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Immersive Words traces how innovations in visual practices and aesthetics in the nineteenth century changed the aesthetics of American literature with profound consequences for America's evolving national identity.
Winner, 2021 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award, given by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Winner, 2021 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best Academic/Scholarly Work Honorable Mention, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture Association Winner, 2020 Charles Hatfield Book Prize, given by the Comic Studies Society Traces the history of racial caricature and the ways that Black cartoonists have turned this visual grammar on its head Revealing the long aesthetic tradition of African American cartoonists who have made use of racist caricature as a black diasporic art practice, Reb...
Haunted by the memories of her powerfully destructive mother, Jamaica Kincaid is a writer out of necessity. Born Elaine Potter Richardson, Kincaid grew up in the West Indies in the shadow of her deeply contemptuous and abusive mother, Annie Drew. Drawing heavily on Kincaid's many remarks on the autobiographical sources of her writings, J. Brooks Bouson investigates the ongoing construction of Kincaid's autobiographical and political identities. She focuses attention on what many critics find so enigmatic and what lies at the heart of Kincaid's fiction and nonfiction work: the "mother mystery." Bouson demonstrates, through careful readings, how Kincaid uses her writing to transform her feelings of shame into pride as she wins the praise of an admiring critical establishment and an ever-growing reading public.
Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in efforts to advance women’s work and in exploring the implicit obstacles to gender equity – such as the “glass floor,” “glass ceiling,” and “glass walls” – that have persisted in most career fields. This interdisciplinary collection contributes to this new field of knowledge by curating scholarly essays and current research on gendered work environments and all the nuanced meanings of “work” in the context of feminism and gender equality. The chapters represent some of the most outstanding papers presented at the Women and Gender Conference held at the University of South Dakota on April 9–10, 2015. The unifying...
The book studies the cultural texts—fiction, protest effigies, photographs, films, reportage, eyewitness accounts, campaign posters and reports—produced around the world’s worst industrial disaster: the Bhopal tragedy of 1984. It makes a case for an ecological Gothic, wherein the city, its landscape and its people are Gothicized. After tracing the history of the disaster as a history of negligence, the book proceeds in later chapters to study the coverage of the events themselves by eyewitnesses and survivors, and the remnants, in various forms, of the disaster – the haunting – within human bodies and nature. Finally, it examines the industrial ruins and the mobilization of protests against Union Carbide.
Millions of Southerners left the South in the twentieth century in a mass migration that has, in many ways, rewoven the fabric of American society on cultural, political, and economic levels. Because the movements of Southerners—and people in general—are controlled not only by physical boundaries marked on a map but also by narratives that define movement, narrative is central in building and sustaining borders and in breaking them down. In Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of Southern Identity, author Mary Weaks-Baxter analyzes narratives by and about those who left the South and how those narratives have remade what it means to be southern. Drawing from a b...
Dirty Work sheds light on the complex relationships between women employers and their household help in the early twentieth century through their representations in literature, including women’s magazines, conduct manuals, and particularly female-authored fiction. Domestic service brought together women from different classes, races, and ethnicities, and with it, a degree of social anxiety as upwardly mobile young women struggled to construct their identities in a changing world. The book focuses on the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Anzia Yezierska, and Fannie Hurst and their various depictions of the maid/mistress relationship, revealing “a feminized and racialized brand of class hegemony.” Modern servants became configured as racial, hygienic, and social threats to the emergent ideal of the nuclear family, and played critical rhetorical roles in first-wave feminism and the New Negro movements. Ann Mattis reveals how U.S. domestic service was the political unconscious of cultural narratives that attempted to define modern domesticity and progressive femininity in monolithic terms.
This book explores the poetry, pottery, and culture of David Drake, an antebellum slave who distinguished himself by composing verse on the ceramics he produced in the years leading up to the Civil War. From the 1830s to 1850s, he incised couplets and signatures (a singular "Dave") onto the incredibly large storage vessels that he made. In fact, his stoneware pots and jars are among the largest made in North America during the antebellum era. Rich with biblical allusions, historical facts, and personal opinions, his art provides insights into the lives of slaves, craftsmen, and the culture of the American South in the first half of the nineteenth century. The essays here engage with the historical context and major issues that Drake's work provokes, among them: prohibitions against slave literacy; Drake's privileged status compared to other slaves at the time; the interpretive status of his material craft objects; the influence of contemporary African American poet George Moses Horton; and Drake's ability to sell his pottery despite the fact that slaves were not officially permitted to participate in a cash economy.
"The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. Zachary Tavlin's "Glancing Visions" challenges the long-standing assumption that visuality in nineteenth-century art and literature was inherently imperialistic or possessive. While there is much to be said for both material, economic, and theological impulses to clear the wilderness, superimpose a national identity, and usher in a Puritanical idyll, many literary f...
Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a collection of twelve essays by cultural critics that exposes how fraught relations of identity and race appear through imaging technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, sculpture, photography, painting, music, theater, and, finally, the twenty-first century visual commentary of Kara Walker. Throughout these essays, the racial practices of the nineteenth century are juxtaposed with literary practices involving some of the most prominent writers about race and identity, such as Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the technologies of performance including theater and music. Recent work in critical theories of vision, technology, and the production of ideas about racial discourse has emphasized the inextricability of photography with notions of race and American identity. The collected essays provide a vivid sense of how imagery about race appears in the formative period of the nineteenth-century United States.