Download or read book Avidly Reads Passages written by Michelle D. Commander and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What is the value of Black life in America?" In Avidly Reads Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travel—the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus—to map the mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us, as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin’s long history on and alongside plantations in rural South Carolina, Commander explores her family members’ ability and inability to navigate safely through space, time, and emotion, detailing how Black lives were shaped by the actual vehicles that promised an escape from the confines of American racism, yet nearly always failed to deliver on those promises. Using personal and public archives, Avidly Reads Passages unfolds distinct histories of transatlantic slavery ships, the possibilities presented by rail lines in the Reconstruction South, the fateful legacies of school busing, and the ways that Black Americans attempted to negotiate their automobility, including through the use of road and travel compendiums such as Travelguide and The Negro Motorist Green Book. In order to understand the intricacies of slavery and its aftermath, Commander began her exploration with the hope of engaging with the difficult evidences and stubborn gaps in her family’s genealogy; what she produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on working-class life in the Black South. Commander demonstrates that the forms of intimidation, brutality, surveillance, and restriction used to control Black mobility have merely evolved since slavery, marking Black life writ large in America, with neither the passage of time nor the passage of laws assuring true and adequate racial progress. Despite this bleak observation, Commander catalogs and celebrates, through affecting stories about her beloved South Carolina community, the compelling strivings of Southern Black people to survive by holding on firmly to family, and their faith that new worlds could be imagined, created, and traveled to someday. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Passages offers a unique lens through which to capture the intricacies of Black life.
Download or read book Avidly Reads Passages written by Michelle D. Commander and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What is the value of Black life in America?" In Avidly Reads Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travel—the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus—to map the mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us, as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin’s long history on and alongside plantations in rural South Carolina, Commander explores her family members’ ability and inability to navigate safely through space, time, and emotion, detailing how Black lives were shaped by the actual vehicles that promised an escape from the confines of American racism, yet nearly always failed to deliver on those promises. Using personal and public archives, Avidly Reads Passages unfolds distinct histories of transatlantic slavery ships, the possibilities presented by rail lines in the Reconstruction South, the fateful legacies of school busing, and the ways that Black Americans attempted to negotiate their automobility, including through the use of road and travel compendiums such as Travelguide and The Negro Motorist Green Book. In order to understand the intricacies of slavery and its aftermath, Commander began her exploration with the hope of engaging with the difficult evidences and stubborn gaps in her family’s genealogy; what she produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on working-class life in the Black South. Commander demonstrates that the forms of intimidation, brutality, surveillance, and restriction used to control Black mobility have merely evolved since slavery, marking Black life writ large in America, with neither the passage of time nor the passage of laws assuring true and adequate racial progress. Despite this bleak observation, Commander catalogs and celebrates, through affecting stories about her beloved South Carolina community, the compelling strivings of Southern Black people to survive by holding on firmly to family, and their faith that new worlds could be imagined, created, and traveled to someday. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Passages offers a unique lens through which to capture the intricacies of Black life.
Download or read book Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures written by Arielle Zibrak and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims the femme fictions dismissed as "trash" to celebrate the surprisingly cathartic pleasures of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of patriarchal culture"--
Download or read book Avidly Reads Theory written by Jordan Alexander Stein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Theory offered us a way of understanding the world that, like so many youthful exuberances, was both vital and ridiculous.” As an avowed “theory head,” Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feel—silly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuck—Stein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now. Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. This is a story about the emotional lives of ideas.
Download or read book Avidly Reads Making Out written by Kathryn Bond Stockton and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Here’s the thing with kissing: it matters intensely or not at all.” Mid-kiss, do you ever wonder who you are, who you’re kissing, where it’s leading? It can feel luscious, libidinal, friendly, but are we trying to make out something through our kissing? For Kathryn Bond Stockton, making out is a prism through which to look at the cultural and political forces of our world: race, economics, childhood, books, and movies. Making Out is Stockton’s memoir about a non-binary childhood before that idea existed in her world. We think about kissing as we accompany Stockton to the bedroom, to the closet, to the playground, to the movies, and to solitary moments with a book, the ultimate source of pleasure. Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.
Download or read book Avidly Reads Board Games written by Eric Thurm and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships—from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.
Download or read book The Broken Lands written by Robert Edric and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-02-14 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Broken Lands-a treacherous labyrinth of ice through which the fabled Northwest Passage was sought for centuries. Cabot, Frobisher, Hudson, Parry and Ross were all defeated, and the names on the maps testify to their despair: Bay of God's Mercy, the Devil's Cape, Savage Isles, and Repulse Bay. Determined to succeed where the rest had failed, Sir John Franklin-"the Lion of the Arctic"-set sail from Greenland in 1845. His two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, were last sighted in August of that year, after which the entire expedition-all 135 men-disappeared. For three years, the two ships were trapped in the Arctic ice. Eventually the slow vise of the ice pack and spoiling provisions proved to be too much. Nothing was heard of Franklin's expedition for over a decade, and only many years later did the world begin to learn of their terrible, agonizing fate. In this enthralling, richly inventive novel, Robert Edric recreates what possibly happened to this doomed expedition.
Download or read book Afro Atlantic Flight written by Michelle D. Commander and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Afro-Atlantic Flight Michelle D. Commander traces how post-civil rights Black American artists, intellectuals, and travelers envision literal and figurative flight back to Africa as a means by which to heal the dispossession caused by the slave trade. Through ethnographic, historical, literary, and filmic analyses, Commander shows the ways that cultural producers such as Octavia Butler, Thomas Allen Harris, and Saidiya Hartman engage with speculative thought about slavery, the spiritual realm, and Africa, thereby structuring the imaginary that propels future return flights. She goes on to examine Black Americans’ cultural heritage tourism in and migration to Ghana; Bahia, Brazil; and various sites of slavery in the US South to interrogate the ways that a cadre of actors produces “Africa” and contests master narratives. Compellingly, these material flights do not always satisfy Black Americans’ individualistic desires for homecoming and liberation, leading Commander to focus on the revolutionary possibilities inherent in psychic speculative returns and to argue for the development of a Pan-Africanist stance that works to more effectively address the contemporary resonances of slavery that exist across the Afro-Atlantic.
Download or read book Cringeworthy written by Melissa Dahl and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the ways that embracing socially awkward situations, even when they lead to embarrassment and self-conciousness, also provide the opportunity to test oneself and to recognize how people are connected to each other.
Download or read book Black Gods of the Asphalt written by Onaje X. O. Woodbine and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J-Rod moves like a small tank on the court, his face mean, staring down his opponents. "I play just like my father," he says. "Before my father died, he was a problem on the court. I'm a problem." Playing basketball for him fuses past and present, conjuring his father's memory into a force that opponents can feel in each bone-snapping drive to the basket. On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half-men, half-heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket. Basketball is popular among young black American men but not because, as many claim, they are "pushed by poverty" or "pulled" by white institutions to play it. Black men choose to participate in basketball because of the transcendent experience of the game. Through interviews with and observations of urban basketball players, Onaje X. O. Woodbine composes a rare portrait of a passionate, committed, and resilient group of athletes who use the court to mine what urban life cannot corrupt. If people turn to religion to reimagine their place in the world, then black streetball players are indeed the hierophants of the asphalt.
Download or read book Avidly Reads Opera written by Alison Kinney and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Opera is community, comfort, art, voice, breath, life. It’s hope.” All art exists to make life more bearable. For Alison Kinney, it was the wild, fantastical world of opera that transformed her listening and her life. Whether we’re listening for the first time or revisiting the arias that first stole our hearts, Avidly Reads Opera welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique—and, always, beautiful music. In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social activism. Avidly Reads Opera is a love letter to the music and those who love it, complete with playlists, a crowdsourced tip sheet from ultra-fans to newbies, and stories of the turbulent, genre-busting, and often hilarious history of opera and its audiences. Across five acts—and the requisite intermission—Alison Kinney takes us everywhere opera’s rich melodies are heard, from the cozy bedrooms of listeners at home, to exclusive music festivals, to protests, and even prisons. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Opera is an homage to the marvelous, sensational world of opera for the casual viewer.
Download or read book Where the Blue Begins written by Christopher Morley and published by Franklin Classics Trade Press. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book The Luckiest Girl written by Beverly Cleary and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic coming-of-age love story from beloved Newbery Medal winner Beverly Cleary. Sixteen-year-old Shelley Latham longs for her junior year of high school to be different from the stifling sameness of the years before. When she is sent from Oregon to California to stay with friends of the family for the school year, she gets her wish. Right away, Shelley’s pretty looks and “Northern” ways endear her to her new classmates, including Hartley, the student body president. Meanwhile, Shelley sets her heart on star basketball player Philip—and when he asks her out, everything seems perfect. Shelley truly is the luckiest girl…but is it Philip or Hartley whom she really loves?
Download or read book Avidly Reads Poetry written by Jacquelyn Ardam and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Poetry has leapt out of its world and into the world” Poetry is everywhere. From Amanda Gorman performing “The Hill We Climb” before the nation at Joe Biden’s Presidential inauguration, to poems regularly going viral on Instagram and Twitter, more Americans are reading and interacting with poetry than ever before. Avidly Reads Poetry is an ode to poetry and the worlds that come into play around the different ways it is written and shared. Mixing literary and cultural criticism with the author’s personal and often intimate relationship with poetry, Avidly Reads Poetry breathes life into poems of every genre—from alphabet poems and Shakespeare’s sonnets to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Rupi Kaur’s Instapoetry—and asks: How do poems come to us? How do they make us feel and think and act when they do? Who and what is poetry for? Who does poetry include and exclude, and what can we learn from it? Each section links a reason why we might read poetry with a type of poem to help us think about how poems are embedded in our lives, in our loves, our educations, our politics, and our social media, sometimes in spite of, and sometimes very much because of, the nation we live in. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Poetry shatters the wall between poetry and “the rest of us.”
Download or read book Unsung written by Schomburg Center and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new historical anthology from transatlantic slavery to the Reconstruction curated by the Schomburg Center, that makes the case for focusing on the histories of Black people as agents and architects of their own lives and ultimate liberation, with a foreword by Kevin Young This is the first Penguin Classics anthology published in partnership with the Schomburg Center, a world-renowned cultural institution documenting black life in America and worldwide. A historic branch of NYPL located in Harlem, the Schomburg holds one of the world's premiere collections of slavery material within the Lapidus Center for Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery. Unsung will place well-known documents by abolitionists alongside lesser-known life stories and overlooked or previously uncelebrated accounts of the everyday lives and activism that were central in the slavery era, but that are mostly excised from today's master accounts. Unsung will also highlight related titles from founder Arturo Schomburg's initial collection: rare histories and first-person narratives about slavery that assisted his generation in understanding the roots of their contemporary social struggles. Unsung will draw from the Schomburg's rich holdings in order to lead a dynamic discussion of slavery, rebellion, resistance, and anti-slavery protest in the United States.
Download or read book Avidly Reads Screen Time written by Phillip Maciak and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Avidly Reads Screen Time is a heartwarming, harrowing diary of our relationship with screens and the complicated feelings we have about them"--
Download or read book Lives of the Monster Dogs written by Kirsten Bakis and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a race of elegant, superintelligent dogs arrives in twenty-first-century New York, they become instant celebrities, but, unable to adjust to the modern world and confronted with an incurable disease, they construct a fantastic castle and barricade themselves inside.
