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How a preoccupation with charismatic leadership in African American culture has influenced literature from World War I to the present
Reciprocity, Wonder, Consequence : Object Lessons in the Land of Fire -- Of Blindness, Blood, and Second Sight : Transpersonal Journeys from Brazil to Ethiopia -- Creole Authenticity and Cultural Performance : Ethnographic Personhood in the Twentieth Century -- Performing Diaspora : The Science of Speaking for Haiti -- Conclusion : "I Danced, I Don't Know How" : Media, Race, and the Posthuman
This new collection of essays on American stage and film melodrama assesses the multifarious and contradictory uses to which melodrama has been put in American culture from the late 18th century to the present. It focuses on the various ways in which the genre has periodically intervened in debates over race, class, gender and sexuality and, in this manner, has also persistently contributed to the formation and transformation of American nationhood: from the debates over who constitutes the newborn nation in the Early Republic, to the subsequent conflict over abolition and the discussion of gender roles at the turn of the 19th century, to the fervent class struggles of the 1930s and the critiques of domestic containment in the 1950s, as well as to ongoing debates of gender, race, and sexuality today. Addressing these issues from a variety of different angles, including historical, aesthetic, cultural, phenomenological, and psychological approaches, these essays present a complex picture of the cultural work and passionate politics accomplished by melodrama over the course of the past two centuries, particularly at times of profound social change.
Racial capitalism is and was not inevitable. At every point in US history, the exploited and dispossessed rebelled for an alternative future. In No More Peace, Oliver Baker highlights how numerous insurrections, revolts, and armed campaigns of enslaved and colonized people advanced abolition war as the movement to win collective life over class society in North America. From this aim, abolition war became the motor force for constant white counterrevolution. This puts America's history of class struggles in a revealing new light. Through historical analysis, literary critique, and theory, Baker shows how Black and Indigenous rebels developed insights about counterrevolution precisely through...
The book investigates the relations between American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the sciences of the brain and the nervous system, showing how literary authors investigated, used, and challenged this emerging neurophysiology.
Musicologists and performance studies scholars reach across their disciplines to examine the role of performance in musical culture
For much of the nineteenth century, the nervous system was a medical mystery, inspiring scientific studies and exciting great public interest. Because of this widespread fascination, the nerves came to explain the means by which mind and body related to each other. By the 1830s, the nervous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body, and for society, of major historical changes. Literary writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used the nerves as a metaphor to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Representing the 'romance' of the nervous system and its cultural impact thoughtfully and, at times, critically, the fictional experiments of this century helped construct and explore a neurological vision of the body and mind. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.
This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural productions, examining how they serve as ways of perceiving American culture. Visiting literature, film, and music, it considers how manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, including how they have been commodified.
"The unending tragedy of Reconstruction," wrote W. E. B. Du Bois, "is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its... national and worldwide implications." And yet the long shadow of Reconstruction's failure has loomed large in the American imagination, serving as a parable of race and democracy both at home and abroad. In Reconstructing the World Harilaos Stecopoulos looks at an array of American writers who, over the course of the twentieth century, used the South as a touchstone for thinking about the nation's global ambitions. Focusing on the lives and writings of Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Richard ...
In Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850, Mark J. Miller argues that transatlantic Protestant discourses of abjection engaged with, and furthered the development of, concepts of race and sexuality in the creation of public subjects and public spheres.