You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Dismantles the Woody Guthrie we have been taught—the rough-and-ready rambling’ man—to reveal an artist who discovered how intimacy is crucial for political struggle Woody Guthrie is often mythologized as the classic American “rambling’ man,” a real-life Steinbeckian folk hero who fought for working-class interests and inspired Bob Dylan. Biographers and fans frame him as a foe of fascism and focus on his politically charged folk songs. What’s left unexamined is how the bulk of Guthrie’s work—most of which is unpublished or little known—delves into the importance of intimacy in his personal and political life. Featuring an insert with personal photos of Guthrie’s family ...
DIVExamines the role of television in public space at different points in the history of the medium and how that differs from the normal assumptions of domestic viewing space./div
From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating and provocative insights into our sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.
This issue of Social Text offers fresh perspectives on the study of sound, music, and politics by centering its attention on recording. The contributors to "The Politics of Recorded Sound" seek to tell a broader story, both politically and historically, about the role of recording in modernity, moving beyond the usual focus on music alone, and portraying it as dialectically engaged with historical formations of race, gender, labor, disability, and nation. One essay uncovers the lost history of studio recordings of lynching reenactments in the 1890s and analyzes the place of these reenactments among representations of blackness in early phonography. Another essay provides a detailed account of the piano roll's centrality in technological and cultural conceptions of sound reproduction, while yet another essay exposes the role of experiments with the deaf in the development of sound recording technology. The final essay addresses the utopian impulse in contemporary global pop.
Queer Insists is a memorial essay, a work of mourning, written for the queer theorist and performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013) shortly after his untimely death in December 2013. In a series of fragments, not unlike Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, Michael O'Rourke shares memories of Muñoz, the stories and reflections of his friends in the wake of his passing, and readings of his work from Disidentifications to Cruising Utopia and beyond. O'Rourke argues that, for Muñoz, queer does not exist, per se, but rather insists, soliciting us from the future to-come. Muñoz reached towards teleopoietic worlds as he invented a queer theory we have yet to find, but are invited to glimp...
Before the Civil War, American writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe had established authorship as a respectable profession for women. But though they had written some of the most popular and influential novels of the century, they accepted the taboo against female writers, regarding themselves as educators and businesswomen. During and after the Civil War, some women writers began to challenge this view, seeing themselves as artists writing for themselves and for posterity. Writing for Immortality studies the lives and works of four prominent members of the first generation of American women who strived for recognition as serious literary artists: Louisa May Alc...
“Dazzling intelligence radiates here, out from sentences giving such pleasure, yielding the finest devotion I’ve seen to literature’s own theoretical force. Coviello listens, carefully, brilliantly, for the flickerings, the liquid meanderings, all too easily explained as “sexual”—or never even perceived at all. Here is a critic as joyful as Whitman, with his dark core fully afire.” —Kathryn Bond Stockton, Distinguished Professor of English at University of Utah In nineteenth-century America—before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality—what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexu...
This is not a book about sound. It is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. John Mowitt seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. Mowitt is particularly interested in the fact that beyond hearing and listening we “audit” sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of "sound studies." To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound—including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence—to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making. Sounds: The Ambient Humanities significantly engages, provokes, and contributes to the dynamic field and inquiry of sound studies.
In the second half of the twentieth century, new sounds began to reverberate across the United States. The voices of African-Americans as well as of women, Latinx, queer, and trans people broke through in social movements, street protests, and in media stories of political and social disruption. Postwar America literally sounded different. This book argues that new technologies and new mobilities sharpened American attention to these audibly coded identities, on the radio, on the streets and highways, in new music, and on television. Covering the Puerto Rican migration to New York in the 1950s, the varying uses of CB radio by white and African American citizens in the 1970s, and the emergence of audible queerness, Art M. Blake attunes us to the sounds of race, mobility, and audible difference. As he argues, marginalized groups disrupted the postwar machine age by using new media technologies to make themselves heard.
Acoustic Jurisprudence provides the first detailed study of the trial of Simon Bikindi, who was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of inciting genocide with his songs. Using Bikindi as a case study, the book develops the many relations between law and sound, and the importance of sound in legal practice more widely.