBC Goes to War unforgettably portrays life in the press corps. This newly uncovered perspective also helps balance the CBS-heavy radio scholarship about the war, which has always focused heavily on Edward R. Murrow and his “Murrow’s Boys.”

Read more less

Pushing the boundaries of Latinx literature and what constitutes a borderlands poetics. Throughout Roberto Tejada’s body of work, the renowned poet and celebrated critic has explored themes of Latinx culture, politics, history, language, and ecologies. In his latest collection, Why the Assembly Disbanded, he presents a unique contribution to Latinx letters that reflects on the relations between the United States and Latin America, especially their real and symbolic borderlands. Immersive, postmodern, and philosophical, Why the Assembly Disbanded provides an associative, critical Latinx aesthetic connecting the Mexico–United States borderlands to Latin America’s neo-baroque heritage. Migrants, settlers, tourists, and exiles moving across various hemispheric landscapes are featured in these exuberant, capacious, and self-reflexive poems. Tejada relates the ravages of white supremacy in our culture that, together with immigrant precarity, turn home into a place of foreboding and impending eviction, even as a dream-weather makes room at last for scenes of possibility and attainment in the account of human history. The sweeping futuristic vistas open on to narratives of colonial extraction, human displacement, abuses of capitalism, mass media spectacle, the antagonism of language and technical images in the sensorium of urban and digital life-worlds, and the relations of desire encouraged by pictures and words in the economy of attention. Los Angeles and Mexico City figure prominently in poems committed to voicing modes of formation and community in an intersectional reckoning of personhoods prompted in work by artists Betye Saar, Amiri Baraka, Connie Samaras, and Rubén Ortiz Torres. With language given to pageantry, tonal precision, and a hopeful lyric radiance that can accommodate ecstasy and justice, Roberto Tejada’s carnivalesque, borderland imagery pushes the boundaries of Latinx literature. World-building by way of reverie, speculation, and retro-futurist tableaux, and with vivid, sometimes violent particularity, his poems enact hallucinatory realities of the hemisphere: an imagination that triangulates history, lyricism, and art as social practice.

Read more less

Women and Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity fills a significant gap in the sociology of religious practice: Studies focused on women’s religiosity have overlooked Orthodox populations, while studies of Orthodox practice (operating within the dominant theological, historical, and sociological framework) have remained gender-blind. The essays in this collection shed new light on the women who make up a considerable majority of the Orthodox population by engaging women’s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to their religion in multiple, varied localities, discussing both contemporary and pre-1989 developments. These contributions critically engage the pluralist and changing character of Orthodox institutional and social life by using feminist epistemologies and drawing on original ethnographic research to account for Orthodox women’s previously ignored perspectives, knowledges, and experiences. Combining the depth of ethnographic analysis with geographical breadth and employing a variety of research methodologies, this book expands our understanding of Orthodox Christianity by examining Orthodox women of diverse backgrounds in different settings: parishes, monasteries, and the secular spaces of everyday life, and under shifting historical conditions and political regimes. In defiance of claims that Orthodox Christianity is immutable and fixed in time, these essays argue that continuity and transformation can be found harmoniously in social practices, demographic trends, and larger material contexts at the intersection between gender, Orthodoxy, and locality. Contributors: Kristin Aune, Milica Bakic-Hayden, Maria Bucur, Ketevan Gurchiani, James Kapaló, Helena Kupari, Ina Merdjanova, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Eleni Sotiriou, Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir, Detelina Tocheva

Read more less

Shortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book Award Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory. Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

Read more less

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a rising interest in Arabic texts describing and explaining the rituals of the Coptic Church of Egypt. This book provides readers with an English translation of excerpts from three key texts on the Coptic liturgy by Abū al-Barakāt ibn Kabar, Yūh.annā ibn Sabbā‘, and Pope Gabriel V. With a scholarly introduction to the works, their authors, and the Coptic liturgy, as well as a detailed explanatory apparatus, this volume provides a useful and needed introduction to the worship tradition of Egypt’s Coptic Christians. Presented for the first time in English, these texts provide valuable points of comparison to other liturgical commentaries produced elsewhere in the medieval Christian world.

Read more less

Viking Mediologies is a study of pre-modern multimedia rooted in the embodied poetic practice of Viking Age skalds. Prior study of the skaldic tradition has focused on authorship—distinctions of poetic style, historical contexts, and attention to the oeuvres of the skalds whose names are preserved in the written tradition. Kate Heslop reconsiders these not as texts but as pieces in a pre-modern media landscape, focusing on poetry’s medial capacity to embody memory, visuality, and sound. Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social formations—bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial expeditions—achieved new prominence in the Viking Age. Skalds offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable. With their complicated poetry, they claimed to be able to capture shared contingent meanings and re-mediate them in named, memorable, reproducible works. The commemorative poetry in kviðuháttr remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses and reproduces the presence of the gods. Dróttkvætt encomium evokes for the leader’s retinue the soundscape of battle. As writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization, the media landscape shifted. In the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, skalds adjusted to the demands of a literate audience, while the historical and poetological texts of the Icelandic High Middle Ages opened a dialogue between Latin Christian ideas of mediation and local traditions. In the Second Grammatical Treatise, for example, the literate technology of the grid is used to analyze the complex resonances of dróttkvætt as the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy—a poetry machine. Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrápa, and Háttatal, and examinations of lesser-known texts like Glymdrápa, Líknarbraut, and Sturla Þórðarson’s Hákonarkviða, Viking Mediologies explores the powers and limits of poetic mediation.

Read more less

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America’s Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

Read more less

More than a purely philosophical problem, straddling the ambivalent terrain between necessity and impossibility, contingency has become the very horizon of everyday life. Often used as a synonym for the precariousness of working conditions under neoliberalism, for the unknown threats posed by terrorism, or for the uncertain future of the planet itself, contingency needs to be calculated and controlled in the name of the protection of life. The overcoming of contingency is not only called upon to justify questionable mechanisms of political control; it serves as a central legitimating factor for Enlightenment itself. In this volume, nine major philosophers and theorists address a range of questions around contingency and moral philosophy. How can we rethink contingency in its creative aspects, outside the dominant rhetoric of risk and dangerous exposure? What is the status of contingency—as the unnecessary and law-defying—in or for ethics? What would an alternative “ethics of contingency”—one that does not simply attempt to sublate it out of existence—look like? The volume tackles the problem contingency has always posed to both ethical theory and dialectics: that of difference itself, in the difficult mediation between the particular and the universal, same and other, the contingent singularity of the event and the necessary generality of the norms and laws. From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today’s most influential thinkers reshape many of the most debated concepts in moral philosophy: difference, agency, community, and life itself. Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe, Slavoj Žižek

Read more less

Winner, Prix Littéraire Paris-Liège 2021 Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation When we speak of mass killers, we may speak of radicalized ideologues, mediocrities who only obey orders, or bloodthirsty monsters. Who are these men who kill on a mass scale? What is their consciousness? Do they not feel horror or compassion? Richard Rechtman’s Living in Death offers new answers to a question that has haunted us at least since the Holocaust. For Rechtman, it is not ideologies that kill, but people. This book descends into the ordinary life of people who execute hundreds every day, the same way others go to the office. Bringing philosophical sophistication to the ordinary, the book constitutes an anthropology of mass killers. Turning away from existing psychological and philosophical accounts of genocide’s perpetrators, Rechtman instead explores the conditions under which administering death becomes a job like any other. Considering Cambodia, Rwanda, and other mass killings, Living in Death draws on a vast array of archival research, psychological theory, and anecdotes from the author’s clinical work with refugees and former participants in genocide. Rechtman mounts a compelling case for reframing and refocusing our attempts to explain—and preempt—acts of mass torture, rape, killing, and extermination. What we must see, Rechtman argues, is that for genocidaires (those who carry out acts that are or approach genocide), there is nothing extraordinary, unusual, or world-historical about their actions. On the contrary, they are preoccupied with the same mundane things that characterize any other job: interactions with colleagues, living conditions, a drink and a laugh at the end of the day. To understand this is to understand how things came to be the way they are—and how they might be different.

Read more less

Finalist, 2021 Bram Stoker Awards (Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction) The first collection of essays to address Satan’s ubiquitous and popular appearances in film Lucifer and cinema have been intertwined since the origins of the medium. As humankind’s greatest antagonist and the incarnation of pure evil, the cinematic devil embodies our own culturally specific anxieties and desires, reflecting moviegoers’ collective conceptions of good and evil, right and wrong, sin and salvation. Giving the Devil His Due is the first book of its kind to examine the history and significance of Satan onscreen. This collection explores how the devil is not just one monster among many, nor is he the “prince of darkness” merely because he has repeatedly flickered across cinema screens in darkened rooms since the origins of the medium. Satan is instead a force active in our lives. Films featuring the devil, therefore, are not just flights of fancy but narratives, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes calling into question, a familiar belief system. From the inception of motion pictures in the 1890s and continuing into the twenty-first century, these essays examine what cinematic representations tell us about the art of filmmaking, the desires of the film-going public, what the cultural moments of the films reflect, and the reciprocal influence they exert. Loosely organized chronologically by film, though some chapters address more than one film, this collection studies such classic movies as Faust, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, Angel Heart, The Witch, and The Last Temptation of Christ, as well as the appearance of the Devil in Disney animation. Guiding the contributions to this volume is the overarching idea that cinematic representations of Satan reflect not only the hypnotic powers of cinema to explore and depict the fantastic but also shifting social anxieties and desires that concern human morality and our place in the universe. Contributors: Simon Bacon, Katherine A. Fowkes, Regina Hansen, David Hauka, Russ Hunter, Barry C. Knowlton, Eloise R. Knowlton, Murray Leeder, Catherine O’Brien, R. Barton Palmer, Carl H. Sederholm, David Sterritt, J. P. Telotte, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Read more less

Winner, Prix Littéraire Paris-Liège 2021 Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation When we speak of mass killers, we may speak of radicalized ideologues, mediocrities who only obey orders, or bloodthirsty monsters. Who are these men who kill on a mass scale? What is their consciousness? Do they not feel horror or compassion? Richard Rechtman’s Living in Death offers new answers to a question that has haunted us at least since the Holocaust. For Rechtman, it is not ideologies that kill, but people. This book descends into the ordinary life of people who execute hundreds every day, the same way others go to the office. Bringing philosophical sophistication to the ordinary, the book constitutes an anthropology of mass killers. Turning away from existing psychological and philosophical accounts of genocide’s perpetrators, Rechtman instead explores the conditions under which administering death becomes a job like any other. Considering Cambodia, Rwanda, and other mass killings, Living in Death draws on a vast array of archival research, psychological theory, and anecdotes from the author’s clinical work with refugees and former participants in genocide. Rechtman mounts a compelling case for reframing and refocusing our attempts to explain—and preempt—acts of mass torture, rape, killing, and extermination. What we must see, Rechtman argues, is that for genocidaires (those who carry out acts that are or approach genocide), there is nothing extraordinary, unusual, or world-historical about their actions. On the contrary, they are preoccupied with the same mundane things that characterize any other job: interactions with colleagues, living conditions, a drink and a laugh at the end of the day. To understand this is to understand how things came to be the way they are—and how they might be different.

Read more less

A graphic novel that confronts our habits, narratives, and fantasies head-on to help break our petroleum dependency What if the biggest barriers to responding to climate change are not technological or governmental but, rather, cultural? In other words, what if we ourselves could help to enact change through a deeper understanding of our petroleum dependency? In a provocative graphic format that draws widely from history, critical theory, and popular culture, Gasoline Dreams explores and challenges the ways fossil fuels have shaped our identities, relationships, and our ability to imagine sustainable, equitable futures. As our rapidly warming planet is pushed toward ecological collapse, we might often feel helpless or paralyzed by the enormity of the challenges confronting us. However, reflecting upon the cultural dimensions of our predicament helps reveal the great potential for social transformation inherent in the multiplying crises. Author and artist Simon Orpana engages with contemporary scholarship in the emergent field of Energy Humanities to confront the habits, narratives, and fantasies that support our attachment to fossil fuels. By revealing the many ways petroculture repeatedly fails to deliver on its promises of “the good life,” Gasoline Dreams calls us to the difficult work of waking up from the fantasies that inhibit us from working toward a global transition to renewable energy. Written in an engaging graphic format that makes relevant historical, cultural, and political analyses of global warming and petrol dependency important to a wide audience, Gasoline Dreams refutes the progress narratives that depict contemporary, energy-intensive societies as the inevitable product of human history. By revealing the contingencies, coercions, and compulsions this myth disguises, the book allows us to imagine truly progressive alternatives. Rather than casting climate change as a problem for technological elites to solve, the book confronts the everyday realities that reinforce our dependence on fossil fuels, offering a space of hope and engagement from which concerned people can work to build a more sustainable future. On the threshold of the single greatest transformation the human species has yet faced, Gasoline Dreams challenges us to start living, working, and dreaming differently to become less culturally dependent on petroleum.

Read more less

This book—part memoir, part political statement—examines the influence of the author’s maternal and paternal ancestry on his life. Delving into the rich history of Francis Mading Deng’s heritage, Blood of Two Streams acts as a bridge to cross-cultural understanding and multidisciplinary connection between the personal, the communal, and the universal.

Read more less

Larry Hollingworth, current visiting Professor of Humanitarian Studies at Fordham University in New York City, served as head of the UNHCR’s efforts in Bosnia throughout the lengthy conflict that plagued the former Yugoslavia in the early to mid ’90s. Aid Memoir follows Larry and his UN colleagues throughout multiple efforts to provide much-needed relief for besieged, isolated, and desperate communities riddled by senseless killing and aggression. The characters encountered throughout are at times thrilling, at times frightening. Larry spares no details, however troubling, and therefore shines a telling light on the reality of the situation that most will remember to have watched on their television screens.

Read more less

A missed phone call. A misheard word. An indiscernible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement. Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between biopolitical theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings. Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of “over-hearings” between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability. Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality’s subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening. Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound’s capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered.

Read more less

Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association Honorable Mention, René Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization. Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a richaccount of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos’ rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto’s Indonesia. Watson’s book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific. Cold War Reckonings is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Read more less

Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of careful readings, Robert Mitchell shows how a range of elements of modern literature, from character-systems to free indirect discourse, are closely intertwined with Romantic-era liberalism and biopolitics. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century theorists of liberalism such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus drew upon the new sciences of population to develop a liberal biopolitics that aimed to coordinate differences among individuals by means of the culling powers of the market. Infectious Liberty focuses on such authors as Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth, who drew upon the sciences of population to develop a biopolitics beyond liberalism. These authors attempted what Roberto Esposito describes as an “affirmative” biopolitics, which rejects the principle of establishing security by distinguishing between valued and unvalued lives, seeks to support even the most abject members of a population, and proposes new ways of living in common. Infectious Liberty expands our understandings of liberalism and biopolitics—and the relationship between them—while also helping us to understand better the ways creative literature facilitates the project of reimagining what the politics of life might consist of. Infectious Liberty is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Read more less

Material Mystery considers three apparently anthropocentric myths that are central to Abrahamic religions—those of the primal human, the incarnated and possibly divine redeemer, and the resurrected body. At first glance, these stories reinforce a human-centered theology and point to a very anthropomorphic God. Taking them seriously seems to ignore the material turn in the humanities entirely, with the same sort of willful ignorance that some of our politicians show in declaring that their myths count as facts, or that the point of the rest of the world is to further human consumption. But it is possible, Karmen MacKendrick shows, to read these figures through a particular tradition that emerges from the Hebrew Bible, the tradition of Wisdom as a creative force. Wisdom texts are common across the ancient Near East. As the idea of creative Wisdom develops from antiquity into the middle ages, it gathers philosophical influences from a range of philosophical traditions. This exuberantly promiscuous impurity—intellectual, artistic, and theological—generates new interpretive possibilities. In these interpretations, each human-like figure opens up onto the world''s matter, as an interdependent part of it, and matter is thoroughly mixed with divinity. Such mythic readings complement our factual, scientific understanding of the material world, to engage wider kinds of knowing and affective attention—particularly Wisdom''s combination of care and delight.

Read more less

Anarchy and the Kingdom of God reclaims the concept of “anarchism” both as a political philosophy and a way of thinking of the sociopolitical sphere from a theological perspective. Through a genuinely theological approach to the issues of power, coercion, and oppression, Davor Džalto advances human freedom—one of the most prominent forces in human history—as a foundational theological principle in Christianity. That principle enables a fresh reexamination of the problems of democracy and justice in the age of global (neoliberal) capitalism.

Read more less

This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip. Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal

Read more less

This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip. Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal

Read more less

WINNER, NEW JERSEY STUDIES ACADEMIC ALLIANCE BOOK AWARD James Collins Johnson made his name by escaping slavery in Maryland and fleeing to Princeton, New Jersey, where he built a life in a bustling community of African Americans working at what is now Princeton University. After only four years, he was recognized by a student from Maryland, arrested, and subjected to a trial for extradition under the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. On the eve of his rendition, after attempts to free Johnson by force had failed, a local aristocratic white woman purchased Johnson’s freedom, allowing him to avoid re-enslavement. The Princeton Fugitive Slave reconstructs James Collins Johnson’s life, from birth and enslaved life in Maryland to his daring escape, sensational trial for re-enslavement, and last-minute change of fortune, and through to the end of his life in Princeton, where he remained a figure of local fascination. Stories of Johnson’s life in Princeton often describe him as a contented, jovial soul, beloved on campus and memorialized on his gravestone as “The Students Friend.” But these familiar accounts come from student writings and sentimental recollections in alumni reports—stories from elite, predominantly white, often southern sources whose relationships with Johnson were hopelessly distorted by differences in race and social standing. In interrogating these stories against archival records, newspaper accounts, courtroom narratives, photographs, and family histories, author Lolita Buckner Inniss builds a picture of Johnson on his own terms, piecing together the sparse evidence and disaggregating him from the other black vendors with whom he was sometimes confused. By telling Johnson’s story and examining the relationship between antebellum Princeton’s black residents and the economic engine that supported their community, the book questions the distinction between employment and servitude that shrinks and threatens to disappear when an individual’s freedom is circumscribed by immobility, lack of opportunity, and contingency on local interpretations of a hotly contested body of law.

Read more less

A provocative re-reading of Stanley Kubrick’s work and its focus on masculine desire The work of Stanley Kubrick amounts to a sustained reflection on the male condition: past, present, and future. The persistent theme of his filmmaking is less violence or sex than it is the pressurized exertion of masculinity in unusual or extreme circumstances, where it may be taxed or exaggerated to various effects, tragic and comic—or metamorphosed, distorted, and even undone. The stories that Kubrick’s movies tell range from global nuclear politics to the unpredictable sexual dynamics of a marriage; from a day in the life of a New York City prizefighter preparing for a nighttime bout to the evolution of humankind. These male melodramas center on sociality and asociality. They feature male doubles, pairs, and rivals. They explore the romance of men and their machines, and men as machines. They figure intensely conflicted forms of male sexual desire. And they are also very much about male manners, style, taste, and art. Examining the formal, thematic, and theoretical affiliations between Kubrick’s three bodies of work—his photographs, his documentaries, and his feature films—Kubrick’s Men offers new vantages on to the question of gender and sexuality, including the first extended treatment of homosexuality in Kubrick’s male-oriented work.

Read more less

The first detailed study of “Neo-Antique” architecture applies an archaeological lens to the study of New York City’s structures Since the city’s inception, New Yorkers have deliberately and purposefully engaged with ancient architecture to design and erect many of its most iconic buildings and monuments, including Grand Central Terminal and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Brooklyn, as well as forgotten gems such as Snug Harbor on Staten Island and the Gould Memorial Library in the Bronx. Antiquity in Gotham interprets the various ways ancient architecture was re-conceived in New York City from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Contextualizing New York’s Neo-Antique architecture within larger American architectural trends, author Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis applies an archaeological lens to the study of the New York buildings that incorporated these various models in their design, bringing together these diverse sources of inspiration into a single continuum. Antiquity in Gotham explores how ancient architecture communicated the political ideals of the new republic through the adaptation of Greek and Roman architecture, how Egyptian temples conveyed the city’s new technological achievements, and how the ancient Near East served many artistic masters, decorating the interiors of glitzy Gilded Age restaurants and the tops of skyscrapers. Rather than classifying neo-classical (and Greek Revival), Egyptianizing, and architecture inspired by the ancient Near East into distinct categories, Macaulay-Lewis applies the Neo-Antique framework that considers the similarities and differences—intellectually, conceptually, and chronologically—among the reception of these different architectural traditions. This fundamentally interdisciplinary project draws upon all available evidence and archival materials—such as the letters and memos of architects and their patrons, and the commentary in contemporary newspapers and magazines—to provide a lively multi-dimensional analysis that examines not only the city’s ancient buildings and rooms themselves but also how New Yorkers envisaged them, lived in them, talked about them, and reacted to them. Antiquity offered New Yorkers architecture with flexible aesthetic, functional, cultural, and intellectual resonances—whether it be the democratic ideals of Periclean Athens, the technological might of Pharaonic Egypt, or the majesty of Imperial Rome. The result of these dialogues with ancient architectural forms was the creation of innovative architecture that has defined New York City’s skyline throughout its history.

Read more less

Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity. Nothing Absolute reclaims German Idealism as a political-theological trajectory. Across the volume’s contributions, German thought from Kant to Marx emerges as crucial for the genealogy of political theology and for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and the secular. By investigating anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, theodicy, the Earth, and the world, as well as the concept of political theology itself, this volume not only rethinks German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today. Contributors: Joseph Albernaz, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Agata Bielik-Robson, Kirill Chepurin, S. D. Chrostowska, Saitya Brata Das, Alex Dubilet, Vincent Lloyd, Thomas Lynch, James Martel, Steven Shakespeare, Oxana Timofeeva, Daniel Whistler

Read more less

Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.

Read more less

Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together major feminist thinkers to debate Cavarero’s call for a postural ethics of nonviolence and a sociality rooted in bodily interdependence. Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together three major feminist thinkers—Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig—to debate Cavarero’s call for a postural ethics of nonviolence. The book consists of three longer essays by Cavarero, Butler, and Honig, followed by shorter responses by a range of scholars that widen the dialogue, drawing on post-Marxism, Italian feminism, queer theory, and lesbian and gay politics. Together, the authors contest the boundaries of their common project for a pluralistic, heterogeneous, but urgent feminist ethics of nonviolence.

Read more less

In the seventeenth century the ancient hope for the physical resurrection of the body and its flesh began an unexpected second life as critical theory, challenging the notion of an autonomous self and driving early modern avant-garde poetry. As an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology transformed the ancient hope for the resurrection of the flesh into the fantasy of a soul or mind living on separately from any body, literature complicated the terms of the debate. Such poets as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson picked up the discarded idea of the resurrection of the flesh and bent it from an apocalyptic future into the here and now to imagine the self already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the resurrection body. Fate of the Flesh explores what happens when seventeenth-century poets posit a resurrection body within the historical person. These poets see the resurrection body as the precondition for the social person’s identities and forms of agency and yet as deeply other to all such identities and agencies, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. This perspective leads seventeenth-century poets to a compelling awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to re-imagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in its light. By developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materiality within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They frame their poems neither as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers assembled around a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Read more less

Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” demonologies in contemporary America. Situating spiritual warfare as part of broader frameworks of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire management, author S. Jonathon O’Donnell exposes the theological foundations of the systems of queer- and transphobia, anti-blackness, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current U.S. political order. O’Donnell argues that demonologies are not only tools of dehumanization but also ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies—models of the “right ordering” of space, time, and bodies that stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Alternative orders are demonized as passing, framed as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. Yet these orders refuse to simply pass on, instead giving strength to deviant desires that challenge the legitimacy of sovereign violence. Critically examining this challenge in the demonologies of three figures—Jezebel, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders re-imagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.

Read more less

Tells the story of the building of the American Museum of Natural History and Hayden Planetarium, a story of history, politics, science, and exploration, including the roles of American presidents, New York power brokers, museum presidents, planetarium directors, polar and African explorers, and German rocket scientists. The American Museum of Natural History is one of New York City’s most beloved institutions, and one of the largest, most celebrated museums in the world. Since 1869, generations of New Yorkers and tourists of all ages have been educated and entertained here. Located across from Central Park, the sprawling structure, spanning four city blocks, is a fascinating conglomeration of many buildings of diverse architectural styles built over a period of 150 years. The first book to tell the history of the museum from the point of view of these buildings, including the planned Gilder Center, The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way contextualizes them within New York and American history and the history of science. Part II, “The Heavens in the Attic,” is the first detailed history of the Hayden Planetarium, from the museum’s earliest astronomy exhibits, to Clyde Fisher and the original planetarium, to Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and it features a photographic tour through the original Hayden Planetarium. Author Colin Davey spent much of his childhood literally and figuratively lost in the museum’s labyrinthine hallways. The museum grew in fits and starts according to the vicissitudes of backroom deals, personal agendas, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. Chronicling its evolution―from the selection of a desolate, rocky, hilly, swampy site, known as Manhattan Square to the present day―the book includes some of the most important and colorful characters in the city’s history, including the notoriously corrupt and powerful “Boss” Tweed, “Father of New York City” Andrew Haswell Green, and twentieth-century powerbroker and master builder Robert Moses; museum presidents Morris K. Jesup, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Ellen Futter; and American presidents, polar and African explorers, dinosaur hunters, and German rocket scientists. Richly illustrated with period photos, The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way is based on deep archival research and interviews.

Read more less

In Theosemiotic, Michael Raposa uses Charles Peirce’s semiotic theory to rethink certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. He first sketches a history that links Peirce’s thought to that of earlier figures (both within the tradition of American religious thought and beyond), as well as to other classical pragmatists and to later thinkers and developments. Drawing on Peirce’s ideas, Raposa develops a semiotic conception of persons/selves emphasizing the role that acts of attention play in shaping human inferences and perception. His central Peircean presuppositions are that all human experience takes the form of semiosis and that the universe is “perfused” with signs. Religious meaning emerges out of a process of continually reading and re-reading certain signs. Theology is explored here in its manifestations as inquiry, therapy, and praxis. By drawing on both Peirce’s logic of vagueness and his logic of relations, Raposa makes sense out of how we talk about God as personal, and also how we understand the character of genuine communities. An investigation of what Peirce meant by “musement” illuminates the nature and purpose of prayer. Theosemiotic is portrayed as a form of religious naturalism, broadly conceived. At the same time, the potential links between any philosophical theology conceived as theosemiotic and liberation theology are exposed.

Read more less

This sparkling collection of essays invites readers to join a seasoned scholar on his journey to catch “radical theology” in action, both in the Church and our culture at large. Capturing a career’s worth of thought and erudition, this rich volume treats readers to creative thought, careful argumentation, and sophisticated analysis transmitted through the lucid, accessible prose that has earned the author a wide readership of academics and non-academics alike. In tackling “radical theology,” John D. Caputo has in mind the deeper stream that courses its way through various historical and confessional theologies, upon which these theologies draw even while it disturbs them from within. They are well served by this disturbance because it keeps them on their toes. When we read about professional theologians’ losing their jobs in confessional institutions, the chances are that, by earnestly digging into what is going on in their tradition, they have hit upon radical theological rock. Unlike modernist dismissals of religion, radical theology does not debunk but re-invents the theological tradition. Radical theology, Caputo says, is a double deconstruction—of supernatural theology on the one hand and of transcendental reason on the other, and therefore of the settled distinctions between the religious and the secular. Caputo also addresses the challenge for radical theology to earn a spot in the curriculum, given that the “radical” makes it suspect among the confessional seminaries while the “theology” renders it suspect among university seminars. Journeying from the academy to contemporary American culture, In Search of Radical Theology includes a captivating presentation of radical political theology for the time of Trump. This utterly unique volume not only brings readers on an enlightening tour of Caputo’s thought but also invites us to accompany the author as he travels into intriguing new territories.

Read more less

Winner, 2022 Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Scholarly Illustrated Category A significant contribution on the development and aftermath of post–World War II Concretism in Brazil Form and Feeling features a collection of essays by noted scholars exploring the sensorial, experience-based, and participatory practices pioneered in the 1950s by artists and poets such as Flávio de Carvalho, Ivan Serpa, Hélio Oiticica, Haroldo de Campos, Mary Vieira, Lygia Pape, Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Clark, Waly Salomão, and Emil Forman, among many others. Fourteen thought-provoking essays examine how many of their strategies constituted a pertinent critique of the country’s wide-ranging embrace of Eurocentric modernity while anticipating a number of practices prevalent among contemporary artists today—namely, the rise of art as social practice, the embrace of pedagogical concerns by artists, and relational aesthetics. The fourteen essays collected in this volume consider the ramifications of modernist abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century and contribute to a growing academic field in postwar Brazilian and Latin American art history. Contributions to this anthology examine the development of modernist ideas that flourished in Brazil during a controversial period interspersed by dictatorial regimes. The global aspect of Brazilian art is especially evident in these studies, presenting the relational complexity of their subjects as transcultural, transnational actors while simultaneously contributing to a growing, increasingly nuanced understanding of visual and material culture, performance, and criticism in Brazil. Form and Feeling continues the important process of re-analyzing the intersections of Concretism and Neo concretism, arguing for greater affinities between the primary and lesser-known cast of characters while equally redistributing the strict geographical divisions of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This anthology broadly situates this extraordinary period of artistic experimentation in direct relationship to contemporary factors, such as psychoanalysis, educational systems, poetry, politics, and feminism. It crafts innovative relationships about the constructive hierarchies of form and space, poetry and painting, and mathematics and philosophy, thus engendering new positions for a deeply ensconced period in Brazilian history.

Read more less

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Étienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought. The book shows the continuing vitality of materialist thought across the humanities and social sciences and will be fundamental for understanding the philosophical bases of the contemporary left critique of globalization, neoliberalism, and the articulation of race, racism, and economic exploitation. Contributors: Emily Apter, Étienne Balbar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith Butler, Monique David-Ménard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis Gourgouris, Bernard E. Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier, Warren Montag, Adi Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler, Gary Wilder

Read more less

Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that make these terms central to modern understandings of relation.

Read more less

This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Womanpriests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Womanpriest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Womanpriest analyzes the womenpriests’ actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change. In order to understand how womenpriests navigate tradition and transgression, this study situates RCWP within post–Vatican II Catholicism, apostolic succession, sacraments, ministerial action, and questions of embodiment. Womanpriest reveals RCWP to be a discrete religious movement in a distinct religious moment, with a small group of tenacious women defying the Catholic patriarchy, taking on the priestly role, and demanding reconsideration of Roman Catholic tradition. Doing so, the women inhabit and re-create the central tensions in Catholicism today.

Read more less

Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or “figuratives” that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.

Read more less

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a geological unconscious—unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it was named. These close readings show the entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

Read more less

Today’s regnant global economic and cultural system, neoliberal capitalism, demands that life be led as a series of sacrifices to the market. Send Lazarus’s theological critique wends its way through four neoliberal crises: environmental destruction, slum proliferation, mass incarceration, and mass deportation, all while plumbing the sacrificial and racist depths of neoliberalism.

Read more less

The new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics examines one of those modes: book-length poems, from Louis Zukofsky to Harryette Mullen, all structured by particular editions of specific dictionaries. By reading these poems in tandem with their source texts, Dworkin puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde literature is nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Following a methodology of “critical description,” Dictionary Poetics maps the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition, and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.

Read more less

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante’s 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work’s present and future impact. The contributors to this work—writers, critics, fans, scholars, screenwriters, directors, and others—analyze the provocative set of diaspora tensions informing Fante’s masterpiece that distinguish it from those accounts of earlier East Coast migrations and minglings. A must-read for aficionados of L.A. fiction and new migration literature, John Fante’s “Ask the Dust”: A Joining of Voices and Views is destined for landmark status as the first volume of Fante studies to reveal the novel’s evolving intertextualities and intersectionalities. Contributors: Miriam Amico, Charles Bukowski, Stephen Cooper, Giovanna DiLello, John Fante, Valerio Ferme, Teresa Fiore, Daniel Gardner, Philippe Garnier, Robert Guffey, Ryan Holiday, Jan Louter, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Meagan Meylor, J’aime Morrison, Nathan Rabin, Alan Rifkin, Suzanne Manizza Roszak, Danny Shain, Robert Towne, Joel Williams

Read more less

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall. Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music’s physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.

Read more less

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprising the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

Read more less

A compelling and innovative reflection on the way photography captures and condenses time Two photographs, connected by a ladder, separated by a century. First, William Henry Fox Talbot photographed a faithfully realistic image of a ladder against a haystack in the English countryside.One hundred years later, an anonymous photographer captured another ladder, “photographed” alongside an incinerated man by the blinding light of the atomic bomb. These two images underpin a poetic and theoretical reflection on the origins of photographic technique, the imaginative power of montage, and the relation of photography to time itself in Jean-Christophe Bailly’s The Instant and Its Shadow, translated into English for the very first time. A rare find of intellectual caliber and theoretical rigor, The Instant and Its Shadow pursues a unique and powerful reflection on the first hundred years of photography’s history and on the essence of the photographic art in general. Inspired by the unexpected coming together of these two iconic images, the book begins by retracing Talbot’s invention of the photographic calotype in the early nineteenthcentury, highlighting the paradox that saw Talbot wishing to imitate the representative arts of painting and drawing while simultaneously liberating the image from any imitative paradigm. This analysis leads Bailly to elucidate photography’s relation to material and visual reality. A meditation on photography’s seeming ability to stop time follows, concluding with the photographs of Hiroshima and the photographic nature of the atomic bomb. Building on an inspired juxtaposition of The Haystack with the Hiroshima photographs, the book becomes a testament to the potency of photomontage, arguing that “the more singular an image, the greater its connective power.” Bailly’s book is at once a lyrical homage to some of the founding texts of photographic theory and a startling reminder of the uncanny power of photography itself. Part theoretical reflection, part lyrical reverie, The Instant and Its Shadow is packed with profound and stellar insights about the medium.

Read more less

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.

Read more less

A rare and evocative memoir of a respected constitutional scholar, dedicated public servant, political reformer, and facilitator of peace in the land of his ancestors. John D. Feerick’s life has all the elements of a modern Horatio Alger story: the poor boy who achieves success by dint of his hard work. But Feerick brought other elements to that classic American success story: his deep religious faith, his integrity, and his paramount concern for social justice. In his memoir, That Further Shore, Feerick shares his inspiring story, from his humble beginnings: born to immigrant parents in the South Bronx, going on to practice law, participating in framing the U.S. Constitution’s Twenty-Fifth Amendment, serving as dean of Fordham Law, and serving as President of the New York City Bar Association and chair of state commissions on government integrity. Beginning with Feerick’s ancestry and early life experiences, including a detailed genealogical description of Feerick’s Irish ancestors in County Mayo and his laborious quest to identify them and their relationships with one another, the book then presents an evocative survey of the now-vanished world of a working-class Irish Catholic neighborhood in the South Bronx. Feerick’s account of how he financed his education from elementary school through law school is a moving tribute to the immigrant work ethic that he inherited from his parents and shared with many young Americans of his generation. The book then traces Feerick’s career as a lawyer and how he gave up a lucrative partnership in a prestigious New York City law firm at an early age to accept the office of Dean of the Fordham School of Law at a fraction of his previous income because he felt it was time to give back something to the world. John Feerick has consistently shown his commitment to the law as a vocation as well as a profession by his efforts to protect the rights of the poor, to enable minorities to achieve their rightful places in American society, and to combat political corruption. That Further Shore is an inspiring memoir of how one humble and decent man helped to make America a more just and equitable society.

Read more less