Download or read book Reckless Eyeballing written by Ishmael Reed and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masochism is out and feminism is in, Jews are out and Germans are in, race is out and gender is in, and everyone's fighting (and rewriting) for a piece of the pie. Jewish director Jim Minsk disappears during a trip to the South. Black playwright Ian Ball writes the all-female play Reckless Eyeballing in hopes of getting off the "sex-list." Preeminent playwright Jack Brashford, claiming the Jews stole all his black material, decides to write about Armenians. In the background, an unknown assailant dubbed the "Flower Phantom" runs loose through the city shaving heads of prominent black feminists (to the secret delight of black men).In this hilarious, devastating, but also deeply sympathetic novel, Ishmael Reed turns characters on the backs, sides, tops and bottoms to expose the multiple hypocrisies at the heart of American culture.
Download or read book Film Blackness written by Michael Boyce Gillespie and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.
Download or read book Ardor in the Court written by Jeffrey Miller and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1656: A Boston court sentences a ship's captain to sit in the stocks for two hours for 'lewd and unseemly behaviour' on the Sabbath. His offence? Arriving home that Sunday after three years at sea, he had kissed his wife. 1889: The chief justice of England debates with fellow judges whether a man can have 'sexual connection with a duck.' 1968: J. Edgar Hoover tries to ban the recording 'Two Virgins' because the cover depicts John Lennon and Yoko Ono stark naked from both directions. 2000: A stripper sues her plastic surgeon because her bottom looks like her top after he stitches breast implants into her buttocks. Spanning all legal history, from the Bible onward, these and other sex-charged legal cases are covered when sex meets the law in "Ardor in the Court."
Download or read book Feel Free written by Zadie Smith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Notable Book From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right. Arranged into five sections--In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free--this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network--and Facebook itself--really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes--and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat." Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive--and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith. Zadie Smith's new book, Grand Union, is on sale 10/8/2019.
Download or read book How to See the World written by Nicholas Mirzoeff and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every two minutes, Americans alone take more photographs than were printed in the entire nineteenth century; every minute, people from around the world upload over 300 hours of video to YouTube; and in 2014, we took over one trillion photographs. From the funny memes that we send to our friends to the disturbing photographs we see in the news, we are consuming and producing images in quantities and ways that could never have been anticipated. In the process, we are producing a new worldview powered by changing demographics -- one where the majority of people are young, urban, and globally connected. In How to See the World, visual culture expert Nicholas Mirzoeff offers a sweeping look at history's most famous images -- from Velezquez's Las Meninas to the iconic "Blue Marble" -- to contextualize and make sense of today's visual world. Drawing on art history, sociology, semiotics, and everyday experience, he teaches us how to close read everything from astronaut selfies to Impressionist self-portraits, from Hitchcock films to videos taken by drones. Mirzoeff takes us on a journey through visual revolutions in the arts and sciences, from new mapping techniques in the seventeenth century to new painting styles in the eighteenth and the creation of film, photography, and x-rays in the nineteenth century. In today's networked world, mobile technology and social media enable us to exercise "visual activism" -- the practice of producing and circulating images to drive political and social change. Whether we are looking at pictures showing the effects of climate change on natural and urban landscapes or an fMRI scan demonstrating neurological addiction, Mirzoeff helps us to find meaning in what we see. A powerful and accessible introduction to this new visual culture, How to See the World reveals how images shape our lives, how we can harness their power for good, and why they matter to us all.
Download or read book The Morning After written by Katie Roiphe and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 1994-09-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Katie Roiphe arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1986, she found that the feminism she had been raised to believe in had been radically transformed. The women's movement, which had once signaled such strength and courage, now seemed lodged in a foundation of weakness and fear. At Harvard, and later as a graduate student at Princeton, Roiphe saw a thoroughly new phenomenon taking shape on campus: the emergence of a culture captivated by victimization, and of a new bedroom politics in the university, cloaked in outdated assumptions about the way men and women experience sex. Men were the silencers and women the silenced, and if anyone thought differently no one was saying so. Twenty-four-year-old Katie Roiphe is the first of her generation to speak out publicly against the intolerant turn the women's movement has taken, and in The Morning After she casts a critical eye on what she calls the mating rituals of a rape-sensitive community. From Take Back the Night marches (which Roiphe terms "march as therapy",and "rhapsodies of self-affirmation") to rape-crisis feminists and the growing campus concern with sexual harassment, Roiphe shows us a generation of women whose values are strikingly similar to those their mothers and grandmothers fought so hard to escape from - a generation yearning for regulation, fearful of its sexuality, and animated by a nostalgia for days of greater social control. At once a fierce excoriation of establishment feminism and a passionate call to our best instincts, The Morning After sounds a necessary alarm and entreats women of all ages to take stock of where they came from and where they want to go.
Download or read book Nostalgia and Sexual Difference RLE Feminist Theory written by Janice Doane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dissatisfaction with the present can cause people to gaze nostalgically back to an idealized past; that nostalgia pervades contemporary rhetoric. In lamenting the ‘degeneracy’ of present-day America, social and literary critics as well as contemporary novelists often choose as their scapegoat the women’s movement and its increasing influence. Doane and Hodges show us how these social observers seek to ‘reinstate’ America and American values in ways that, overtly or covertly, do battle with the feminist movement for control of rhetoric, the power of language.
Download or read book Invisibility Blues written by Michele Wallace and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include recollections of her early life in Harlem; a look at the continued underrepresentation of black voices in politics, media, and culture; and the legacy of such figures as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison,and Alice Walker. Wallace addresses the tensions between race, gender, and society, bringing them into the open with a singular mix of literary virtuosity and scholarly rigor. Invisibility Blues challenges and informs with the plain-spoken truth that has made it an acknowledged classic.
Download or read book Shadowing Ralph Ellison written by John S. Wright and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-18 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1952, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) published his novel Invisible Man, which transformed the dynamics of American literature. The novel won the National Book Award, extended the themes of his early short stories, and dramatized in fictional form the cultural theories expressed in his later essay collections Shadow & Act and Going to the Territory. In Shadowing Ralph Ellison, John Wright traces Ellison's intellectual and aesthetic development and the evolution of his cultural philosophy throughout his long career. The book explores Ellison's published fiction, his criticism and correspondence, and his passionate exchanges with—and impact on—other literary intellectuals during the Cold War 1950s and during the culture wars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Wright examines Ellison's body of work through the lens of Ellison's cosmopolitan philosophy of art and culture, which the writer began to construct during the late 1930s. Ellison, Wright argues, eschewed orthodoxy in both political and cultural discourse, maintaining that to achieve the highest cultural awareness and the greatest personal integrity, the individual must cultivate forms of thinking and acting that are fluid, improvisational, and vitalistic—like the blues and jazz. Accordingly, Ellison elaborated throughout his body of work the innumerable ways that rigid cultural labels, categories, and concepts—from racial stereotypes and fashionable academic theories to conventional political doctrines—fail to capture the full potential of human consciousness. Instead, Ellison advocated forms of consciousness and culture akin to what the blues and jazz reveal, and he portrayed those musical traditions as the best embodiment of the evolving American spirit.
Download or read book African American Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reena Virk written by Mythili Rajiva and published by Canadian Scholars’ Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The murder of British Columbia teen Reena Virk shocked Canadians and provoked an outpouring of media commentary, academic explanation, plays, and novels. But while much attention was paid to the problem of violence and "girl bullying," race and related issues hardly figured in mainstream conversation. This collection aims to refocus the conversation about Reena Virk by considering how racism, colonialism, and hierarchies of gender, class, age, and sexuality figure in this crime and our understanding of it. The ten thoughtful chapters by both prominent and emerging scholars force us to grapple with the difficult and at times ugly implications of Reena Virk's murder for Canadian national identity.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Tennessee written by Nancy Capace and published by Somerset Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Tennessee contains detailed information on States: Symbols and Designations, Geography, Archaeology, State History, Local History on individual cities, towns and counties, Chronology of Historic Events in the State, Profiles of Governors, Political Directory, State Constitution, Bibliography of books about the state and an Index.
Download or read book United States written by A. Robert Lee and published by Universitat de València. This book was released on 2011-11-28 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aquest estudi analitza un ordre literari canviant: Amèrica com unitat i diversitat, com un ens nacional i transnacional. Els escrits crítics literaris reunits aquí ofereixen una sèrie de perspectives que tracen gran part de la geografia cultural en joc: la narrativa, l'autobiografia, el teatre, etc. Es presenten també un conjunt d'assajos i ressenyes que, amb diverses direccions d'enfocament, posen atenció als fonaments previs a Colón, a una antologia canònica nord-americana de poesia i al que s'ha omès; la narrativa llatina i als principals dramaturgs antics. Inclou entrevistes a creatius i acadèmics com Gerald Vizenor, Frank Chin, Louis Owens, John Cawelti i Rex Burns. La secció de ressenyes final ofereix una sèrie de monografies de rellevant erudició multicultural així com contribucions a l'emergent i ampli mural d'anàlisi.
Download or read book The Satire of Ishmael Reed written by Jiří Šalamoun and published by Masarykova univerzita. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tato kniha se zaměřuje na tvorbu afroamerického spisovatele Ishmaela Reeda a sleduje, jak se napříč jeho padesátiletou románovou tvorbou proměňuje způsob, jímž autor uplatňuje satiru. Přestože je každý Reedův román originálním knižním počinem, v uplatnění satiry lze najít jisté pravidelnosti a vývojové tendence. Zatímco v Reedově rané satiře převládá společenská kritika založená na zobrazení nestandardní sexuality, v jeho současnější satiře (čímž je označována autorova románová tvorba od roku 1993 dále) dominuje společenská kritika založená na argumentaci. Uvedené mody satiry jsou v knize dále propojeny se dvěma druhy amerického rasismu, s rasismem zjevným a skrytým. Kniha dokládá, že spolu s tím, jak se zjevný rasismus stal v americkém společenském diskurzu nepřípustným a byl nahrazen rasismem skrytým, aktualizoval Ishmael Reed svoji satiru, aby i nadále zůstala efektivním modem společenské kritiky. Kniha je určena pro čtenáře z řad odborné i širší veřejnosti, kteří mají zájem o tvorbu Ishmaela Reeda i afroamerickou literaturu obecně. Inspirativní může být i pro ty, jež se zajímají o žánr satiry a její vývoj.
Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature written by Jay Parini and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 2273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.
Download or read book Facing Black and Jew written by Adam Zachary Newton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-07-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adam Zachary Newton couples works of prose fiction by African American and Jewish American authors from Henry Roth and Ralph Ellison to Philip Roth and David Bradley. Reading the work of such writers alongside and through one another, Newton offers an original way of juxtaposing two major traditions in American literature and rethinking their sometimes vexing relationship. Newton combines Emmanuel Levinas' ethical philosophy and Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory in shaping an innovative kind of ethical-political criticism. A final chapter addresses the Black/Jewish dimension of the O. J. Simpson trial.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media written by Steve Choe and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-09 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters contained in this handbook address key issues concerning the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of violence in film and media. In addition to providing analyses of representations of violence, they also critically discuss the phenomenology of the spectator, images of atrocity in international cinema, affect and documentary, violent video games, digital infrastructures, cruelty in art cinema, and media and state violence, among many other relevant topics. The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media updates existing studies dealing with media and violence while vastly expanding the scope of the field. Representations of violence in film and media are ubiquitous but remain relatively understudied. Too often they are relegated to questions of morality, taste, or aesthetics while judgments about violence can themselves be subjected to moral judgment. Some may question whether objectionable images are worthy of serious scholarly attention at all. While investigating key examples, the chapters in this handbook consider both popular and academic discourses to understand how representations of violence are interpreted and discussed. They propose new approaches and raise novel questions for how we might critically think about this urgent issue within contemporary culture.
