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From her operational-base-cum-family-home, Commie Girl brings you this brave and brilliant journal of daily life in a land where no liberal-humanist sentiment has been detected since the dawn of Reaganism. Whether working her way through a syphilis scare or puzzling in vain over the philosophical conundrum of taking Arnold Schwarzenegger seriously, Commie Girl finds the inner solidarity to hoist the red flag everywhere it isn't welcome. And the ferocious gaiety with which she defends herself from the Versace-decked, HumVee-crashing, Chardonnay-addled denizens of the USA's ultimate evil paradise will draw gasps of astonishment and admiration from all those who think it really can't be that bad.
The Year's Work in Medievalism, volume XXV, is based upon but not restricted to the 2010 proceedings of the annual International Conference on Medievalism, organized by the Director of Conferences for the International Society for the Study of Medievalism, Gwendolyn Morgan, and, for 2009, Dr. Pam Clements. The Year's Work in Medievalism also publishes bibliographies, book reviews, and announcements for conferences and other events. Richard Utz, Pi(o)us Medievalism vs. Catholic Modernism: The Case Of George Tyrell Martha Oberle, The Legacy of the Medieval Mendicant Orders Chelsea Gunter, Mysticism and Messianism in the Poetry of Paul Celan William Calin, Postcolonialism and Medievalism: How F...
The work of black writers, editors, publishers, and librarians is deeply embedded in the history of American print culture, from slave narratives to digital databases. While the printed word can seem democratizing, it remains that the infrastructures of print and digital culture can be as limiting as they are enabling. Contributors to this volume explore the relationship between expression and such frameworks, analyzing how different mediums, library catalogs, and search engines shape the production and reception of written and visual culture. Topics include antebellum literature, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement; “post-Black” art, the role of black librarians, and how present-day technologies aid or hinder the discoverability of work by African Americans. Against a Sharp White Background covers elements of production, circulation, and reception of African American writing across a range of genres and contexts. This collection challenges mainstream book history and print culture to understand that race and racialization are inseparable from the study of texts and their technologies.
Los Lobos leaped into the national spotlight in 1987, when their cover of “La Bamba” became a No. 1 hit. But what looked like an overnight achievement to the band’s new fans was actually a way station in a long musical journey that began in East Los Angeles in 1973 and is still going strong. Across four decades, Los Lobos (Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano, David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez, and Steve Berlin) have ranged through virtually the entire breadth of American vernacular music, from rockabilly to primal punk rock, R&B to country and folk, Mexican son jarocho to Tex-Mex conjunto and Latin American cumbia. Their sui generis sound has sold millions of albums and won acclaim from fans and crit...
Evil Paradises, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, is a global guidebook to phantasmagoric but real places—alternate realities being constructed as “utopias” in a capitalist era unfettered by unions and state regulation. These developments—in cities, deserts, and in the middle of the sea—are worlds where consumption and inequality surpass our worst nightmares. Although they read like science fiction, the case studies are shockingly real. In Dubai, where child slavery existed until very recently, a gilded archipelago of private islands known as “The World” is literally being added to the ocean. In Medellín and Kabul, drug lords—in many ways textbook capitalists—...
“I worked in a trailer that ICE had set aside for conversations between the women and the attorneys. While we talked, their children, most of whom seemed to be between three and eight years old, played with a few toys on the floor. It was hard for me to get my head around the idea of a jail full of toddlers, but there they were.” For decades, advocates for refugee children and families have fought to end the U.S. government’s practice of jailing children and families for months, or even years, until overburdened immigration courts could rule on their claims for asylum. Baby Jails is the history of that legal and political struggle. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown Universit...
John Kulvicki offers an account of the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful which is inspired by the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts, along with language, gesture, facial expressions, and props. They express wide ranges of thoughts, make assertions, offer warnings, instructions, and commands. Pictures are also representations. They have meanings, which help explain the range of communicative uses to which they can be put. Modelling the meanings of pictures is accounting for the ways in which pictures manage to be meaningful, with an eye toward how those meanings let us use them as we do. By framing pictures with the philosophy of language, ...
The magazine of digital arts.
De-Centering Cold War History challenges the Cold War master narratives that focus on super-power politics by shifting our analytical perspective to include local-level experiences and regional initiatives that were crucial to the making of a Cold War world. Cold War histories are often told as stories of national leaders, state policies and the global confrontation that pitted a Communist Eastern Bloc against a Capitalist West. Taking a new analytical approach this book reveals unexpected complexities in the historical trajectory of the Cold War. Contributions from an international group of scholars take a fresh look at historical agency in different places across the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. This collaborative effort shapes a street-level history of the global Cold War era, one that uses the analysis of the 'local' to rethink and reframe the wider picture of the 'global', connecting the political negotiations of individuals and communities at the intersection of places and of meeting points between 'ordinary' people and political elites to the Cold War at large. Essential reading for all students of Cold War history.
Best Music Writing has faithfully collected the year's most compelling writing on music for a decade now, so it's appropriate this special edition be guest-edited by one of the best-known writers on music and popular culture, Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces, Mystery Train, Like a Rolling Stone, and other groundbreaking excursions into the very fabric of music, America, and beyond. As always, Series Editor Daphne Carr has culled an impressively wide range of essays, profiles, news articles, interviews, creative non-fiction, fiction, book reviews, long-format reviews, blog posts, and journal articles on music and music culture, from rock and hip-hop to R&B and jazz to pop, blues, and more. Writers who have been published in Best Music Writing include Alex Ross, Jonathan Lethem, Ann Powers, Dave Eggers, Susan Orlean, and more.