Search results for ""Fordham University Press""

Exploring the broad implications of evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis’s work, this collection brings together specialists across a range of disciplines, from paleontology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory, and geobiology to developmental systems theory, archaeology, history of science, cultural science studies, and literature and science. Addressing the multiple themes that animated Margulis’s science, the essays within take up, variously, astrobiology and the origin of life, ecology and symbiosis from the microbial to the planetary scale, the coupled interactions of earthly environments and evolving life in Gaia theory and earth system science, and the connections of these newer scientific ideas to cultural and creative productions. Dorion Sagan acquaints the reader with salient issues in Lynn Margulis’s scientific work, the controversies they raised, and the vocabulary necessary to follow the arguments. Sankar Chatterjee synthesizes several strands of current theory for the origin of life on earth. James Strick tells the intertwined origin stories of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and Margulis’s serial endosymbiosis theory. Jan Sapp explores the distinct phylogenetic visions of Margulis and Carl Woese. Susan Squier examines the epigenetics of embryologist and developmental biologist C. H. Waddington. Bruce Clarke studies the convergence of ecosystem ecology, systems theory, and science fiction between the 1960s and the 1980s. James Shapiro discusses the genome evolution that results not from random changes but rather from active cell processes. Susan Oyama shows how the concept of development balances an over-emphasis on genetic coding and other deterministic schemas. Christopher Witmore studies the ways in which a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, mixes up natural resources, animal lives, and human appetites. And Peter Westbroek brings the insights of earth system science toward a new worldview essential for a proper response to global change.

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Despite Georges Bataille’s acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille’s work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

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Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit. Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema, in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white, its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups. The apocalyptic genre is not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that, every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing. In a Postface specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his argument into a debate with speculative materialism. Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that question the “ultratestimonial” structure of the filmic gaze. The cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.

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In a series of exquisite close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, Jeffrey Sacks considers the relation of poetic statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Addressing the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn, Sacks demonstrates the reiterated incursion of loss into the time of life—losses that language declines to mourn. Language occurs as the iteration of loss, confounding its domestication in the form of the monolingual state in the Arabic nineteenth century’s fallout. Reading the late lyric poetry of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in relation to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, Sacks reconsiders the nineteenth century Arabic nahda and its relation to colonialism, philology, and the European Enlightenment. He argues that this event is one of catastrophic loss, wherein the past suddenly appears as if it belonged to another time. Reading al-Shidyaq’s al-Saq ‘ala al-saq (1855) and the legacies to which it points in post-1948 writing in Arabic, Hebrew, and French, Sacks underlines a displacement and relocation of the Arabic word adab and its practice, offering a novel contribution to Arabic and Middle East Studies, critical theory, poetics, aesthetics, and comparative literature. Drawing on writings of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Theodor Adorno, and Edward W. Said, Iterations of Loss shows that language interrupts its pacification as an event of aesthetic coherency, to suggest that literary comparison does not privilege a renewed giving of sense but gives place to a new sense of relation.

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Salvage Work examines contemporary literary responses to the law’s construction of personhood in the Americas. Tracking the extraordinary afterlives of the legal slave personality from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, Angela Naimou shows the legal slave to be a fractured but generative figure for contemporary legal personhood across categories of race, citizenship, gender, and labor. What emerges is a compelling and original study of how law invents categories of identification and how literature contends with the person as a legal fiction. Through readings of Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman, Edwidge Danticat’s Krik?Krak!, Rosario Ferre’s Sweet Diamond Dust (Maldito Amor), Gayl Jones’s Song for Anninho and Mosquito, and John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon, Naimou shows how literary engagements with legal personhood reconfigure formal narrative conventions in Black Atlantic historiography, the immigrant novel, the anticolonial romance, the trope of the talking book, and the bildungsroman. Revealing links between colonial, civic, slave, labor, immigration, and penal law, Salvage Work reframes debates over civil and human rights by revealing the shared hemispheric histories and effects of legal personhood across seemingly disparate identities—including the human and the corporate person, the political refugee and the economic migrant, and the stateless person and the citizen. In depicting the material remains of the legal slave personality in the de-industrialized neoliberal era, these literary texts develop a salvage aesthetic that invites us to rethink our political and aesthetic imagination of personhood. Questioning liberal frameworks for civil and human rights as well as what Naimou calls death-bound theories of personhood—in which forms of human life are primarily described as wasted, disposable, bare, or dead in law—Salvage Work thus responds to critical discussions of biopolitics and neoliberal globalization by exploring the potential for contemporary literature to reclaim the individual from the legal regimes that have marked her.

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This book brings together a group of Judith Butler’s philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power. Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler’s embodied account of ethical relations.

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This groundbreaking collection explores the important ways Jesuits have employed rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion and the current art of communications, from the sixteenth century to the present. Much of the history of how Jesuit traditions contributed to the development of rhetorical theory and pedagogy has been lost, effaced, or dispersed. As a result, those interested in Jesuit education and higher education in the United States, as well as scholars and teachers of rhetoric, are often unaware of this living 450-year-old tradition. Written by highly regarded scholars of rhetoric, composition, education, philosophy, and history, many based at Jesuit colleges and universities, the essays in this volume explore the tradition of Jesuit rhetorical education—that is, constructing “a more usable past” and a viable future for eloquentia perfecta, the Jesuits’ chief aim for the liberal arts. Intended to foster eloquence across the curriculum and into the world beyond, Jesuit rhetoric integrates intellectual rigor, broad knowledge, civic action, and spiritual discernment as the chief goals of the educational experience. Consummate scholars and rhetors, the early Jesuits employed all the intellectual and language arts as “contemplatives in action,” preaching and undertaking missionary, educational, and charitable works in the world. The study, pedagogy, and practice of classical grammar and rhetoric, adapted to Christian humanism, naturally provided a central focus of this powerful educational system as part of the Jesuit commitment to the Ministries of the Word. This book traces the development of Jesuit rhetoric in Renaissance Europe, follows its expansion to the United States, and documents its reemergence on campuses and in scholarly discussions across America in the twenty-first century. Traditions of Eloquence provides a wellspring of insight into the past, present, and future of Jesuit rhetorical traditions. In a period of ongoing reformulations and applications of Jesuit educational mission and identity, this collection of compelling essays helps provide historical context, a sense of continuity in current practice, and a platform for creating future curricula and pedagogy. Moreover it is a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding a core aspect of the Jesuit educational heritage.

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Thresholds of Listening addresses recent and historical changes in the ways listening has been conceived. Listening, having been emancipated from the passive, subjected position of reception, has come to be asserted as an active force in culture and in collective and individual politics. The contributors to this volume show that the exteriorization of listening— brought into relief by recent historical studies of technologies of listening—involves a re-negotiation of the theoretical and pragmatic distinctions that underpin the notion of listening. Focusing on the manifold borderlines between listening and its erstwhile others, such as speaking, reading, touching, seeing, or hearing, the book maps new frontiers in the history of aurality. They suggest that listening’s finitude— defined in some of the essays as its death or deadliness—should be considered as a heuristic instrument rather than as a mere descriptor. Listening emerges where it appears to end or to run up against thresholds and limits—or when it takes unexpected turns. Listening’s recent emergence on the cultural and theoretical scene may therefore be productively read against contemporary recurrences of the motifs of elusiveness, finitude, and resistance to open up new politics, discourses, and technologies of aurality.

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In recent years, a number of books in the field of literacy research have addressed the experiences of literacy users or the multiple processes of learning literacy skills in a rapidly changing technological environment. In contrast to these studies, this book addresses the subjects of literacy. In other words, it is about how literacy workers are subjected to the relations between new forms of labor and the concept of human capital as a dominant economic structure in the United States. It is about how literacies become forms of value producing labor in everyday life both within and beyond the workplace itself. As Evan Watkins shows, apprehending the meaning of literacy work requires an understanding of how literacies have changed in relation to not only technology but also to labor, capital, and economics. The emergence of new literacies has produced considerable debate over basic definitions as well as the complexities of gain and loss. At the same time, the visibility of these debates between advocates of old versus new literacies has obscured the development of more fundamental changes. Most significantly, Watkins argues, it is no longer possible to represent human capital solely as the kind of long-term resource that Gary Becker and other neoclassical economists have defined. Like corporate inventory and business management practices, human capital—labor—now also appears in a “just-in-time” form, as if a power of action on the occasion rather than a capital asset in reserve. Just-in-time human capital valorizes the expansion of choice, but it depends absolutely on the invisible literacy work consigned to the peripheries of concentrated human capital. In an economy wherein peoples’ attention begins to eclipse information as a primary commodity, a small number of choices appear with an immensely magnified intensity while most others disappear entirely. As Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital deftly illustrates, the concentration of human labor in the digital age reinforces and extends a class division of winners on the inside of technological innovation and losers everywhere else.

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In 1964, a little-noticed albeit pioneering encounter in the Holy Land between the heads of the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church spawned numerous contacts and diverse openings between the two “sister churches,” which had not communicated with each other for centuries. Fifty years later, Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew meet in Jerusalem to commemorate that historical event and celebrate the close relations that have developed through mutual exchanges of formal visits and an official theological dialogue that began in 1980. This book contains three unique chapters: The first is a sketch of the behind-the-scenes challenges and negotiations that accompanied the meeting in 1964, detailing the immediate consequences of the event and setting the tone for the volume. The second is an inspirational account, interwoven with a scholarly evaluation of the work of the North American Standing Council on Orthodox/Catholic relations over the past decades. The third chapter presents a recently discovered reflection on the meeting that took place fifty years ago by one of the most important Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, expressing cautious optimism about the future of Christian unity.

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Over the past decade, Jeffrey J. Williams has been one of the most perceptive observers of contemporary literary and cultural studies. He has also been a shrewd analyst of the state of American higher education. How to Be an Intellectual brings together noted and new essays and exemplifies Williams’s effort to bring criticism to a wider public How to Be an Intellectual profiles a number of critics, drawing on a unique series of interviews that give an inside look at their work and careers. The book often looks at critical thought from surprising angles, examining, for instance, the history of modern American criticism in terms of its keywords as they morphed from sound to rigorous to smart. It also puts in plain language the political travesty of higher education policies that produce student debt, which, as Williams demonstrates, all too readily follow the model of colonial indenture, not just as a metaphor but in actual point of fact. How to Be an Intellectual tells a story of intellectual life since the culture wars. Shedding academic obscurity and calling for a better critical writing, it reflects on what makes the critic and intellectual—the accidents of careers, the trends in thought, the institutions that shape us, and politics. It also includes personal views of living and working with books.

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Over the past decade, Jeffrey J. Williams has been one of the most perceptive observers of contemporary literary and cultural studies. He has also been a shrewd analyst of the state of American higher education. How to Be an Intellectual brings together noted and new essays and exemplifies Williams’s effort to bring criticism to a wider public How to Be an Intellectual profiles a number of critics, drawing on a unique series of interviews that give an inside look at their work and careers. The book often looks at critical thought from surprising angles, examining, for instance, the history of modern American criticism in terms of its keywords as they morphed from sound to rigorous to smart. It also puts in plain language the political travesty of higher education policies that produce student debt, which, as Williams demonstrates, all too readily follow the model of colonial indenture, not just as a metaphor but in actual point of fact. How to Be an Intellectual tells a story of intellectual life since the culture wars. Shedding academic obscurity and calling for a better critical writing, it reflects on what makes the critic and intellectual—the accidents of careers, the trends in thought, the institutions that shape us, and politics. It also includes personal views of living and working with books.

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What’s new about the apocalypse? Revelation does not allow us to look back after the end and enumerate pivotal turning points. It happens in an immediate encounter with the transformatively new. John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics attempt to render the experience of such an apocalyptic change in the present. In this respect they take seriously the Reformation’s insistence that eschatology is a historical phenomenon. Yet these poets are also reacting to the Regicide, and, as a result, their works explore very modern questions about the nature of events, what it means for a significant historical occasion to happen. Lyric Apocalypse argues that Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics challenge any retrospective understanding of events, including one built on a theory of revolution. Instead, these poems show that there is no “after” to the apocalypse, that if we are going to talk about change, we should do so in the present, when there is still time to do something about it. For both of these poets, lyric becomes a way to imagine an apocalyptic event that would be both hopeful and new.

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This book’s theological and philosophical construction of a God of enjoyment poetically remaps divine love. Posing a critique to the Aristotelian unmoved mover whose intellective enjoyment is self-enclosed, this book’s affective tones depict a passionate God who intermingles with the cosmos to suffer and yearn out of love— even improper love. Divine Enjoyment leads the reader to a path of excess, first in the form of an intellective appetite that for Aquinas places God beyond the divine self, then more erotically in the silhouette of a lover whose love is like the delectable pain of mystics. Culminating with banqueting, fiesta, and carnival, the book deterritorializes God’s affect, conceiving of an expansively hospitable enjoyment stemming from many life forms With a renewed welcome for pleasure, the book also upholds a disruptive ethic. Ultimately, an immoderate God of love whose passionate enjoyment stems from the sufferings as well as joys of the cosmos offers another paradigm of lovingly enjoying oneself in relationship with passionate becomings that belong to many others.

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THE NEW YORK OBSERVER: ONE OF THE TOP 10 BOOKS FOR FALL It’s no wonder that New York has always been a magnet city for writers. Manhattan is one of the most walkable cities in the world. While many novelists, poets, and essayists have enjoyed long walks in New York, not all of them have had favorable impressions. Addressing an endlessly appealing subject, Walking New York is a study of twelve American writers and several British writers who walked the streets of New York and wrote about their impressions of the city in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Seen through the eyes of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Jacob Riis, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, James Weldon Johnson, Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Colson Whitehead, and Teju Cole, almost all the works in Walking New York are about Manhattan, with only Whitman and Kazin writing about Brooklyn. Though the writers were often irritated, disturbed, and occasionally shocked by what they saw on their walks, they were still fascinated by the city William Dean Howells called “splendidly and sordidly commercial” and Cynthia Ozick called “faithfully inconstant, magnetic, man-made, unnatural—the synthetic sublime.” In this idiosyncratic guidebook to New York, celebrated writers ruminate on questions that are still hotly debated to this day: the pros and cons of capitalism and the impact of immigration. Many imply that New York is a bewildering text that is hard to make sense of. Returning to New York after an absence of two decades, Henry James loathed many things about “bristling” New York, while native New Yorker Walt Whitman both celebrated and criticized “Mannahatta” in his writings. Combining literary scholarship with urban studies, Walking New York reveals how this crowded, dirty, noisy, and sometimes ugly city gave these “restless analysts” plenty of fodder for their craft.

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Communities in Fiction reads six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) in the light of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams, Martin Heidegger, and Jean- Luc Nancy. The book’s topic is the question of how communities or noncommunities are represented in fictional works. Such fictional communities help the reader understand real communities, including those in which the reader lives. As against the presumption that the trajectory in literature from Victorian to modern to postmodern is the story of a gradual loss of belief in the possibility of community, this book demonstrates that communities have always been presented in fiction as precarious and fractured. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Pynchon and Cervantes in the last chapter demonstrates that period characterizations are never to be trusted. All the features both thematic and formal that recent critics and theorists such as Fredric Jameson and many others have found to characterize postmodern fiction are already present in Cervantes’s wonderful early-seventeenth-century “Exemplary Story,” “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” All the themes and narrative devices of Western fiction from the beginning of the print era to the present were there at the beginning, in Cervantes Most of all, however, Communities in Fiction looks in detail at its six fictions, striving to see just what they say, what stories they tell, and what narratological and rhetorical devices they use to say what they do say and to tell the stories they do tell. The book attempts to communicate to its readers the joy of reading these works and to argue for the exemplary insight they provide into what Heidegger called Mitsein— being together in communities that are always problematic and unstable.

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What can theology offer in the context of neoliberalism, globalization, growing inequality, and an ever more ecologically precarious planet that disproportionately affects the poor? This book, by one of the country’s best-known Latino theologians, explores possibilities for liberation from the forces that would impose certain forms of knowledge on our social world to manipulate our experience of identity, power, and justice. Beautifully written in a refreshingly direct and accessible prose, Maduro’s book is nevertheless built upon subtly articulated critiques and insights. But to write a conventional academic tractatus would have run counter to Maduro’s project, which is built on his argument that ignorance is masked in the language of expertise, while true knowledge is dismissed because it is sometimes articulated in pedestrian language by those who produce it through the praxis of solidarity and struggle for social justice. With a generosity and receptivity to his readers reminiscent of letters between old friends, and with the pointed but questioning wisdom of a teller of parables, Maduro has woven together a twenty-first-century reply to Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach.” Neither conventional monograph nor memoir, neither a theological nor a political tract, but with elements of all of these, Maps for a Fiesta arrives as Maduro’s philosophical and theological testament—one that celebrates the knowledge-work and justice-making of the poor. What Maduro offers here is a profound meditation on the relationship between knowledge and justice that could be read as a manifesto against the putatively unknowable world that capitalist chaos has made, in favor of a world that is known by the measure of its collective justice. His fiesta grants us the joy that nourishes us in our struggles, just as knowledge gives us the tools to build a more just society. What Maduro offers is nothing less than an epistemology of liberation.

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What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property’s ontology. Chad Luck argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with precisely these questions. Reading slave narratives, gothic romances, city-mystery novels, and a range of other property narratives, Luck unearths a wide-ranging literary effort to understand the nature of ownership, the phenomenology of possession. In these antebellum texts, ownership is not an abstract legal form but a lived relation, a dynamic of embodiment emerging within specific cultural spaces—a disputed frontier, a city agitated by class conflict. Luck challenges accounts that map property practice along a trajectory of abstraction and “virtualization.” The book also reorients recent Americanist work in emotion and affect by detailing a broader phenomenology of ownership, one extending beyond emotion to such sensory experiences as touch, taste, and vision. This productive blend of phenomenology and history uncovers deep-seated anxieties—and enthusiasms—about property across antebellum culture.

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It is commonly supposed that certain elements of medieval philosophy are uncharacteristically preserved in modern philosophical thought through the idea that mental phenomena are distinguished from physical phenomena by their intentionality, their intrinsic directedness toward some object. The many exceptions to this presumption, however, threaten its viability. This volume explores the intricacies and varieties of the conceptual relationships medieval thinkers developed among intentionality, cognition, and mental representation. Ranging from Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Buridan through less-familiar writers, the collection sheds new light on the various strands that run between medieval and modern thought and bring us to a number of fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind as it is conceived today.

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In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” Benjamin’s effort to transpose the dream phenomenon to the history of a collective remained fragmentary, though it underlies the principle of retrograde temporality, which, it is argued, is central to his idea of history. The “passages” are not just the Paris arcades: They refer also to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his work and thought. Gelley works through many of Benjamin’s later works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening. For Benjamin, memory is not only antiquarian; it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. Gelley reads this call in the motif of awakening, which conveys a qualified but crucial performative intention of Benjamin’s undertaking.

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This book reconstructs the emergence of the phenomenon of “lost time” by engaging with two of the most significant time experts of the nineteenth century: the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz and the French writer Marcel Proust. Its starting point is the archival discovery of curve images that Helmholtz produced in the context of pathbreaking experiments on the temporality of the nervous system in 1851. With a “frog drawing machine,” Helmholtz established the temporal gap between stimulus and response that has remained a core issue in debates between neuroscientists and philosophers. When naming the recorded phenomena, Helmholtz introduced the term temps perdu, or lost time. Proust had excellent contacts with the biomedical world of late-nineteenth-century Paris, and he was familiar with this term and physiological tracing technologies behind it. Drawing on the machine philosophy of Deleuze, Schmidgen highlights the resemblance between the machinic assemblages and rhizomatic networks within which Helmholtz and Proust pursued their respective projects.

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To appreciate the life of the Italian immigrant enclave from the great heart of the Italian migration to its settlement in America requires that one come to know how these immigrants saw their communities as colonies of the mother country. Edited with extraordinary skill, Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943 brings to an English-speaking audience a definitive collection of classic writings on, about, and from the formative years of the Italian-American experience. Originally published in Italian, this landmark collection of translated writings establishes a rich, diverse, and mature sense of Italian-American life by allowing readers to see American society through the eyes of Italian-speaking immigrants. Filled with the voices from the first generation of Italian-American life, the book presents a unique treasury of long-inaccessible writing that embodies a literary canon for Italian-American culture—poetry, drama, journalism, political advocacy, history, memoir, biography, and story—the greater part of which has never before been translated. Italoamericana introduces a new generation of readers to the “Black Hand” and the organized crime of the 1920s, the incredible “pulp” novels by Bernardino Ciambelli, Paolo Pallavicini, Italo Stanco, Corrado Altavilla, the exhilarating “macchiette” by Eduardo Migliaccio (Farfariello) and Tony Ferrazzano, the comedies by Giovanni De Rosalia, Riccardo Cordiferro’s dramas and poems, the poetry of Fanny Vanzi-Mussini and Eduardo Migliaccio. Edited by a leading journalist and scholar, Italoamericana introduces an important but little-known, largely inaccessible Italian-language literary heritage that defined the Italian-American experience. Organized into five sections—“Annals of the Great Exodus,” “Colonial Chronicles,” “On Stage (and Off-Stage),” “Anarchists, Socialist, Fascists, Anti-Fascists,” and “Apocalyptic Integrated / Integrated Apocalyptic Intellectuals”—the volume distinguishes a literary, cultural, and intellectual history that engages the reader in all sorts of archaeological and genealogical work. The original volume in Italian: Italoamericana Vol II: Storia e Letteratura degli Italiani negli Stati Uniti 1880-1943

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The subject of this book is a new “Islam.” This Islam began to take shape in 1988 around the Rushdie affair, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the first Gulf War of 1991. It was consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. It is a name, a discursive site, a signifier at once flexible and constrained—indeed, it is a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism, and reformation are worked out. At this discursive site are many metonyms for Islam: the veiled or “pious” Muslim woman, the militant, the minority Muslim injured by Western free speech. Each of these figures functions as a cipher enabling repeated encounters with the question “How do we free ourselves from freedom?” Again and again, freedom is imagined as Western, modern, imperial—a dark imposition of Enlightenment. The pious and injured Muslim who desires his or her own enslavement is imagined as freedom’s other. At Freedom’s Limit is an intervention into current debates regarding religion, secularism, and Islam and provides a deep critique of the anthropology and sociology of Islam that have consolidated this formation. It shows that, even as this Islam gains increasing traction in cultural production from television shows to movies to novels, the most intricate contestations of Islam so construed are to be found in the work of Muslim writers and painters. This book includes extended readings of jihadist proclamations; postcolonial law; responses to law from minorities in Muslim-majority societies; Islamophobic films; the novels of Leila Aboulela, Mohammed Hanif, and Nadeem Aslam; and the paintings of Komail Aijazuddin.

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Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond shines light on traditional divisions of Old Norse–Icelandic poetry and awakens the reader to work that blurs these boundaries. Many of the texts and topics taken up in these enlightening essays have been difficult to categorize and have consequently been overlooked or undervalued. The boundaries between genres (Eddic and Skaldic), periods (Viking Age, medieval, early modern), or cultures (Icelandic, Scandinavian, English, Continental) may not have been as sharp in the eyes and ears of contemporary authors and audiences as they are in our own. When questions of classification are allowed to fade into the background, at least temporarily, the poetry can be appreciated on its own terms. Some of the essays in this collection present new material, while others challenge long-held assumptions. They reflect the idea that poetry with “medieval” characteristics continued to be produced in Iceland well past the fifteenth century, and even beyond the Protestant Reformation in Iceland (1550). This superb volume, rich in up-to-date scholarship, makes little-known material accessible to a wide audience.

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Spoken on the margin between death and birth, reading and writing, separation and union, the poems of Errings address the absent—a lost leader, a remote love, a protege not yet born—and across those distances delineate the motion of consciousness as it passes from one body to the next. “Videos of Fish,” the opening sequence, speaks to the spirit of the poet’s late father, adapting devices from Dante, Tibetan metaphysical philosophy, and the biomechanics of the most primitive of vertebrate bodies, the fish, to envision paths of the disembodied soul. “How difficult it is to remain one person,” the poet claims, echoing Czesław Miłosz; in its progress between persons, the collection’s regular shifts in mode and form include the purgatorian tercet, the Japanese poetic diary, didactic verse, the Persian ghazal, the erasure, and the miniature. THE READER Experience among the waves allows one to limit the field. Each year he grew another soul, oblong, slightly pointed at the end, like an oar, its surface turned to the light. Blacken now and lift your news into the air.

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Simultaneously restless and enchanted, the primary speaker of these poems is a tourist in the truest sense. She finds herself on trains, in the backcountry of the American wilderness, in crowded European hostels, and in Vietnam, eating a partially fertilized egg. All the while, Michigan, the landscape of childhood, serves as her reference point (“A rustic sort of place I can’t back away from”). Inspired by the Buddhist concept of anatta, or “no-self,” the speaker navigates unfamiliar terrain, sparking the question of identity and the agent of its construction. The poems ask how through perception the body metabolizes experience. From this intersection the passionate investigation of consciousness takes flight, framing the slippage between thinking and being, the feast of the subconscious and the seeds planted from waking life, the impermanence of a given moment, versus the materialism of memory, the reality of isolation despite the presence of a crowd, the influence of culture versus biology’s common baseline. Drawing from contemporary neuroscience and rare case studies, the poems illuminate the peculiar interrelated aspects of the mechanisms of the brain and personality. But there is nothing clinical about these poems, culled from dreams and memory fragments. The question of consciousness gives rise to the distinct human ability to reflect, to invent. Which is what the poems—poignant, strange, radiating musicality—enact: someone gropes for the deer mount its goofy snarl and patchwork hide a ruse underway laughter in the pantry the deer lifted into someone’s sleep (from “Staff After Hours”) Not the love a mile underground on a train that slows into the station like a sore arm bending, but the kind boarded on a ship and sailed hard into the storm we’ve made of ourselves. (from “Please do Not Touch”) Gray Matter: 1. the material of the brain. 2. an expression naming an idea or situation held in shadow. This book tangles with the unknown, but also celebrates the seductive curiosity its mystery provokes. It is a love letter from the imagination to the scientists and philosophers who, despite remarkable attempts, still cannot locate its source.

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Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist uncritically preoccupied with “noble savages” and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau presents the emancipatory possibilities of Rousseau’s thought and argues that a fresh, “fugitive” perspective on political freedom is bound up with Rousseau’s treatments of primitivism and slavery. Rather than trace Rousseau’s arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau’s famous sentence “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable.

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The guiding theme of these essays by aesthetician, musician, and Santayana scholar Morris Grossman is the importance of preserving the tension between what can be unified and what is disorganized, random, and miscellaneous. Grossman described this as the tension between art and morality: Art arrests a sense of change and yields moments of unguarded enjoyment and peace; but soon, shifting circumstances compel evaluation, decision, and action. According to Grossman, the best art preserves the tension between the aesthetic consummation of experience and the press of morality understood as the business of navigating conflicts, making choices, and meeting needs. This concern was intimately related to his reading of George Santayana. The best philosophy, like the best art, preserves the tension between what can be ordered and what resists assimilation, and Grossman read Santayana as exemplifying this virtue in his embrace of multiple perspectives. Other scholars have noted the multiplicity or irony in Santayana’s work, but Grossman was unique in taking such a style to be a substantive part of Santayana’s philosophizing.

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Because the Internet has changed and is changing the ways in which we think and act, it must also be changing the ways in which we think Christianity and its theology. Cybertheology is the first book to explore this process from a Catholic point of view. Drawing on the theoretical work of authors such as Marshall McLuhan, Peter Levy, and Teilhard de Chardin, it questions how technologies redefine not only the ways in which we do things but also our being and therefore the way we perceive reality, the world, others, and God. “Does the digital revolution affect faith in any sense?” Spadaro asks. His answer is an emphatic Yes. But how, then, are we to live well in the age of the Internet? Spadaro delves deeply into various dimensions of the impact of the Net on the Church and its organization, on our understanding of revelation, grace, liturgy, the sacraments, and other classical theological themes. He rightly points out that the digital environment is not merely an external instrument that facilitates human communication or a purely virtual world, but part of the daily experience of many people, a new “anthropological space” that is reshaping the way we think, know, and express ourselves. Naturally, this calls for a new understanding of faith so that it makes sense to people who live and work in the digital media environment. In developing the notion of cybertheology, Spadaro seeks to propose an intelligence of faith (intellectus fidei) in the era of the Internet. The book’s chapters include reflections on man the decoder and the search engines of God, networked existence and the mystical body, hacker ethics and Christian vision, sacraments and “virtual presence,” and the theological challenges of collective intelligence.

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The life of Howard Johnson, nicknamed “Stretch” because of his height (6'5"), epitomizes the cultural and political odyssey of a generation of African Americans who transformed the United States from a closed society to a multiracial democracy. Johnson’s long-awaited memoir traces his path from firstborn of a multiclass/multiethnic” family in New Jersey to dancer in Harlem’s Cotton Club to communist youth leader and, later, professor of Black studies. A Dancer in the Revolution is a powerful statement about Black resilience and triumph amid subtle and explicit racism in the United States. Johnson’s engaging, beautifully written memoir provides a window into everyday life in Harlem—neighborhood life, arts and culture, and politics—from the 1930s to the 1970s, when the contemporary Black community was being formed. A Dancer in the Revolution explores Johnson’s twenty-plus years in the Communist Party and illuminates in compelling detail how the Harlem branch functioned and flourished in the 1930s and ’40s. Johnson thrived as a charismatic leader, using the connections he built up as an athlete and dancer to create alliances between communist organizations and a cross-section of the Black community. In his memoir, Johnson also exposes the homoerotic tourism that was a feature of Harlem’s nightlife in the 1930s. Some of America’s leading white literary, musical, and artistic figures were attracted to Harlem not only for the community’s artistic creativity but to engage in illicit sex—gay and straight—with their Black counterparts. A Dancer in the Revolution is an invaluable contribution to the literature on Black political thought and pragmatism. It reveals the unique place that Black dancers and artists hold in civil rights pursuits and anti-racism campaigns in the United States and beyond. Moreover, the life of “Stretch” Johnson illustrates how political activism engenders not only social change but also personal fulfillment, a realization of dreams not deferred but rather pursued and achieved. Johnson’s journey bears witness to critical periods and events that shaped the Black condition and American society in the process.

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For Strasbourg consists of a series of essays and interviews about the city of Strasbourg and the philosophical friendships Jacques Derrida developed there over a period of some forty years. Written just months before his death, the opening essay, “The Place Name(s): Strasbourg,” recounts in detail, and in very moving terms, Derrida’s deep attachment to this French city on the border between France and Germany. More than just a personal narrative, however, the essay is a profound interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and place, philosophy and language, and philosophy and friendship. As such, it raises a series of philosophical, political, and ethical questions that might all be placed under the aegis of what Derrida once called “philosophical nationalities and nationalism.” The other three texts included in the book are long interviews/conversations between Derrida and his two principal interlocutors in Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. These interviews are significant both for the themes they focus on (language, politics, friendship, death, life after death, and so on) and for what they reveal about Derrida’s relationships to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Filled with sharp insights into one anothers’ work and peppered with personal anecdotes and humor, the interviews bear witness to the decades-long intellectual friendships of these three important contemporary thinkers. This collection thus stands as a reminder of and testimony to Derrida’s unique relationship to Strasbourg and to the two thinkers most closely associated with that city.

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This book sheds light on the most philosophically interesting of contemporary objects: the cell phone. “Where are you?”—a question asked over cell phones myriad times each day—is arguably the most philosophical question of our age, given the transformation of presence the cell phone has wrought in contemporary social life and public space. Throughout all public spaces, cell phones are now a ubiquitous prosthesis of what Descartes and Hegel once considered the absolute tool: the hand. Their power comes in part from their ability to move about with us—they are like a computer, but we can carry them with us at all times—in part from what they attach to us (and how), as all that computational and connective power becomes both handy and hand-sized. Quite surprisingly, despite their name, one might argue, as Ferraris does, that cell phones are not really all that good for sound and speaking. Instead, the main philosophical point of this book is that mobile phones have come into their own as writing machines—they function best for text messages, e-mail, and archives of all kinds. Their philosophical urgency lies in the manner in which they carry us from the effects of voice over into reliance upon the written traces that are, Ferraris argues, the basic stuff of human culture. Ontology is the study of what there is, and what there is in our age is a huge network of documents, papers, and texts of all kinds. Social reality is not constructed by collective intentionality; rather, it is made up of inscribed acts. As Derrida already prophesized, our world revolves around writing. Cell phones have attached writing to our fingers and dragged it into public spaces in a new way. This is why, with their power to obliterate or morph presence and replace voice with writing, the cell phone is such a philosophically interesting object.

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This book explores the co-dependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, to differing degrees they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Derrida and Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety. The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence in these Jewish thinkers is symptomatic of a larger question. Recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology, a religion without religion, are not radical enough. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other. The logic of apophasis, if permitted to run its course fully, would exceed the need to posit some form of transcendence that is not ultimately a facet of immanence. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis that surpasses the theolatrous impulse lying coiled at the crux of theism, an apophasis of apophasis, based on accepting an absolute nothingness—to be distinguished from the nothingness of an absolute—that does not signify the unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being’s core. Hence, the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift must give way to the more neutral and less theologically charged notion of an unconditional givenness in which the distinction between giver and given collapses. To think givenness in its most elemental, phenomenological sense is to allow the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.

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Since the 1960s, most U.S. History has been written as if the civil rights movement were primarily or entirely a Southern history. This book joins a growing body of scholarship that demonstrates the importance of the Northern history of the movement. The contributors make clear that civil rights in New York City were contested in many ways, beginning long before the 1960s, and across many groups with a surprisingly wide range of political perspectives. Civil Rights in New York City provides a sample of the rich historical record of the fight for racial justice in the city that was home to the nation’s largest population of African-Americans in mid-twentiethcentury America. The ten contributions brought together here address varying aspects of New York’s civil rights struggle, including the role of labor, community organizing campaigns, the pivotal actions of prominent national leaders, the movement for integrated housing, the fight for racial equality in public higher education, and the part played by a revolutionary group that challenged structural, societal inequality. Long before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. helped launch the Harlem Bus Boycott of 1941. The New York City’s Teachers’ Union had been fighting for racial equality since 1935. Ella Baker worked with the NAACP and the city’s grassroots movement to force the city to integrate its public school system. In 1962, a direct action campaign by Brooklyn CORE, a racially integrated membership organization, forced the city to provide better sanitation services to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn’s largest black community. Integrating Rochdale Village in South Jamaica, the largest middle-class housing cooperative in New York, brought together an unusual coalition of leftists, liberal Democrats, moderate Republicans, pragmatic government officials, and business executives. In reexamining these and other key events, Civil Rights in New York City reaffirms their importance to the larger national fight for equality for Americans across racial lines.

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The essays in this collection examine philosophical, religious, and literary or artistic texts using methodologies and insights that have grown out of reflection on literature and art. In them, them phrase “material spirit” becomes a point of departure for considering the continuing spectral effects of religious texts and concerns in ways that do not simply call for, or assume, new orrenewed forms of religiosity. The writers in this collection seek to examine religion beyond traditional notions of transcendence: Their topics range from early Christian religious practices to global climate change. Some of the essays explore religious themes or tones in literary texts, for example, works by Wordsworth, Hopkins, Proust, Woolf, and Teresa of Avila. Others approach—in a literarycritical mood—philosophical or para-philosophical writers such as Bataille, Husserl, Derrida, and Benjamin. Still others treat writers of a more explicitly religious orientation, such as Augustine, Rosenzweig, or Bernard of Clairvaux.

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In his famous theses on the philosophy of history, Benjamin writes: “We have been endowed with a weak messianic power to which the past has a claim.” This claim addresses us not just from the past but from what will have belonged to it only as a missed possibility and unrealized potential. For Benajmin, as for Celan and Derrida, what has never been actualized remains with us, not as a lingering echo but as a secretly insistent appeal. Because such appeals do not pass through normal channels of communication, they require a special attunement, perhaps even a mode of unconscious receptivity. Levine examines the ways in which this attunement is cultivated in Benjamin’s philosophical, autobiographical, and photohistorical writings; Celan’s poetry and poetological addresses; and Derrida’s writings on Celan.

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“Pagan life seduces me a little more with each passing day. If it were possible today, I would change my religion and would joyfully embrace poetic paganism,” wrote the Armenian poet Daniel Varuzhan in 1908. During the seven years that remained in his life, he wrote largely in this “pagan” vein. If it was an artistic endeavour, why then should art be defined in reference to religion? And which religion precisely? Was Varuzhan echoing Schelling’s Philosophy of Art? Mourning Philology draws on Varuzhan and his work to present a history of the national imagination, which is also a history of national philology, as a reaction to the two main philological inventions of the nineteenth century: mythological religion and the native. In its first part, the book thus gives an account of the successive stages of orientalist philology. The last episode in this story of national emergence took place in 1914 in Constantinople, when the literary journal Mehyan gathered around Varuzhan the great names to come of Armenian literature in the diaspora

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During a tumultuous period when financial speculation began rapidly to outpace industrial production and consumption, Victorian financial journalists commonly explained the instability of finance by criticizing its inherent artifice—drawing persistent attention to what they called “fictitious capital.” In a shift that naturalized this artifice, this critique of fictitious capital virtually disappeared by the 1860s, replaced by notions of fickle investor psychology and mental equilibrium encapsulated in the fascinating metaphor of “psychic economy.” In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature’s unique facility for evaluating ideas in process. Inheritors of this novelistic project, Marx and Freud each advance a critique of psychic economy that refuses to naturalize capitalism.

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The nineteenth century was a time of extraordinary attunement to the unspoken, the elusively present, and the subtly haunting. Quiet Testimony finds in such attunement a valuable rethinking of what it means to encounter the truth. It argues that four key writers—Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and Henry James—open up the domain of the witness by articulating quietude’s claim on the clamoring world. The premise of quiet testimony responds to urgent questions in critical theory and human rights. Emerson is brought into conversation with Levinas, and Douglass is considered alongside Agamben. Yet the book is steeped in the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, in which speech and meaning might exceed the bounds of the recognized human subject. In this context, Melville’s characters could read the weather, and James’s could spend an evening with dead companions. By following the path by which ostensibly unremarkable entities come to voice, Quiet Testimony suggests new configurations for ethics, politics, and the literary.

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Is writing haunted by a categorical imperative? Does the Kantian sublime continue to shape the writer’s vocation, even for twentieth-century authors? What precise shape, form, or figure does this residue of sublimity take in the fictions that follow from it—and that leave it in ruins? This book explores these questions through readings of three authors who bear witness to an ambiguous exigency: writing as a demanding and exclusive task, at odds with life, but also a mere compulsion, a drive without end or reason, even a kind of torture. If Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett mimic a sublime vocation in their extreme devotion to writing, they do so in full awareness that the trajectory it dictates leads not to metaphysical redemption but rather downward, into the uncanny element of fiction. As this book argues, the sublime has always been a deeply melancholy affair, even in its classical Kantian form, but it is in the attenuated speech of narrative voices progressively stripped of their resources and rewards that the true nature of this melancholy is revealed.

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This book argues that Freud’s mapping of trauma as a scene is central to both his clinical interpretation of his patients’ symptoms and his construction of successive theoretical models and concepts to explain the power of such scenes in his patients’ lives. This attention to the scenic form of trauma and its power in determining symptoms leads to Freud’s break from the neurological model of trauma he inherited from Charcot. It also helps to explain the affinity that Freud and many since him have felt between psychoanalysis and literature (and artistic production more generally), and the privileged role of literature at certain turning points in the development of his thought. It is Freud’s scenography of trauma and fantasy that speaks to the student of literature and painting. Overall, the book develops the thesis of Jean Laplanche that in Freud’s shift from a traumatic to a developmental model, along with the undoubted gains embodied in the theory of infantile sexuality, there were crucial losses: specifically, the recognition of the role of the adult other and the traumatic encounter with adult sexuality that is entailed in the ordinary nurture and formation of the infantile subject.

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Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World is an insightful collection that articulates how Jesuit colleges and universities create an educational community energized to transform the lives of its students, faculty, and administrators and to equip them to transform a broken world. The essays are rooted in Pedro Arrupe’s ideal of forming men and women for others and inspired by Peter-Hans Kolvenbach’s October 2000 address at Santa Clara in which he identified three areas where the promotion of justice may be manifested in our institutions: formation and learning, research and teaching, and our way of proceeding. Using the three areas laid out in Fr. Kolvenbach’s address as its organizing structure, this stimulating volume addresses the following challenges: How do we promote student life experiences and service? How does interdisciplinary collaborative research promote teaching and reflection? How do our institutions exemplify justice in their daily practices? Introductory pieces by internationally acclaimed authors such as Rev. Dean Brackley, S.J.; David J. O’Brien; Lisa Sowle Cahill; and Rev. Stephen A. Privett, S.J., pave the way for a range of smart and highly creative essays that illustrate and honor the scholarship, teaching, and service that have developed out of a commitment to the ideals of Jesuit higher education. The topics covered span disciplines and fields from the arts to engineering, from nursing to political science and law. The essays offer numerous examples of engaged pedagogy, which as Rev. Brackley points out fits squarely with Jesuit pedagogy: insertion programs, community-based learning, study abroad, internships, clinical placements, and other forms of interacting with the poor and with cultures other than our own. This book not only illustrates the dynamic growth of Jesuit education but critically identifies key challenges for educators, such as: How can we better address issues of race in our teaching and learning? Are we educating in nonviolence? How can we make the college or university “greener”? How can we evoke a desire for the faith that does justice? Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World is an indispensable volume that has the potential to act as an academic facilitator for the promotion of justice within not only Jesuit schools but all schools of higher education.

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X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought offers an original account of matters African American, and by implication the African diaspora in general, as an object of discourse and knowledge. It likewise challenges the conception of analogous objects of study across dominant ethnological disciplines (e.g., anthropology, history, and sociology) and the various forms of cultural, ethnic, and postcolonial studies. With special reference to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Chandler shows how a concern with the Negro is central to the social and historical problematization that underwrote twentieth-century explorations of what it means to exist as an historical entity—referring to their antecedents in eighteenth-century thought and forward into their ongoing itinerary in the twenty-first century. For Du Bois, “the problem of the color line” coincided with the inception of a supposedly modern horizon. The very idea of the human and its avatars—the idea of race and the idea of culture—emerged together with the violent, hierarchical inscription of the so-called African or Negro into a horizon of commonness beyond all natal premises, a horizon that we can still situate with the term global. In ongoing struggles with the idea of historical sovereignty, we can see the working out of then new concatenations of social and historical forms of difference, as both projects of categorical differentiation and the irruption of originary revisions of ways of being. In a word, the world is no longer—and has never been—one. The world, if there is such—from the inception of something like “the Negro as a problem for thought”— could never be, only, one. The problem of the Negro in “America” is thus an exemplary instance of modern historicity in its most fundamental sense. It renders legible for critical practice the radical order of an ineluctable and irreversible complication at the heart of being—its appearance as both life and history—as the very mark of our epoch.

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Secular criticism is a term invented by Edward Said to denote not a theory but a practice that counters the tendency of much modern thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity. Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to society’s radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and (2) how the space of the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or secularist. Gourgouris’s point is to disrupt the co-dependent relation between the religious and the secular—hence, his rejection of fashionable languages of postsecularism—in order to engage in a double critique of heteronomous politics of all kinds. For him, secular criticism is a form of political being: critical, antifoundational, disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negation’s sake but creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action that alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but also the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be human. Written in a free and combative style and given both to close readings of texts and to gazing off into the broad horizon, these essays cover a range of issues—historical and philosophical, archaic and contemporary, literary and political—that ultimately converge in the significance of contemporary radical politics: the assembly movements we have seen in various parts of the world in recent years. The secular imagination demands a radical pedagogy and unlearning a great many established thought patterns. Its most important dimension is not battling religion per se but dismantling theological politics of sovereignty in favor of radical conditions for social autonomy.

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More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar traces differences and intersections in the development of gender and queer theories on both sides of the Atlantic. Looking at these theories through lenses that are both “American” and “French,” thus simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, she tries to account for their alleged exhaustion and currency on the two sides of the Atlantic. The book is divided into four parts. In the first, the author examines two specifically “American” features of gender theories since their earliest formulations: on the one hand, an emphasis on the theatricality of gender (from John Money’s early characterization of gender as “role playing” to Judith Butler’s appropriation of Esther Newton’s work on drag queens); on the other, the early adoption of a “queer” perspective on gender issues. In the second part, the author reflects on a shift in the rhetoric concerning sexual minorities and politics that is prevalent today. Noting a shift from efforts by oppressed or marginalized segments of the population to make themselves “heard” to an emphasis on rendering themselves “visible,” she demonstrates the formative role of the American civil rights movement in this new drive to visibility. The third part deals with the travels back and forth across the Atlantic of “sexual difference,” ever since its elevation to the status of quasi-concept by psychoanalysis. Tracing the “queering” of sexual difference, the author reflects on both the modalities and the effects of this development. The last section addresses the vexing relationship between Western feminism and capitalism. Without trying either to commend or to decry this relationship, the author shows its long-lasting political and cultural effects on current feminist and postfeminist struggles and discourses. To that end, she focuses on one of the intense debates within feminist and postfeminist circles, the controversy over prostitution.

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During the “golden age” of radio, from roughly the late 1920s until the late 1940s, advertising agencies were arguably the most important sources of radio entertainment. Most nationally broadcast programs on network radio were created, produced, written, and/or managed by advertising agencies: for example, J. Walter Thompson produced “Kraft Music Hall” for Kraft; Benton & Bowles oversaw “Show Boat” for Maxwell House Coffee; and Young & Rubicam managed “Town Hall Tonight” with comedian Fred Allen for Bristol-Myers. Yet this fact has disappeared from popular memory and receives little attention from media scholars and historians. By repositioning the advertising industry as a central agent in the development of broadcasting, author Cynthia B. Meyers challenges conventional views about the role of advertising in culture, the integration of media industries, and the role of commercialism in broadcasting history. Based largely on archival materials, A Word from Our Sponsor mines agency records from the J. Walter Thompson papers at Duke University, which include staff meeting transcriptions, memos, and account histories; agency records of BBDO, Benton & Bowles, Young & Rubicam, and N. W. Ayer; contemporaneous trade publications; and the voluminous correspondence between NBC and agency executives in the NBC Records at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Mediating between audiences’ desire for entertainment and advertisers’ desire for sales, admen combined “showmanship” with “salesmanship” to produce a uniquely American form of commercial culture. In recounting the history of this form, Meyers enriches and corrects our understanding not only of broadcasting history but also of advertising history, business history, and American cultural history from the 1920s to the 1940s.

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Malcolm Bull offers a detailed analysis of nihilism in Nietzsche's works. Along with accompanying commentaries by Cascardi and Clark, he explores the significance of Nietzscheís views given the fact that a wide range of readers have come to embrace his ideas as new orthodoxy. There seem to be no anti-Nietzscheans today, but Bull demonstrates that this wide embrace of Nietzsche runs counter to the very meaning of nihilism as Nietzsche understood it.

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Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has happened since then both in theory and in practice. Adorno’s powerful vision of aesthetics calls for reconsideration in this light. Must his work be defended, updated, resisted, or simply left behind? This volume gathers new essays by leading philosophers, critics, and theorists writing in the wake of Adorno in order to address these questions. They hold in common a deep respect for the power of Adorno’s aesthetic critique and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory in response to recent developments in aesthetics and its contexts.

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