Search results for ""the university of michigan press""

One of the hottest topics in education today is trauma-informed pedagogy. Much of what has been written in this area comes from counselors, therapists, and other experts in this field, but there is very little written specifically about the effects of trauma on English learners. This book has been written to address this need. The authors have sifted through the literature on trauma and social-emotional learning (SEL) to provide the material that applies directly to English learners. This book was written mainly for teachers of students with immigrant backgrounds and for the building administrators who support them, including counselors, paraprofessionals, and social workers. This book is designed to provide a practical resource to help educators better understand the possible traumatic backgrounds of their students and how that could be affecting their academic, social, and emotional lives. It also focuses on how school personnel can create a safe environment in schools and classrooms to help students recognize, nurture, and expand the internal resilience that has enabled them to weather past situations and that will allow them to continue the healing process. One chapter is devoted to the topic of self-care for educators who are working so hard to help students be resilient. An appendix features a list of recommended books on the topics of personal migration and resilience.

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Brilliant in conception and flowing in style, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire documents Roman expansion in what came to be the beginnings of the early imperial period. In an inimitable way, the author of this groundbreaking work explores how Romans came to map the world they knew and conquered. Claude Nicolet studies both the agrimensores, who in the state’s interest took care to observe and record territories for Britain to the farther reaches of Asia Minor, and M. Vipsanius Agrippa, the sometime son-in-law of the Emperor Augustus.In this absorbing study Nicolet sets forth the integral relations between territorial expansion and political expansion, as well as between propaganda cultivated in the national interest and propaganda designed to secure the status of the princeps as primus inter pares, first among equals.Unique in presentation, drawing upon unexpected texts both ancient and modern, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire offers startling new insights into the character of Rome and its princeps-cum-king, Augustus.

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Research article introductions are central to Creating Contexts: Writing across Genres with the CaR (creating a research space) model used as a starting point. This volume focuses on introductions for other kinds of texts that are also part of the graduate student writing experience such as course papers and critiques, proposals, and dissertations.This volume represents a revision and expansion of the material on introductions that appeared in English in Today's Research World.The material presented in this volume is appropriate for graduate students and others already working in their chosen academic fields. The material has, in fact, been used with each of these groups in both writing courses and writing workshops. We believe that the material would also be suitable for those wishing to pursue a course of self-study. To target these different possible uses, we have included a variety of topics and tasks that we hope will deepen users’ understanding of how to create a writing context for their work. Tasks range from evaluating text commentaries to open-ended questions and have been designed to generate lively classroom or workshop discussion as well as thoughtful consideration by an individual user.

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The Puerto Rican debt crisis, the challenges of social, political, and economic transition in Cuba, and the populist politics of Duterte in the Philippines—these topics are typically seen as disparate experiences of social reality. Though these island territories were colonized by the same two colonial powers—by the Spanish Empire and, after 1898, by the United States—research in the fields of history and the social sciences rarely draws links between these three contexts.Located at the intersection of Postcolonial Studies, Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, and History, this interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from the US, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines to examine the colonial legacies of the three island nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Instead of focusing on the legacies of US colonialism, the continuing legacies of Spanish colonialism are put center-stage. The analyses offered in the volume yield new and surprising insights into the study of colonial and postcolonial constellations that are of interest not only for experts, but also for readers interested in the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during Spanish colonization and in the present. The empirical material profits from a rigorous and systematic analytical framework and is thus easily accessible for students, researchers, and the interested public alike.

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This volume collects original essays on Hungarian-German playwright and screenwriter George Tabori (1914–2007) and his remarkable contributions to the stage. Tabori, a Jewish refugee and a truly transnational author, was best known for his work in New York theater that irreverently explored the Jewish experience, particularly the Holocaust. Although his illustrious career spanned a century, two continents, several languages, and a variety of literary genres, Tabori’s work has received scant attention in American letters, in spite of its significance for U.S. theater and Holocaust studies.Until Tabori, most dramas about the Holocaust were either rooted in American domestic realism, striving to create a strong empathetic connection between the audience and Holocaust victims, or featured an unembellished documentary style. Tabori staked out a third position, beyond realism and documentation. The volume brings together the voices of international scholars to provide a comprehensive introduction to Tabori’s theater as well as in-depth analyses of his work, discussing all of his major plays. Individual essays address Tabori’s postdramatic theater in relation to sacrificial ritual, performance studies, and post-humanist approaches to the contemporary stage, as well as performance aspects of his productions, questions of ethics and aesthetics raised by his theater, and his plays’ relation to Holocaust representation in popular culture.

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Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature examines ability, as a category of embodiment and embodied experience, and in the process opens up a new area of inquiry in the growing field of literary disability studies. It argues that the construction of ability arises through a process of exclusion and forgetting, in which the depiction of sensory information and epistemological judgment subtly (or sometimes un-subtly) elide the fact of embodied subjectivity. The result is what Colangelo calls “the myth of the diaphanous abled body,” a fiction that holds that an abled body is one which does not participate in or situate experience. The diaphanous abled body underwrites the myth that abled and disabled constitute two distinct categories of being rather than points on a constantly shifting continuum.In any system of marginalization, the dominant identity always sets itself up as epistemologically and experientially superior to whichever group it separates itself from. Indeed, the norm is always most powerful when it is understood as an empty category or a view from nowhere. Diaphanous Bodies explores the phantom body that underwrites the artificial dichotomy between abled and disabled upon which the representation of embodied experience depends.

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We have seen recent massive intervention by the United States and its allies in Europe in internal conflict in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Civil Wars and Foreign Powers, Patrick Regan systematically answers the question about the conditions under which third parties intervene in civil conflicts to stop the fighting. It uses data on all civil conflicts since 1945 to identify those conflicts that are amenable to outside interventions and the types of interventions that are more likely to be successful.Civil Wars and Foreign Powers is a book about how governments can help facilitate the end of civil conflicts. In a time when internal conflicts appear to be increasing in number, and increasingly destabilizing, governments need to know what policies work and when. Interventions are generally of two sorts--unilateral, or when one state takes action, and multilateral, such as UN or NATO action. This book examines the conditions under which each form of intervention is most likely and most effective. The analysis suggests that three conditions associated with multi-lateral interventions will increase the likelihood of success: mutual consent of the parties involved; impartiality on the part of the intervenors; and the existence of a coherent intervention strategy. The questions are posed from the perspective of the decision maker and the answers offered are framed in a language familiar to the decision-making community. The book mixes descriptive case material with systematic statistical analysis of a unique data set of all civil conflicts since World War II, providing contemporary examples to illustrate overall trends in the data. Beyond the policy implications this work is also rich in theoretical development about issues of conflict and conflict management.This book will appeal to students of international conflict, civil war, ethnic conflict, and those who are concerned with developing policy in the post-cold war world to deal with intrastate conflict.

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In this book, Vladimir Gel’man considers bad governance as a distinctive politico-economic order that is based on a set of formal and informal rules, norms, and practices quite different from those of good governance. Some countries are governed badly intentionally because the political leaders of these countries establish and maintain rules, norms, and practices that serve their own self-interests. Gel’man considers bad governance as a primarily agency-driven rather than structure-induced phenomenon. He addresses the issue of causes and mechanisms of bad governance in Russia and beyond from a different scholarly optics, which is based on a more general rationale of state-building, political regime dynamics, and policy-making. He argues that although these days, bad governance is almost universally perceived as an anomaly, at least in developed countries, in fact human history is largely a history of ineffective and corrupt governments, while the rule of law and decent state regulatory quality are relatively recent matters of modern history, when they emerged as side effects of state-building. Indeed, the picture is quite the opposite: bad governance is the norm, while good governance is an exception. The problem is that most rulers, especially if their time horizons are short and the external constraints on their behavior are not especially binding, tend to govern their domains in a predatory way because of the prevalence of short-term over long-term incentives. Contemporary Russia may be considered as a prime example of this phenomenon. Using an analysis of case studies of political and policy changes in Russia after the Soviet collapse, Gel’man discusses the logic of building and maintenance of politico-economic order of bad governance in Russia and paths of its possible transformation in a theoretical and comparative perspective.

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Modern and contemporary women's artistic production of autobiography frequently occurs at the interfaces of image and text. The many permutations of words and images in all their modes of production--photograph, pose, invocation, written narrative, sculpture, dance, diatribe--create countless possibilities of expression, and this volume charts some of the ways in which women artists are seizing these possibilities.Editors Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have been at the vanguard of the study of women's self-representation, and here have collected leading critics' and scholars' thoughts on artistic fusions of the visual and autobiographical. Marianne Hirsch, Linda Hutcheon, Linda Kauffman, Nellie McKay, Marjorie Perloff, Lee Quinby, and the other contributors offer new insights into the work of such artists as Laurie Anderson, Judy Chicago, Frida Kahlo, Orlan, and Cindy Sherman. From a painter's diary to a performance artist's ritualized enactments of kitchen domesticity, the many narratives of the self arising from these artists' negotiations of the visual and textual prove to be goldmines for analysis.Art historians, artists, critics, literary scholars in women's studies, and anyone interested in the forms and implications of depicting the self will enjoy this richly illustrated collection.

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Mines 21st-century media artifacts - including films like The Martian and TV/streaming media shows such as Firefly and House of Cards - to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States.

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Drawing on original interviews with improvising musicians, on critical pedagogy and cultural studies, and on the authors’ personal histories with improvised music as a form of activism, community-based pedagogy, Jamming the Classroom examines how the teaching and learning of improvisational musical practices can be understood as vital and publicly resonant acts that generate new forms of knowledge, new understandings of identity and community, and new imaginative possibilities. The book takes its cue not just from the learning in conventional classrooms and credentialing institutions but also from the work that happens in and through broader communities of practice. Heble and Stewart ask how the improvisational practices of artists and the internal educational endeavors within community groups model—and enact—new forms of community-making and critical thinking, as well as what it means to theorize the pedagogy of improvised music in relation to public programs of action, debate, and critical practice and the context of material practices and struggles for institutional authority.

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Disability in Africa has received significant attention as a dimension of global development and humanitarian initiatives. Little international attention is given, however, to the ways in which disability is discussed and addressed in specific countries in Africa. Little is known also about the ways in which persons with disabilities have advocated for themselves over the past one hundred years and how their needs were or were not met in locations across the continent. Kenya has been on the forefront of disability activism and disability rights since the middle of the twentieth century. The country was among the first African states to create a legal framework addressing the rights of persons with disabilities, namely the Persons with Disabilities Act of 2003. Kenya, however, has a much longer history of institutions and organizations that are dedicated to addressing the specific needs of persons with disabilities, and substantial developments have occurred since the introduction of the legal framework in 2003.Disability and Social Justice in Kenya: Scholars, Policymakers, and Activists in Conversation is the first interdisciplinary and multivocal study of its kind to review achievements and challenges related to the situation of persons with disabilities in Kenya today, in light of the country’s longer history of disability and the wide range of local practices and institutions. It brings together scholars, activists, and policymakers who comment on topics including education, the role of activism, the legal framework, culture, the impact of the media, and the importance of families and the community.

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Though not all people are religious believers, religion has played important historic roles in developing political systems, parties, and policies—affecting believers and non-believers alike. This is particularly true in the United States, where scholars have devoted considerable attention to a variety of political phenomena at the intersection of religious belief and identity, including social movements, voting behavior, public opinion, and public policy. These outcomes are motivated by “identity boundary-making” among the religiously affiliated. The contributors to this volume examine two main factors that influence religious identity: the communication of religious ideas and the perceptions of people (including elites) in communicating said ideas.Exploring the Public Effects of Religious Communication on Politics examines an array of religious communication phenomena. These include the media’s role in furthering religious narratives about minority groups, religious strategies that interest groups use to advance their appeal, the variable strength of Islamophobia in cross-national contexts, what qualifies as an “evangelical” identity, and clergy representation of religious and institutional teachings. The volume also provides ways for readers to think about developing new insights into the influence religious communication has on political outcomes.

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For beginning or advanced students of poetry focused on the art of structuring a poem, A Poet's Ear serves as a handbook to writing in numerous fixed forms. Here, Annie Finch's remarkably in-depth introduction to poetic form in English opens a new and exciting world to contemporary poets. From the basic meters and traditional European forms of the ballad and the sonnet to poetic forms brought to English from worldwide cultures and postmodern forms and techniques, A Poet's Ear serves as both a survey and a guide to the exploration of poetic form. More diverse and comprehensive than any other form handbook, A Poet's Ear will be essential to the serious student of poetry.

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China’s rise to power is one of the biggest questions in International Relations theory (IRT) and foreign policy circles. Although power has been a core concept of IRT for a long time, the faces and mechanisms of power as it relates to Chinese foreign policymaking has changed the contours of that debate. The rise of China and other powers across the global political arena sparks a new visibility for different kinds of encounters between states, particularly between China and other Global South states. These encounters are more visible to IR scholars because of the increasing influence that rising powers have in the international system. This book shows that foreign policy encounters between rising powers and Global South states do not necessarily exhibit the same logics, behaviors, or investment strategies of Euro-American hegemons. Instead, they have distinctive features that require new theoretical frameworks for analysis. Shaping the Future of Power probes the types of power mechanisms that build, diffuse, and project China’s power in Africa. One must take into account the processes of knowledge production, social capital formation, and skills transfers that Chinese foreign policy directs toward African states to fully understand China’s power-building mechanisms. The relational power framework requires these elements to capture both the material aspects and ideational people-centered aspects to power. By examining China’s investments in human resource development programs for Africa, the book reveals a vital, yet undertheorized, aspect of China’s foreign policy making.

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As we face new challenges from climate change and the rise of populism in Western politics and beyond, there is little doubt that we are entering a new configuration of world politics. Driven by nostalgia for past certainties or fear of what is coming next, references to normalcy have been creeping into political discourse, with people either vying for a return to a past normalcy or coping with the new normal.This book traces main discourses and practices associated with normalcy in world politics. Visoka and Lemay-Hébert mostly focus on how dominant states and international organizations try to manage global affairs through imposing normalcy over fragile states, restoring normalcy over disaster-affected states, and accepting normalcy over suppressive states. They show how discourses and practices come together in constituting normalization interventions and how in turn they play in shaping the dynamics of continuity and change in world politics.

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Minimalism stands as the key representative of 1960s radicalism in art music histories—but always as a failed project. In The Names of Minimalism, Patrick Nickleson holds in buzzing tension collaborative composers in the period of their collaboration, as well as the musicological policing of authorship in the wake of their eventual disputes. Through examinations of the droning of the Theatre of Eternal Music, Reich’s Pendulum Music, Glass’s work for multiple organs, the austere performances of punk and no wave bands, and Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca’s works for massed electric guitars, Nickleson argues for authorship as always impure, buzzing, and indistinct.Expanding the place of Jacques Rancière’s philosophy within musicology, Nickleson draws attention to disciplinary practices of guarding compositional authority against artists who set out to undermine it. The book reimagines the canonic artists and works of minimalism as “(early) minimalism,” to show that art music histories refuse to take seriously challenges to conventional authorship as a means of defending the very category “art music.” Ultimately, Nickleson asks where we end up if we imagine the early minimalist project—artists forming bands to perform their own music, rejecting the score in favor of recording, making extensive use of magnetic type as compositional and archival medium, hosting performances in lofts and art galleries rather than concert halls—not as a utopian moment within a 1960s counterculture doomed to fail, but as the beginning of a process with a long and influential afterlife.

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Why do some states provide infrastructure and social services to their citizens, and others do not? In Development in Multiple Dimensions, Alexander Lee examines the origins of success and failure in the public services of developing countries. Comparing states within India, this study examines how elites either control, or are shut out of, policy decisions and how the interests of these elites influence public policy. He shows that social inequalities are not single but multiple, creating groups of competing elites with divergent policy interests. Since the power of these elites varies, states do not necessarily focus on the same priorities: some focus on infrastructure, others on social services, and still others on both or neither. The author develops his ideas through quantitative comparisons and case studies focusing on four northern Indian states: Gujarat, West Bengal, Bihar, and Himachal Pradesh, each of which represents different types of political economy and has a different set of powerful caste groups. The evidence indicates that regional variation in India is a consequence of social differences, and the impact of these differences on carefully considered distributional strategies, rather than differences in ideology, geography, or institutions.

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Popular music in the US and UK during the late 1970s and early 1980s was wildly eclectic and experimental. 'Post-punk', as it was retroactively labeled, is not an easily definable musical category. How do electro-pop melodies, distorted guitars, avant-garde industrial sounds, and reggae beats fit under the same categorical umbrella? What post-punk is not is as interesting a question as what it is.What Is Post-Punk? combines a close reading of the late-1970s music press discourse with musical analyses and theories of identity to unpack post-punk's status as a genre. Mimi Haddon traces the discursive foundations of post-punk across publications such as Sounds, ZigZag, Melody Maker, the Village Voice, and the NME, and presents case studies of bands including Wire, PiL, Joy Division, the Raincoats, and Pere Ubu. By positioning post-punk in relation to genres such as punk, new wave, dub, and disco, Haddon reveals post-punk as a community of tastes and predilections rather than a stylistically unified whole. Haddon diversifies the discourse around post-punk, exploring both its gender and racial dynamics and its proto-industrial aesthetics to restore the historical complexity surrounding the genre’s terms and origins.A detailed exploration of an otherwise under-explored cultural phenomenon, What Is Post-Punk? is a significant addition to scholarship in popular music, of interest to scholars of genre theory and discourse analysis, including feminist and postcolonial discourse.

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What does federalism do to welfare states? This question arises in scholarly debates about policy design as well as in discussions about the right political institutions for a country. It has frustrated many, with federalism seeming to matter in all sorts of combinations with all sorts of issues, from nationalism to racism to intergovernmental competition. The diffuse federalism literature has not come to compelling answers for very basic questions.Scott L. Greer, Daniel BÉland, AndrÉ Lecours, and Kenneth A. Dubin argue for a new approach—one methodologically focused on configurations of variables within cases rather than a fruitless attempt to isolate “the” effect of federalism; and one that is substantively engaged with identifying key elements in configurations as well as with when and how their interactions matter. Born out of their work on a multi-year, eleven-country project (now published as Federalism and Social Policy: Patterns of Redistribution in Eleven Countries, University of Michigan Press, 2019), this book comprises a methodological and substantive agenda. Methodologically, the authors shift to studies that embraced and understood the complexity within which federal political institutions operate. Substantively, they make an argument for the importance of plurinationalism, changing economic interests, and institutional legacies.

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Modern Western culture is saturated with images, imprinting visual standards of concepts such as beauty and femininity onto our collective consciousness. Blindness Through the Looking Glass examines how gender and femininity are performed and experienced in everyday life by women who do not rely on sight as their dominant mode of perception, identifying the multiple senses involved in the formation of gender identity within social interactions. Challenging visuality as the dominant mode to understand gender, social performance, and visual culture, the book offers an ethnographic investigation of blindness (and sight) as a human condition, putting both blindness and vision 'on display,' discussing people's auditory, tactile, and olfactory experiences, as well as vision and sight, and exploring ways individuals perform blindness and 'sightedness' in their everyday lives. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 blind women in Israel and anthropological fieldwork, the book investigates the social construction and daily experience of blindness in a range of domains. Uniquely, the book brings together blind symbolism with the everyday experiences of blind and sighted individuals, joining in mutual conversation the fields of disability studies, visual culture, anthropology of the senses, and gender studies.

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Muslims in a Post-9/11 America examines how public fears about Muslims in the United States compare with the reality of American Muslims’ attitudes on a range of relevant issues. While most research on Muslim Americans focuses on Arab Muslims, a quarter of the Muslim American population, Rachel Gillum includes perspectives of Muslims from ethnic and national communities—from African Americans to those of Pakistani, Iranian, or Eastern European descent. Using interviews and one of the largest nationwide surveys of Muslim Americans to date, Rachel Gillum examines over three generations of Muslim American immigrants to assess how segments of the Muslim American community are integrating into the U.S. social fabric, and how they respond to post-9/11 policy changes. Gillum’s findings challenge perceptions of Muslims as a homogeneous, isolated, un-American, and potentially violent segment of the U.S. population.Despite these realities, negative political rhetoric around Muslim Americans persists. The findings suggest that the policies designed to keep America safe from terrorist attacks may have eroded one of law enforcement’s greatest assets in the fight against violent extremism—a relationship of trust and goodwill between the Muslim American community and the U.S. government. Gillum argues for policies and law enforcement tactics that will bring nuanced understandings of this diverse category of Americans and build trust, rather than alienate Muslim communities.

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Everyday Leadership offers strategies to improve leadership skills, improve results, and gain greater satisfaction in these hectic times. It speaks to the everyday leader, whether that person is a CEO, a principal, a pastor, or a mom or dad. Daniel Mulhern, advisor to Fortune 500 companies, acclaimed speaker, and the husband of Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, immediately sets a warm and personal tone as he recalls his wife's acceptance speech for the nomination of Michigan attorney general. Instead of getting to hear the nominee's address, Mulhern finds himself changing their one-year-old son's diaper in a bathroom of the conference center. In this revealing moment Mulhern finds an instructive mix of humor, frustration, and enlightenment. It was, he says, a chance to learn about the ""unusual three-way intersection where leading, serving, and being human all meet. This book is about that intersection in the lives of human leaders."" ""Everyday Leadership"" brings the art of management down to earth, presenting stories that illuminate some of the best ideas about real human leadership. It offers practical steps to achieve the goal of leading well in our lives through creating a vision, communicating that vision, and living it.

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In an era when the sounds of monasticism's interior life speak to a new generation, Eleanor Shipley Duckett offers an illuminated description of its development under such figures as Columban, "the saint afire with Irish enthusiam"; St. Benedict, greatest of the monks, who established a pattern of the religious life still vibrant to this day; and St. Gregory, Benedict's pupil and greatest of the popes, who more than any other prepared the See of Rome for its triumphant emergence in the Middle Ages.

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Deindustrializing and revitalizing cities in the United States are at a particular crossroads when it comes to the contest over refugees. Do refugees represent opportunity or danger? These cities are in desperate need to stem population and resource loss. However, they are also dealing with local communities that are feeling internally displaced by economic and technological flux. Few U.S. locations provide a more vivid case study of this fight than Metro Detroit, where competing interest groups are waging war over the meaning of the figure of the refugee. This book dives deeply into the discourse on refugees that various institutions in Metro Detroit are producing. The way in which local institutions talk about refugees gives us vital clues as to how they are negotiating competing pressures and how the city overall is negotiating competing imperatives. Indeed, the way various groups talk about refugees in Metro Detroit gives us a crucial glimpse into how U.S. cities are defining and redefining themselves today. The figure of the refugee becomes a slate on which groups with varied interests write their stories, aspirations, and fears. Consequently, we can figure out from local refugee discourses the ongoing question of what it means to be a Metro Detroiter now—and by extension, what it means to be a revitalizing U.S. city at this time.

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Latinx peoples and culture have permeated Shakespearean performance in the United States for over 75 years—a phenomenon that, until now, has been largely overlooked as Shakespeare studies has taken a global turn in recent years. Author Carla Della Gatta argues that theater-makers and historians must acknowledge this presence and influence in order to truly engage the complexity of American Shakespeares. Latinx Shakespeares investigates the history, dramaturgy, and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s—the era of West Side Story. This first-ever book of Latinx representation in the most-performed playwright’s canon offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater looks beyond the visual to prioritize aural signifiers such as music, accents, and the Spanish language. The book’s focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art-making (including casting), and modes of storytelling. The case studies range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, the book draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, first-hand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, largely by scholars of color. Latinx Shakespeares moves toward healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose oeuvre has too often been mobilized in the service of a culturally specific English-language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins within the establishment of European/British colonialism/imperialism.

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Queer Subjects in Modern Japanese Literature: Male Love, Erotics, and Intimacy, 1886–2014 is an anthology of translated Japanese literature about men behaving lovingly, erotically, and intimately with other men. Covering more than 125 years of modern and contemporary Japanese history, this book aims to introduce a diverse array of authors to an English-speaking audience and provide further context for their works. While no anthology can comprehensively represent queer Japanese literature, these selections nonetheless expand our understanding of queerness in Japanese culture.

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Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) brings together scholars, musicians, and family members of people with disabilities to collectively recount years of personal experiences, research, and perspectives on the societal and community impact of inclusive musical improvisation. One of the lesser-known projects of composer, improviser, and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), the AUMI was designed as a liberating and affordable alternative to the constraints of instruments created only for normative bodies, thus opening a doorway for people of all ages, genders, abilities, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds to access artistic practice with others. More than a book about AUMI, this book is an invitation to readers to use AUMI in their own communities. This book, which contains wisdom from many who have been affected by their work with the instrument and the people who use it, is a representation of how music and extemporized performance have touched the lives and minds of scholars and families alike. Not only has AUMI provided the opportunity to grow in listening to others who may speak differently (or not at all), but it has been used as an avenue for a diverse set of people to build friendships with others whom they may have never otherwise even glanced at in the street. By providing a space for every person who comes across AUMI to perform, listen, improvise, and collaborate, the continuing development of this instrument contributes to a world in which every person is heard, welcomed, and celebrated.

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This is the first book to dedicate critical attention to the work of influential theater-maker Taylor Mac. Mac is particularly celebrated for the historic performance event A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, in which Mac, in fantastical costumes designed by collaborator Machine Dazzle, sang the history of the United States for 24 straight hours in October 2016. The MacArthur Foundation soon thereafter awarded their “genius” award to a “writer, director, actor, singer, and performance artist whose fearlessly experimental works dramatize the power of theater as a space for building community . . . [and who] interacts with the audience to inspire a reconsideration of assumptions about gender, identity, ethnicity, and performance itself.” Featuring essays, interviews, and commentaries by noted critics and artists, the volume examines the vastness of Mac’s theatrical imagination, the singularity of their voice, the inclusiveness of their cultural insights and critiques, and the creativity they display through stylistic and formal qualities and the unorthodoxies of their personal and professional trajectories. Contributors consider the range of Mac’s career as a playwright, performer, actor, and singer, expanding and enriching the conversation on this much-celebrated and deeply resonant body of work.

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Dialectical Imaginaries brings together essays that analyze the effects of class conflict and capitalist ideology on contemporary works of U.S. Latino/a literature. The editors argue that recent global events have compelled contemporary scholars to reexamine traditional interpretive models that center on identity politics and an ethics of multiculturalism. The volume seeks to demonstrate that materialist methodologies have a greater critical reach than other methods, and that Latino/a literary criticism should be more attuned to interpretive approaches that draw on Marxism and other globalizing social theories. The contributors analyze a wide range of literary works in fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir by writers including Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria Anzaldúa, Daniel Borzutzky, Angie Cruz, Sergio de la Pava, Mónica de la Torre, Sergio Elizondo, Juan Felipe Herrera, Rolando Hinojosa, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Óscar Martínez, Cherríe Moraga, Urayoán Noel, Emma Pérez, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, Ernesto Quiñónez, Ronald Ruiz, Hector Tobar, Rodrigo Toscano, Alfredo Véa, Helena María Viramontes, and others.

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COVID-19 is probably the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers involved have been stupefying, whether they speak of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures such as mobility restrictions, or the economic consequences for unemployment and public sector spending. A significant amount of research has already been published on COVID-19, with a focus on its medical and epidemiological dimensions but also social science country reports and monitoring projects that are essentially descriptive. The objective of this book is to identify key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. The editors bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book's coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.

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Though she published only five volumes of poetry over the course of her career, Jane Cooper (1924–2007) was deeply admired by her contemporaries, and teaching at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly forty years, she served as a mentor to many aspiring poets. Her elegant, honest, and emotionally and formally precise poems, often addressing the challenges of women's lives—especially the lives of women in the arts—continue to resonate with a new generation of readers. In Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention, Martha Collins and Celia Bland bring together several decades' worth of essential writing on Cooper's poetry. While some pieces offer close examination of Cooper's process or thoughtful consideration of the craft of a single poem, the volume features reviews of her collections, including a previously unpublished piece on her first book, The Weather of Six Mornings (1969), by James Wright, a lifelong champion of her work. Marie Howe, Jan Heller Levi, and Thomas Lux, among others, share personal remembrances of Cooper as a teacher, colleague, and inspiration. L. R. Berger's moving tribute to Cooper's final days closes the volume. Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention will be a welcome addition to the collection of anyone who has already come to love Cooper's work and will attract new readers, especially among younger poets, to her enduring poems.

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The story of The White Snake is one of the "four great narratives" of China and yet it is almost unknown in the West. It is as much a founding text in China as The Odyssey is in the West. Like The Odyssey, it is not only an enchanting tale full of adventure, monsters, and romance, it also has something profound to say about human nature. In its more modern iterations it argues strongly for tolerance of the strange, the uncanny, and for compassion for human frailty. It drives home the argument that love is without boundary and is transformative. The Global White Snake is a major, accessible contribution to our knowledge of the story, its traditional interpretations and its importance throughout history; at the same time, it offers a refreshing new reading of the text as surprisingly disruptive and revolutionary. Anyone with an interest in the story, or in the uses of the fantastic and the fabulous, will want to read this book. It highlights a spirit of persistent anti-authoritarianism and tolerance for the strange and the unusual that the average American has not particularly associated with China throughout its modern transformations. The book creates a gentle yet persuasive counterargument to the prevailing discourse of "cultural appropriation" as high crime. It shows how Lady White Snake travels through a multitude of translations and adaptations across cultures, time, geography, and media, transforming from demoness to goddess, and continues the circle all over again, her story bending and twisting in meaning, always on the move and in mediation. It implies that culture itself is that which appropriates. Culture is on the move; its artifacts are always in the process of transformation, and this ability to travel and transform is what keeps them alive as they shed skin after skin to reach new stages of life and afterlife.

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Explains understanding the intended audience, the purpose of the paper, and academic genres; includes the use of task-based methodology, analytic group discussion, and genre consciousness-raising; shows how to write summaries and critiques; features "language focus" sections that address linguistic elements as they affect the wider rhetorical objectives; and helps students position themselves as junior scholars in their academic communities.Among the many changes in the third edition: newer, longer, and more authentic texts and examples greater discipline variety in texts (added texts from hard sciences and engineering) more in-depth treatment of research articles greater emphasis on vocabulary issues revised flow-of-ideas section additional tasks that require students to do their own research more corpus-informed content The Commentary has also been revised and expanded.This edition of Academic Writing for Graduate Students, like its predecessors, has many special features: It is based on the large body of research literature dealing with the features of academic (or research) English and extensive classroom experience. It is as much concerned with developing academic writers as it is improving academic texts. It provides assistance with writing part-genres (problem-solutions and Methods and Discussion sections) and genres (book reviews,research papers). Its approach is analytical and rhetorical-users apply analytical skills to the discourses of their chosen disciplines to explore how effective academic writing is achieved. It includes a rich variety of tasks and activities, ranging from small-scale language points to issues of how students can best position themselves as junior researchers.

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Declamations were composed and orally delivered in the Roman Empire by sophists, or teachers of rhetoric, of whom the Greek-speaking Libanius was one of the most distinguished. Stock Characters Speaking may be thought of as emerging from three developments of recent decades: an explosive interest in late antiquity, a newly sympathetic interest in rhetoric (including ancient declamation), and a desire to bring Libanius’s massive corpus into English and other modern languages. In this book, author Robert J. Penella translates eight of Libanius’s declamations: 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 45, 46, 47, and, in an appendix, the thirteenth-century Gregory of Cyprus’s response to Declamation 34. Each translation is accompanied by an introduction, in which Penella examines the themes, structure, and the stasis, or key issue, of the declamations. Figures who appear in the translated declamations include a parasite who has lost his patron, a man envious of his rich neighbor, a miser’s son, a poor man willing to die for his city, a rich war-hero accused of aiming at tyranny, and a convict asking for exile. Three of these declamations have appeared in German; otherwise, these translations are the first into a modern language.

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Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.

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Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics of sound in Bollywood cinema. Taking as its subject the expansive domain of the aural in cinema, this book identifies singing, listening, and speaking in cinema as key sites in which notions of identity and difference take form. The book traces sonic representations of gender and community across seven decades of Hindi film history and asks which sounds and tongues Bombay and its cinema call their own. The book takes seriously the radical potential of listening and models a critical orientation to the aural that can engender new imaginaries, while still being attuned to questions of difference, power, and privilege. Keeping in play the many different sonic elements that films use, as well as the “inter-aural” fields in which those sounds register, Listening with a Feminist Ear helps chart new and interdisciplinary paths through the history of cinema. Challenging the ocular-centrism of cinema studies and its emphasis on medium specificity, the book offers a feminist interpretive practice that centers sound and listening. It also moves beyond national, monolingual, and Eurocentric frameworks, generating counter-hegemonic understandings of belonging so sorely needed in our times.

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In The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord, Gavriel Shapiro contends that Vladimir Nabokov’s worldview and verbal artistry cannot be fully understood without first understanding the relationship between the writer and his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the distinguished jurist and prominent statesman at the turn of the 20th century, who at the same time was a great connoisseur of literature, painting, theatre, and music; a passionate lepidopterist; an enthusiastic chess player; and an avid athlete. Although Nabokov experts have long noted the importance of this relationship, this is the very first book-length study on this crucial subject.In this book, Shapiro explores the unique nature of their bond, which Nabokov characterised as that of the “tender friendship” marked by the “charm of our perfect accord,” particularly exceptional when compared to numerous father-and-son relationships in Russian and Western European literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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In the late nineteenth century, the United States was known internationally as a place full of gaudiness and glitter. While scholars have long assumed that this visual excess was literal, linked to the United States-utilization of sophisticated modern light and consumer technologies, Fashion Nation argues that far from being linked to technology or consumerism, the reputation of the United States as a place of glittery bodies and landscapes was rooted in early nineteenth-century British and European ethnic nationalism, and the fashion of wearing colorful ethnic costuming that was adopted as part of these movements. In this work, Sandra Tomc traces the history of the idea of America as a gauche, flashy place from its early proliferation in the 1820s and 1830s, when American flashiness was associated primarily with colorful clothes, to its fruition in late nineteenth-century mass entertainment when the notion of American visual audacity shifted from clothes to elaborate lights and technological displays. Tomc argues that in the wake of pressure in the first half of the nineteenth century to embrace racially and ethnically saturated national types, significant branches of U.S. nationalist culture developed national types distinguished by their refusal to divulge racial and ethnic affiliation. To make its case, Fashion Nation reads literature alongside an extraordinary, colorful, and largely forgotten archive of international costume books, theatrical spectacles, travelogues, and world's fair extravaganzas to show how America was textually and visually constructed for transatlantic audiences.

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Administering Justice examines the leadership role of chief justices in the American states, including how those duties require chief justices to be part of the broader state political environment. Vining and Wilhelm focus extensively on the power of chief justices as public spokespersons, legislative liaisons, and reform leaders. In contrast to much existing research on states’ chief justices, theirs is primarily on their extrajudicial responsibilities rather than intracourt leadership. They analyze the reform agendas advanced by chief justices by assessing the content of State of the Judiciary remarks delivered over a period of sixty years. The authors also determine what factors influence the likelihood of success when chief justices request legislators to enact reforms. These analyses confirm that chief justices engage with state politics in meaningful ways and that reactions to their proposals are influenced by ideological congruence with other political elites and the scope of their requests. They also examine the chief justice position as an institution, provide a collective profile of its occupants, and examine growing diversity among court leaders.

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“Creativity” is a word that excites and dazzles us. It promises brilliance and achievement; it is a shield against conformity, a channel for innovation across the arts, sciences, technology, and education, and a mechanism for economic revival and personal success. But it has not always evoked these ideas. Once a term reserved for the ultimate power of the divine, and later associated primarily with the work of the artist, creativity has become attached to ideas about economics, politics, and the self in particular ways. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly.Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of the cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary K-12 education, and even modern electoral politics. Along the way, the book turns to a set of art works—from mobile steampunk sculptures to bicentennial adaptations of Frankenstein to a musical about the 2016 US Presidential election—that ask how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling.

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While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, the power and respect that accrued to the guild members, and the lasting legacy of the Tokugawa guilds into the current moment. The book illustrates why disability must be assessed within a particular society’s social, political, and medical context, and also the importance of bringing medical history into conversation with cultural history. A Euro-American-centric disability studies perspective that focuses on disability and oppression, the author contends, risks overlooking the unique situation in a non-Western society like Japan in which disability was constructed to enhance blind people’s power. He explores what it meant to be blind in Japan at that time, and what it says about current frameworks for understanding disability.

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