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The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship
by null Rebecca F. SpurrierHow do communities consent to difference? How do they recognize and create the space and time necessary for the differences and disabilities of those who constitute them? Christian congregations often make assumptions about the shared abilities, practices, and experiences that are necessary for communal worship. The author of this provocative new book takes a hard look at these assumptions through a detailed ethnographic study of an unusual religious community where more than half the congregants live with diagnoses of mental illness, many coming to the church from personal care homes or independent living facilities. Here, people’s participation in worship disrupts and extends the formal orders of worship. Whenever one worships God at Sacred Family Church, there is someone who is doing it differently.Here, the author argues, the central elements and the participation in the symbols of Christian worship raise questions rather than supply clear markers of unity, prompting the question, What do you need in order to have a church that assumes difference at its heart?Based on three years of ethnographic research, The Disabled Church describes how the Sacred Family community, comprising people with very different mental abilities, backgrounds, and resources, sustains and embodies a common religious identity. It explores how an ethic of difference is both helped and hindered by a church’s embodied theology. Paying careful attention to how these congregants improvise forms of access to a common liturgy, this book offers a groundbreaking theology of worship that engages both the fragility and beauty revealed by difference within the church. As liturgy requires consent to difference rather than coercion, an aesthetic approach to differences within Christian liturgy provides a frame for congregations and Christian liturgists to pay attention to the differences and disabilities of worshippers. This book creates a distinctive conversation between critical disability studies, liturgical aesthetics, and ethnographic theology, offering an original perspective on the relationship between beauty and disability within Christian communities. Here is a transformational theological aesthetics of Christian liturgy that prioritizes human difference and argues for the importance of the Disabled Church.
Bound by Conflict: Dilemmas of the Two Sudans
by null Francis Mading DengSince its independence on January 1, 1956, Sudan has been at war with itself. Through the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, the North–South dimension of the conflict was seemingly resolved by the independence of the South on July 9, 2011. However, as a result of issues that were not resolved by the CPA, conflicts within the two countries have reignited conflict between them because of allegations of support for each other’s rebels. In Bound by Conflict: Dilemmas of the Two Sudans, Francis M. Deng and Daniel J. Deng critique the tendency to see these conflicts as separate and to seek isolated solutions for them, when, in fact, they are closely intertwined. The policy implication is that resolving conflicts within the two Sudans is critical to the prospects of achieving peace, security, and stability between them, with the potential of moving them to some form of meaningful association.
Corpus: Writings On Sexuality (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
by null Jean-Luc NancyHow have we thought “the body”? How can we think it anew? The body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, the “mystical body of Christ”—all these (and others) are incorporated in the word Corpus, the title and topic of Jean-Luc Nancy’s masterwork.Corpus is a work of literary force at once phenomenological, sociological, theological, and philosophical in its multiple orientations and approaches. In thirty-six brief sections, Nancy offers us at once an encyclopedia and a polemical program—reviewing classical takes on the “corpus” from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Paul to Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and Freud, while demonstrating that the mutations (technological, biological, and political) of our own culture have given rise to the need for a new understanding of the body. He not only tells the story of this cultural change but also explores the promise and responsibilities that such a new understanding entails.The long-awaited English translation is a bold, bravura rendering. To the title essay are added five closely related recent pieces—including a commentary by Antonia Birnbaum—dedicated in large part to the legacy of the “mind-body problem” formulated by Descartes and the challenge it poses to rethinking the ancient problems of the corpus. The last and most poignant of these essays is “The Intruder,” Nancy’s philosophical meditation on his heart transplant. The book also serves as the opening move in Nancy’s larger project called “The deconstruction of Christianity.”
Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon
by null Ken SeigneurieSince the mid-1970s, Lebanon has been at the center of the worldwide rise in sectarian extremism. Its cultural output has both mediated and resisted this rise. Standing by the Ruins reviews the role of culture in supporting sectarianism, yet argues for the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic of resistance to it. Focusing on contemporary Lebanese fiction, film, and popular culture, this book shows how artists reappropriated the twin legacies of commitment literature and the ancient topos of “standing by the ruins” to form a new “elegiac humanism” during the tumultuous period of 1975 to 2005. It redirects attention to the critical role of culture in conditioning attitudes throughout society and is therefore relevant to other societies facing sectarian extremism.Standing by the Ruins is also a strong intervention in the burgeoning field of World Literature. Elaborating on the great Arabist Hilary Kilpatrick’s crucial insight that ancient Arabic forms and topoi filter into modern literature, the author details how the “standing by the ruins” topos—and the structure of feeling it conditions—has migrated over time. Modern Arabic novels, feature films, and popular culture, far from being simply cultural imports, are hybrid forms deployed to respond to the challenges of contemporary Arab society. As such, they can take their place within a World Literature paradigm: they are cultural products that travel and intervene in the world.
Politics in Captivity: Plantations, Prisons, and World-Building (Just Ideas)
by null Lena ZuckerwiseFrom the 1811 German Coast Slave Rebellion to the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising, from the truancy of enslaved women to the extreme self-discipline exercised by prisoners in solitary confinement, Black Americans have, through time, resisted racial regimes in extraordinary and everyday ways. Though these acts of large and small-scale resistance to slavery and incarceration are radical and transformative, they have often gone unnoticed. This book is about Black rebellion in captivity and the ways that many of the conventional well-worn constructs of academic political theory render its political dimensions obscure and indiscernible. While Hannah Arendt is an unlikely theorist to figure prominently in any discussion of Black politics, her concepts of world and worldlessness offer an indispensable framework for articulating a theory of resistance to chattel and carceral captivity. Politics in Captivity begins by taking seriously the ways in which slavery and incarceration share important commonalities, including historical continuity. In Zuckerwise’s account of this commonality, the point of connection between enslaved and incarcerated people is not exploited labor, but rather resistance. The relations between the rebellions of both groups appear in the writings of Muhammed Ahmad, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Ruchell Magee, and Assata Shakur, a genre Zuckerwise calls Black carceral political thought. The insights of these thinkers and activists figure into Zuckerwise’s analyses of largescale uprisings and quotidian practices of resistance, which she conceives as acts of world-building, against conditions of forced worldlessness. In a moment when a collective racial reckoning is underway; when Critical Race Theory is a target of the Right; when prison abolition has become more prominent in mainstream political discourse, it is now more important than ever to look to historical and contemporary practices of resistance to white domination.
The Bread of the Strong: Lacouturisme and the Folly of the Cross, 1910-1985 (Catholic Practice in North America)
by null Jack Lee DowneyContributing to the ongoing excavation of the spiritual lifeworld of Dorothy Day—“the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism”—The Bread of the Strong offers compelling new insight into the history of the Catholic Worker movement, including the cross-pollination between American and Quebecois Catholicism and discourse about Christian antimodernism and radicalism.The considerable perseverance in the heroic Christian maximalism that became the hallmark of the Catholic Worker’s personalism owes a great debt to the influence of Lacouturisme, largely under the stewardship of John Hugo, along with Peter Maurin and myriad other critical interventions in Day’s spiritual development. Day made the retreat regularly for some thirty-five years and promoted it vigorously both in person and publicly in the pages of The Catholic Worker.Exploring the influence of the controversial North American revivalist movement on the spiritual formation of Dorothy Day, author Jack Lee Downey investigates the extremist intersection between Roman Catholic contemplative tradition and modern political radicalism. Well grounded in an abundance of lesser-known primary sources, including unpublished letters, retreat notes, privately published and long-out-of-print archival material, and the French-language papers of Fr. Lacouture, The Bread of the Strong opens up an entirely new arena of scholarship on the transnational lineages of American Catholic social justice activism. Downey also reveals riveting new insights into the movement’s founder and namesake, Quebecois Jesuit Onesime Lacouture. Downey also frames a more reciprocal depiction of Day and Hugo’s relationship and influence, including the importance of Day’s evangelical pacifism on Hugo, particularly in shaping his understanding of conscientious objection and Christian antiwar work, and how Hugo’s ascetical theology animated Day’s interior life and spiritually sustained her apostolate.A fascinating investigation into the retreat movement Day loved so dearly, and which she claimed was integral to her spiritual formation, The Bread of the Strong explores the relationship between contemplative theology, asceticism, and radical activism. More than a study of Lacouture, Hugo, and Day, this fresh look at Dorothy Day and the complexities and challenges of her spiritual and social expression presents an outward exploration of the early- to mid–twentieth century dilemmas facing second- and third-generation American Catholics.
Ambiguity and the Absolute: Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty on the Question of Truth (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
by null Frank ChouraquiFriedrich Nietzsche and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Chouraqui argues, are linked by how they conceive the question of truth. Although both thinkers criticize the traditional concept of truth as objectivity, they both find that rejecting it does not solve the problem. What is it in our natural existence that gave rise to the notion of truth?The answer to that question is threefold. First, Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty both propose a genealogy of “truth” in which to exist means to make implicit truth claims. Second, both seek to recover the preobjective ground from which truth as an erroneous concept arose. Finally, this attempt at recovery leads both thinkers to ontological considerations regarding how we must conceive of a being whose structure allows for the existence of the belief in truth. In conclusion, Chouraqui suggests that both thinkers’ investigations of the question of truth lead them to conceive of being as the process of self-falsification by which indeterminate being presents itself as determinate.
Being of Two Minds: Modernist Literary Criticism and Early Modern Texts
by null Jonathan GoldbergBeing of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality.Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot’s engagement with Aristotle’s theory of the soul and Empson’s Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference.The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.
Eunice Hunton Carter: A Lifelong Fight for Social Justice
by null Marilyn Greenwald null Yun Li2022 PROSE Awards Category Winner - Biography & AutobiographyForeword INDIES Book of the Year Awards - 2021 BRONZE Winner for BiographyThe fascinating biography of Eunice Hunton Carter, a social justice and civil rights trailblazer and the only woman prosecutor on the Luciano trial Eunice Hunton Carter rose to public prominence in 1936 as both the only woman and the only person of color on Thomas Dewey’s famous gangbuster team that prosecuted mobster Lucky Luciano. But her life before and after the trial remains relatively unknown. In this definitive biography on this trailblazing social justice activist, authors Marilyn S. Greenwald and Yun Li tell the story of this unknown but critical pioneer in the struggle for racial and gender equality in the twentieth century.Carter worked harder than most men because of her race and gender, and Greenwald and Li reflect on her lifelong commitment to her adopted home of Harlem, where she was viewed as a role model, arts patron, community organizer, and, later, as a legal advisor to the United Nations, the National Council of Negro Women, and several other national and global organizations.Carter was both a witness to and a participant in many pivotal events of the early and mid– twentieth century, including the Harlem riot of 1935 and the social scene during the Harlem Renaissance.Using transcripts, letters, and other primary and secondary sources from several archives in the United States and Canada, the authors paint a colorful portrait of how Eunice continued the legacy of the Carter family, which valued education, perseverance, and hard work: a grandfather who was a slave who bought his freedom and became a successful businessman in a small colony of former slaves in Ontario, Canada; a father who nearly single-handedly integrated the nation’s YMCAs in the Jim Crow South; and a mother who provided aid to Black soldiers in France during World War I and who became a leader in several global and domestic racial equality causes.Carter’s inspirational multi-decade career working in an environment of bias, segregation, and patriarchy in Depression-era America helped pave the way for those who came after her.
Only in New York: An Exploration of the World's Most Fascinating, Frustrating, and Irrepressible City
by null Sam RobertsNo one denies that New York City is unique—but what makes it sui generis? Sam Roberts, a longtime city reporter, has puzzled over this in print and in his popular New York Times podcasts for years. In Only in New York, updated with new tales and fascinating glimpses into uniquely NYC life, he writes about what makes this city tick and why things are the way they are in the greatest of all metropolises on earth. The more than 75 essays in this book cover a variety of topics, including:-How do New Yorkers react during disasters?-Maritime history (the Hudson River)-Crowds, space, and population growth-1908: a year in History history-Jewish Daily Forward-What happens when a neighborhood loses its tony ZIP code?A winning and informative gift book for every fan of “the city,” Only in New York is elegantly written and solidly reported.
Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion (Berkeley Forum in the Humanities)
by Gilad Sharvit Karen S. FeldmanOver the last few decades, vibrant debates regarding post-secularism have found inspiration and provocation in the works of Sigmund Freud. A new interest in the interconnection of psychoanalysis, religion and political theory has emerged, allowing Freud’s illuminating examination of the religious and mystical practices in “Obsessive Neurosis and Religious Practices,” and the exegesis of the origins of ethics in religion in Totem and Taboo, to gain currency in recent debates on modernity. In that context, the pivotal role of Freud’s masterpiece, Moses and Monotheism, is widely recognized. Freud and Monotheism brings together fundamental new contributions to discourses on Freud and Moses, as well as new research at the intersections of theology, political theory, and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic work. Highlighting the broad impact of Moses and Monotheism across the humanities, the contributors hail from such diverse disciplines as philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, Jewish studies and psychoanalysis.Jan Assmann and Richard Bernstein, whose books pioneered the earlier debate that initiated the Freud and Moses discourse, seize the opportunity to revisit and revise their groundbreaking work. Gabriele Schwab, Gilad Sharvit, Karen Feldman, and Yael Segalovitz engage with the idiosyncratic, eccentric and fertile nature of the book as a Spӓtstil, and explore radical interpretations of Freud’s literary practice, theory of religion and therapeutic practice. Ronald Hendel offers an alternative history for the Mosaic discourse within the biblical text, Catherine Malabou reconnects Freud’s theory of psychic phylogenesis in Moses and Monotheism to new findings in modern biology and Willi Goetschel relocates Freud in the tradition of works on history that begins with Heine, while Joel Whitebook offers important criticisms of Freud’s main argument about the advance in intellectuality that Freud attributes to Judaism.
The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form
by null Audrey WasserThe Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of history, language use, or the social? How are new works in turn recognizable to already-existing institutions? Tracing the relationship between literature and the problem of newness back to a set of concerns first articulated in early German romanticism, this book goes on to mount a critique of romantic tendencies in contemporary criticism in order, ultimately, to develop an original theory of literary production. Along the way, it offers new readings of major modernist novels by Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein.
A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics)
by null Jacob EdmondWhy is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies?In A Common Strangeness, Jacob Edmond exemplifies a new, multilingual and multilateral approach to literary and cultural studies. He begins with the entrance of China into multinational capitalism and the appearance of the Parisian flâneur in the writings of a Chinese poet exiled in Auckland, New Zealand. Moving among poetic examples in Russian, Chinese, and English, he then traces a series of encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, Edmond tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms.
Humbug!: The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City's Penny Press
by null Wendy Jean KatzApproximately 300 daily and weekly newspapers flourished in New York before the Civil War. A majority of these newspapers, even those that proclaimed independence of party, were motivated by political conviction and often local conflicts. Their editors and writers jockeyed for government office and influence. Political infighting and their related maneuvers dominated the popular press, and these political and economic agendas led in turn to exploitation of art and art exhibitions. Humbug traces the relationships, class animosities, gender biases, and racial projections that drove the terms of art criticism, from the emergence of the penny press to the Civil War.The inexpensive “penny” papers that appeared in the 1830s relied on advertising to survive. Sensational stories, satire, and breaking news were the key to selling papers on the streets. Coverage of local politicians, markets, crime, and personalities, including artists and art exhibitions, became the penny papers’ lifeblood. These cheap papers, though unquestionably part of the period’s expanding capitalist economy, offered socialists, working-class men, bohemians, and utopianists a forum in which they could propose new models for American art and society and tear down existing ones.Arguing that the politics of the antebellum press affected the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized, Humbug covers the changing politics and rhetoric of this criticism. Author Wendy Katz demonstrates how the penny press’s drive for a more egalitarian society affected the taste and values that shaped art, and how the politics of their art criticism changed under pressure from nativists, abolitionists, and expansionists. Chapters explore James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald and its attack on aristocratic monopolies on art; the penny press’s attack on the American Art-Union, an influential corporation whose Board purchased artworks from living artists, exhibited them in a free gallery, and then distributed them in an annual five-dollar lottery; exposés of the fraudulent trade in Old Masters works; and the efforts of socialists, freethinkers, and bohemians to reject the authority of the past.
Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Lit Z)
by null Frédéric NeyratThis book offers a manifesto for a radical existentialism aiming to regenerate the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside “atopia”: not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world where everything would be perfect, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an “object-oriented ontology” would be able to formalize, nor the matter that “new materialisms” could identify. Atopia is what constitutes the existence of any object or subject, its singularity or more precisely its “eccentricity.” Etymologically, to exist means “to be outside” and the book argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world, wandering without any ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism does not privilege human beings (as Sartre and Heidegger did), but considers existence as a universal condition that concerns every being.It is important to offer a radical existentialism because the current denial of the outside is politically, and aesthetically, damaging. Only an atopian philosophy—a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy—can care for our fear of the outside. For therapeutic element, a radical existentialism favors everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. To sustain these alternatives, the book identifies the atopia as a condition of the possibility to break immanence and analyze these breaks in human and animal subjectivity, language, politics and metaphysics.
Look Round for Poetry: Untimely Romanticisms (Lit Z)
by null Brian McGrathPoetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that this book exploits and challenges.In his 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth anticipates that readers accustomed to the poetic norms of the day might not recognize his experiments as poems and might signal their awkward confusion upon opening the book by looking round for poetry, as if seeking it elsewhere. Look Round for Poetry transforms Wordsworth’s idiomatic expression into a methodological charge. By placing tropes and figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with contemporary economic, technological, and political discourse, Look Round for Poetry identifies poetry’s untimely echoes in discourses not always read as poetry or not always read poetically.Once one begins looking round for poetry, McGrath insists, one might discover it in some surprising contexts. In chapters that spring from poems by Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, McGrath reads poetic examples of understatement alongside market demands for more; the downturned brow as a figure for economic catastrophe; Romantic cloud metaphors alongside the rhetoric of cloud computing; the election of the dead as a poetical, and not just a political, act; and poetic investigations into the power of prepositions as theories of political assembly.For poetry to retain a vital power, McGrath argues, we need to become ignorant of what we think we mean by it. In the process we may discover critical vocabularies that engage the complexity of social life all around us.
The Covenant's Veil: Ethiopian Orthodox Tradition of Elaboration (Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought)
by null Alexandra Sellassie AntohinAn exploration of how contemporary Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity preserves and protects sacred ideas and relationships“Ethiopia stretches her hand upon God,” the narrative of Sheba and Solomon, the material presence of the Ark of the Covenant in Axum. For Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, these classic understandings of the covenant are prized narratives. For historical and scriptural scholarship, a central focus is to explain the characteristics of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity as retaining key “Old Testament” qualities to demonstrate a wide chasm with post-Enlightenment, secular societies. By widening the lens of analysis to include a body of knowledge best accessed through Orthodox Christian devotional culture, The Covenant’s Veil offers an interpretation that challenges the reader to adopt a novel understanding of these well-established ideas.The multiple, complex ways that the covenant idea appears as ideas, idioms, customs, symbols, and articulations in the lifeworld of Ethiopian Orthodox are the starting point for The Covenant’s Veil. Ethiopia’s story of the covenant is a domain of nested reference points that inspires celebrants, through their devotional activities, to expand and elaborate upon a network of meanings. Covenant refractions within Ethiopian Orthodox devotional culture not only demonstrate the established pattern of magnifying spiritual importance through symbolic similes and analogic pairings, but perform a vital function for keeping traditional knowledge alive and current. Detailed ethnographic material arranges devotional activities such as mahaber rituals of communing and processions of tabots on feast days. It describes habits of making vows, presenting oneself at church, and telling stories of saints and their covenants. Thinking about the covenant concept as refracting—the bending motion of points encountering a common surface—is a way to conceive how these reference points reveal a connective thread, what is theorized as an Ethiopian Orthodox method of elaboration. Identifying when and where elaboration of tradition is happening provides an opportunity to demonstrate how Orthodox Christianity is integral to the lives and actions of its faithful. By reframing covenant as expanding beyond Ethiopian religious and political exceptionalism, The Covenant’s Veil provides us with a timely reappraisal of this concept in light of increased social fragmentation and the urgency for negotiating harmony in a country with many forms of diversity.
Telling the Bees: An Interspecies Monologue
by null Dominic PettmanIn a bid to wean himself off Facebook and Twitter, media scholar and cultural theorist Dominic Pettman decided to revive an ancient custom. He decided to tell the local bees of his thoughts, theories, musings, and meditations. The result was an apian journal that parses the daily news and the routines of modern life in a more sustained and reflective way than the Pavlovian posts to which we are so addicted.The account that emerges from Pettman’s regular discussion with the bees forms a compelling portrait of the tumultuous period running from the Fall of 2019 to New Year’s Eve, 2022. What began as a reflection on the traumatic effects of an “unprecedented” presidency soon evolved into a real-time response to the equally extraordinary events of the pandemic and its aftermath. One key concern that emerges from Pettman’s ongoing discussion with the bees is the extent to which, thanks to the alienating effects of neoliberalism, we were already engaged in an advanced form of social distancing long before anyone had heard of COVID. Other key themes include education, human-animal relations, climate change, mediated intimacy, attention ecologies, collective memory, slow violence, the self-fulfilling prophecy that is New York City, the never-ending end of history, and the mundane strategies we share in a bid to forge on, despite the accumulating challenges of the twenty-first century. Telling the Bees is an invitation to rediscover the art of reflection and a profound meditation on human connection, alienation, and our collective yearning for intimacy in an age of distance. Through what Pettman describes as an "interspecies monologue," readers are treated to a unique perspective on navigating the complexities of the twenty-first century, inspired by the ingenuity and resilience of our natural cohabitants.
The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism
by null Rajani SudanNamed 'Top 6' South Asia studies publications of 2016 by the British Association for South Asian StudiesThe Alchemy of Empire unravels the non-European origins of Enlightenment science. Focusing on the abject materials of empire-building, this study traces the genealogies of substances like mud, mortar, ice, and paper, as well as forms of knowledge like inoculation. Showing how East India Company employees deployed the paradigm of alchemy in order to make sense of the new worlds they confronted, Rajani Sudan argues that the Enlightenment was born largely out of Europe’s (and Britain’s) sense of insecurity and inferiority in the early modern world. Plumbing the depths of the imperial archive, Sudan uncovers the history of the British Enlightenment in the literary artifacts of the long eighteenth century, from the correspondence of the East India Company and the papers of the Royal Society to the poetry of Alexander Pope and the novels of Jane Austen.
Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam (Fordham University Press Ser.)
by null Ben TranPost-Mandarin offers an engaging look at a cohort of Vietnamese intellectuals who adopted European fields of knowledge, a new Romanized alphabet, and print media—all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. This new generation of intellectuals established Vietnam’s modern anticolonial literature.The term “post-mandarin” illuminates how Vietnam’s deracinated figures of intellectual authority adapted to a literary field moving away from a male-to-male literary address toward print culture. With this shift, post-mandarin intellectuals increasingly wrote for and about women.Post-Mandarin illustrates the significance of the inclusion of modern women in the world of letters: a more democratic system of aesthetic and political representation that gave rise to anticolonial nationalism. This conceptualization of the “post-mandarin” promises to have a significant impact on the fields of literary theory, postcolonial studies, East Asian and Southeast Asian studies, and modernist studies.
The Rigor of Things: Conversations with Dan Arbib
by null Jean-Luc Marion null Dan ArbibIn a series of conversations, Jean-Luc Marion reconstructs a career’s path in the history of philosophy, theology, and phenomenology. Discussing such concepts as the event, the gift, and the saturated phenomenon, Marion elaborates the rigor displayed by the things themselves. He discusses the major stages of his work and offers his views on the forces that have driven his thought.The conversation ranges from Marion’s engagement with Descartes, to phenomenology and theology, to Marion’s intellectual and biographical backgrounds, concluding with illuminating insights on the state of the Catholic Church today and on Judeo-Christian dialogue. Marion also reflects on the relationship of philosophy to history, theology, aesthetics, and literature. At the same time, the book provides an account of French intellectual life in the late twentieth century. In these interviews, Marion’s language is more conversational than in his formal writing, but it remains serious and substantive. The book serves as an excellent and comprehensive introduction to Marion’s thought and work.
Theory for Beginners: Children’s Literature as Critical Thought
by null Kenneth B. KiddSince its inception in the 1970s, the Philosophy for Children movement (P4C) has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in children’s classics, especially Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature in significant ways. Offering a novel take on this phenomenon, Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. Examining everything from the rise of French Theory in the United States to the crucial pedagogies offered in children’s picture books, from Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to studies of queer childhood, Kenneth B. Kidd deftly reveals the way in which children may learn from philosophy and vice versa.
Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship
by null Aaron GoodfellowWhile the topic of gay marriage and families continues to be popular in the media, few scholarly works focus on gay men with children. Based on ten years of fieldwork among gay families living in the rural, suburban, and urban area of the eastern United States, Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship presents a beautifully written and meticulously argued ethnography of gay men and the families they have formed.In a culture that places a premium on biology as the founding event of paternity, Aaron Goodfellow poses the question: Can the signing of legal contracts and the public performances of care replace biological birth as the singular event marking the creation of fathers? Beginning with a comprehensive review of the relevant literature in this field, four chapters—each presenting a particular picture of paternity—explore a range of issues, such as interracial adoption, surrogacy, the importance of physical resemblance in familial relationships, single parenthood, delinquency, and the ways in which the state may come to define the norms of health. The author deftly illustrates how fatherhood for gay men draws on established biological, theological, and legal images of the family often thought oppressive to the emergence of queer forms of social life.Chosen with care and described with great sensitivity, each carefully researched case examines gay fatherhood through life narratives. Painstakingly theorized, Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship contends that gay families are one of the most important areas to which social scientists might turn in order to understand how law, popular culture, and biology are simultaneously made manifest and interrogated in everyday life. By focusing specifically on gay fathers, Goodfellow produces an anthropological account of how paternity, sexuality, and masculinity are leveraged in relations of care between gay fathers and their children.
The Sentimental Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism
by null Aaron RitzenbergBetween 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses ceased to be family owned, instead becoming sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Sentimental literature—work written specifically to convey and inspire deep feeling—does not seem to fit with a swiftly bureaucratizing society. Surprisingly, though, sentimental language persisted in American literature, even as a culture of managed systems threatened to obscure the power of individual affect.The Sentimental Touch explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language in the face of a rapidly changing culture. Analyzing novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Nathanael West, the book demonstrates that sentimental language changes but remains powerful, even in works by authors who self-consciously write against the sentimental tradition. Sentimental language has an afterlife, enduring in American literature long after authors and critics declared it dead, insisting that human feeling can resist a mechanizing culture and embodying, paradoxically, the way that literary conventions themselves become mechanical and systematic.
On the High Line: The Definitive Guide
by null Annik LaFargeThe most comprehensive, up-to-date, and acclaimed guide to the High Line by the leading expert on the history of the park—now in a fully revised editionBuilt atop a former freight railroad, the “park in the sky” is regularly cited as one of the premiere examples of adaptive reuse and quickly became one of New York’s most popular destinations, attracting more than 8 million visitors a year. This updated Third Edition of On the High Line— published to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of the park’s opening—remains the definitive guide to the park that transformed an entire neighborhood and became an inspiration to cities around the globe.In short entries organized by roughly two city block sections, the guide provides rich details about everything in view on both sides of the park. Illustrated with more than 110 black & white photographs, it covers historic and modern architecture; plants and horticulture; and important industries and technological innovations that developed in the neighborhoods the park traverses, from book publishing and food distribution to the introduction of cold storage and the development of radar, the elevator, and talking movies. Updated to include newly opened sections of the park, this edition also features a new conversation pertaining to the more controversial side of the High Line’s story and how it became a poster child for the most grievous manifestations of gentrification and inequity in public spaces. Author Annik LaFarge provides a frank discussion on how the park’s leadership created a platform for discussing these issues and for advising other projects on how to work more inclusively and from a social justice and equity perspective.On the High Line serves as an educated travel companion, someone invisibly perched on a visitor’s shoulder who can answer every question, including what was here before, moving back in time through the early 20th century, the Industrial Revolution, and the colonial and pre-European times when this stretch of what we call Manhattan was home to the Lenape people and much of it was covered by the waters of the Hudson River. A companion website with more than 650 photos—historic, contemporary, rooftop and aerial—can be viewed at HighLineBook.com.