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Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)
by null Alenka ZupančičA provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles’ Antigone. The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular “obsessions” have driven the author’s thinking and writing about Antigone. First is the issue of violence. The violence in Antigone is the opposite of “graphic” as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific “undeadness” that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted the author to look at the relationship between language, sexuality, death, and “second death.” The third issue, which constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. The author asks, how does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the “unwritten law” she follows, tally with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power? Attempting to answer this leads to the question of what this particular (Oedipal) family’s misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity. Which in turn forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: “What is incest?”Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič’s absorbing and succinct guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising intervention into the broad and prominent field of study related to Sophocles’ Antigone illuminates the classical text’s ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.
Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness
by null George HartFrom 1920 until his death in 1962, consciousness and its effect on the natural world was Robinson Jeffers’s obsession. Understanding and explaining the biological basis of mind is one of the towering challenges of modern science to this day, and Jeffers’s poetic experiment is an important contribution to American literary history—no other twentieth-century poet attempted such a thorough engagement with a crucial scientific problem. Jeffers invented a sacramental poetics that accommodates a modern scientific account of consciousness, thereby integrating an essentially religious sensibility with science in order to discover the sacramentality of natural process and reveal a divine cosmos.There is no other study of Jeffers or sacramental nature poetry like this one. It proposes that Jeffers’s sacramentalism emerged out of his scientifically informed understanding of material nature. Drawing on ecocriticism, religious studies, and neuroscience, Inventing the Languageto Tell It shows how Jeffers produced the most compelling sacramental nature poetry of the twentieth century.
Beyond Violence: Religious Sources of Social Transformation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Abrahamic Dialogues)
by James L. HeftIn an age of terrorism and other forms of violence committed in the name of religion, how can religion become a vehicle for peace, justice, and reconciliation? And in a world of bitter conflicts-many rooted in religious difference-how can communities of faith understand one another?The essays in this important book take bold steps forward to answering these questions. The fruit of a historic conference of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars and community leaders, the essays address a fundamental question: how the three monotheistic traditions can provide the resources needed in the work of justice and reconciliation.Two distinguished scholars represent each tradition. Rabbis Irving Greenberg and Reuven Firestone each examine the relationship of Judaism to violence, exploring key sources and the history of power, repentance, and reconciliation. From Christianity, philosopher Charles Taylor explores the religious dimensions of "categorical" violence against other faiths, other groups, while Scott Appleby traces the emergence since Vatican II of nonviolence as a foundation of Catholic theology and practice. Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia, discusses Muslim support of pluralism and human rights, and Mohamed Fathi Osman examines the relationship between political violence and sacred sources in contemporary Islam.By focusing on transformative powers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the essays in this book provide new beginnings for people of faith committed to restoring peace among nations through peace among religions.
Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (Just Ideas)
by null Jane Anna GordonMight creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call “home.”Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.
Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (Thinking from Elsewhere)
by null Vaibhav SariaWinner, 2023 Bernard S. Cohn Prize, Association for Asian StudiesWinner, 2021 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social SciencesWinner, 2021 Ruth Benedict Prize, Association for Queer AnthropologyHonorable Mention, 2023 Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize, Human Sexuality & Anthropology Interest GroupHijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination—in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life, often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a moral presence in Indian electoral politics, and with heightened vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population caught within the AIDS epidemic. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers recounts two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche.Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance, irresponsibility, or illiteracy but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning beyond the secular horizons of public health or queer theory.Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday—laughter, flirting, teasing—to impossible longings, kinship, and economies of property and substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.
Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form
by null Anna KornbluhDuring a tumultuous period when financial speculation began rapidly to outpace industrial production and consumption, Victorian financial journalists commonly explained the instability of finance by criticizing its inherent artifice—drawing persistent attention to what they called “fictitious capital.” In a shift that naturalized this artifice, this critique of fictitious capital virtually disappeared by the 1860s, replaced by notions of fickle investor psychology and mental equilibrium encapsulated in the fascinating metaphor of “psychic economy.”In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature’s unique facility for evaluating ideas in process. Inheritors of this novelistic project, Marx and Freud each advance a critique of psychic economy that refuses to naturalize capitalism.
Startling Figures: Encounters with American Catholic Fiction (Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O'Connor Trust Series)
by null Michael O'ConnellStartling Figures is about Catholic fiction in a secular age and the rhetorical strategies Catholic writers employ to reach a skeptical, indifferent, or even hostile audience. Although characters in contemporary Catholic fiction frequently struggle with doubt and fear, these works retain a belief in the possibility for transcendent meaning and value beyond the limits of the purely secular. Individual chapters include close readings of some of the best works of contemporary American Catholic fiction, which shed light on the narrative techniques that Catholic writers use to point their characters, and their readers, beyond the horizon of secularity and toward an idea of transcendence while also making connections between the widely acknowledged twentieth-century masters of the form and their twenty-first-century counterparts.This book is focused both on the aspects of craft that Catholic writers employ to shape the reader’s experience of the story and on the effect the story has on the reader. One recurring theme that is central to both is how often Catholic writers use narrative violence and other, similar disorienting techniques in order to unsettle the reader. These moments can leave both characters within the stories and the readers themselves shaken and unmoored, and this, O’Connell argues, is often a first step toward the recognition, and even possibly the acceptance, of grace. Individual chapters look at these themes in the works of Flannery O’Connor, J. F. Powers, Walker Percy, Tim Gautreaux, Alice McDermott, George Saunders, and Phil Klay and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity (Commonalities)
by null James D. LilleyWhat are the relationships between the books we read and the communities we share? Common Things explores how transatlantic romance revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century influenced—and were influenced by—emerging modern systems of community.Drawing on the work of Washington Irving, Henry Mackenzie, Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Charles Brockden Brown, the book shows how romance promotes a distinctive aesthetics of belonging—a mode of being in common tied to new qualities of the singular. Each chapter focuses on one of these common things—the stain of race, the “property” of personhood, ruined feelings, the genre of a text, and the event of history—and examines how these peculiar qualities work to sustain the coherence of our modern common places. In the work of Horace Walpole and Edgar Allan Poe, the book further uncovers an important— and never more timely—alternative aesthetic practice that reimagines community as an open and fugitive process rather than as a collection of common things.
Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance (Forms of Living)
by null Roma ChatterjiThe essays in this book explore the critical possibilities that have been opened by Veena Das’s work. Taking off from her writing on pain as a call for acknowledgment, several essays explore how social sciences render pain, suffering, and the claims of the other as part of an ethics of responsibility. They search for disciplinary resources to contest the implicit division between those whose pain receives attention and those whose pain is seen as out of sync with the times and hence written out of the historical record.Another theme is the co-constitution of the event and the everyday, especially in the context of violence. Das’s groundbreaking formulation of the everyday provides a frame for understanding how both violence and healing might grow out of it. Drawing on notions of life and voice and the struggle to write one’s own narrative, the contributors provide rich ethnographies of what it is to inhabit a devastated world.Ethics as a form of attentiveness to the other, especially in the context of poverty, deprivation, and the corrosion of everyday life, appears in several of the essays. They take up the classic themes of kinship and obligation but give them entirely new meaning.Finally, anthropology’s affinities with the literary are reflected in a final set of essays that show how forms of knowing in art and in anthropology are related through work with painters, performance artists, and writers.
The Corpse in the Kitchen: Enclosure, Extraction, and the Afterlives of the Black Hawk War
by null Adam John WatermanReassessing the archive of the Black Hawk War, The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the enclosure of Indigenous land, histories of resource extraction, and the literary culture of settler colonialism. While conventional histories of the Black Hawk War have long treated the conflict as gratuitous, Adam John Waterman argues that the war part of a struggle over the dispensation of mineral resources specifically, mineral lead—and the emergence of new cultures of killing and composition. The elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, lead drawn from the mines of the upper Mississippi, contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples through the consolidation of U.S. control over a vital military resource. Rendered as metallic type, Mississippian lead contributed to the expansion of print culture, providing the occasion for literary justifications of settler violence, and promulgating the fiction of Indigenous disappearance.Treating the theft and excarnation of Black Hawk’s corpse as coextensive with processes of mineral extraction, Waterman explores ecologies of racial capitalism as forms of inscription, documentary traces written into the land. Reading the terrestrial in relation to more conventional literary forms, he explores the settler fetishization of Black Hawk’s body, drawing out homoerotic longings that suffuse representations of the man and his comrades. Moving from print to agriculture as modes of inscription, Waterman looks to the role of commodity agriculture in composing a history of settler rapine, including literal and metaphoric legacies of anthropophagy. Traversing mouth and stomach, he concludes by contrasting forms of settler medicine with Black Hawk’s account of medicine as an embodied practice, understood in relation to accounts of dreaming and mourning, processes that are unforgivably slow and that allow time for the imagination of other futures, other ways of being.
Chaos is the New Calm (American Poets Continuum)
by null Wyn CooperChaos is the New Calm expands the parameters of the sonnet form, putting rhymes in unusual places, inventing new stanza structures, and addressing a variety of subject matter ranging from travelogue to inner monologue, from social commentary to solitary musing. These poems are alive with sound, rhythm, and lyric insights into the world.Wyn Cooper&’s poem &“Fun&” was adapted by Sheryl Crow for her hit song &“All I Wanna Do.&” He collaborates on music and spoken word with novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Cooper is co-organizer of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. He consults for the Poetry Foundation&’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.
Four in Hand (American Poets Continuum Series #198)
by null Alicia MountainComprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain’s Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language and white space equally captivate with their sparsity and abundance as Mountain pursues the implications of national political identity with intersectional awareness. These poems interrogate our collective complicity in late-stage capitalism, drone warfare, the election of Donald Trump, environmental degradation, mental health crises, and the dawn of Covid-19 through the lens of gay poetic lineage, regionalism, and familial kinships structures.As in all lived experiences, treacheries and triumphs fade in and out of focus and intimacy, heartbreak, travel, eroticism, joy, and quotidian happenings offer character and momentum across non-linear narrative arcs. Through enthralling images, gripping storytelling, and world-building, Four in Hand carves out necessary space for lesbian gaze, speakership, and personhood. From the back corner of a vast, sprawling, yet gorgeous landscape of thought, Mountain's poems beckon us inside.
Broken Hallelujahs (American Poets Continuum)
by null Sean Thomas DoughertyFusing street scenes (from Budapest to New York City) with family history (African American and Jewish), Sean Thomas Dougherty uses both traditional and experimental forms to explore issues of identity and family. Deeply rooted in music and performance, Dougherty&’s poetry resists easy categorization, revealing the complexity of our lives and times. Sean Thomas Dougherty lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in the BFA program for creative writing at Penn State Erie. He is a nationally renowned performance poet and author of nine previous poetry collections. He was a finalist for the 2005 Paterson Poetry Prize and winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize.
Refuge (American Poets Continuum)
by null Adrie KusserowDeeply cross cultural, humanitarian, political and global poems about how humans deal with suffering across the world. These are poems about cultures rubbing up against each other, war, refugees, child soldiers, spiritual refugees trying to find a home, and a mother who is witnessing these firsthand. Rare ethnographic poetry by a world traveling cultural anthropologist and human rights activist.
The Human Half (American Poets Continuum #173)
by null Deborah BrownThreaded with echoes of familial trauma—a sister’s battle with cancer, a brother’s struggles with depression—the lyric poems in The Human Half reveal an open-hearted speaker who finds solace in the beauties of celestial navigation, the flowers along the railroad tracks, and the brushwork of Vermeer and Van Gogh. Filled with quirks of perception, Deborah Brown holds space for wonder amidst of life’s seasons of longing.
Model Homes (American Poets Continuum #Vol. 87)
by null Wayne KoestenbaumWayne Koestenbaum knows how to drop the language in the blender of the imagination and hit frappe! The 13 ottava rima cantos in Model Homes present a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on in the poet’s present home and various events from his childhood. Modulating a voice that is urbane and ribald, melancholic and wry, Koestenbaum puts a memorable spin on the status quo notion of domestic arrangements.Wayne Koestenbaum holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He was co-winner of the 1989 Discovery/The Nation poetry contest, has published three books of poetry and three books of prose, and writes frequently for The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books and other periodicals. He lives in New York, NY.
An Orchard in the Street (American Readers Series)
by null Reginald GibbonsThis new collection by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings-city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court-as way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations explode with imagery, looking and listening deeply into our everyday experience-the extraordinary within the ordinary, the impossible within the possible.Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous collections of poetry and fiction. His book Creatures of a Day was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Evanston, IL, where he teaches at Northwestern University.
Casual Conversation (New Poets of America #47)
by null Renia WhiteA Blessing the Boats Selection with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, Renia White’s debut poetry collection pushes against state-sanctioned authority and societal thought while ruminating on Black joy. Renia White’s debut poetry collection strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all come from. From her vantage point of Black womanhood, White probes the norms and mores of everyday interactions. In observations, insights, and snippets of speech, these poems look to the unspoken thoughts behind our banter, questioning the authority of not only the rule of law but also of our small talk itself—the concepts we have accepted and integrated without pause. Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear out of formality: consequence, embarrassment, anger. It plays, it tarries, it disrupts. It pulls apart what seems sound in an effort to see: what did we make here? How’s it going?
Diwata (American Poets Continuum #123)
by null Barbara Jane ReyesTagalog is a language spoken by twenty-two million people in the Philippines. Diwata is a Tagalog term meaning "muse." Diwata is also a term for a mythical being who resides in nature, and who human communities must acknowledge, respect, and appease in order to live harmoniously in this world.In her book Diwata, Barbara Jane Reyes frames her poems between the Book of Genesis creation story and the Tagalog creation myth, placing her work somewhere culturally between both traditions. Also setting the tone for her poems is the death and large shadow cast by her grandfather, a World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor, who has passed onto her the responsibility of remembering. Reyes' voice is grounded in her community's traditions and histories, despite war and geographical dislocation.From "Estuary 2":She was born with fins and fishtail,A quick blade slicing water.She was her father's mermaid child,A river demon, elders said.She mimicked her cetaceous brothers,Abalone diving bluest depths.She polished smooth her brothers' masks,Inlaid nacre half moon eyes.She lit oak pyres and bade the windA whispered requiem.Barbara Jane Reyes is author of two previous poetry collections including Poeta en San Francisco, which was awarded the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as adjunct professor in Philippine studies at the University of San Francisco.From National Book Critics Circle:"Diwata as a mythological invocation takes teh reader back to pre-colonial Philippines when the belief in these god and goddesses shaped the everyday lives on the Southeast Asian archipelago. They have now become your muses as you reach toward this cultural legacy to shape a distinct postmodern poetics in which yo u don’t simply erase colonial history- you build with that narrative as well."
Year of the Dog (American Poets Continuum #178)
by null Deborah ParedezIn the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez’s second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War. The title refers to the year 1970—the “year of the Metal Dog” in the lunar calendar—which was the year of the author’s birth, the year of her father’s deployment to Vietnam with a troop of Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father’s snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout the collection as Paredez recalls untold stories from a war that changed her family and the nation. In poems and lamentations that evoke Hecuba, the mythic figure so consumed by grief over the atrocities of war that she was transformed into a howling dog, and La Llorona, the weeping woman in Mexican folklore who haunts the riverbanks in mourning and threatens to disturb the complicity of those living in the present, Paredez recontextualizes the historical moments of the Vietnam era, from the arrest of Angela Davis to the haunting image of Mary Ann Vecchio at the Kent State Massacre, never forgetting the outcry and outrage that women’s voices have carried across time.
The Law as it Could Be
by null Owen FissThe Law As It Could Be gathers Fiss’s most important work on procedure, adjudication and public reason, introduced by the author and including contextual introductions for each piece—some of which are among the most cited in Twentieth Century legal studies. Fiss surveys the legal terrain between the landmark cases of Brown v. Board of Education and Bush v. Gore to reclaim the legal legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. He argues forcefully for a vision of judges as instruments of public reason and of the courts as a means of shaping society in the image of the Constitution. In building his argument, Fiss attends to topics as diverse as the use of the injunction to restructure social institutions; how law and economics have misunderstood the role of the judge; why the movement seeking alternatives to adjudication fails to serve the public interest; and why Bush v. Gore was not the constitutional crisis some would have us believe. In so doing, Fiss reveals a vision of adjudication that vindicates the public reason on which Brown v. Board of Education was founded.
Transformation of Rage: Mourning and Creativity in George Eliot's Fiction
by null Peggy Fitzhugh JohnstoneGeorge Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones.
After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (Cultural Front #1)
by null Mike HillView the Table of Contents.Read the Introduction. "Beautifully written and rigorously argued, After Whiteness is the most important theoretical statement on white racial formation since ‘whiteness studies' began its current academic sojourn. By reading debates about multiculturalism, ethnicity, and the desire for difference as part of the material practices of the U.S. university system, it engages questions of race, humanistic inquiry, intellectual labor, and the democratic function of critical thought. The result is a critically nuanced analysis that promises to solidify Mike Hill's reputation as one of the finest thinkers of his generation."-Robyn Wiegman, Duke University "Mike Hill's After Whiteness is an important, provocative and timely book."-Against the Current "A lucid, fiercely argued, brilliantly conceived, richly provocative work in an emergent and growing area of cultural studies. After Whiteness sets new directions in American literary and cultural studies, and will become a landmark in the field."-Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University"Americanists across the disciplines will find Hill's analysis insightful and brilliant. A must for any scholar who wishes to, in Ralph Ellison's words, ‘go to the territory.'"-Sharon Holland, University of Illinois at ChicagoAs each new census bears out, the rise of multiracialism in the United States will inevitably result in a white minority. In spite of the recent proliferation of academic studies and popular discourse on whiteness, however, there has been little discussion of the future: what comes after whiteness? On the brink of what many are now imagining as a post-white American future, it remains a matter of both popular and academic uncertainty as to what will emerge in its place.After Whiteness aims to address just that, exploring the remnants of white identity to ask how an emergent post-white national imaginary figure into public policy issues, into the habits of sexual intimacy, and into changes within public higher education. Through discussions of the 2000 census and debates over multiracial identity, the volatile psychic investments that white heterosexual men have in men of color-as illustrated by the Christian men's group the Promise Keepers and the neo-fascist organization the National Alliance-and the rise of identity studies and diversity within the contemporary public research university, Mike Hill surveys race among the ruins of white America. At this crucial moment, when white racial change has made its ambivalent cultural debut, Hill demonstrates that the prospect of an end to whiteness haunts progressive scholarship on race as much as it haunts the paranoid visions of racists.
Children and War: A Historical Anthology
by James Marten"This anthology is breathtaking in its geographic and temporal sweep."-Canadian Journal of History The American media has recently "discovered" children's experiences in present-day wars. A week-long series on the plight of child soldiers in Africa and Latin America was published in Newsday and newspapers have decried the U.S. government's reluctance to sign a United Nations treaty outlawing the use of under-age soldiers. These and numerous other stories and programs have shown that the number of children impacted by war as victims, casualties, and participants has mounted drastically during the last few decades. Although the scale on which children are affected by war may be greater today than at any time since the world wars of the twentieth century, children have been a part of conflict since the beginning of warfare. Children and War shows that boys and girls have routinely contributed to home front war efforts, armies have accepted under-aged soldiers for centuries, and war-time experiences have always affected the ways in which grown-up children of war perceive themselves and their societies. The essays in this collection range from explorations of childhood during the American Revolution and of the writings of free black children during the Civil War to children's home front war efforts during World War II, representations of war and defeat in Japanese children's magazines, and growing up in war-torn Liberia. Children and War provides a historical context for two centuries of children's multi-faceted involvement with war.
The American Title Insurance Industry: How a Cartel Fleeces the American Consumer
by null Joseph W Eaton null David EatonAfter World War II, banks and other mortgage lenders began requiring insurance to protect them against flawed or defective real estate titles. Over the past sixty years, the title insurance industry has grown steadily in size, power, and secrecy: policies are available for both lenders and property owners and many title insurers offer an array of other real estate services, such as escrow and appraisal. Yet details about the industry’s operational procedures remain closely guarded from public exposure.In The American Title Insurance Industry, Joseph and David Eaton present evidence that improvements in recordkeeping over the last sixty years—particularly the advent of computers—have reduced the likelihood of a defective title going unnoticed in a property transaction. But the industry’s flaws run deeper than mere obsolescence: in most states, title insurers are allowed to engage in anticompetitive business practices, including price-fixing. Among the findings in this meticulously researched study are instances of insurers charging premiums well above the amount necessary to compensate them for assuming the risk of defect and identical policies with identical risk that vary in price by hundreds of percentage points for different geographic locations.The authors also examine the widely ignored role that the federal and most state governments play in perpetuating the title insurance industry’s unfair practices. Whereas most private industries prefer as little government intervention as possible, title insurers welcome it. Federal statue exempts title insurers from anti-trust liability, opening the door for price-fixing and destroying any semblance of free-market competition or market power for consumers.A landmark study for elected officials, and all those involved in the insurance, real estate, and brokerage industries, The American Title Insurance Industry brings to light a long-neglected problem—and offers suggestions for how it might be remedied.