Spark

Uncut explores the significance of the foreskin in contemporary culture

Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the foreskin and its position in contemporary Anglo-American culture. From language to art, from religion to medicine and public health, Uncut is a provocative book that asks us to ask ourselves what we know and don’t know about this seemingly small piece of skin.

The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whether or not the foreskin should be removed so their little boy can grow up to “look like dad” or to avoid imagined bullying in the locker room. Medical experts and public health organizations argue back and forth about whether circumcision is medically necessary, while “intactivists” advocate that removing an infant’s foreskin without their consent is mutilation.

Drawing on all these threads, Jonathan A. Allan leads us through the history and cultural construction of the foreskin—from Michelangelo’s David to parenting manuals, from nineteenth-century panic over masturbation to foreskin restoration—to ultimately ask: what is the future of the foreskin?

In 2015, the New York Times ran just a single headline with the term “sexual misconduct.” Three years later, it ran dozens of such headlines, averaging more than one per week, and expanded coverage across other media organizations followed. This shift in coverage is reflective of significant changes in public discourse about sexual harm helping to hold some perpetrators accountable for their behaviour and paved the path for #MeToo and related movements against sexual abuse and harm to receive national and global attention.

In Defining Sexual Misconduct, Stacey Hannem and Christopher Schneider trace contemporary shifts in power in relation to the increased recognition and censure of sexual misconduct and the ways in which the shifting social landscape is communicated in the coverage of sexual misconduct in media.

Hannem and Schneider also examine the contemporary dynamics of public accusations and their relationship to more formal criminal justice processes, as well as the implications for the stigmatization of alleged abusers and public response to alleged victims. Since behaviours categorized as sexual misconduct may not all be defined as crimes, or punishable through legal means, social censure and cancel culture often stand as proxy forms of punishment, and the authors reflect on what the pursuit of justice might look like in this extra-legal context.

One of the few biographies of an Inuk man from the 19th Century—separated from his family, community, and language—finding his place in history.
 
Augustine Tataneuck was an Inuk man born near the beginning of the 19th century on the northwestern coast of Hudson Bay. Between 1812 and 1834, his family sent him to Churchill, Manitoba, to live and work among strangers, where he could escape the harsh Arctic climate and earn a living in the burgeoning fur trade. He was perhaps the first Inuk man employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company as a labourer, and he also worked as an interpreter on John Franklin’s two overland expeditions in search of the northwest passage.
 
Tataneuck’s life was shaped by the inescapable, harsh environments he lived within, and he was an important, but not widely recognized, player in the struggle for the possession of northwest North America waged by Britain, Russia, and the United States. He left no diaries or letters.
 
Using the Hudson’s Bay Company’s journals and historical archives, historian Renee Fossett has pieced together a compelling biography of Augustine and the historical times he lived through: climate disasters, lethal disease episodes, and political upheavals on an international scale.
 
While The Life and Times of Augustine Tataneuck is a captivating portrait of an Inuk man who lived an extraordinary life, it also is an arresting, unique glimpse into the North as it was in the 19th century and into the lives of trappers, translators, and labourers who are seldom written about and often absent in the historical record.
 

A meditation on the poetics of hunger and the social worlds of cooking

“When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . .” —MFK Fisher

When chef and writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith left the city for rural life on a farm in Saskatchewan, she planned to replace cooking and teaching with poetry and prose. But—as begin the best stories—her next adventure didn’t quite work that way.

Food trickled into her poems, her essays, her fiction. And water poured into her property in both Saskatchewan and Calgary during two devastating floods.

Bread and Water uses lyrical prose to describe those two fundamental ingredients, and to probe the essential questions on how to live a life. Hobsbawn-Smith uses food to explore the hungers of the human soul: wilder hungers that loiter beyond cravings for love. She kneads ideas of floods and place, grief and loss; the commonalities of refugees and Canadians through common tastes in food; cooking methods, grandmothers and mentors; the politics of local and sustainable food; parenting; male privilege in the restaurant world; and the challenges of aging gracefully.

It is an elegant collection that weaves joy into exploring the quotidian in search for larger meaning.

A menu for an edible future

In a world expected to reach a staggering population of 9 billion by 2050, and with global temperatures rising fast, humanity must fundamentally change the way it grows and consumes food. But can we produce enough food to feed ourselves sustainably for an uncertain future? How will agriculture adapt to a climate change? How will climate change determine what we eat? Will we really be eating bugs?

Uncertain Harvest questions scientists, chefs, activists, entrepreneurs, farmers, philosophers, and engineers working on the global future of food on how to make a more equitable, safe, sustainable, and plentiful food future. Examining cutting-edge research on the science, culture, and economics of food, the authors present a roadmap for a global food policy, while examining eight foods that could save us: algae, caribou, kale, millet, tuna, crickets, milk, and rice.

Illuminating two hundred years of lost Black History through the lens of an iconic abolitionist settlement
In the Light of Dawn shares the compelling story of how the iconic Dawn Settlement—now largely within the boundaries of Dresden, Ontario— shaped (and was shaped by) a broader course of international events along a 200-year continuum of resistance and contribution. Using a geographic approach, the book reveals that the town’s size, scope, and importance eclipses its previous narrow interpretations as a “failed” utopian colony at a terminus of the Underground Railroad lead by the Reverend Josiah Henson (the “real Uncle Tom” of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark anti-slavery novel).
Beyond Henson, Dawn’s history contains familiar figures like Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks as well as a pantheon of lesser known but equally important Black leaders including Dennis Hill, William Whipper, William Carter, and Hugh Burnett. The trajectories of Dawn’s residents often intersect with pivotal international events from the time of the fur trade to the modern Civil Rights movement. Activism from 19th-century Pennsylvania’s Black Elite and other major American centres run like a golden thread through successive generations in Dawn, resulting in landmark actions such as the challenge to segregation of private businesses and publicly funded schools. Dawn’s people not only resisted slavery and oppression but also made successful and lasting contributions to the growth of local communities and wider society.
Far from being a failed colony, the Dawn Settlement emerges as a vibrant community of racial and economic diversity, where people of agency and ability influenced wider societal change. In the Light of Dawn presents an expansive yet nuanced account of a small rural town that challenges traditional notions of Black History and the contributions of early Black pioneers, leaving behind an enduring legacy.