Download or read book Kindred Specters written by Christopher Peterson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The refusal to recognize kinship relations among slaves, interracial couples, and same-sex partners is steeped in historical and cultural taboos. In Kindred Specters, Christopher Peterson explores the ways in which non-normative relationships bear the stigma of death that American culture vehemently denies. Probing Derrida’s notion of spectrality as well as Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death,” Peterson examines how death, mourning, and violence condition all kinship relations. Through Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Peterson lays bare concepts of self-possession and dispossession, freedom and slavery. He reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved against theoretical and historical accounts of ethics, kinship, and violence in order to ask what it means to claim one’s kin as property. Using William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! he considers the political and ethical implications of comparing bans on miscegenation and gay marriage. Tracing the connections between kinship and mourning in American literature and culture, Peterson demonstrates how racial, sexual, and gender minorities often resist their social death by adopting patterns of affinity that are strikingly similar to those that govern normative relationships. He concludes that socially dead “others” can be reanimated only if we avow the mortality and mourning that lie at the root of all kinship relations. Christopher Peterson is visiting assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Download or read book The Afterlives of Specimens written by Lindsay Tuggle and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Afterlives of Specimens explores the space between science and sentiment, the historical moment when the human cadaver became both lost love object and subject of anatomical violence. Walt Whitman witnessed rapid changes in relations between the living and the dead. In the space of a few decades, dissection evolved from a posthumous punishment inflicted on criminals to an element of preservationist technology worthy of the presidential corpse of Abraham Lincoln. Whitman transitioned from a fervent opponent of medical bodysnatching to a literary celebrity who left behind instructions for his own autopsy, including the removal of his brain for scientific study. Grounded in archival discoveries, Afterlives traces the origins of nineteenth-century America’s preservation compulsion, illuminating the influences of botanical, medical, spiritualist, and sentimental discourses on Whitman’s work. Tuggle unveils previously unrecognized connections between Whitman and the leading “medical men” of his era, such as the surgeon John H. Brinton, founding curator of the Army Medical Museum, and Silas Weir Mitchell, the neurologist who discovered phantom limb syndrome. Remains from several amputee soldiers whom Whitman nursed in the Washington hospitals became specimens in the Army Medical Museum. Tuggle is the first scholar to analyze Whitman’s role in medically memorializing the human cadaver and its abandoned parts.

Download or read book The Politics of Mourning written by Micki McElya and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize Winner of the Sharon Harris Book Award Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award of the American Civil War Museum Arlington National Cemetery is one of America’s most sacred shrines, a destination for millions who tour its grounds to honor the men and women of the armed forces who serve and sacrifice. It commemorates their heroism, yet it has always been a place of struggle over the meaning of honor and love of country. Once a showcase plantation, Arlington was transformed by the Civil War, first into a settlement for the once enslaved, and then into a memorial for Union dead. Later wars broadened its significance, as did the creation of its iconic monument to universal military sacrifice: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. As Arlington took its place at the center of the American story, inclusion within its gates became a prerequisite for claims to national belonging. This deeply moving book reminds us that many brave patriots who fought for America abroad struggled to be recognized at home, and that remembering the past and reckoning with it do not always go hand in hand. “Perhaps it is cliché to observe that in the cities of the dead we find meaning for the living. But, as McElya has so gracefully shown, such a cliché is certainly fitting of Arlington.” —American Historical Review “A wonderful history of Arlington National Cemetery, detailing the political and emotional background to this high-profile burial ground.” —Choice

Download or read book Specters of God written by John D. Caputo and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Specters of God, John D. Caputo returns to the original impulse of his work, the "mystical element" in things, here under the name of an "anxious apophatics," as distinct from an "edifying apophatics" anchored in unity with God. In dialogue with Schelling, a new turn for him and the lynchpin of this argument, Caputo addresses the nocturnal powers in being, the specters that haunt our being and bring us up short. The result is an erudite and insightful analysis—in his usual lively and masterful style—of several key "spectral" figures from medieval angelology and Eckhart's Gottheit, through Luther's deus absconditus and Schelling's "Satanology," to the spectralization and virtualization of the world in the "posthuman" age. Arguing that the name of God is not the master name of a super-being who is going to save us but a placeholder for sources deep in our apophatic imaginary, he asks, Has "God" become a (holy) ghost of the past? A passing spectral effect of the ancient harmonies of the spheres? Does radical thinking culminate in a cosmopoetics beyond theism and its theology, in a doxology to the transient glory of the world, whatever it was in the beginning, however eerie its end, world without why?

Download or read book Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by Melanie R. Anderson and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2013-03-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At first glance, Beloved would appear to be the only “ghost story” among Toni Morrison’s nine novels, but as this provocative new study shows, spectral presences and places abound in the celebrated author’s fiction. Melanie R. Anderson explores how Morrison uses specters to bring the traumas of African American life to the forefront, highlighting histories and experiences, both cultural and personal, that society at large too frequently ignores. Working against the background of magical realism, while simultaneously expanding notions of the supernatural within American and African American writing, Morrison peoples her novels with what Anderson identifies as two distinctive types of ghosts: spectral figures and social ghosts. Deconstructing Western binaries, Morrison uses the spectral to indicate power through its transcendence of corporality, temporality, and explication, and she employs the ghostly as a metaphor of erasure for living characters who are marginalized and haunt the edges of their communities. The interaction of these social ghosts with the spectral presences functions as a transformative healing process that draws the marginalized figure out of the shadows and creates links across ruptures between generations and between past and present, life and death. This book examines how these relationships become increasingly more prominent in the novelist’s canon—from their beginnings in The Bluest Eye and Sula, to their flowering in the trilogy that comprises Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, and onward into A Mercy. An important contribution to the understanding of one of America’s premier fiction writers, Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison demonstrates how the Nobel laureate’s powerful and challenging works give presence to the invisible, voice to the previously silenced, and agency to the oppressed outsiders who are refused a space in which to narrate their stories. Melanie R. Anderson is an Instructional Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Mississippi.

Download or read book Modernist Mysteries Persephone written by Tamara Levitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone is a landmark study that will move the field of musicology in important new directions. The book presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of the melodrama Perséphone at the Paris Opera on April 30th, 1934, engaging with the collaborative, transnational nature of the production. Author Tamara Levitz demonstrates how these collaborators-- Igor Stravinsky, André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Ida Rubinstein, among others-used the myth of Persephone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art. In investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of the artists' diverging perspectives, and the fall-out of their titanic clash on the theater stage, Levitz dismantles myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. The result is a revisionary account of modernism in music in the 1930s. As a result of its focus on the collaborative performance, this book differs from traditional accounts of musical modernism and neoclassicism in several ways. First and foremost, it centers on the performance of modernism, highlighting the theatrical, performative, and sensual. Levitz places Christianity in the center of the discussion, and questions the national distinctions common in modernist research by involving a transnational team of collaborators. She further breaks new ground in shifting the focus from "history" to "memory" by emphasizing the commemorative nature of neoclassic listening rituals over the historicist stylization of its scores, and contends that modernists captured on stage and in philosophical argument their simultaneous need and inability to mourn the past. The book as a whole counters the common criticism that neoclassicism was a "reactionary" musical style by suggesting a more pluralistic, ambivalent, and sometimes even progressive politics, and reconnects musical neoclassicism with a queer classicist tradition extending from Winckelmann through Walter Pater to Gide. Modernist Mysteries concludes that 1930s modernists understood neoclassicism not as formalist compositional approaches but rather as a vitalist art haunted by ghosts of the past and promissory visions of the future.

Download or read book A Companion to Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Queer Studies written by George E. Haggerty and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies is the first single volume survey of current discussions taking place in this rapidly developing area of study. Recognizing the multidisciplinary nature of the field, the editors gather new essays by an international team of established and emerging scholars Addresses the politics, economics, history, and cultural impact of sexuality Engages the future of queer studies by asking what sexuality stands for, what work it does, and how it continues to structure discussions in various academic disciplines as well as contemporary politics

Download or read book Cavalry from Hoof to Track written by Roman Jarymowycz and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2009-10-09 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History of cavalry from horses to tanks and helicopters.

Download or read book The Black Reproductive written by Sara Clarke Kaplan and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Black women’s reproduction became integral to white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy—and remains key to their dismantling In the United States, slavery relied on the reproduction and other labors of unfree Black women. Nearly four centuries later, Black reproductivity remains a vital technology for the creation, negotiation, and transformation of sexualized and gendered racial categories. Yet even as Black reproduction has been deployed to resolve the conflicting demands of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, Sara Clarke Kaplan argues that it also holds the potential to destabilize the oppressive systems it is supposed to maintain. The Black Reproductive convenes Black literary and cultural studies with feminist and queer theory to read twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts and images alongside their pre-emancipation counterparts. These provocative, unexpected couplings include how Toni Morrison’s depiction of infanticide regenders Orlando Patterson’s theory of social death, and how Mary Prince’s eighteenth-century fugitive slave narrative is resignified through the representational paradoxes of Gayl Jones’s blues novel Corregidora. Throughout, Kaplan offers new perspectives on Black motherhood and gendered labor, from debates over the relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, to the demise of racist icon Aunt Jemima, to discussions of Black reproductive freedom and abortion. The Black Reproductive gives vital insight into the historic and ongoing conditions of Black unfreedom, and points to the possibilities for a Black feminist practice of individual and collective freedom.

Download or read book Harnessing the Airplane written by Lori A. Henning and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At its dawn in the early twentieth century, the new technology of aviation posed a crucial question to American and British cavalry: what do we do with the airplane? Lacking the hindsight of historical perspective, cavalry planners based their decisions on incomplete information. Harnessing the Airplane compares how the American and British armies dealt with this unique challenge. A multilayered look at a critical aspect of modern industrial warfare, this book examines the ramifications of technological innovation and its role in the fraught relationship that developed between traditional ground units and emerging air forces. Cavalry officers pondered the potential military uses of airplanes and other new technologies early on, but preferred to test them before embracing and incorporating them in their operations. Cavalrymen cautiously examined airplane capabilities, developed applications and doctrine for joint operations, and in the United States, even tried to develop their own, specially designed craft. Throughout the interwar period, instead of replacing the cavalry, airplanes were used cooperatively with cavalry forces in reconnaissance, security, communication, protection, and pursuit—a collaboration tested in maneuvers and officially blessed in both British and American doctrine. This interdependent relationship changed drastically, however, during the 1930s as aviation priorities and doctrine shifted from tactical support of ground troops toward independent strategic bombardment. Henning shows that the American and British experiences with military aviation differed. The nascent British aviation service made quicker inroads into reconnaissance and scouting, even though the British cavalry was the older institution with more-established traditions. The American cavalry, despite its youth, contested the control of reconnaissance as late as the 1930s, years after similar arguments ended in Britain. Drawing on contemporary government reports, memoirs and journals of service personnel, books, and professional and trade journals and magazines, Harnessing the Airplane is a nuanced account of the cavalry’s response to aviation over time and presents a new perspective on a significant chapter of twentieth-century military history.

Download or read book Illegible Will written by Hershini Bhana Young and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Illegible Will Hershini Bhana Young engages with the archive of South African and black diasporic performance to examine the absence of black women's will from that archive. Young argues for that will's illegibility, given the paucity of materials outlining the agency of black historical subjects. Drawing on court documents, novels, photographs, historical records, websites, and descriptions of music and dance, Young shows how black will can be conjured through critical imaginings done in concert with historical research. She critically imagines the will of familiar subjects such as Sarah Baartman and that of obscure figures such as the eighteenth-century slave Tryntjie of Madagascar, who was executed in 1713 for attempting to poison her mistress. She also investigates the presence of will in contemporary expressive culture, such as the Miss Landmine Angola beauty pageant, placing it in the long genealogy of the freak show. In these capacious case studies Young situates South African performance within African diasporic circuits of meaning throughout Africa, North America, and South Asia, demonstrating how performative engagement with archival absence can locate that which was never recorded.

Download or read book Politics Theory and Film written by Bonnie Honig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lars von Trier's intense, disturbing, and sometimes funny films have led many to condemn him as misogynist or misanthropic. The same films inspire this collection's reflections on how our fears and desires regarding gender, power, race, finitude, family, and fate often thwart -- and sometimes feed -- our best democratic aspirations. The essays in this volume attend to von Trier's role as provocateur, as well as to his films' techniques, topics, and storytelling. Where others accuse von Trier of being clichéd, the editors argue that he intensifies the "clichés of our times" in ways that direct our political energies towards apprehending and repairing a shattered world. The book is certainly for von Trier lovers and haters but, at the same time, political, critical, and feminist theorists entirely unfamiliar with von Trier's films will find this volume's essays of interest. Most of the contributors tarry with von Trier to develop new readings of major thinkers and writers, including Agamben, Bataille, Beauvoir, Benjamin, Deleuze, Euripides, Freud, Kierkegaard, Ranciére, Nietzsche, Winnicott, and many more. Von Trier is both central and irrelevant to much of this work. Writing from the fields of classics, literature, gender studies, philosophy, film and political theory, the authors stage an interdisciplinary intervention in film studies.

Download or read book The Ethics of Community written by Ana M. Luszczynska and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ethics of Community initiates a conversation between continental philosophy and cultural/literary studies that is long overdue. Illustrating that there is a fundamental ethics in deconstructionist approaches to community that can be provocatively traced in the context of cultural considerations central to African-American and U.S. Latino literature, this is a book about bridging gaps. Luszczynska nimbly traverses the complex terrain of preeminent French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, offering a valuable introduction to the ethical components of their philosophical projects. Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ana Menendez's In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd serve as case studies through which Nancian community and Derridean bearing witness are elaborated. As Luszczynska demonstrates, Morrison's foregrounding of the distinct cultural sensibilities of her black and white characters and Menendez's preoccupation with geographical displacement and exile, themselves activate a deconstructive ethics. In this groundbreaking study, distinct cultural understandings and contexts provide a novel way of thinking through intricacies of Nancy and Derrida's thought while revealing the potential of the novel to re-imagine ways of being in the concrete world.

Download or read book Queer Roots for the Diaspora written by Jarrod Hayes and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-08-11 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employing rootedness as a way of understanding identity has increasingly been subjected to acerbic political and theoretical critiques. Politically, roots narratives have been criticized for attempting to police identity through a politics of purity—excluding anyone who doesn’t share the same narrative. Theoretically, a critique of essentialism has led to a suspicion against essence and origins regardless of their political implications. The central argument of Queer Roots for the Diaspora is that, in spite of these debates, ultimately the desire for roots contains the “roots” of its own deconstruction. The book considers alternative root narratives that acknowledge the impossibility of returning to origins with any certainty; welcome sexual diversity; acknowledge their own fictionality; reveal that even a single collective identity can be rooted in multiple ways; and create family trees haunted by the queer others patrilineal genealogy seems to marginalize. The roots narratives explored in this book simultaneously assert and question rooted identities within a number of diasporas—African, Jewish, and Armenian. By looking at these together, one can discern between the local specificities of any single diaspora and the commonalities inherent in diaspora as a global phenomenon. This comparatist, interdisciplinary study will interest scholars in a diversity of fields, including diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, LGBTQ studies, French and Francophone studies, American studies, comparative literature, and literary theory.

Download or read book Understanding John Rechy written by María DeGuzmán and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first book-length monograph on the Mexican American novelist, essayist, and playwright John Rechy, best known for his debut novel City of Night, María DeGuzmán offers a conceptually clear yet aesthetically, philosophically, and socio-politically fine-grained analysis of the spectrum of his writing. Recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, ONE Magazine's National Gay and Lesbian Cultural Hero Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement, Rechy is the author of fifteen novels, at least three plays, and several volumes of nonfiction. He has written for the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and Saturday Review. In Understanding John Rechy, María DeGuzmán offers a brief biographical overview and then traces the development of Rechy's craft through his major works by calling attention to central issues, recurring situations and characters, styles, and special techniques. She examines the complexities of his representation of identity, the subjectivity in his male homosexual odyssey and identity quest novels, and his experimentation with genre. She offers a concise yet intricate analysis of the major organizing paradigms and themes, genres, modes, styles, and handling of the gay Chicano's oeuvre. The book's guiding analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which Rechy's works function as cultural critique challenging mainstream values in a deep-structure manner.

Download or read book The Violence of Love written by Kit W. Myers and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2025-01-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents--a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures--in contrast to others that are not--and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.

Download or read book Alabama Getaway written by Allen Tullos and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Alabama Getaway Allen Tullos explores the recent history of one of the nation's most conservative states to reveal its political imaginary—the public shape of power, popular imagery, and individual opportunity. From Alabama's largely ineffectual politicians to its miserly support of education, health care, cultural institutions, and social services, Tullos examines why the state appears to be stuck in repetitive loops of uneven development and debilitating habits of judgment. The state remains tied to fundamentalisms of religion, race, gender, winner-take-all economics, and militarism enforced by punitive and defensive responses to criticism. Tullos traces the spectral legacy of George Wallace, ponders the roots of anti-egalitarian political institutions and tax structures, and challenges Birmingham native Condoleezza Rice's use of the civil rights struggle to justify the war in Iraq. He also gives due coverage to the state's black citizens who with a minority of whites have sustained a movement for social justice and democratic inclusion. As Alabama competes for cultural tourism and global industries like auto manufacturing and biomedical research, Alabama Getaway asks if the coming years will see a transformation of the “Heart of Dixie.”