Fordham University Press

Facts and established truths are regularly denied in contemporary life. This situation has brought paranoid politics into the mainstream, from conspiracy theories like QAnon, to sex panics and assaults on public health measures, to election denialism and the rise of vigilante militias. Paranoid Publics analyzes these phenomena as psychosocial realities enmeshed with emerging ways of determining truth.

Today’s paranoia cannot simply be blamed on the rise of social media or the recent surge of populist anger. Rather, as Chaudhary shows, both are fueled by preexisting psychosocial processes. Applying psychodynamics to analyze truth and politics, Paranoid Publics foregrounds unconscious demands, wishes, and compulsions. Against the hope that progressive economic policies might dispel widespread disorientation and disillusionment, Chaudhary reveals how psychic realities mark politics as deeply as do self-interest and class dynamics.

Chaudhary takes up and reinvents psychoanalytic concepts to analyze how, for example, the personal liberty exercised through vaccine exemptions is paradoxically grounded in submission to the authority of the family and the state. Such politically consequential attitudes concerning truth emerge from a social order that they proceed to challenge. Making a case for psychosocial understandings of our current historical juncture, Paranoid Publics radically expands our notion of the political.

In cinema, blurriness is usually intended to go unnoticed. When it appears it is either considered an error — a mistake of focus or a technological failure — or a background effect of shallow focus intended to offset a defined image. As Martine Beugnet argues, however, blur is an essential feature of the cinema, possessing its own properties and affordances, and capable of powerful effects.

Examining an array of notable examples of blurriness from horror to art cinema and experimental film, and including the works of the Lumière brothers, Josef von Sternberg, Agnès Varda and many others, she develops a taxonomy of blurs, from speed and motion blur to the hand-held, “shaky camera” blur common in contemporary digital cinema. These wide-ranging instances all return the viewer to the sensorial and material qualities of the moving image.

In the face of technological developments that valorize sharpness as an indicator of progress, blur stands as a provocative reminder of the value of uncertainty—a sign of the irreducible mystery at the heart of the filmic image.

Facts and established truths are regularly denied in contemporary life. This situation has brought paranoid politics into the mainstream, from conspiracy theories like QAnon, to sex panics and assaults on public health measures, to election denialism and the rise of vigilante militias. Paranoid Publics analyzes these phenomena as psychosocial realities enmeshed with emerging ways of determining truth.

Today’s paranoia cannot simply be blamed on the rise of social media or the recent surge of populist anger. Rather, as Chaudhary shows, both are fueled by preexisting psychosocial processes. Applying psychodynamics to analyze truth and politics, Paranoid Publics foregrounds unconscious demands, wishes, and compulsions. Against the hope that progressive economic policies might dispel widespread disorientation and disillusionment, Chaudhary reveals how psychic realities mark politics as deeply as do self-interest and class dynamics.

Chaudhary takes up and reinvents psychoanalytic concepts to analyze how, for example, the personal liberty exercised through vaccine exemptions is paradoxically grounded in submission to the authority of the family and the state. Such politically consequential attitudes concerning truth emerge from a social order that they proceed to challenge. Making a case for psychosocial understandings of our current historical juncture, Paranoid Publics radically expands our notion of the political.

How Thomas Jefferson’s vision for knowledge shapes what we know and how we access it—and why that matters more than ever

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Peculiar Satisfaction examines how the ideals and contradictions of the nation’s founding live on in libraries, archives, and museums. Thomas Jefferson championed an informed citizenry as essential to democracy, yet the systems he built to organize knowledge reinforced racial and ideological hierarchies that persist today.

Melissa Adler explores Jefferson’s lasting influence on public institutions, from his personal library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress, to his archival practices in gov­ernment record-keeping and his museum at Monticello as a site of colonial knowledge production. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she reveals how his methods of classification and preservation shaped national memory and democratic participation.

Drawing from archival research and critical theory, Peculiar Satisfaction exposes the paradoxes of access, exclusion, and control embedded in information systems. As censorship and disinformation threaten democracy, Adler argues that understanding these foundational structures is essential to defending the role of knowledge in public life.

Offering a fresh perspective on the ways information, power, and race have shaped American institutions, this book will engage scholars and general readers interested in how libraries, archives, and museums influence history, democracy, and collective memory and argues for a nuanced understanding of these institutions at a critical moment where disinformation and authoritarian rule threaten to undo them.

Explores four centuries of colonization, land divisions, and urban development around this historic landmark neighborhood in West Harlem

It was the neighborhood where Alexander Hamilton built his country home, George Gershwin wrote his first hit, a young Norman Rockwell discovered he liked to draw, and Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man. Through words and pictures, Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill traces the transition of this picturesque section of Harlem from lush farmland in the early 1600s to its modern-day growth as a unique Manhattan neighborhood highlighted by stunning architecture, Harlem Renaissance gatherings, and the famous residents who called it home.

Stretching from approximately 135th Street and Edgecombe Avenue to around 165th, all the way to the Hudson River, this small section in the Heights of West Harlem is home to so many significant events, so many extraordinary people, and so much of New York’s most stunning architecture, it’s hard to believe one place could contain all that majesty. Author Davida Siwisa James brings to compelling literary life the unique residents and dwelling places of this Harlem neighborhood that stands at the heart of the country’s founding. Here she uncovers the long-lost history of the transitions to Hamilton Grange in the aftermath of Alexander Hamilton’s death and the building boom from about 1885 to 1930 that made it one of Manhattan’s most historic and architecturally desirable neighborhoods, now and a century ago. The book also shares the story of the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art, one of the fi rst in the nation to focus on arts and music. The author chronicles the history of the James A. Bailey House, as well as the Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan’s oldest surviving residence and famously known as George Washington’s headquarters at the start of the American Revolution.

By telling the history of its vibrant people and the beautiful architecture of this lovely, well-maintained historic landmark neighborhood, James also dispels the misconception that Harlem was primarily a ghetto wasteland. The book also touches upon the Great Migration of Blacks leaving the South who landed in Harlem, helping it become the mecca for African Americans, including such Harlem Renaissance artists and luminaries as Thurgood Marshall, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Paul Robeson, Regina Anderson Andrews, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

FINALIST, THE RANDY SHILTS AWARD FOR GAY NONFICTION, THE PUBLISHING TRIANGLE AWARDS

A passionate exhortation to expand the ways we talk about human sex, sexuality, and gender.

Twenty-five years ago, Mark D. Jordan published his landmark book on the invention and early history of the category “sodomy,” one that helped to decriminalize certain sexual acts in the United States and to remove the word sodomy from the updated version of a standard English translation of the Christian Bible. In Queer Callings, Jordan extends the same kind of illuminating critical analysis to present uses of “identity” with regard to sexual difference. While the stakes might not seem as high, he acknowledges, his newest history of sexuality is just as vital to a better present and future.

Shaking up current conversations that focus on “identity language,” this essential new book seeks to restore queer languages of desire by inviting readers to consider how understandings of “sexual identity” have shifted—and continue to shift—over time. Queer Callings re-reads texts in various genres—literary and political, religious and autobiographical—that have been preoccupied with naming sex/gender diversity beyond a scheme of LGBTQ+ identities. Engaging a wide range of literary and critical works concerned with sex/gender self-understanding in relation to “spiritual­ity,” Jordan takes up the writings of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Djuna Barnes, Samuel R. Delany, Audre Lorde, Geoff Mains, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maggie Nelson, and others.

Before it’s possible to perceive sexual identities differently, Jordan argues, current habits for classifying them have to be disrupted. In this way, Queer Callings asks us to reach beyond identity language and invites us to re-perform a selection of alternate languages—some from before the invention of phrases like “sexual identity,” others more recent. Tracing a partial genealogy for “sexual identity” and allied phrases, Jordan reveals that the terms are newer than we might imagine. Many queer folk now counted as literary or political ancestors didn’t claim a sexual or gender identity: They didn’t know they were supposed to have one. Finally, Queer Callings joins the writers it has evoked to resist any remaining confidence that it’s possible to give neatly contained accounts of human desire. Reaching into the past to open our eyes to extraordinary opportunities in our present and future, Queer Callings is a generatively destabilizing and essential read.

In cinema, blurriness is usually intended to go unnoticed. When it appears it is either considered an error — a mistake of focus or a technological failure — or a background effect of shallow focus intended to offset a defined image. As Martine Beugnet argues, however, blur is an essential feature of the cinema, possessing its own properties and affordances, and capable of powerful effects.

Examining an array of notable examples of blurriness from horror to art cinema and experimental film, and including the works of the Lumière brothers, Josef von Sternberg, Agnès Varda and many others, she develops a taxonomy of blurs, from speed and motion blur to the hand-held, “shaky camera” blur common in contemporary digital cinema. These wide-ranging instances all return the viewer to the sensorial and material qualities of the moving image.

In the face of technological developments that valorize sharpness as an indicator of progress, blur stands as a provocative reminder of the value of uncertainty—a sign of the irreducible mystery at the heart of the filmic image.

An exiled professor’s journey from inside and beyond academe

In the summer of 2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois for his unwavering stance on Palestinian human rights and other political controversies. A year later, he landed a job in Lebanon, but that, too, ended badly. With no other recourse, Salaita found himself trading his successful academic career for an hourly salaried job. Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus—a vantage point from which Salaita explores social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, pro­fessional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school—An Honest Living describes the author’s decade of turbulent post-professorial life and his recent return to the lectern.

Steven Salaita was practically born to a life in academia. His father taught physics at an HBCU in southern West Virginia and his earliest memories are of life on campus and the cinder walls of the classroom. It was no surprise that he ended up in the classroom straight after graduate school. Yet three of his university jobs—Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois, and the American University of Beirut [AUB] —ended in public controversy. Shaken by his sudden notoriety and false claims of antisemitism, Salaita found himself driving a school bus to make ends meet. While some considered this just punishment for his anti-Zionist beliefs, Steven found that driving a bus provided him with not just a means to pay the bills but a path toward freedom of thought.

Now ten years later, with a job at American University at Cairo, Salaita reconciles his past with his future. His restlessness has found a home, yet his return to academe is met with the same condition of fugitivity from whence he was expelled: an occasion for defiance, not conciliation. An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of the author’s decade of professional joys and travails.

WINNER, AMERICAN BOOK AWARD

Chronicles a Black Puerto Rican man’s odyssey and transformation from an incarcerated gang member to the Co-Founder of the Young Lords Party.

Growing up fatherless and poor, Felipe Luciano didn’t yearn for wealth or dream of becoming a famous actor or athlete. He was tired of being poor and ached to be a man, to reach that point of sagacity, courage, and independence that would signal to the world that he was now a warrior, ready to fight the battle for truth and justice, to slay the dragon of evil, whatever that might be. In Flesh and Spirit, Luciano paints a vivid portrait of his life in New York City as a member of the city’s Latino community as well as his pivotal role in the Young Lords and The Last Poets.

Luciano’s memoir begins when as a teenage Brooklyn gang member he is convicted of man­slaughter. This pivotal moment changes the trajectory of his life. The American kid raised on Davy Crockett and Superman TV tales emerged from the womb of prison into a harsh, new monochromatic black/white world without the benefit of rose-colored glasses. It was a painful shattering of all his childhood beliefs and the realization that he was a poor Black Puerto Rican in white America clutching onto values that didn’t work. The only flotsam in this churning sea of ’60s social turmoil was college, poetry, revolutionary activity, and sometimes God. After getting an education, Luciano went on to become an acclaimed poet and political activist who advocates for the Latino population of New York City, for the kids growing up in the same circumstances he did.

Sparing no one—not the revolutionaries, the Revolution, nor the author himself—Flesh and Spirit is written with honesty and humility to help guide young people of color and other Americans through the labyrinths of ideology, organization, missteps, false paths, and phony societal promises.

Featuring archival photographs by Michael Abramson reproduced from Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 © 2011 Haymarket Books.

Available in a new digital edition with reflowable text suitable for e-readers

In this comparative work, Jesuit priest and Zen meditation advocate William Johnston offers a contemporary reading of the fourteenth-century Christian mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing and its powerful message of God's unconditional love in the face of despair.

Available in a new digital edition with reflowable text suitable for e-readers

This rare epistolary collection from the Civil War era preserves, amidst a recounting of the martial actions of the Irish Brigade, Peter Welsh's reflections on migration, citizenship, and what we owe to our institutions in an era of prejudice and discrimination.

A bold, trailblazing investigation into soteriology, approached by way of Girardian mimetic theory and Eastern Orthodox theological reflection

Redemption: A Mimetic Soteriology brings French literary critic René Girard’s mimetic theory of human behavior together with a breadth of Christian approaches to redemption through the Cross. Girard’s mimetic understanding of sacrifice is drawn upon to illuminate biblical narratives about redemption as well as the theologies of Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, and Gregory of Nyssa. Nicholas Roumas shows by these readings that redemption can be understood as a reconfigura­tion of symbolic values with profound consequences for human relations and social organization. Redemption thus serves theologians as a basis for a new practical dogmatics.

This exploration is a breath of fresh air in Orthodox theology, utilizing patristic and scriptural sources outside the framework of the predominant “neo-Patristic synthesis” and introducing an entirely new modern paradigm onto the Orthodox scene. For theologians of other traditions, Redemption contributes to the library of Girardian theologies its first Eastern Orthodox install­ment. For Girardians, it provides critique and refinement of many of Girard’s most nuanced views and gives due attention to overlooked and controversial aspects of his thought. For the lay reader, the book provides an accessible entry into the spirituality of the Cross through a lens that is both modern and traditional.

Redemption provides a revitalizing infusion into contemporary Orthodox theological discourse. Its ideas will impact theology in the Orthodox Church and beyond for decades to come and are the basis for a paradigm shift in our understanding of redemption and its practical consequences. The lay reader and professional theologian alike will find novelty and utility in its ideas.

The first sustained treatment of religion and religions in the scholarship of a prominent Caribbean thinker

Sylvia Wynter is a profoundly transdisciplinary scholar whose works span an impressive array of theory, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies as well as different forms, including essays, plays, a novel, and a 935-page unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamor­phosis: New Natives in a New World.” Whatever the medium, Wynter frequently engages religion as a relevant category of analysis, from reflections on Christianity, Islam, and Rastafarianism to the category and role of religion as a universal aspect of human social production.

Wynter’s writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work.

Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years and illustrates how Wynter’s writing has significant implications for the study of religion and religion’s relationship to colonialism, race, humanism, science, and political theology.

This coursebook is the first full-length study of cinematic “legal medievalism,” or the modern interpretation of medieval law in film and popular culture

For more than a century, filmmakers have used the “Middle Ages” to produce popular entertainment and comment on contemporary issues. Each of the twenty chapters in Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World represents an original contribution to our understanding of how medieval regulations, laws, and customs have been depicted in film. It offers a window into the “rules” of medieval society through the lens of popular culture.

This book includes analyses of recent and older films, avant-garde as well as popular cinema. Films discussed in this book include Braveheart (1995), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), The Last Duel (2021), The Green Knight (2021), The Little Hours (2017), and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), among others.

Each chapter explores the contemporary context of the film in question, the medieval literary or historical milieu the film references, and the lessons the film can teach us about the medieval world. Attached to each chapter is an appendix of medieval documentary sources and reading questions to prompt critical reflection.

Inspired by and committed to global Indigenous solidarity and South-South encounters, Indigenous Affinities examines the multifaceted connection between Chiapas and Palestine. In tracing unseen threads that connect parallel geographies of struggle found in contemporary Mayan and Palestinian narratives, Indigenous Affinities proposes affinity as a new conceptual framework. Eqeiq shows how—despite emerging from distinct historical processes of minoritization, subalternization, and racialization—Mayan and Palestinian written, visual, and performance texts articulate a common configuration of Indigeneity. These seemingly unrelated connections, Eqeiq contends, can be read through shared histories of land struggle, practices of autonomy, quests for liberation, and collective resistance to racial capitalism, military oppression, and colonial violence.

Eqeiq examines murals that offer a visual testimony to common struggles and transnational connection, explores fragmented bilingualisms that have propelled language revival and revitalization, highlights a shared concern with borders, and documents the performative commemorations of massacres. Reading such sites together in the complexities and specificities of disparate contexts, Indigenous Affinities illuminates how the lens of affinity can elucidate solidarity and resistance within the Global South.

What is the relationship between a writer’s life, milieu, and thought? In this daring and intellectually expansive text, part memoir and part political philosophy, the anthropologist Rafael Sánchez explores the forces and events that shaped him and the nations through which he moved.

Reconocimientos is a book of both personal and political reckoning, from the thrillingly emancipatory possibilities of Venezuela’s plazas to the political promise and disappointments of revolution. Written in the final year of his life, Reconocimientos moves from scenes of Sánchez’s youth in Cuba to fieldwork on the cult of Maria Lionza in Venezuela to confront the terrifying and alluring forces of patriarchal privilege at the base of monumentalist authoritarianism.

Sánchez’s intimate prose speaks with the urgency both of his own mortality and of the political crises of our moment. Amid the resurgence of patriarchy, hierarchy, and the valorization of inequality that have become pillars of populist movements in Latin America and beyond, Sánchez finds a residual radical possibility in ‘horizontal’ spaces, where the forces of mimesis permit manifold transformations.

Opens the field of Dante Studies to further transnational studies of the Divine Comedy’s circulation, translation, and global influence

This fascinating book examines how Dante was repurposed by Argentine politicians and authors who were concerned with the construction of Argentine national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sottong’s work is informed by the theories of Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, and Nicolas Shumway, who coined the concepts of “invented traditions,” “imagined communities,” and “guiding fictions,” respectively. Sottong has applied these notions to the case of Argentina, which, after the War of Independence from Spain (1810–1818), had to develop its own national cultural identity.

In this volume, she investigates Dante’s transnational influence in Argentina: Why did Argentine authors consistently call upon Dante in their attempts to develop Argentine literature? What are the textual and thematic characteristics of Dante’s Divine Comedy that make it an ideal vehicle for literary appropriation? What are the historical and cultural factors that account for Dante’s enduring popularity in Italy and beyond? How did the strong presence of Italians in Argentina influence cultural production in the developing nation? And how are the re-writings of Dante in the Argentine canon in dialogue with one another?

What Sottong found, remarkably, was that rewriting Dante was a way for Argentine authors to voice their views on the direction that should be taken to develop Argentine letters; Dante became something of a literary guide as Argentine intellectuals navigated the complex labyrinth of their national identity. The consistent rewriting of the Divine Comedy in the Argentine context testifies to the fact that great works of literature can be revived during different periods and even reappropriated by various peoples to foster mythologies of inclusion or exclusion related to national identity.

Offers new perspectives on freedom of conscience and religious liberty by tracing their origins to the Middle Ages, thereby challenging the common assumption that these core tenets of modernity were products of the Enlightenment

Deeply committed to the formation of a just and sacred society, medieval theologians and canon­ists developed sophisticated arguments in defense of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. They did so based upon the conviction that each human person possesses an inalienable right to pursue his or her spiritual vocation and to inquire into the truth, provided that such pursuits were not deemed injurious to the commonweal. For this was an age in which all power, whether secular or sacred, was held to be exercised legitimately only insofar as it served the common good. Within these basic parameters there existed a domain of personal freedom guaranteed by natural and divine law that could not be infringed by either secular or ecclesiastical authority. Theologians and canonists did not countenance blind obedience to reigning powers nor did they permit Christians to stand idle in the face of manifest transgressions of sacred tradition, constitutional order, and fundamental human rights.

Such foundational principles as the sacred domain of conscience, freedom of intellectual inquiry, dissent from unjust authority, and inalienable personal rights had been carefully developed throughout the later Middle Ages, hence from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Contrary to the popular conception, therefore, the West did not need to wait for the Protestant Reforma­tion, or the Enlightenment, for these values to take hold. In fact, the modern West may owe its greatest debt to the Middle Ages. With a Pure Conscience sheds further light on these matters in a variety of contexts, within and without the medieval university walls, and often amid momentous controversies. This was a robust intellectual culture that revered careful analysis and vigorous disputation in its relentless quest to understand and defend the truth as it could be ascertained through both reason and revelation.

Opens the field of Dante Studies to further transnational studies of the Divine Comedy’s circulation, translation, and global influence

This fascinating book examines how Dante was repurposed by Argentine politicians and authors who were concerned with the construction of Argentine national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sottong’s work is informed by the theories of Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, and Nicolas Shumway, who coined the concepts of “invented traditions,” “imagined communities,” and “guiding fictions,” respectively. Sottong has applied these notions to the case of Argentina, which, after the War of Independence from Spain (1810–1818), had to develop its own national cultural identity.

In this volume, she investigates Dante’s transnational influence in Argentina: Why did Argentine authors consistently call upon Dante in their attempts to develop Argentine literature? What are the textual and thematic characteristics of Dante’s Divine Comedy that make it an ideal vehicle for literary appropriation? What are the historical and cultural factors that account for Dante’s enduring popularity in Italy and beyond? How did the strong presence of Italians in Argentina influence cultural production in the developing nation? And how are the re-writings of Dante in the Argentine canon in dialogue with one another?

What Sottong found, remarkably, was that rewriting Dante was a way for Argentine authors to voice their views on the direction that should be taken to develop Argentine letters; Dante became something of a literary guide as Argentine intellectuals navigated the complex labyrinth of their national identity. The consistent rewriting of the Divine Comedy in the Argentine context testifies to the fact that great works of literature can be revived during different periods and even reappropriated by various peoples to foster mythologies of inclusion or exclusion related to national identity.

The Small Worlds of Childhood argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood contain surprising opportunities to reflect on the temporality of experience. In their narratives of children at home in their everyday worlds, Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin are not only able to shed a unique light on key issues in the history of philosophy. They also offer a queer critique of the normative expectation that the literature of childhood is oriented toward the future.

Stone shows that when writers engage in philosophical storytelling, showing children tarrying in quotidian experience, they dislodge childhood from its nostalgic value to grown-ups and the heteronormative demand to grow up. Such stories of children as philosophical subjects thus take on their own lingering, backwards, or all together strange sense of time. Stone demonstrates the necessity of recognizing how texts on childhood—before and beyond Freud—engage literary language in the service of a variety of philosophical attitudes, reminding us how poetic techniques can tell us something extraordinary about moments of ordinary experience and the manner with which humans, and especially children, cognize the world.

By bringing canonical German-language literary and philosophical traditions into conversation with current English-language queer approaches, Stone opens a queer counter-history of German and Austrian realist and modernist literature.

This title is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

What is the relationship between a writer’s life, milieu, and thought? In this daring and intellectually expansive text, part memoir and part political philosophy, the anthropologist Rafael Sánchez explores the forces and events that shaped him and the nations through which he moved.

Reconocimientos is a book of both personal and political reckoning, from the thrillingly emancipatory possibilities of Venezuela’s plazas to the political promise and disappointments of revolution. Written in the final year of his life, Reconocimientos moves from scenes of Sánchez’s youth in Cuba to fieldwork on the cult of Maria Lionza in Venezuela to confront the terrifying and alluring forces of patriarchal privilege at the base of monumentalist authoritarianism.

Sánchez’s intimate prose speaks with the urgency both of his own mortality and of the political crises of our moment. Amid the resurgence of patriarchy, hierarchy, and the valorization of inequality that have become pillars of populist movements in Latin America and beyond, Sánchez finds a residual radical possibility in ‘horizontal’ spaces, where the forces of mimesis permit manifold transformations.

Commemorating the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, this volume offers an original examination of the enduring impact of the single most famous gathering of Christians since the apostolic age

Despite the longstanding historical and theological study of the Council of Nicaea, several central questions remain. Was Nicaea a theological event or a political one? What does it mean if it was both? Was Constantine’s intervention without precedent, or was he simply continuing a long-standing role of a Roman emperor who was responsible for leading a religious cult (albeit now for a different faith tradition)? And what about the actual theological debates of Nicaea and our ability to understand them? Scholars might never exhaust this avenue of inquiry, despite the numerous studies in recent decades.

For many scholars and Christian activists today, the significance of Nicaea centers around the idea of conciliarity and what this has meant, both historically and theologically, for the Christian community. Why and how did Nicaea become foundational for thinking that the church operates in a conciliar manner? How did that work historically in different parts of the Christian world? And how should it work today?

Nicaea and the Future of Christianity offers a fresh, globally-diverse, ecumenically-minded approach to these questions with an impressive collection of both senior and junior scholars, reflecting a diversity of views within the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant traditions. The great benefit of this wide-ranging approach lies precisely in its ability to see the many ways in which Nicaea continues to speak to the future of Christianity.

A deeply researched and clearly argued account of the mutual growth of the federal government and the modern tobacco

Nearly everything about the United States tobacco economy changed in the generation following the American Civil War. From labor to consumption, manufacturing to regulation, tobacco was utterly reconstructed, “comparatively a new industry,” as one contemporary wrote.

The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 exposes the causes of these changes, and in the process, it reconsiders cornerstones of the American national narrative. Through a detailed rendering of tobacco’s late-nineteenth-century political economy, this book argues that the federal state’s and American capitalism’s development were mutually constitutive—and fundamentally political—processes. From the Civil War to the Progressive Era, diverse political movements across tobacco’s commodity chain drove state and market development, creating the immense power and stifling poverty that defined tobacco’s reconstruction. The Political Reconstruc­tion of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 emphasizes the significance of the thousands of manufactur­ers whose interest groups shaped federal tax policy and, in turn, forged a powerful and effective internal revenue system; the increasingly influential fertilizer producers and warehouse operators who determined tobacco’s value; and the crop scientists who sought to promote and rationalize US tobacco production. As these actors reshaped tobacco’s commodity chain, they missed, and even dismissed, the interests of tobacco growers, especially newly emancipated African Americans and smallholding whites throughout the South.

The ruling logic of tobacco’s reconstructed political economy rationalized agrarian indebtedness, justified low prices, and intensified labor discipline on thousands of small farms. In emphasizing these exclusions, The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 reveals how nineteenth-century state and economic development coincided with and even created rural poverty.

The Small Worlds of Childhood argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood contain surprising opportunities to reflect on the temporality of experience. In their narratives of children at home in their everyday worlds, Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin are not only able to shed a unique light on key issues in the history of philosophy. They also offer a queer critique of the normative expectation that the literature of childhood is oriented toward the future.

Stone shows that when writers engage in philosophical storytelling, showing children tarrying in quotidian experience, they dislodge childhood from its nostalgic value to grown-ups and the heteronormative demand to grow up. Such stories of children as philosophical subjects thus take on their own lingering, backwards, or all together strange sense of time. Stone demonstrates the necessity of recognizing how texts on childhood—before and beyond Freud—engage literary language in the service of a variety of philosophical attitudes, reminding us how poetic techniques can tell us something extraordinary about moments of ordinary experience and the manner with which humans, and especially children, cognize the world.

By bringing canonical German-language literary and philosophical traditions into conversation with current English-language queer approaches, Stone opens a queer counter-history of German and Austrian realist and modernist literature.

This title is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

This coursebook is the first full-length study of cinematic “legal medievalism,” or the modern interpretation of medieval law in film and popular culture

For more than a century, filmmakers have used the “Middle Ages” to produce popular entertainment and comment on contemporary issues. Each of the twenty chapters in Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World represents an original contribution to our understanding of how medieval regulations, laws, and customs have been depicted in film. It offers a window into the “rules” of medieval society through the lens of popular culture.

This book includes analyses of recent and older films, avant-garde as well as popular cinema. Films discussed in this book include Braveheart (1995), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), The Last Duel (2021), The Green Knight (2021), The Little Hours (2017), and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), among others.

Each chapter explores the contemporary context of the film in question, the medieval literary or historical milieu the film references, and the lessons the film can teach us about the medieval world. Attached to each chapter is an appendix of medieval documentary sources and reading questions to prompt critical reflection.

Muslim charities and community organizations have assumed a significant role in refugee support since the Syrian catastrophe: in Jordan and Canada, as elsewhere, they deliver food aid, house orphans, and organize remedial education. But Islam is more than just a resource for humanitarian projects. The Dread Heights details how the Islamic tradition guides refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars in a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement.

Through an ethnography of religious imagination and theological argumentation, Iqbal demonstrates what is at stake beyond secular frames for migration and relief. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between national orders, The Dread Heights brings another suspension into view: a form of life whose gestures are illuminated by the Quranic figure of the Heights. Iqbal’s ethnography pursues an unsentimental lucidity across the search for refuge, the trials of creational existence, and the ultimately enigmatic divine decree. In the shadow of war, beyond humanitarian order, Islam offers an orientation to the devastation of the present.

A deeply researched and clearly argued account of the mutual growth of the federal government and the modern tobacco

Nearly everything about the United States tobacco economy changed in the generation following the American Civil War. From labor to consumption, manufacturing to regulation, tobacco was utterly reconstructed, “comparatively a new industry,” as one contemporary wrote.

The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 exposes the causes of these changes, and in the process, it reconsiders cornerstones of the American national narrative. Through a detailed rendering of tobacco’s late-nineteenth-century political economy, this book argues that the federal state’s and American capitalism’s development were mutually constitutive—and fundamentally political—processes. From the Civil War to the Progressive Era, diverse political movements across tobacco’s commodity chain drove state and market development, creating the immense power and stifling poverty that defined tobacco’s reconstruction. The Political Reconstruc­tion of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 emphasizes the significance of the thousands of manufactur­ers whose interest groups shaped federal tax policy and, in turn, forged a powerful and effective internal revenue system; the increasingly influential fertilizer producers and warehouse operators who determined tobacco’s value; and the crop scientists who sought to promote and rationalize US tobacco production. As these actors reshaped tobacco’s commodity chain, they missed, and even dismissed, the interests of tobacco growers, especially newly emancipated African Americans and smallholding whites throughout the South.

The ruling logic of tobacco’s reconstructed political economy rationalized agrarian indebtedness, justified low prices, and intensified labor discipline on thousands of small farms. In emphasizing these exclusions, The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 reveals how nineteenth-century state and economic development coincided with and even created rural poverty.

The first sustained treatment of religion and religions in the scholarship of a prominent Caribbean thinker

Sylvia Wynter is a profoundly transdisciplinary scholar whose works span an impressive array of theory, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies as well as different forms, including essays, plays, a novel, and a 935-page unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamor­phosis: New Natives in a New World.” Whatever the medium, Wynter frequently engages religion as a relevant category of analysis, from reflections on Christianity, Islam, and Rastafarianism to the category and role of religion as a universal aspect of human social production.

Wynter’s writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work.

Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years and illustrates how Wynter’s writing has significant implications for the study of religion and religion’s relationship to colonialism, race, humanism, science, and political theology.

The first comparative treatment of the topic of līlā in Hindu and Christian traditions, this volume explores what it means to consider divine and human action under the categories of play, wit, drama, grace, and compassion

God at Play presents a theological exploration of the multifaceted motif of līlā across diverse Hindu and Christian landscapes and its wide-ranging connections to divine and human creativity. Given its ubiquity in Hindu theologies and life-forms, līlā offers a rich comparative framework for exploring certain ways of understanding divine and human action as expressed in Hindu and Christian sacred texts, philosophical theology, and ritual practices.

Though līlā is often interpreted simply as “play,” the essays in this volume reflect a far richer semantic and conceptual field, ranging from spontaneity and gratuitousness, through joy and humor, to mercy and compassion. By focusing on the different contexts in which līlā is found in Hindu traditions and resisting any uniform translation of the term, the contributors to this volume avoid the risk of using predominantly western or Christian categories to understand the Hindu other. The volume thus explores how līlā functions in a variety of distinctive philosophical, theological, and devotional ways across Hindu traditions, and listens for echoes in Christian understandings of the gratuitousness of the created order in relation to God.

God at Play is a genuine experiment in deep learning across traditions. Each chapter reflects on what is learned by taking līlā as the category of comparison and invites the reader to think about what these conversations add, confirm, or change in relation to earlier twentieth-century scholarship on play—not least, in terms of what difference it might make to understand human life as an imitation and a participation in the divine life of a playful deity.

Across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, colonial Britain’s property laws are in the process of being transformed. Aesthetic Impropriety analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law’s colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common law suits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine.

Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy’s challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.

Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature’s generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.

Muslim charities and community organizations have assumed a significant role in refugee support since the Syrian catastrophe: in Jordan and Canada, as elsewhere, they deliver food aid, house orphans, and organize remedial education. But Islam is more than just a resource for humanitarian projects. The Dread Heights details how the Islamic tradition guides refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars in a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement.

Through an ethnography of religious imagination and theological argumentation, Iqbal demonstrates what is at stake beyond secular frames for migration and relief. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between national orders, The Dread Heights brings another suspension into view: a form of life whose gestures are illuminated by the Quranic figure of the Heights. Iqbal’s ethnography pursues an unsentimental lucidity across the search for refuge, the trials of creational existence, and the ultimately enigmatic divine decree. In the shadow of war, beyond humanitarian order, Islam offers an orientation to the devastation of the present.

The first comparative treatment of the topic of līlā in Hindu and Christian traditions, this volume explores what it means to consider divine and human action under the categories of play, wit, drama, grace, and compassion

God at Play presents a theological exploration of the multifaceted motif of līlā across diverse Hindu and Christian landscapes and its wide-ranging connections to divine and human creativity. Given its ubiquity in Hindu theologies and life-forms, līlā offers a rich comparative framework for exploring certain ways of understanding divine and human action as expressed in Hindu and Christian sacred texts, philosophical theology, and ritual practices.

Though līlā is often interpreted simply as “play,” the essays in this volume reflect a far richer semantic and conceptual field, ranging from spontaneity and gratuitousness, through joy and humor, to mercy and compassion. By focusing on the different contexts in which līlā is found in Hindu traditions and resisting any uniform translation of the term, the contributors to this volume avoid the risk of using predominantly western or Christian categories to understand the Hindu other. The volume thus explores how līlā functions in a variety of distinctive philosophical, theological, and devotional ways across Hindu traditions, and listens for echoes in Christian understandings of the gratuitousness of the created order in relation to God.

God at Play is a genuine experiment in deep learning across traditions. Each chapter reflects on what is learned by taking līlā as the category of comparison and invites the reader to think about what these conversations add, confirm, or change in relation to earlier twentieth-century scholarship on play—not least, in terms of what difference it might make to understand human life as an imitation and a participation in the divine life of a playful deity.

Across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, colonial Britain’s property laws are in the process of being transformed. Aesthetic Impropriety analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law’s colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common law suits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine.

Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy’s challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.

Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature’s generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.

Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live.

Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine.

Contributors: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar

“Fighter-Writer” reports from major battles in the Pacific highlight what America’s Marines endured in World War II

Douglass K. Daniel presents a fascinating trove of previously classified material withheld from the public because of government and public relations concerns at the time, including tactical details that could inadvertently aid the enemy, battlefield gore that could disturb readers, and the gamut of issues of taste. Navy censors in the field and editors at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington were also on alert for any material that could negatively affect the Corps itself or the overall war effort. Soul-searching stories that questioned the nature of war were rejected lest they sow doubt stateside about the cause for which so many lives were being lost.

Behind the bylines was a new breed of storytellers. Considered “fighter-writers,” Marine combat correspondents, or CCs, carried typewriters as well as weapons. The Marine Corps Division of Public Relations recruited them from America’s newsrooms to join the fight that stretched from Guadalcanal and the bloody assault on Tarawa to the black sands of Iwo Jima and the dense jungles of Okinawa. Their approved work appeared in civilian newspapers, magazines, and other national and local media.

This collection also highlights the unique efforts of the CCs and the public relations officers who commanded them. While they were assigned to report and write, they were Marines first. They eagerly put aside their notebooks to take up arms against the enemy as needed. Many were wounded in battle, and more than a dozen were killed, giving their lives to get the story behind the most significant conflict in human history.

Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world. Their engagement with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism broadens the scope of global intellectual history to include a non-European origin of concepts and ideas.

Due to the differences in their local crises, the Chinese and the European stories are often narrated in separate national and cultural contexts. Bridging the critical divide between China and the West, The Quest for Liberation examines the thinkers’ shared interest in Chinese philosophy and their common effort to envision a world culture other than Western modernity.

Breaking with the common logic of either studying the reception and adaptation of Western ideas in the East or critiquing the misrepresentation of the East in the West, Zhang’s book emphasizes entanglements between Chinese and European thinkers and highlights their quest for liberation in a globalizing world. Their visions of an ontological commons for everyone help us imagine a better world community in our time of global crises, beyond the clash of civilizations.

This book is available from the publisher on an open access basis.

Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live.

Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine.

Contributors: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar

Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world. Their engagement with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism broadens the scope of global intellectual history to include a non-European origin of concepts and ideas.

Due to the differences in their local crises, the Chinese and the European stories are often narrated in separate national and cultural contexts. Bridging the critical divide between China and the West, The Quest for Liberation examines the thinkers’ shared interest in Chinese philosophy and their common effort to envision a world culture other than Western modernity.

Breaking with the common logic of either studying the reception and adaptation of Western ideas in the East or critiquing the misrepresentation of the East in the West, Zhang’s book emphasizes entanglements between Chinese and European thinkers and highlights their quest for liberation in a globalizing world. Their visions of an ontological commons for everyone help us imagine a better world community in our time of global crises, beyond the clash of civilizations.

This book is available from the publisher on an open access basis.

Inspired by and committed to global Indigenous solidarity and South-South encounters, Indigenous Affinities examines the multifaceted connection between Chiapas and Palestine. In tracing unseen threads that connect parallel geographies of struggle found in contemporary Mayan and Palestinian narratives, Indigenous Affinities proposes affinity as a new conceptual framework. Eqeiq shows how—despite emerging from distinct historical processes of minoritization, subalternization, and racialization—Mayan and Palestinian written, visual, and performance texts articulate a common configuration of Indigeneity. These seemingly unrelated connections, Eqeiq contends, can be read through shared histories of land struggle, practices of autonomy, quests for liberation, and collective resistance to racial capitalism, military oppression, and colonial violence.

Eqeiq examines murals that offer a visual testimony to common struggles and transnational connection, explores fragmented bilingualisms that have propelled language revival and revitalization, highlights a shared concern with borders, and documents the performative commemorations of massacres. Reading such sites together in the complexities and specificities of disparate contexts, Indigenous Affinities illuminates how the lens of affinity can elucidate solidarity and resistance within the Global South.

A bold, trailblazing investigation into soteriology, approached by way of Girardian mimetic theory and Eastern Orthodox theological reflection

Redemption: A Mimetic Soteriology brings French literary critic René Girard’s mimetic theory of human behavior together with a breadth of Christian approaches to redemption through the Cross. Girard’s mimetic understanding of sacrifice is drawn upon to illuminate biblical narratives about redemption as well as the theologies of Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, and Gregory of Nyssa. Nicholas Roumas shows by these readings that redemption can be understood as a reconfigura­tion of symbolic values with profound consequences for human relations and social organization. Redemption thus serves theologians as a basis for a new practical dogmatics.

This exploration is a breath of fresh air in Orthodox theology, utilizing patristic and scriptural sources outside the framework of the predominant “neo-Patristic synthesis” and introducing an entirely new modern paradigm onto the Orthodox scene. For theologians of other traditions, Redemption contributes to the library of Girardian theologies its first Eastern Orthodox install­ment. For Girardians, it provides critique and refinement of many of Girard’s most nuanced views and gives due attention to overlooked and controversial aspects of his thought. For the lay reader, the book provides an accessible entry into the spirituality of the Cross through a lens that is both modern and traditional.

Redemption provides a revitalizing infusion into contemporary Orthodox theological discourse. Its ideas will impact theology in the Orthodox Church and beyond for decades to come and are the basis for a paradigm shift in our understanding of redemption and its practical consequences. The lay reader and professional theologian alike will find novelty and utility in its ideas.

“Fighter-Writer” reports from major battles in the Pacific highlight what America’s Marines endured in World War II

Douglass K. Daniel presents a fascinating trove of previously classified material withheld from the public because of government and public relations concerns at the time, including tactical details that could inadvertently aid the enemy, battlefield gore that could disturb readers, and the gamut of issues of taste. Navy censors in the field and editors at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington were also on alert for any material that could negatively affect the Corps itself or the overall war effort. Soul-searching stories that questioned the nature of war were rejected lest they sow doubt stateside about the cause for which so many lives were being lost.

Behind the bylines was a new breed of storytellers. Considered “fighter-writers,” Marine combat correspondents, or CCs, carried typewriters as well as weapons. The Marine Corps Division of Public Relations recruited them from America’s newsrooms to join the fight that stretched from Guadalcanal and the bloody assault on Tarawa to the black sands of Iwo Jima and the dense jungles of Okinawa. Their approved work appeared in civilian newspapers, magazines, and other national and local media.

This collection also highlights the unique efforts of the CCs and the public relations officers who commanded them. While they were assigned to report and write, they were Marines first. They eagerly put aside their notebooks to take up arms against the enemy as needed. Many were wounded in battle, and more than a dozen were killed, giving their lives to get the story behind the most significant conflict in human history.

Poetry that weaves personal narratives with deep political insights, masterfully exploring the intricate intersections of history, philosophy, and emotion

In this debut collection, renowned scholar Rosalind Morris spans the lyrical landscapes of personal experience and global political dilemmas. Organized into four distinct sections, each featuring seven poems that vary in style and content, For Lack of a Dictionary reflects the diverse facets of human complexity and the struggle to find a language capable of addressing them. Beginning with a mythopoetic exploration of the self and progressing through varied voices and forms—from the epistolary and the erotic to the elegiac—the collection navigates the absences and presences that shape our interpersonal connections. From Homer’s Iliad to Hobbes’s Leviathan, and from the intimate letters of the Rosenbergs to the television broadcasts of lunar landings, Morris revisits epic figures of classical literature with a contemporary voice, concluding with poignant reflections on personal loss and the seductive allure of magical thinking in times of grief.

In the tradition of Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser, Morris engages in a dialogue that challenges and enlightens, positioning For Lack of a Dictionary as a profound commentary on the intersections of personal and political realms.

An exploration of the mythical Mary Glass—her art, her life, and her times

Mary Glass (1946–2021) was an innovative modern dancer and choreographer, quietly instrumental to the San Francisco Bay Area art scene of the 1960s and ’70s—barely known today—admired for her experimental movements based on sounds and images of the Pacific.

As a child, Mary Glass took her first dance class with Anna Halprin on her famed redwood dance deck in Marin County’s Kent Woodlands. Dancing with the blue sky as her ceiling—surrounded by magical madrones and redwoods—the effect on Mary Glass was seismic. Fittingly, Halprin called her classes “dance experiences.”
Mary Glass’s lifestyle, her anxieties, and her dance reflect the human geography of Northern California: Happenings, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), feminism, same-sex love, civil rights, Vietnam, environmentalism. Cascading in the waves of the politics of the time was Mary Glass’s anorexia, an unexpected pregnancy, and her life-long love affair with the Black painter Eliza Vesper.

Today Mary Glass is remembered by an increasingly diminishing handful of devotees. Author Carol Mavor is one of them.

In this daring work of fictocriticism, where “feelings are facts,” Like the Sea asks its readers—just as Anna Halprin asked of each of her young students as they were leaving class—“What are you taking with you from the natural world?”

Halprin’s words will resonate in Mary’s mind her entire lifetime and beyond.

In the after-time of the prescient Mary Glass—with its decline of sea kelp and warm Decembers— Mavor herself considers the Anthropocene, tasting extinction as if swallowing the long-gone abalone mollusks of her own Bay-Area childhood: salty, like the sea, but strangely sweet. And from it, Mavor delivers the reader to the far-away country of the not-so-distant past to help envision a future.

There are no photographs or films of Mary Glass dancing. The life of Mary Glass is nearly forgotten, her memory on the edge of extinction. In meditative, dazzling and lyrical prose, Like the Sea tells us—like the ocean’s music in our ear—we need to remember extinction to imagine our way out of it.

From Marienbad to the Bates Motel, cinematic hotels are more than a mere backdrop to a film’s action. They actively scaffold the formal, aesthetic, and narrative possibilities of cinema. This book takes a journey through spaces of temporary dwelling—hotels, inns, and motels—to delve into the dynamics and contradictions that structure modern life.

Along the way, O’Dwyer considers questions of plot and eroticism, labor and globalization, and the ethics and economics of hospitality. Drawing on a broad array of films from European art cinema to experimental adult media, and placing cinema into dialogue with film theory and media history, Hotels explores both how and why the hotel has such a strong purchase on the cinematic imaginary.

What does it mean to lead a moral life?

In their first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy yet grounded in the opacity of the human subject.

Butler takes as their starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” They show that these questions can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I’ who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?” Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.

In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, they eloquently argue the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.

Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn’t an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?

By recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures” to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.

Bringing together lyric poetry, documentary photographs, and lives lived along the U.S.-Mexico borderland

Written during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, in Carbonate of Copper Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement. The poems stage scenes adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the realities of migration warped by jarring political vitriol, bearing witness to past and present-day hazards and sorrows wagered by those in search of asylum. So enabled, these poems make visible not only the infrastructure of militarized surveillance and its detention complex but also the aspiration to justice and mercy and the resilient self-organized order of time for migrants seeking human dignity while awaiting passage to the other side of the dividing line.

The book’s title refers also to a mineral found in azurite and malachite, a color medium that had an impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise, and its systems of extraction. Carbonate of copper was less desirable than the deeper ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli, but Renaissance artists and patrons nonetheless coveted it and prompted a market for the blue derivative used in tempera and oil pigment. The blue powder pigment serves, too, as a form of sorcery: one that would ward off those who deal in injury of the already dispossessed.

Turning his attention to the forced relocation of peoples, the COVID-19 death toll, the encroaching dangers of illiberal rule, the meanings of home and eviction, the power of cultural memory, as well as his artistic forebears, Tejada accounts for the uncounted and those excluded from belonging in voices that tell the cruel fortunes and joyful vitality of human and non-human life forms.

What are film props? What do they do? This book answers these questions by a close attention to those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds.

The term “prop” is short for property. This truncated term’s etymology belies the expansiveness of the concept and indicates the micro and macro scales at which the prop operates. Props are the material—often literal—furniture of cinema’s diegetic reality. Props are also narrative agents: think of the animacy of objects in Jean Epstein’s account of photogénie, the crystal egg in Risky Business, or the domestic bric-à-brac of Sirk’s melodramas. The prop is central to production design and the construction of mise-en-scène. And yet, the prop has rarely—almost never—been taken as an object of analysis and theorization in its own right.

This book begins by tracing the prop’s curious but unacknowledged role in film theory, before proceeding to a series of theoretical speculations and close readings that bring the prop into focus. Analyses of scenes of “prop mastery” demonstrate the labor that props perform and enable, as well as the interpretive work they make possible. Across a variety of genres, modes, and historical contexts—studio filmmaking, art cinema, adult and avant-garde films—The Prop introduces readers to the notion of “prop value,” a quality that puts the prop in proximity to the capitalist commodity, but also provides an ironic distance from the commodity’s subjection to exchange value. Gorfinkel and Rhodes argue that the prop is nothing less than a condensation of how labor, subjection, value, and instrumentality underwrite the very conditions of cinema.

A profound new volume that reckons with the history of an American Catholic Church embedded in and drawing benefits from White supremacy

For the Church to become a truly anti-racist institution, we must first understand how today’s racial challenges are embedded in the theo-logic of American Christianity and the cultural production of our Christian educational institutions. As colleges and universities reckon with their involvement in slavery, Grace of the Ghosts asks Christian-affiliated institutions (of congregation, school, and media) to expand this reckoning with attention to the many ways they have been embedded in and drew benefits from American systems of White supremacy.

Too often, White Christian histories render White Christians as the “good guys” in order to make a brutal history plausible and thus erase countless injustices committed against Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian peoples. Author Jeannine Hill Fletcher writes instead a US Catholic history that sheds light on the crimes committed against these ancestors by members of their own faith community. Grace of the Ghosts focuses on specific case studies of Catholic educational and ecclesial institutions, journeying through numerous microhistories to provide an accessible program to work toward the flourishing of a multiracial and multicultural Church. Hill Fletcher digs deeply into the details of Jesuit slaveholding at Georgetown, the expansion of Church networks on the frontiers to the West and South and emer­gent cities to the North, and the extension of the work of religious women from the East Coast to the Midwest. The volume considers the implications of Catholic involvement in Indian Boarding Schools and envisions alternative possibilities in the Catholic activism of the United Farmworkers. Each micro­history elevates the theological insights that emerge from those who withstood the assaults of White Christian supremacy. Hill Fletcher then orients the reader forward by envisioning possibilities of repair. Recognizing that this will require extensive and ongoing work, the book closes with the consideration of spiritual capital (including a reclamation of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises) that might sustain us as we write the next chapter in the nation’s long struggle against White supremacy.

Much work must be done for reparation, reconciliation, and repair to unfold fully. Grace of the Ghosts provides a bridge to institutional accountability for past failings and a path toward becoming transformative institutions for the future.

What are film props? What do they do? This book answers these questions by a close attention to those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds.

The term “prop” is short for property. This truncated term’s etymology belies the expansiveness of the concept and indicates the micro and macro scales at which the prop operates. Props are the material—often literal—furniture of cinema’s diegetic reality. Props are also narrative agents: think of the animacy of objects in Jean Epstein’s account of photogénie, the crystal egg in Risky Business, or the domestic bric-à-brac of Sirk’s melodramas. The prop is central to production design and the construction of mise-en-scène. And yet, the prop has rarely—almost never—been taken as an object of analysis and theorization in its own right.

This book begins by tracing the prop’s curious but unacknowledged role in film theory, before proceeding to a series of theoretical speculations and close readings that bring the prop into focus. Analyses of scenes of “prop mastery” demonstrate the labor that props perform and enable, as well as the interpretive work they make possible. Across a variety of genres, modes, and historical contexts—studio filmmaking, art cinema, adult and avant-garde films—The Prop introduces readers to the notion of “prop value,” a quality that puts the prop in proximity to the capitalist commodity, but also provides an ironic distance from the commodity’s subjection to exchange value. Gorfinkel and Rhodes argue that the prop is nothing less than a condensation of how labor, subjection, value, and instrumentality underwrite the very conditions of cinema.

Discover New York’s poignant memorials through powerful photographs capturing everything from fleeting tributes to enduring monuments

The photographs in Here Down on Dark Earth document the many ways New Yorkers express their intertwined feelings of loss and remembrance. The famous and the unknown, the rich and the poor, meet the same fate, but how they are mourned and remembered varies greatly. New York City’s monuments and memorials are large and small, civic and personal, traditional and vernacular, planned and spontaneous. Some commemorate a significant event such as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, others the death of a single child hit by a stray bullet. A memorial of stone and steel dedicated to deceased WWII veterans from a church parish may outlast a painted Rest-In-Peace (RIP) memorial wall for a slain teenager. Still, both grow out of the feeling of loss and a desire to preserve the memory of departed loved ones.

As Racioppo traveled throughout New York City, he became increasingly aware of the impermanence of these memorials. The paint eventually peels, and the image gradually disappears. Sanitation workers remove the rotted toys and flowers. Small and personal, or large and communal, created by professionals or amateurs, the memorials in Here Down on Dark Earth express a powerful sense of loss and connection. Throughout the book, the author’s contextual notes accompany the poignant photographs depicting these expressions of remembrance.

A prize-winning historian details his intellectual and political evolution

Written by the author of the landmark book The Wages of Whiteness and one of the key figures in the critical study of race and racism in America, An Ordinary White is the life story of the historian and radical American writer, David Roediger.

With wry wit and keen observation, Roediger chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in his southern Midwest sundown town to becoming a leading figure in working-class his­tory and Whiteness studies. A latecomer to the New Left, a longtime figure in the Chicago Surrealist Group, and part of the collective reviving of the Charles Kerr Company—the world’s oldest socialist publisher—Roediger captures events and characters absent from standard histories of the left as well as such icons of resistance as Studs Terkel, Noel Ignatiev, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and C. L. R. James.

A direct response to the venom, effectiveness, and durability of white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory, this memoir describes Roediger’s youth as “ordinary,” both in its unfolding in a lower-middle-class family of southern Illinois workers and in the depth of white racism he was taught. He considers himself “saved” by social movements of his time, including those of labor, against empire, and, above all, the Black Freedom struggle. Public education, dissenting currents in Catholicism, knowledge of the importance of good union jobs, and generative impulses in sports and music helped make his salvation stick.

Roediger’s knowledge of white advantage came from his personal everyday experiences, but among people ordinary enough to guard against the mistaken notion that poor and working-class whites are uniquely the culprits of white nationalism. Importantly he argues against the character­ization of them as intractably racist or incapable of understanding the advantages of whiteness. A teacher in state universities for forty years, Roediger has tirelessly fought against their being hollowed out by corporate values and austerity. In An Ordinary White, he writes movingly of these experiences and what we have lost in our institutions whose soaring rhetoric outstrips any ability to defend education or racial justice.

Explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and much more

Alice Austen (1866–1952) lived at Clear Comfort, her grandparent’s Victorian cottage on Staten Island, which is now a National Historic Landmark. As a teenager, she devoted herself to photography, recording what she called “the larky life” of tennis matches, yacht races, and lavish parties.

When she was 25 and expected to marry, Austen used her camera to satirize gender norms by posing with her friends in their undergarments and in men’s clothes, “smoking” cigarettes, and feigning drunkenness. As she later remarked, she was “too good to get married.” Austen embraced the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman,” a moniker given to those who defied expectations by pursuing athletics, higher education, or careers. She had romantic affairs with women, and at 31, she met Gertrude Tate, who became her life partner. Briefly, Austen considered becoming a professional photographer. She illustrated Bicycling for Ladies, a guide written by her friend Violet Ward, and she explored the working-class neighborhoods of Manhattan to produce a portfolio, “Street Types of New York.” Rejecting the taint of commerce, however, she remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side.

Although interest in Austen has accelerated since 2017, when the Alice Austen House was designated a national site of LGBTQ history, the only prior book on Austen was published in 1976. Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful and witty photographer. Through analysis of Austen’s photographs, Yochelson illuminates the history of American photography and the history of sexuality.

A profound new volume that reckons with the history of an American Catholic Church embedded in and drawing benefits from White supremacy

For the Church to become a truly anti-racist institution, we must first understand how today’s racial challenges are embedded in the theo-logic of American Christianity and the cultural production of our Christian educational institutions. As colleges and universities reckon with their involvement in slavery, Grace of the Ghosts asks Christian-affiliated institutions (of congregation, school, and media) to expand this reckoning with attention to the many ways they have been embedded in and drew benefits from American systems of White supremacy.

Too often, White Christian histories render White Christians as the “good guys” in order to make a brutal history plausible and thus erase countless injustices committed against Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian peoples. Author Jeannine Hill Fletcher writes instead a US Catholic history that sheds light on the crimes committed against these ancestors by members of their own faith community. Grace of the Ghosts focuses on specific case studies of Catholic educational and ecclesial institutions, journeying through numerous microhistories to provide an accessible program to work toward the flourishing of a multiracial and multicultural Church. Hill Fletcher digs deeply into the details of Jesuit slaveholding at Georgetown, the expansion of Church networks on the frontiers to the West and South and emer­gent cities to the North, and the extension of the work of religious women from the East Coast to the Midwest. The volume considers the implications of Catholic involvement in Indian Boarding Schools and envisions alternative possibilities in the Catholic activism of the United Farmworkers. Each micro­history elevates the theological insights that emerge from those who withstood the assaults of White Christian supremacy. Hill Fletcher then orients the reader forward by envisioning possibilities of repair. Recognizing that this will require extensive and ongoing work, the book closes with the consideration of spiritual capital (including a reclamation of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises) that might sustain us as we write the next chapter in the nation’s long struggle against White supremacy.

Much work must be done for reparation, reconciliation, and repair to unfold fully. Grace of the Ghosts provides a bridge to institutional accountability for past failings and a path toward becoming transformative institutions for the future.

How Mayor Ray Flynn’s leadership and a coalition of activists transformed Boston, challenging established powers and setting new precedents for urban governance

The Battle for Boston captures the remarkable era under Mayor Ray Flynn, whose election in 1983 marked the beginning of a profound shift in the city’s political and social landscape. Don Gillis, a Flynn senior advisor, chronicles the inspiring journey of a city that dared to challenge the entrenched power brokers—including developers, landlords, and banking industry leaders—through powerful grassroots campaigns.

Gillis provides a vivid portrayal of the political dynamics and the coalition of community organiz­ers, neighborhood leaders, and residents that played a pivotal role in rejecting the business-backed growth machine and the city’s historically divisive racial politics. This book charts the strategic battles fought within the corridors of power and on the streets and highlights the substantial impact these movements had on the city’s governance and power dynamics.

In a historic turn, in 2021, Michelle Wu became the first woman, person of color, and Asian- American elected Mayor of Boston. Wu’s victory on a similarly progressive platform as Flynn underscores the enduring relevance of his legacy, signaling a hopeful future for more inclusive and effectively governed cities.

The Battle for Boston poses a critical inquiry: Can cities truly embrace progressivism and gov­ern effectively in the twenty-first century? This qualitative narrative study is a testament to the possibility of such governance, driven by the indomitable spirit of those who strive for a fair and equitable society.

Discover the chilling untold story of sexual forced labor in Nazi concentration camps

In his seminal work, The Concentration Camp Brothel, Robert Sommer reveals the hidden hor­rors of sexual forced labor within the SS camp system, a subject long overshadowed and seldom acknowledged in the discourse on the Holocaust.

Through his rigorous examination of over seventy archives and poignant interviews with more than thirty survivors, including former visitors of camp brothels, Sommer paints a vivid and harrow­ing picture of the atrocities committed. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive exploration of the establishment, operation, and profound impact of brothels in Nazi concentration camps.

Sommer’s research meticulously details the brothels’ integration into the concentration camp system, their role in the Nazi exploitation of bodies for control and profit, and the complex reac­tions of the prisoner society to these establishments. He explores the desperate survival strategies employed by the women forced into sexual labor and the chilling motivations of their exploiters.

The book also places the tragedy of camp brothels in the broader context of sexual violence under Nazi rule, making a critical connection between these acts of exploitation and the overall history of the Holocaust. This updated English edition incorporates new findings and perspectives since the original German publication in 2009, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the subject. The foreword by Annette F. Timm adds further context and contemporary analysis, enhancing the book’s relevance and depth.

From Marienbad to the Bates Motel, cinematic hotels are more than a mere backdrop to a film’s action. They actively scaffold the formal, aesthetic, and narrative possibilities of cinema. This book takes a journey through spaces of temporary dwelling—hotels, inns, and motels—to delve into the dynamics and contradictions that structure modern life.

Along the way, O’Dwyer considers questions of plot and eroticism, labor and globalization, and the ethics and economics of hospitality. Drawing on a broad array of films from European art cinema to experimental adult media, and placing cinema into dialogue with film theory and media history, Hotels explores both how and why the hotel has such a strong purchase on the cinematic imaginary.

Discover the chilling untold story of sexual forced labor in Nazi concentration camps

In his seminal work, The Concentration Camp Brothel, Robert Sommer reveals the hidden hor­rors of sexual forced labor within the SS camp system, a subject long overshadowed and seldom acknowledged in the discourse on the Holocaust.

Through his rigorous examination of over seventy archives and poignant interviews with more than thirty survivors, including former visitors of camp brothels, Sommer paints a vivid and harrow­ing picture of the atrocities committed. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive exploration of the establishment, operation, and profound impact of brothels in Nazi concentration camps.

Sommer’s research meticulously details the brothels’ integration into the concentration camp system, their role in the Nazi exploitation of bodies for control and profit, and the complex reac­tions of the prisoner society to these establishments. He explores the desperate survival strategies employed by the women forced into sexual labor and the chilling motivations of their exploiters.

The book also places the tragedy of camp brothels in the broader context of sexual violence under Nazi rule, making a critical connection between these acts of exploitation and the overall history of the Holocaust. This updated English edition incorporates new findings and perspectives since the original German publication in 2009, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the subject. The foreword by Annette F. Timm adds further context and contemporary analysis, enhancing the book’s relevance and depth.

A vibrant collection of short plays bringing Irish history and culture alive through an extraordinary collage of documents, songs, poems, and texts.

In Nine Irish Plays for Voices, award-winning poet Eamon Grennan delves deep into key Irish subjects—big, small, literary, historical, political, biographical—and illuminates them for today’s audiences and readers. These short plays draw from original material centering on important moments in Irish history and the formation of the Irish Republic, such as the Great Famine and the Easter Rising; the lives of Irish literary figures like Yeats, Joyce, and Lady Gregory; and the crucial and life-changing condition of emigration.

The rhythmic, musical, and vivid language of Grennan’s plays incorporates traditional song lyrics, lines of Irish poetry, and letters and speeches of the time. The result is a dramatic collage that tells a story through the voices of characters contemporary to the period of the play’s subject. By presenting subjects through the dramatic rendering of the human voice, the plays facilitate a close, intimate relationship between players and the audience, creating an incredibly powerful connection to the past. Historical moments and literary figures that might seem remote to the present-day reader or audience become immediate and emotionally compelling.

One of the plays, Ferry, is drawn entirely from the author’s imagination. It puts unnamed char­acters who come from the world of twentieth-century Ireland on a boat to the underworld with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. On their journey the five strangers, played by two voices, tell stories about their lives, raising the question of how language both captures and transforms lived experience. Addressing the Great Famine, Hunger uses documentary evidence to give audiences a dramatic feel for what has been a silent and traumatic element in Irish history. Noramollyannalivi­alucia: The Muse and Mr. Joyce is a one-woman piece that depicts James Joyce’s wife as an older woman sharing her memories and snippets from the works of her husband. Also included in this rich volume is the author’s adaptation of Synge’s Aran Islands, as well as Emigration Road, History! Reading the Easter Rising, The Muse and Mr. Yeats, The Loves of Lady Gregory, and Peig: An Ordinary Life.

An exploration of the mythical Mary Glass—her art, her life, and her times

Mary Glass (1946–2021) was an innovative modern dancer and choreographer, quietly instrumental to the San Francisco Bay Area art scene of the 1960s and ’70s—barely known today—admired for her experimental movements based on sounds and images of the Pacific.

As a child, Mary Glass took her first dance class with Anna Halprin on her famed redwood dance deck in Marin County’s Kent Woodlands. Dancing with the blue sky as her ceiling—surrounded by magical madrones and redwoods—the effect on Mary Glass was seismic. Fittingly, Halprin called her classes “dance experiences.”
Mary Glass’s lifestyle, her anxieties, and her dance reflect the human geography of Northern California: Happenings, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), feminism, same-sex love, civil rights, Vietnam, environmentalism. Cascading in the waves of the politics of the time was Mary Glass’s anorexia, an unexpected pregnancy, and her life-long love affair with the Black painter Eliza Vesper.

Today Mary Glass is remembered by an increasingly diminishing handful of devotees. Author Carol Mavor is one of them.

In this daring work of fictocriticism, where “feelings are facts,” Like the Sea asks its readers—just as Anna Halprin asked of each of her young students as they were leaving class—“What are you taking with you from the natural world?”

Halprin’s words will resonate in Mary’s mind her entire lifetime and beyond.

In the after-time of the prescient Mary Glass—with its decline of sea kelp and warm Decembers— Mavor herself considers the Anthropocene, tasting extinction as if swallowing the long-gone abalone mollusks of her own Bay-Area childhood: salty, like the sea, but strangely sweet. And from it, Mavor delivers the reader to the far-away country of the not-so-distant past to help envision a future.

There are no photographs or films of Mary Glass dancing. The life of Mary Glass is nearly forgotten, her memory on the edge of extinction. In meditative, dazzling and lyrical prose, Like the Sea tells us—like the ocean’s music in our ear—we need to remember extinction to imagine our way out of it.

WINNER, IPPY BOOK AWARDS, LGBTQ+ FICTION

WINNER, 2023 BEST INDIE BOOK AWARD, LGBTQ2 FICTION

SHORT LIST, VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD

ON LAMBDA LITERARY REVIEW'S SEPTEMBER MOST ANTICIPATED LIST

ONE OF QUEER FORTY'S BEST PRIDE READS FOR SUMMER 2023!

Three gay men in pre-Stonewall New York City find their fates thrown together in the police raid of a Village bar.

Roger Moorhouse is a Wall Street banker and Westchester family man with a preciously guarded secret. As the shouting begins and flashlights blaze in his face, the life he’s carefully curated over the years—a fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, a house in Beechmont Woods, his wife and children—is about to come crashing down around him.

Columbia literature professor Julian Prince lives a comparatively uncloseted life when he finds his first committed relationship tested to its limits. How could he explain to Gus, a fearless young artist, that he couldn’t stay with him that weekend because the woman who was still technically Julian’s fiancée would be visiting? But when Gus is struck unconscious by a police baton, Julian comes out of hiding to protect him, even if exposure means losing everything.

For Danny Duffy, an Irish kid from the Bronx with a sassy mouth and a diverse group of friends, the raid is a galvanizing, Spartacus moment. Danny doesn’t have too much left to lose; his family has just disowned him. But once his name appears in the newspaper, he’ll be fired from his job at Sloan’s Supermarket, where he’s risen to assistant manager of produce, and begin a journey that veers between political enlightenment and violent revenge.

The three men find themselves in a police wagon together, their hidden lives threatened to be revealed to the world. Blackmail, a private investigator, Gus’s disappearance, and Danny’s quest for retribution propel Disorderly Men to its piercing conclusion, as each man meets the boundaries of his own fear, love, and shame. The stakes for each are different, but all of them confront a fundamental question: How much happiness is he allowed to have . . . and what share of it will he lay claim to?

On the urgent need to promote critical reading skills amidst rising authoritarianism

Children’s author Philip Pullman famously said that “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.” While the recent rise of fascist ideology in the United States might seem a subject too large and adult to be dealt with in literature for children or teens, Annette Wannamaker proposes in How to Read Like an Anti-Fascist that there are books aimed at future generations which critique and counter fascist propaganda and mythmaking.

Works of literature can reflect fascist ideology and promote it as well, but Wannamaker proposes that some books also offer tools for understanding it. Books written for beginners can introduce readers to complex concepts, break big ideas into manageable parts, and teach readers how to read the world outside of the book. Antifascist books are ones that analyze fascistic rhetoric and storytelling, educate about America’s long history of authoritarianism, and highlight various facets of fascism such as scapegoating others and reasserting patriarchal power.

From “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and the tales of Superman to Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the 1619 Project and contemporary works such as All Boys Aren’t Blue and Donald Builds the Wall, Wannamaker shows how the ethos of authoritarianism is characterized by a strict hierarchy that places children at its very bottom. In doing so, she argues convincingly that books written for young people can provide a particular view from the bottom, a perspective well-suited to interrogating systems of power.

Discover the vibrant journey of music from New York’s melting pot to the mystical shores of the Bosphorus

From the Bronx to the Bosphorus explores the vibrant, yet largely concealed, musical culture of New York, tracing its origins to a period when the city served as a crucible for immigrants and their diverse musical expressions. Walter Zev Feldman chronicles his journey through the musical landscapes of post–WWII New York—from the declining world of East European immigrant klezmorim to the dynamic environments of Greek, Armenian, and Caucasian musicians.

These experiences culminate in the klezmer revitalization movement of the late 1970s. Feldman, whose father emigrated from Bessarabia—a region known for its rich interactions among Jewish, Roma, and Greek musicians—connects various musical worlds. From the local Turkish Sephardi synagogue and the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Washington Heights to the lively Armenian and Greek nightclubs of Manhattan, his interactions with a diverse group of musicians, including an Armenian virtuoso who once performed for Stalin and the Shah of Iran, enhance his understanding and appreciation of these interconnected cultures.

Finally, at age twenty-five, in a sense he returned to his father’s shtetl and studied with Dave Tarras, the greatest living klezmer in America, who had learned his key musical lessons in that very same Bessarabian town following World War I. From the Bronx to the Bosphorus is not just a chronicle of music but a poignant examination of the power of music to connect cultures, transcend borders, and preserve the echoes of a nearly vanished world.

On the urgent need to promote critical reading skills amidst rising authoritarianism

Children’s author Philip Pullman famously said that “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.” While the recent rise of fascist ideology in the United States might seem a subject too large and adult to be dealt with in literature for children or teens, Annette Wannamaker proposes in How to Read Like an Anti-Fascist that there are books aimed at future generations which critique and counter fascist propaganda and mythmaking.

Works of literature can reflect fascist ideology and promote it as well, but Wannamaker proposes that some books also offer tools for understanding it. Books written for beginners can introduce readers to complex concepts, break big ideas into manageable parts, and teach readers how to read the world outside of the book. Antifascist books are ones that analyze fascistic rhetoric and storytelling, educate about America’s long history of authoritarianism, and highlight various facets of fascism such as scapegoating others and reasserting patriarchal power.

From “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and the tales of Superman to Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the 1619 Project and contemporary works such as All Boys Aren’t Blue and Donald Builds the Wall, Wannamaker shows how the ethos of authoritarianism is characterized by a strict hierarchy that places children at its very bottom. In doing so, she argues convincingly that books written for young people can provide a particular view from the bottom, a perspective well-suited to interrogating systems of power.

A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female

When photographer Coda Gray befriends a family with a special interest in a young boy, the motivation behind his special attention is difficult to grasp, “like water slipping through our fingers.” Can a man innocently love a boy who is not his own?

Using fiction to reveal the truths about families, communities, art objects, love, and mourning, Like a Lake tells the story of ten-year-old Nico, who lives with his father (an Italian- American architect) and his mother (a Japanese-American sculptor who learned how to draw while interned during World War II). Set in the 1960s, this is a story of aesthetic perfection waiting to be broken. Nico’s midcentury modern house, with its Italian pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. The elephant-hide gray, fiberglass reinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. Clam consommé with kombu, giant kelp, yuzu rind, and a little fennel—in each bowl, two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, symbols of the happy couple. Nico’s boyish delight in developing photographs under the red safety light of Coda’s “Floating Zendo”— the darkroom boat that he keeps on Lake Tahoe.

The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern California’s postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. Author Carol Mavor addresses the sensuality and complexity of a son’s love for his mother and that mother’s own erotic response to it. The relationship between the mother and son is paralleled by what it means for a boy to be a model for a male photographer and to be his muse. Just as water can freeze into snow and ice, melt back into water, and steam, love takes on new forms with shifts of atmosphere. Like a Lake’s haunting images and sensations stay with the reader.

Winner, Victorian Society in America Book Award

A colorful tale of a singular New York City neighborhood and the personalities who make it special

To outsiders or East Siders, Riverside Park and Riverside Drive may not have the star status of Fifth Avenue or Central Park West. But at the city’s westernmost edge, there is a quiet and beauty like nowhere else in all of New York. There are miles of mansions and monuments, acres of flora, and a breadth of wildlife ranging from Peregrine falcons to goats. It’s where the Gershwins and Babe Ruth once lived, William Randolph Hearst ensconced his paramour, and Amy Schumer owns a penthouse. Told in the uniquely personal voice of a longtime resident, Heaven on the Hudson is the only New York City book that features the history, architecture, and personalities of this often overlooked neighborhood, from the eighteenth century through the present day.

Combining an extensively researched history of the area and its people with an engaging one-on-one guide to its sights, author Stephanie Azzarone sheds new light on the initial development of Riverside Park and Riverside Drive, the challenges encountered—from massive boulders to “maniacs”—and the reasons why Riverside Drive never became the “new Fifth Avenue” that promoters anticipated. From grand “country seats” to squatter settlements to multi-million-dollar residences, the book follows the neighborhood’s roller-coaster highs and lows over time. Readers will discover a trove of architectural and recreational highlights and hidden gems, including the Drive’s only freestanding privately owned villa, a tomb that’s not a tomb, and a sweet memorial to an eighteenth-century child. Azzarone also tells the stories behind Riverside’s notable and forgotten residents, including celebrities, murderers, a nineteenth-century female MD who launched the country’s first anti-noise campaign, and an Irish merchant who caused a scandal by living with an Indian princess.

While much has been written about Central Park, little has focused exclusively on Riverside Drive and Riverside Park until now. Heaven on the Hudson is dedicated to sharing this West Side neighborhood’s most special secrets, the ones that, without fail, bring both pleasure and peace in a city of more than 8 million.

Reimagining our cities for a sustainable and human-centric future

In her groundbreaking book Wonder City, Lynn Ellsworth delves deep into the heart of modern urban life, casting a critical eye on the transformative changes sweeping through cities like New York. This compelling journey into the world of urban development goes beyond the usual narra­tive, serving as a passionate call to action that encourages readers to actively participate in shaping the future of their cities.

Ellsworth expertly navigates through complex themes such as affordable housing, urban plan­ning, historic preservation, and architecture. With a focus on major cities undergoing significant transformations, Wonder City offers an insightful examination of the challenges and opportunities that define contemporary urban life.

At the core of this engaging narrative is a striking critique of the real estate industry’s influence over urban landscapes. Ellsworth reveals how historic and culturally rich urban settings are increas­ingly being overshadowed by the rise of impersonal glass towers, a trend she argues is driven by the industry’s grip on politicians and technocrats. This analysis is both eye-opening and unsettling, shedding light on the forces reshaping our urban environments.

Wonder City is more than a critique, however. Ellsworth provides a pragmatic blueprint for revitalizing urban spaces. She champions the need for affordable housing, sustainable urban plan­ning, and architecture that respects and enhances the human experience. Her arguments challenge the prevailing economic theories behind housing supply and question the architectural ideologies that often justify the demolition of historic urban assets.

This book is an essential read for urban planners, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of urban living. Ellsworth’s clear, accessible insights into complex issues make Wonder City a vital contribution to the discourse on urban development, appealing to a broad audience that cares about the dynamics and future of city life.

FINALIST, 2025 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE

InsideHook: The 10 Books You Should Be Reading This November

A gripping account of how the automobile has failed NYC and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to its post-pandemic recovery

In 1969, as all students of New York City history think they have learned, master builder Robert Moses lost his long battle to urbanist Jane Jacobs over his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway. The ten-lane elevated expressway would have sliced across SoHo and Little Italy, demolishing historic build­ings, and displacing thousands of families and businesses. Jacobs and her neighbors defeated Moses, and as a result, New York became the only major American city with no interstate highway running through its core. Like many global cities, though, New York had spent fifty years during the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to tame its heavily populated landscape to fit the private automobile. New York has now spent more than fifty years trying to undo those mistakes, wresting back city space for people, not cars.

Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car chronicles the earlier, less-known battles that preceded the cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway: Jacobs became an example for generations of urban planners, but whose example did Jacobs emulate in an earlier victory that saved Washington Square Park? Moses may serve handily as New York’s uber-villain now, but who, before him, was responsible for destroying a critical part of New York’s transit system?

A well respected urban writer who has focused on New York’s transportation system for more than a decade, author Nicole Gelinas resumes the story where Robert Caro’s landmark The Power Broker ended. Movement explores how, in the half-century leading up to the COVID- 19 pandemic, New York’s re-embracement of its mass-transit system and a livable streetscape helped save the city. Gelinas tackles the 1970s environmental movement, the 1980s rebuilding of the subways, and more contemporary battles, from Mayor Bloomberg's push for more pedestrian plazas and bike lanes in the early 2000s, to transportation advocates' protests to prevent traffic deaths in the Mayor de Blasio era of the 2010s, to how New York’s stewardship of its streets and subways have played a critical role during the 2020 pandemic and subsequent recovery.

Introducing a cast of transportation heroes to rival Jane Jacobs (Shirley Hayes, Hazel Henderson, Richard Ravitch, Nilka Martell) and puncturing the myth of Moses as New York’s anti-hero, Movement explores how New York City has helped redefine what it means to be a global city: not a place that is easy to drive through, but a place where people can take transit, walk, and bike to work, to school, or just for fun.

In his inimitable prose, master storyteller Peter Quinn chronicles his odyssey from the Irish Catholic precincts of the Bronx to the arena of big-league politics and corporate hardball.

Cross Bronx is Peter Quinn’s one-of-a-kind account of his adventures as ad man, archivist, teacher, Wall Street messenger, court officer, political speechwriter, corporate scribe, and award-winning novelist. Like Pete Hamill, Quinn is a New Yorker through and through. His evolution from a childhood in a now-vanished Bronx, to his exploits in the halls of Albany and swish corporate offices, to then walking away from it all, is evocative and entertaining and enlightening from first page to last. Cross Bronx is bursting with witty, captivating stories.

Quinn is best known for his novels (all recently reissued by Fordham University Press under its New York ReLit imprint), most notably his American Book Award–winning novel Banished Children of Eve. Colum McCann has summed up Quinn’s trilogy of historical detective novels as “generous and agile and profound.” Quinn has now seized the time and inspiration afforded by “the strange interlude of the pandemic” to give his up-close-and-personal accounts of working as a speechwriter in political backrooms and corporate boardrooms:

“In a moment of upended expectations and fear-prone uncertainty, the tolling of John Donne’s bells becomes perhaps not as faint as it once seemed. Before judgment is pronounced and sentence carried out, I want my chance to speak from the dock. Let no man write my epitaph. In the end, this is the best I could do.” (from the Prologue)

From 1979 to 1985 Quinn worked as chief speechwriter for New York Governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, helping craft Cuomo’s landmark speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention and his address on religion and politics at Notre Dame University. Quinn then joined Time Inc. as chief speechwriter and retired as corporate editorial director for Time Warner at the end of 2007. As eyewitness and participant, he survived elections, mega-mergers, and urban ruin. In Cross Bronx he provides his insider’s view of high-powered politics and high-stakes corporate intrigue.

Incapable of writing a dull sentence, the award-winning author grabs our attention and keeps us enthralled from start to finish. Never have his skills as a storyteller been on better display than in this revealing, gripping memoir.

Dive into the electrifying tale of a Brooklyn-born patriot turned radical activist, in an era when America was torn by its ideological extremes

In the shadow of recent turmoil, Join the Conspiracy transports readers to a pivotal moment of division and dissent in American history: the late 1960s. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and a nation grappling with internal conflict, this compelling narrative follows the life of George Demmerle, a factory worker whose political odyssey encapsulates the era’s tumultuous spirit. From his roots as a concerned citizen wary of his country’s leftward tilt, Demmerle’s journey takes a dramatic turn as he delves into the heart of radical activism.

Participating in iconic protests from the March on Washington to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Demmerle’s story is a whirlwind of political fervor, embodying the struggle against what was perceived as imperialist war and racial injustice. His transformation is marked by alliances with key figures of the time, including Abbie Hoffman, and an eventual leadership role within an East Coast Black Panther affiliate. Yet, beneath his radical veneer lies a secret: Demmerle is an FBI informant.

Join the Conspiracy reveals Demmerle’s complex role in a society at war with itself, where his deepening involvement with the radical left and a bombing collective forces him to confront his loyalties. The narrative, enriched by a rare trove of period documents, candid photos taken from inside the radical movement, and underground art—more than a hundred of which are included in the book—not only charts Demmerle’s saga but also reflects the broader story of a nation struggling to find its moral compass amidst chaos.

As Demmerle navigates the dangerous waters of political extremism, readers are invited to ponder the price of ideology, the nature of loyalty, and the fine line between activism and betrayal. This book is not just a recounting of historical events but a vibrant portrait of a man and a move­ment that sought to reshape America.

Winner, "Gold" Independent Publishing Award (IPPY) for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction
Winner, The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, 34th Annual Triangle Awards
2023 Lammy Finalist, Gay Memoir/Biography

A coming-of-age memoir of life on the front lines of the AIDS crisis with ACT UP New York.

From the moment Ron Goldberg stumbled into his first ACT UP meeting in June 1987, the AIDS activist organization became his life. For the next eight years, he chaired committees, planned protests, led teach-ins, and facilitated their Monday night meetings. He cruised and celebrated at ACT UP parties, attended far too many AIDS memorials, and participated in more than a hundred zaps and demonstrations, becoming the group’s unofficial “Chant Queen,” writing and leading chants for many of their major actions. Boy with the Bullhorn is both a memoir and an immersive history of the original New York chapter of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, from 1987 to 1995, told with great humor, heart, and insight.

Using the author’s own story, “the activist education of a well-intentioned, if somewhat naïve nice gay Jewish theater queen,” Boy with the Bullhorn intertwines Goldberg’s experiences with the larger chronological history of ACT UP, the grassroots AIDS activist organization that confronted politicians, scientists, drug companies, religious leaders, the media, and an often uncaring public to successfully change the course of the AIDS epidemic.

Diligently sourced and researched, Boy with the Bullhorn provides both an intimate look into how activist strategies are developed and deployed and a snapshot of life in New York City during the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic. On the occasions where Goldberg writes outside his personal experience, he relies on his extensive archive of original ACT UP documents, news articles, and other published material, as well as activist videos and oral histories, to help flesh out actions, events, and the background stories of key activists. Writing with great candor, Goldberg examines the group’s triumphs and failures, as well as the pressures and bad behaviors that eventually tore ACT UP apart.

A story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, from engaging in outrageous, media-savvy demonstrations, to navigating the intricacies of drug research and the byzantine bureaucracies of the FDA, NIH, and CDC, Boy with the Bullhorn captures the passion, smarts, and evanescent spirit of ACT UP—the anger, grief, and desperation, but also the joy, camaraderie, and sexy, campy playfulness—and the exhilarating adrenaline rush of activism.

The tale of New York’s Young Reds—a riveting journey through the YPA’s rise and influence

Young Reds in the Big Apple: The New York YPA, 1923–1934 by Jack Hodgson is a compelling historical account that delves into the heart of American communism through the lens of New York City’s Young Pioneers of America (YPA). This meticulously researched book sheds light on a neglected aspect of American history, revealing the intricate details of the YPA’s formation, ideologies, and activities from 1923 to 1934.

Hodgson illustrates the YPA’s journey, from its early days as a branch of the Communist Party USA, intended for youth aged 8–16, to its eventual disbandment. The book explores the organization’s unique structure, ethos, and activities, showcasing how it became a formidable force in New York’s political landscape. He vividly portrays the YPA members’ involvement in public protests, education reform, and their bold stance against prevailing social norms, including racial and gender issues.

The narrative goes beyond mere historical recounting, offering deep insights into the internal dynamics of the YPA, its relationship with the adult Communist Party, and its interactions with other political entities. Hodgson’s analysis of the YPA’s impact on its young members and the broader community is both insightful and thought-provoking.

Young Reds in the Big Apple stands out for its rigorous approach to a controversial subject, avoiding partisanship to provide a balanced view of the YPA’s legacy. This book is not just a histori­cal account; it’s an exploration of youthful activism, political movements, and the complexities of American communism during a pivotal era.

The tale of New York’s Young Reds—a riveting journey through the YPA’s rise and influence

Young Reds in the Big Apple: The New York YPA, 1923–1934 by Jack Hodgson is a compelling historical account that delves into the heart of American communism through the lens of New York City’s Young Pioneers of America (YPA). This meticulously researched book sheds light on a neglected aspect of American history, revealing the intricate details of the YPA’s formation, ideologies, and activities from 1923 to 1934.

Hodgson illustrates the YPA’s journey, from its early days as a branch of the Communist Party USA, intended for youth aged 8–16, to its eventual disbandment. The book explores the organization’s unique structure, ethos, and activities, showcasing how it became a formidable force in New York’s political landscape. He vividly portrays the YPA members’ involvement in public protests, education reform, and their bold stance against prevailing social norms, including racial and gender issues.

The narrative goes beyond mere historical recounting, offering deep insights into the internal dynamics of the YPA, its relationship with the adult Communist Party, and its interactions with other political entities. Hodgson’s analysis of the YPA’s impact on its young members and the broader community is both insightful and thought-provoking.

Young Reds in the Big Apple stands out for its rigorous approach to a controversial subject, avoiding partisanship to provide a balanced view of the YPA’s legacy. This book is not just a histori­cal account; it’s an exploration of youthful activism, political movements, and the complexities of American communism during a pivotal era.

A testament to the resilience and determination of Black North Carolinians to achieve educational equality

This book examines the educational experiences of Black North Carolinians during the American Civil War and Reconstruction period, 1861–1877. By highlighting the collaborative efforts that led to the growing network of schools for the formerly enslaved people, it argues that schooling the Freedpeople was a contested terrain, fraught with conflicting visions of Black freedom and the role education should play. Although Black men and women emerged as the driving force behind the educational endeavors of this period, their work was facilitated by Northern aid and mission­ary societies, the federally-mandated Freedmen’s Bureau, and over 1,400 teachers from various regional and racial backgrounds. Yet the educational landscape was far from uniform, and the individuals and organizations involved had their distinct visions regarding the nature and purpose of Freedpeople’s education.

Through the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods, this book offers new insights into the reasons why Black and white Northerners and Southerners elected to become teachers. By examining their diverse motivations and experiences, it argues that attitudes toward Freedpeople’s education were complex and fluid, defying neat characterization.

Despite mounting obstacles and opposition to their work, Black North Carolinians’ unrelenting quest for education ultimately gave rise to free public schooling for both races, the professionaliza­tion of Black teachers, and an extensive network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Explores how heritage discourses and local publics interact at Catholic mission sites in the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, and the Southern Cone

Interdisciplinary in scope and classed under the name “critical heritage studies,” Heritage and Its Missions makes extensive use of ethnographic perspectives to examine heritage not as a collection of inert things upon which a general historical interest is centered, but as a series of active meanings that have consequences in the social, political, and economic arenas. This approach considers the places of interaction between heritage discourses and local publics as constructed spaces where the very materiality of the social and the political unfolds.

Heritage and Its Missions brings together researchers from several countries interested in the pre-republican Catholic missions in the Americas as heritage. Each essay discusses the past and current heritage meanings applied to a specific mission by national and multicultural states, local Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, international heritage institutions, and scholars. They then address how heritage actors produce knowledge from their positioned perspectives; how dif­ferent actors, collectives, communities, and publics relate to them; how heritage representations are deployed and contested as social facts; and how different conceptions of “heritage” collide, collaborate, and intersperse to produce the meanings around which heritage struggles unfold.

Explores how heritage discourses and local publics interact at Catholic mission sites in the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, and the Southern Cone

Interdisciplinary in scope and classed under the name “critical heritage studies,” Heritage and Its Missions makes extensive use of ethnographic perspectives to examine heritage not as a collection of inert things upon which a general historical interest is centered, but as a series of active meanings that have consequences in the social, political, and economic arenas. This approach considers the places of interaction between heritage discourses and local publics as constructed spaces where the very materiality of the social and the political unfolds.

Heritage and Its Missions brings together researchers from several countries interested in the pre-republican Catholic missions in the Americas as heritage. Each essay discusses the past and current heritage meanings applied to a specific mission by national and multicultural states, local Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, international heritage institutions, and scholars. They then address how heritage actors produce knowledge from their positioned perspectives; how dif­ferent actors, collectives, communities, and publics relate to them; how heritage representations are deployed and contested as social facts; and how different conceptions of “heritage” collide, collaborate, and intersperse to produce the meanings around which heritage struggles unfold.

A testament to the resilience and determination of Black North Carolinians to achieve educational equality

This book examines the educational experiences of Black North Carolinians during the American Civil War and Reconstruction period, 1861–1877. By highlighting the collaborative efforts that led to the growing network of schools for the formerly enslaved people, it argues that schooling the Freedpeople was a contested terrain, fraught with conflicting visions of Black freedom and the role education should play. Although Black men and women emerged as the driving force behind the educational endeavors of this period, their work was facilitated by Northern aid and mission­ary societies, the federally-mandated Freedmen’s Bureau, and over 1,400 teachers from various regional and racial backgrounds. Yet the educational landscape was far from uniform, and the individuals and organizations involved had their distinct visions regarding the nature and purpose of Freedpeople’s education.

Through the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods, this book offers new insights into the reasons why Black and white Northerners and Southerners elected to become teachers. By examining their diverse motivations and experiences, it argues that attitudes toward Freedpeople’s education were complex and fluid, defying neat characterization.

Despite mounting obstacles and opposition to their work, Black North Carolinians’ unrelenting quest for education ultimately gave rise to free public schooling for both races, the professionaliza­tion of Black teachers, and an extensive network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Embracing hospitality and inclusion in Abrahamic traditions

One of the signal moments in the narrative of the biblical Abraham is his insistent and enthusiastic reception of three strangers, a starting point of inspiration for all three Abrahamic traditions as they evolve and develop the details of their respective teachings. On the one hand, welcoming the stranger by remembering “that you were strangers in the land of Egypt” is enjoined upon the ancient Israelites, and on the other, oppressing the stranger is condemned by their prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible.

These sentiments are repeated in the New Testament and the Qur’an and elaborated in the interpretive literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Such notions resonate obliquely within the history of India and its Dharmic traditions. On the other hand, they have been seriously challenged throughout history. In the 1830s, America’s “Nativists” sought to emphatically reduce immigra­tion to these shores. A century later, the Holocaust began by the decision of the Nazi German government to turn specific groups of German citizens into strangers. Deliberate marginalization leading to genocide flourished in the next half century from Bosnia and Cambodia to Rwanda. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the United States renewed a decisive twist toward closing the door on those seeking refuge, ushering in an era where marginalized religious and ethnic groups around the globe are deemed unwelcome and unwanted.

The essays in Welcoming the Stranger explore these issues from historical, theoretical, theo­logical, and practical perspectives, offering an enlightening and compelling discussion of what the Abrahamic traditions teach us regarding welcoming people we don’t know.

Welcoming the Stranger: Abrahamic Hospitality and Its Contemporary Implications is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Published by The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art and the Fordham University Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work

A primer for those with no previous knowledge of Chinese, this book introduces readers to the fundamentals of classical Chinese poetry through twenty-nine ways of understanding a single poem. “Seeing Off a Friend,” by the great Tang poet Li Bai (701–762) has long been praised for its vividness, subtlety, and poignancy. Anthologizing twenty-nine translations of the poem, Timothy Billings not only introduces the poem’s richness and depth but also the nuanced art of translating Chinese poetry into European languages.

A famous exemplar of “seeing off poetry,” which was common in an empire whose literati were continually on the move, Li’s poem has continued to fascinate readers far removed from its moment of composition, from the Victorians, to Ezra Pound, to contemporary translators from around the world. In talking us through these linguistic crossings, Billings unpacks the intricacies of the lüshi or "regulated verse poem," a form as pivotal to Chinese literature as the sonnet is to European tradition.

This book promises to transform its readers, step-by-step, into adept interpreters of one of the most significant verse forms in Chinese literary history. Billings’s engaging teaching style, backed by a lightly worn but deep scholarly engagement with Chinese poetry, makes this work an indispensable guide for anyone interested in poetry, translation, or the cultural heritage of China.

We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside?

The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other.

Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.

A new perspective on spirituality and social change as seen through the work of six visionary thinkers

In Liberating Spiritualities, Christopher D. Tirres offers an in-depth exploration of spirituality as a catalyst for social transformation, showcasing the profound insights of six distinguished twentieth-century liberation thinkers from across the Américas. This thought-provoking work examines the contributions of Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, renowned educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, innovative constructive theologian Virgilio Elizondo, influential cultural and feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, activist mujerista theologian and social ethicist Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and groundbreaking ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara.

Tirres examines the distinct yet interconnected philosophies of these figures, showcasing their unified critique of colonial Christendom and their deep commitment to the marginalized. He adeptly articulates how their diverse religious and philosophical backgrounds come together in a shared vision of spirituality as a fundamental aspect of human life and intelligence. He further illuminates how these thinkers advocate for spirituality as a non-reductive, life-affirming practice, transcending traditional boundaries and offering an integrated approach to faith, culture, and social justice. Their collective insights form a persuasive case for re-envisioning spirituality as a crucial element in the quest for a more just and compassionate world.

Liberating Spiritualities is not only a tribute to these six influential figures but also a critical reflection on the relevance of their ideas in today’s global context. Tirres’s transdisciplinary study bridges liberationist and pragmatic insights, offering readers a fresh, highly original interpretation of socially engaged spirituality, making this book an essential resource for those seeking to understand the transformative power of spirituality in the pursuit of social justice and human dignity.

A fictional manual to help disrupt today’s all-too-real energy and climate emergencies

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation inter­vention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy, emergency, and repair. The E.E.R.K combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers.

Created collectively by artists, designers, and scholars working and living at various places on Turtle Island, the E.E.R.K. offers a host of situated activities and speculative probes designed to respond to today and tomorrow’s energy emergencies. The kit intermingles diagrammatic designs with instructional convolutions and perplexing protocols that supply non-programmatic yet highly pragmatic means for navigating, communicating, operating, and undoing the investments that have come to overdetermine energetic relations in the past, present, and future. Triggered most immediately by the pandemic moment circa 2020, with its strangely intermittent and inscrutable convolutions of fossil-fueled business-as-usual, the E.E.R.K. reflects and reckons the long-roiling and fully chronic energy emergency orchestrated over several centuries by racial-fossil capitalism’s mass production of injustices.

The E.E.R.K. positions energy as more than just a resource to be exploited and managed, more than an infrastructural obstacle to overcome, more than fuel for the nightmares that lie ahead (or that are, in too many cases, already here). As a generative, multitudinous fabulation, the E.E.R.K. probes energetic networks—the bonds of endeavor; the glow of affection; the pulse of attunement; the drive of subtraction; the charge of uncertainty; the resilience of exhaustion; the obstinacy of making do; the shadow of fossils; the pull of futurity; the zeroes and ones; the force of an other­wise—that, together, seem to compose the circuits of energy emergency now.

Composed as a counter-history of western philosophical and political thought, Stormy Weather explores the role western cosmologies have played in the conquests of paganism in Europe and the Americas, the production of climate wreckage, and the concealment of that wreckage from western humanists and earth scientists until late in the day. A lived cosmology, Connolly says, contains embedded understandings about the beginnings of the earth and the way time unfolds. The text engages the major western cosmologies of Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Tocqueville, together with pagan and minor western orientations that posed challenges to them or could have. Hesiod, Ovid, William Apess, Amazonian and Aztec cosmologies, Catherine Keller’s minor Christianity, James Baldwin, and Michel Serres instigate key responses, often challenging binary logics and the subject/object dichotomy with a world of multiple human and nonhuman subjectivities.

Connolly pursues a conception of time as a multiplicity of intersecting temporalities to come to terms with the vicissitudes of climate destruction and the grandeur of an earth neither highly susceptible to mastery nor designed to harmonize smoothly with humans. The book revisits the “improbable necessity” of a politics of swarming to respond to the ongoing wreckage and potential fascist responses to vast infusions of climate refugees from the south into temperate-zone capitalist states.

Stormy Weather draws on the work of earth scientists, indigenous thinkers, naturalists, humanists, and students of nonwestern cosmologies. Ultimately, Connolly contends that critical intellectuals today must not remain enclosed in disciplinary silos, or even in “the humanities” as currently defined, to do justice to our moment of climate wreckage.

Composed as a counter-history of western philosophical and political thought, Stormy Weather explores the role western cosmologies have played in the conquests of paganism in Europe and the Americas, the production of climate wreckage, and the concealment of that wreckage from western humanists and earth scientists until late in the day. A lived cosmology, Connolly says, contains embedded understandings about the beginnings of the earth and the way time unfolds. The text engages the major western cosmologies of Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Tocqueville, together with pagan and minor western orientations that posed challenges to them or could have. Hesiod, Ovid, William Apess, Amazonian and Aztec cosmologies, Catherine Keller’s minor Christianity, James Baldwin, and Michel Serres instigate key responses, often challenging binary logics and the subject/object dichotomy with a world of multiple human and nonhuman subjectivities.

Connolly pursues a conception of time as a multiplicity of intersecting temporalities to come to terms with the vicissitudes of climate destruction and the grandeur of an earth neither highly susceptible to mastery nor designed to harmonize smoothly with humans. The book revisits the “improbable necessity” of a politics of swarming to respond to the ongoing wreckage and potential fascist responses to vast infusions of climate refugees from the south into temperate-zone capitalist states.

Stormy Weather draws on the work of earth scientists, indigenous thinkers, naturalists, humanists, and students of nonwestern cosmologies. Ultimately, Connolly contends that critical intellectuals today must not remain enclosed in disciplinary silos, or even in “the humanities” as currently defined, to do justice to our moment of climate wreckage.

A revealing exploration of domestic fascism in the United States from the 1930s to the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C.

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress presented to the United Nations We Charge Genocide, a more than two-hundred-page petition that held the United States accountable for genocide against African Americans. This landmark text represented the dawn of Black Lives Matter and is as relevant today as it was then, as evidenced by the rise of white supremacist groups across the nation and the January 6th Capitol riot which disclosed the specter of a fascist revival in the US Tracing this specter to its roots, We Charge Genocide! provides an original interpretation of American fascism as a permanent and longstanding current in US politics dating to the origins of US settler-colonialism.

Picking up where Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” left off, We Charge Genocide! reveals how the United States legal system has contributed to the growth of fascist states and fascist movements domestically and internationally. American Studies scholar Bill V. Mullen contends that the preservation of a white supremacist world order—and the prevention of revolutionary threats to that order—structure the discourse and practice of US fascism. He names this fascist modality the “counterrevolution of law” in tribute to the radicals on the American Left, such as George Jackson, Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, and the Black Panther Party, who perceived the American state’s destruction of revolutionary groups and ideas as a distinctive form of American fascism. Mullen argues that US law, particularly US “race law,” has been an enabling mechanism for modalities of fascist rule that have locked historic blocs of non-white populations into an iron cage of legal and extralegal violence.

To this end We Charge Genocide! offers a legal historiography of US fascism rooted in law’s capacity to legitimate and sustain racial domination. By recovering the legacy of important orga­nizations, such as the Civil Rights Congress and Black Panther Party, which have both theorized and resisted American legal fascism, Mullen demonstrates how their work and critical theorists like Davis, Marcuse, Jackson, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Fraenkel illuminate the threat of American legal fascism to its most vulnerable racialized victims of state violence in our time, including gender and transgender violence.

A revealing exploration of domestic fascism in the United States from the 1930s to the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C.

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress presented to the United Nations We Charge Genocide, a more than two-hundred-page petition that held the United States accountable for genocide against African Americans. This landmark text represented the dawn of Black Lives Matter and is as relevant today as it was then, as evidenced by the rise of white supremacist groups across the nation and the January 6th Capitol riot which disclosed the specter of a fascist revival in the US Tracing this specter to its roots, We Charge Genocide! provides an original interpretation of American fascism as a permanent and longstanding current in US politics dating to the origins of US settler-colonialism.

Picking up where Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” left off, We Charge Genocide! reveals how the United States legal system has contributed to the growth of fascist states and fascist movements domestically and internationally. American Studies scholar Bill V. Mullen contends that the preservation of a white supremacist world order—and the prevention of revolutionary threats to that order—structure the discourse and practice of US fascism. He names this fascist modality the “counterrevolution of law” in tribute to the radicals on the American Left, such as George Jackson, Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, and the Black Panther Party, who perceived the American state’s destruction of revolutionary groups and ideas as a distinctive form of American fascism. Mullen argues that US law, particularly US “race law,” has been an enabling mechanism for modalities of fascist rule that have locked historic blocs of non-white populations into an iron cage of legal and extralegal violence.

To this end We Charge Genocide! offers a legal historiography of US fascism rooted in law’s capacity to legitimate and sustain racial domination. By recovering the legacy of important orga­nizations, such as the Civil Rights Congress and Black Panther Party, which have both theorized and resisted American legal fascism, Mullen demonstrates how their work and critical theorists like Davis, Marcuse, Jackson, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Fraenkel illuminate the threat of American legal fascism to its most vulnerable racialized victims of state violence in our time, including gender and transgender violence.

Gentleman Jigger stands as a landmark novel, celebrated for its candid exploration of Black sexuality set against the dynamic backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance. The story follows Stuartt, a defiantly queer artist, who navigates the complexities of racial and sexual identity in a period of profound cultural upheaval. Originating from a distinguished light-skinned Black family in Washington D.C., Stuartt immerses himself into the burgeoning arts scene of Harlem, where he aligns with the "Niggeratti," a group of young, rebellious artists and writers. This collective boldly challenges their elders’ conviction that their creative endeavors should be dedicated solely to the advancement of racial equality.

When their rebellion fizzles and they go their separate ways, Stuartt moves downtown to Greenwich Village where, where he fully indulges in his desires, intertwines with underworld figures, and achieves unexpected fame and fortune. It is also a world that, until his Hollywood debut, assumes that he is white.

Part fictionalized autobiography, part social satire, Gentleman Jigger opens up a whole new dimension not only of the Harlem Renaissance but also of the racial and sexual politics of the Jazz Age.

We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside?

The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other.

Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.

One of the enduring claims in the Christian tradition is that creation is good. Given the diversity of experience and the abundance of suffering in the world, however, such an affirmation is not always straightforward. The Play of Goodness provides a phenomenology of creation’s goodness that clarifies the ongoing relevance of the doctrine today. It argues that what is “good” about creation is not synonymous with a confession of faith and does not require an overly optimistic disposition, but instead appears within diverse and often surprising circumstances.

Alongside original contributions to French phenomenology and creation theology, The Play of Goodness counterbalances a tendency in continental philosophy to focus on negative phenomena. By developing the philosophical concept of a prelinguistic experience of goodness, the book identifies a quality of goodness that is integral to the place in which we find ourselves. It also articulates shared points of contact among people in an increasingly polarized world, while demonstrating that distinctly theological concepts do not need to be presented in opposition to secular, agnostic, or atheist perspectives in order to be relevant.

Benjamins develops an account of creation’s goodness that has the potential to animate an abiding affection for one’s place, accentuate our reasons to care for it, and confirm that what happens in our lives is of genuine significance.

A profound exploration into the spiritual beliefs and practices of Seattle’s unhoused youth

Soul Woundedness is an intimate, piercing book about everyday life for young adults living on the streets of Seattle. Based on over five years of research and as a participant-observer, Paul Houston Blankenship-Lai presents the personal experiences of “street kids,” highlighting how their spiritual beliefs and practices offer them comfort, a sense of community, and a feeling of belonging amidst their struggles. They also demonstrate how spirituality on the streets can alienate people from themselves and the world.

The stories Blankenship-Lai tells here are about how social wounds go soul deep, and how seemingly antireligious spiritual practices, fashioned in an almost unlivable local world, help people create a life still worth living. By paying deep, sustained attention to what spirituality is like on the streets and what difference it makes, Blankenship-Lai uncovers an important, overlooked dimension in the experience and study of homelessness. They invite us to enter these stories and to question how our own spiritual and otherwise practices can help create “a more loving love.”

Aimed at a diverse audience, Soul Woundedness is a book not merely to educate but to transform. It is particularly relevant for those interested in spirituality’s role in addressing social inequities and underscores the importance of spiritual practices in overcoming adversity and promoting social change, making a compelling case for a world where everyone has a place to call home.

Exploring the ever-changing philosophy of city life with Jean-Luc Nancy

In The City in the Distance, Jean-Luc Nancy embarks on nothing less than a philosophy of the city. Drawing on his widely discussed accounts of sense and of the fraught question of community, Nancy views the city as the site of a disposition that is constantly undergoing metamorphoses.

Far from an abstract account, Nancy attends in the most concrete way possible to the workings of a city not typically taken as paradigmatic, Los Angeles. As Jean-Christophe Bailly suggests in his foreword, Nancy joins Walter Benjamin in thinking the city not from an external vantage point, but on its own terms.

FINALIST, ASSOCIATION FOR THEATRE IN HIGHER EDUCATION (ATHE) OUTSTANDING BOOK AWARD

A moving journey through the shadows of queer suicide and a tribute to lives marked by struggle and beauty

The Lamentations explores the struggles and resilience within the queer community, offering a unique blend of historical analysis and emotional tribute to those affected. Author Patrick Ander­son examines the phenomenon of queer suicide across various art forms such as film, theatre, and literature, tracing its evolution from the twentieth century to today.

Anderson brings to light the personal stories of individuals in the queer community who have ended their lives, compiling narratives from sources like newspaper articles, obituaries, and case studies. The book confronts the harsh realities of loneliness, shame, and oppression faced by many LGBTQ+ individuals, providing a poignant reflection on the societal challenges they face.

The Lamentations is more than a meditation on death; it’s a narrative of survival, mourning, and healing. Sharing personal accounts, including the losses of loved ones and friends, Anderson highlights the importance of memory and storytelling in celebrating the vibrancy of queer life amidst the sorrow of loss.

Accessible to a broad readership, the book transcends academic boundaries to address themes of love, loss, and the human spirit. It’s a compelling read for anyone interested in queer studies or anyone seeking to understand human experience through the lens of loss and legacy.

FINALIST, ASSOCIATION FOR THEATRE IN HIGHER EDUCATION (ATHE) OUTSTANDING BOOK AWARD

A moving journey through the shadows of queer suicide and a tribute to lives marked by struggle and beauty

The Lamentations explores the struggles and resilience within the queer community, offering a unique blend of historical analysis and emotional tribute to those affected. Author Patrick Ander­son examines the phenomenon of queer suicide across various art forms such as film, theatre, and literature, tracing its evolution from the twentieth century to today.

Anderson brings to light the personal stories of individuals in the queer community who have ended their lives, compiling narratives from sources like newspaper articles, obituaries, and case studies. The book confronts the harsh realities of loneliness, shame, and oppression faced by many LGBTQ+ individuals, providing a poignant reflection on the societal challenges they face.

The Lamentations is more than a meditation on death; it’s a narrative of survival, mourning, and healing. Sharing personal accounts, including the losses of loved ones and friends, Anderson highlights the importance of memory and storytelling in celebrating the vibrancy of queer life amidst the sorrow of loss.

Accessible to a broad readership, the book transcends academic boundaries to address themes of love, loss, and the human spirit. It’s a compelling read for anyone interested in queer studies or anyone seeking to understand human experience through the lens of loss and legacy.

A profound exploration into the spiritual beliefs and practices of Seattle’s unhoused youth

Soul Woundedness is an intimate, piercing book about everyday life for young adults living on the streets of Seattle. Based on over five years of research and as a participant-observer, Paul Houston Blankenship-Lai presents the personal experiences of “street kids,” highlighting how their spiritual beliefs and practices offer them comfort, a sense of community, and a feeling of belonging amidst their struggles. They also demonstrate how spirituality on the streets can alienate people from themselves and the world.

The stories Blankenship-Lai tells here are about how social wounds go soul deep, and how seemingly antireligious spiritual practices, fashioned in an almost unlivable local world, help people create a life still worth living. By paying deep, sustained attention to what spirituality is like on the streets and what difference it makes, Blankenship-Lai uncovers an important, overlooked dimension in the experience and study of homelessness. They invite us to enter these stories and to question how our own spiritual and otherwise practices can help create “a more loving love.”

Aimed at a diverse audience, Soul Woundedness is a book not merely to educate but to transform. It is particularly relevant for those interested in spirituality’s role in addressing social inequities and underscores the importance of spiritual practices in overcoming adversity and promoting social change, making a compelling case for a world where everyone has a place to call home.

A vivid, artfully crafted, and deeply hopeful account of one community’s struggle to rediscover and reinvent itself after a century of genocidal loss, dispossession, and displacement

To the extent that Middle Eastern Christians register in Euro-American political imaginaries, they are usually invoked to justify Western military intervention into countries like Iraq or Syria, or as an exemption to anti-Islamic immigration policies because of an assumption that their Christianity makes them easily assimilable in the so-called “Judeo-Christian” West.

Using the tools of multisensory ethnography, Sonic Icons uncovers how these views work against the very communities they are meant to benefit. Through long term fieldwork in the Netherlands among Syriac Orthodox Christians—also known as Assyrians, Aramaeans, and Syriacs—Bakker Kel­logg reveals how they intertwine religious practice with political activism to save Syriac Christianity from the twin threats of political violence in the Middle East and cultural assimilation in Europe.

In a historical moment when much of their tradition has been forgotten or destroyed, their story of self-discovery is one of survival and reinvention. By reviving the late antique Syriac litur­gical tradition known as the Daughters and Sons of the Covenant, they seek a complex form of recognition for what they understand to be the ethical core of Christian kinship in an ethnic as well as in a religious sense, despite living in societies that do not recognize this unhyphenated form of ethnoreligiosity as a politically legitimate mode of public identity.

Drawing on both theological and linguistic understandings of the icon, Sonic Icons rethinks foundational theoretical accounts of ethnicization, racialization, and secularization by examining how kinship gets made, claimed, and named in the global politics of minority recognition. The icon, as a site of communicative and reproductive power, illuminates how these processes are shaped by religious histories of struggle for sovereignty over the reproductive future.

A Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures.

Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means “Jewish” and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In contrast, this book calls attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means “German.” By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. In time, when the word shifted to a verb, taytshn, it came to mean the act of translation. To write or speak in Yiddish is thus to render into taytsh and inhabit the gap between languages.

A Taytsh Manifesto highlights the cultural porousness that inheres in taytsh and deploys the term as a paradigm that can be applied to a host of modern Jewish cultural formations. The book reads three corpora in modern Yiddish culture through the lens of translation: Yiddish pulp fiction, also known as shund (trash); the genre of the Yiddish monologue as authored by Sholem Aleichem and other prominent Yiddish writers; and the persistence of Yiddish as a language of vulgarity in contemporary U.S. culture. Together these examples help revise current histories of Yiddish while demonstrating the need for new vocabularies to account for the multidirectionality of Jewish culture. A Taytsh Manifesto develops a model for identifying, in Yiddish and beyond, how cultures intertwine, how they become implicated in world systems and empire, and how they might escape such limiting and oppressive structures.

A vivid, artfully crafted, and deeply hopeful account of one community’s struggle to rediscover and reinvent itself after a century of genocidal loss, dispossession, and displacement

To the extent that Middle Eastern Christians register in Euro-American political imaginaries, they are usually invoked to justify Western military intervention into countries like Iraq or Syria, or as an exemption to anti-Islamic immigration policies because of an assumption that their Christianity makes them easily assimilable in the so-called “Judeo-Christian” West.

Using the tools of multisensory ethnography, Sonic Icons uncovers how these views work against the very communities they are meant to benefit. Through long term fieldwork in the Netherlands among Syriac Orthodox Christians—also known as Assyrians, Aramaeans, and Syriacs—Bakker Kel­logg reveals how they intertwine religious practice with political activism to save Syriac Christianity from the twin threats of political violence in the Middle East and cultural assimilation in Europe.

In a historical moment when much of their tradition has been forgotten or destroyed, their story of self-discovery is one of survival and reinvention. By reviving the late antique Syriac litur­gical tradition known as the Daughters and Sons of the Covenant, they seek a complex form of recognition for what they understand to be the ethical core of Christian kinship in an ethnic as well as in a religious sense, despite living in societies that do not recognize this unhyphenated form of ethnoreligiosity as a politically legitimate mode of public identity.

Drawing on both theological and linguistic understandings of the icon, Sonic Icons rethinks foundational theoretical accounts of ethnicization, racialization, and secularization by examining how kinship gets made, claimed, and named in the global politics of minority recognition. The icon, as a site of communicative and reproductive power, illuminates how these processes are shaped by religious histories of struggle for sovereignty over the reproductive future.

A Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures.

Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means “Jewish” and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In contrast, this book calls attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means “German.” By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. In time, when the word shifted to a verb, taytshn, it came to mean the act of translation. To write or speak in Yiddish is thus to render into taytsh and inhabit the gap between languages.

A Taytsh Manifesto highlights the cultural porousness that inheres in taytsh and deploys the term as a paradigm that can be applied to a host of modern Jewish cultural formations. The book reads three corpora in modern Yiddish culture through the lens of translation: Yiddish pulp fiction, also known as shund (trash); the genre of the Yiddish monologue as authored by Sholem Aleichem and other prominent Yiddish writers; and the persistence of Yiddish as a language of vulgarity in contemporary U.S. culture. Together these examples help revise current histories of Yiddish while demonstrating the need for new vocabularies to account for the multidirectionality of Jewish culture. A Taytsh Manifesto develops a model for identifying, in Yiddish and beyond, how cultures intertwine, how they become implicated in world systems and empire, and how they might escape such limiting and oppressive structures.

Examines the need to recenter the category of sex–theorizing sex itself as nonbinary–in contemporary studies of gender and sexuality

Gender has largely replaced sex as a category in critical theory, in progressive cultural circles, and in everyday bureaucratic language. Much of this development has been salutary. Gender has become a crucial site for theorizing trans identifications and embodiments. Yet, without a concomi­tant theory of sex, gender’s contemporary uses also intersect with late neoliberalism’s emphasis on micro-identities, flexibility, avatar culture, and human capital. Contemporary culture has also grown more ambivalent about sexual desire and its expression. Sex is seen as both ubiquitous and ubiquitously a problem.

In Defense of Sex theorizes sex as both a nonbinary form of embodiment (one that can comple­ment recent trans conceptions of gender as multiple and nonbinary) and a crucial form of social desire. Drawing on intersex and trans theory as well as Marxist theory, feminist new materialism, psychoanalysis, and accounts of the flesh in Black studies, author Christopher Breu argues for a materialist understanding of embodiment and the workings of desire as they structure contemporary culture. Moving from critique to theorizing embodiment, desire, and forms of bioaccumulation, In Defense of Sex concludes by proposing the unabashedly utopian project of building a sexual and embodied commons.

In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire is available from Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.

One of the enduring claims in the Christian tradition is that creation is good. Given the diversity of experience and the abundance of suffering in the world, however, such an affirmation is not always straightforward. The Play of Goodness provides a phenomenology of creation’s goodness that clarifies the ongoing relevance of the doctrine today. It argues that what is “good” about creation is not synonymous with a confession of faith and does not require an overly optimistic disposition, but instead appears within diverse and often surprising circumstances.

Alongside original contributions to French phenomenology and creation theology, The Play of Goodness counterbalances a tendency in continental philosophy to focus on negative phenomena. By developing the philosophical concept of a prelinguistic experience of goodness, the book identifies a quality of goodness that is integral to the place in which we find ourselves. It also articulates shared points of contact among people in an increasingly polarized world, while demonstrating that distinctly theological concepts do not need to be presented in opposition to secular, agnostic, or atheist perspectives in order to be relevant.

Benjamins develops an account of creation’s goodness that has the potential to animate an abiding affection for one’s place, accentuate our reasons to care for it, and confirm that what happens in our lives is of genuine significance.