Download or read book Monstrous Intimacies written by Christina Sharpe and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Download or read book Monstrous Intimacies written by Christina Sharpe and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Download or read book Intimacies written by Katie Kitamura and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE 2021 READS AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A BEST BOOK OF 2021 FROM Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly “Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller…. Katie Kitamura is a wonder.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document “One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths. An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes. A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.

Download or read book Dear Senator written by Essie Mae Washington-Williams and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2006-01-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington–Williams comes forward with a story of unique historical magnitude and incredible human drama. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, was once the nation's leading voice for racial segregation (one of his signature political achievements was his 24–hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, done in the name of saving the South from "mongrelization"). Her mother, however, was a black teenager named Carrie Butler who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family's South Carolina plantation. Set against the explosively changing times of the civil rights movement, this poignant memoir recalls how she struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew–one who was financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate–and the Old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge her publicly. From her richly told narrative, as well as the letters she and Thurmond wrote to each other over the years, emerges a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a father who counseled his daughter about her dreams and goals, and supported her in reaching them–but who was unwilling to break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents. With elegance, dignity, and candor, Washington–Williams gives us a chapter of American history as it has never been written before–told in a voice that will be heard and cherished by future generations.

Download or read book In the Wake written by Christina Sharpe and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-21 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

Download or read book Zong written by M. NourbeSe Philip and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry

Download or read book Throw Yourself Away written by Julia Jarcho and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-09-06 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, critic and playwright Julia Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted in writing. Throw Yourself Away is distinctive in its sustained focus on masochism as an engine of literary production across multiple authors and genres. In particular, Jarcho shows that theater has played a central role in modern erotic fantasies of the literary. Jarcho foregrounds writing as a project of distressed subjects: When masochistic writing is examined as a strategy of response to injurious social systems, it yields a surprisingly feminized—and less uniformly white—image of both masochism and authorship. Ultimately, Jarcho argues that a retheorized concept of masochism helps us understand literature itself as a sex act and shows us how writing can tend to our burdened, desirous bodies. With startling insights into such writers as Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Gaitskill, and Adrienne Kennedy, Throw Yourself Away furnishes a new masochistic theory of literature itself.

Download or read book Bordering intimacy written by Joe Turner and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Bordering intimacy explores the interconnected role of borders and dominant forms of family intimacy in the governance of postcolonial states. Combining a historical investigation with postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the book reveals how the border policies of the British and other European empires have been reinvented for the twenty-first century through appeals to protect and sustain ‘family life’ – appeals that serve to justify and obfuscate the continued organisation of racialised violence. The book examines the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government, including family visa regimes, the policing of ‘sham marriages’, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics and integration policy.

Download or read book A Map to the Door of No Return written by Dionne Brand and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history—the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

Download or read book Sites of Slavery written by Salamishah Tillet and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker—turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States.

Download or read book Notes on an Execution written by Danya Kukafka and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE 2023 EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL • NEW YORK TIMES BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR “Defiantly populated with living women . . . beautifully drawn, dense with detail and specificity . . . Notes on an Execution is nuanced, ambitious and compelling.” —Katie Kitamura, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (Editors' Choice) "A searing portrait of the complicated women caught in the orbit of a serial killer. . . . Compassionate and thought-provoking." –BRIT BENNETT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half Recommended by New York Times Book Review • Los Angeles Times • Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • USA Today • Buzzfeed • Goodreads • Real Simple • Marie Claire • Rolling Stone • Business Insider • Bustle • PopSugar • The Millions • The Guardian • and many more! In the tradition of Long Bright River and The Mars Room, a gripping and atmospheric work of literary suspense that deconstructs the story of a serial killer on death row, told primarily through the eyes of the women in his life—from the bestselling author of Girl in Snow. Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake. Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men. "Poetic and mesmerizing . . . Powerful, important, intensely human, and filled with a unique examination of tragedy, one where the reader is left with a curious emotion: hope." —USA TODAY “A profound and staggering experience of empathy that challenges us to confront what it means to be human in our darkest moments. . . . I relished every page of this brilliant and gripping masterpiece."—ASHLEY AUDRAIN, New York Times bestselling author of The Push

Download or read book Women Mobilizing Memory written by Ayşe Gül Altınay and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations? Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.

Download or read book High Mas written by Kevin Adonis Browne and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas--a key feature of Trinidad performance--as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness. The first series, "Seeing Blue," features Blue Devils from the village of Paramin, whose performances signify an important revision of the post-emancipation tradition of Jab Molassie (Molasses Devil) in Trinidad. The second series, "La Femme des Revenants," chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar's La Diablesse, which reintroduced the "Caribbean femme fatale" to a new audience. The third series, "Moko Jumbies of the South," looks at Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, a pair of stilt-walkers from the performance group Touch de Sky from San Fernando in southern Trinidad. "Jouvay Reprised," the fourth series, follows the political activist group Jouvay Ayiti performing a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain on Emancipation Day in 2015. Troubling the borders that persist between performer and audience, embodiment and spirituality, culture and self-consciousness, the book interrogates what audiences understand about the role of the participant-observer in public contexts. Representing the uneasy embrace of tradition in Trinidad and the Caribbean at large, the book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience and their complementary cultural expressions. For Browne, Mas performance is an exquisite refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, the tyrannies of colonialism, and the myths of independence.

Download or read book Against the Closet written by Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman argues that from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of transgressive sexuality to express African Americans' longings for individual and collective freedom.

Download or read book Precarious Intimacies written by Faith MacNeil Taylor and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2024-02-22 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time of increasing social and economic inequality, this book illustrates the precarity experienced by millennials facing both rising rents and wage stagnation. Featuring the voices of those with lived experience of precarity in north-east London, MacNeil Taylor focuses on intimacy, reproduction and emotional labour. The book widens readers’ understanding of a middle-class ‘generation rent’ beyond those locked out of anticipated home ownership by considering both social and private renters. Situated in a feminist and queer theoretical framework, the book reveals the crucial role of British policy-making on housing, welfare, and immigration in exacerbating inter- and intra-generational inequality.

Download or read book The Intimacies of Four Continents written by Lisa Lowe and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.

Download or read book Somatechnics written by Samantha Murray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Somatechnics highlights the reciprocal bond between the sôma and the techné of 'the body' and the techniques in which bodies are formed and transformed as crafted responses to the world around us. Structured around the themes of the governance of social bodies, the gendering of sexed bodies and the techniques associated with the formation of the self, Somatechnics presents a groundbreaking study of body modification. Its contributions to the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Deluze and Guattari make it a must read for scholars of sociology, cultural and queer studies and philosophy.