bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Precarity and the Pursuit of Unhappiness
Authors: Ty Eleanor
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines three works by Japanese North American writers: Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being,Mariko Tamaki's novella Cover Me, and her graphic novel Skim, illustrated by Jillian Tamaki. Though different in narrative style and technique, these three texts feature Japanese North American teens, who struggle with identity issues, family instability, self-esteem, and depression. The protagonists are unable to follow the kind of hard-working immigrant ethos of their parents; instead, they pursue what looks like a path to unhappiness, and suffer mental and physical consequences. Ozeki plays with the connectedness of geographical space, and uses postmodern devices to show global economic and social uncertainty; Mariko Tamaki uses the detached and ironic first-person point of view of a twenty-year old to critique our obsession with ownership and money. In Skim, verbal and visual techniques convey Skim's outsider status, her broken family, difficulties with her peers, and what Sara Ahmed calls the "happiness commandment."
Work, Depression, Failure
Authors: Ty Eleanor
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at repercussions of the sense of failure in two stories of second-generation Asian immigrant women who grew up assimilated into North American culture and became successful professionals but who experience a crisis and fall into depression. Mimi, a character in Catherine Hernandez's play Singkil (2009), and journalist Jan Wong both suffer from a breakdown that forces them to rethink or reassess their priorities and identities. Singkil is, in part, a coming-of-age story, while Out of the Blue (2012) is a memoir of workplace depression. Though different in genre, these two works recount Asianfails that critique the model minority discourse, and they also show the links between private health and professional, social trauma.
Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Authors: Bendix Regina , Bizer Kilian
Published: September 2017

Both a vision for future scholarship and a slogan for university restructuring, interdisciplinarity promises to break through barriers to address today's complex challenges. Yet even high-stakes projects often falter, undone by contradictory incentives, bureaucratic frameworks, communication breakdowns, and the strong feelings raised by urgent social debates. Jumping into collaborative research without preparation or ongoing attention, researchers often fall back on disciplinary habits and raise disciplinary defenses. Above all, there is never enough time. Born of six years' experience in the Göttingen Interdisciplinary Working Group on Cultural Property, this book examines social research as social process, identifying characteristic challenges of funded interdisciplinary projects: the clash of positivist, interpretivist, and normative approaches, the hierarchies and personalities among researchers, and the interaction of academic knowledge work with the common sense of social problems. While calling for reforms in research policy and administration, the book's immediate goal is to help researchers make the most of existing conditions. Drawing on economistic models of exchange and anthropological accounts of play and ritual, six chapters trace the life cycle of an interdisciplinary project--a temporary community of practice partially removed from everyday academic life--from its initial formulation to closure and aftermath. A seventh chapter provides recommendations for funders, administrators, principal investigators, and junior researchers. Reflexive attention to the research process can shepherd interaction across disciplines and capture insights as they emerge.
The Interdisciplinary Project as Social Form
Authors: Bendix Regina F. , Bizer Kilian , Noyes Dorothy
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the rise and the challenges of the funded interdisciplinary project as a format for research. A range of internal and external causes account for this rise: the complexity of urgent social problems, disciplinary self-critiques, university resource constraints, the influence of neoliberal formats, and public pressure for accountability in research expenditures. Still, the very conditions that facilitate the inauguration of interdisciplinary ventures impede their success in practice. The chapter reviews the interpersonal, intellectual, professional, and institutional sources of team conflict and project dysfunction. It argues for a pragmatic approach of ongoing reflexive attention to social process within the research group, seeking not to overcome but to take account of the inevitable market logics, political agendas, and epistemological compromises.
Holding Up and Folding Up
Authors: Bendix Regina F. , Bizer Kilian , Noyes Dorothy
Published: September 2017

The late stages of a project life cycle raise interlocking challenges of sustaining participation and producing results. External incentives and material challenges weigh more heavily, requiring attention to sociability and the transitions of junior researchers. With mutual knowledge gained, research team activities can shift from generative ambiguity to clarification, identifying unexpected points of convergence and laying out the stakes of irreconciliable differences. These activities in Göttingen offered hindsight to be reaped in subsequent projects regarding mechanisms for capturing emergent insights as well as sustaining an ecology of project "outputs": scholarly and public, disciplinary and interdisciplinary publications. In the absence of consensus on policy recommendations, projects can serve the public through communication elucidating the stakes of hot problems and the institutional contexts of proposed solutions.
Introduction
Authors: Gray White Deborah
Published: September 2017

This chapter explains that the book looks at masculinity by examining, in both contemporary and historical perspective, the different ways that the Promise Keepers, the Million Man marchers and gay men approached masculinity, fatherhood, marriage, and issues of race, faith, and sexuality. Similarly, it explores how different groups of women approached femininity, feminism, motherhood, marriage, and sexuality, and examines their historical and contemporary ability to work across race, class, gender, and sexuality. It explores how African Americans navigated post-blackness, and how lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders negotiated their struggles with inclusion. As such, Lost in the USA reveals how intersectionality functions in the lives of local people and how it works and affects relationships and coalitions.
Standing By Their Men
Authors: Gray White Deborah
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at why women associated with the Promise Keepers and most black women supported the men’s marches. It shows that both groups of women believed in the folly of radical feminism, the evil of homosexuality, the need for strong two parent heterosexual families, and the equality of men and women based on the complementarity of their gender roles. It takes a historical look at black and white womanhood and concludes that Promise Keeper women and black women wanted similar things from men but for different reasons. In looking at black and white women historically this chapter explores the concept of postfeminism and the race-traitor trope. It shows the difference that race made in these women’s approach to the family and social issues.
The Fierce Urgency of Unity
Authors: Gray White Deborah
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the Million Man and Million Woman marches and shows that African Americans marched more for unity than in unity. The rights movements of the 60s and 70s changed black Americans’ sense of themselves as a nation within a nation. Intraracial violence, individualism, and class consciousness had replaced communalism and black unity; and a vertical sisterhood had replaced broad sororal relationships. This chapter looks at the marches for evidence of the changes in the relationship between men and women, leaders and their constituents, heterosexuals and sexual minorities. Postmodernity put pressure on African Americans to redefine black identity, but this chapter argues that as the idea of post-blackness spread at the end of the century, there was no consensus on how to be black.
Epilogue
Authors: Gray White Deborah
Published: September 2017

This ending uses President Obama’s speech at the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to reiterate that marches give people courage and purpose. In the 1990s they helped Americans adjust to the dislocations caused by postmodernity. Identities were in flux and even while marchers gathered with people they identified with, they sought new identities, different ways to experience the world, and a redefinition of freedom that accounted for the new ways that their race, class, gender, sexuality and faith - intersectionality - allowed them to experience their world. Marchers tried to be more inclusive by reaching across identities. While some succeeded others failed. Marches were not oases from postmodernism, but rather reiterated all the complexity of postmodern life.
Forging Broadband for the Commanding-Heights Economy
Authors: Hong Yu
Published: September 2017

To explicate the ascent of the internet into a primary site of economic restructuring, this chapter historicizes broadband internet in China, focusing on the evolving political economy of networks after the neoliberal reform. It argues that the take-up of broadband took place when China’s outward-looking economy has become full blown and crisis-ridden. In this new context and especially after 2008, broadband is interwoven into the state’s manifold thrusts of constructing for an alternative commanding-height economy. However, new contradictions, which the broadband China program fell short of addressing, including labor discontent, excessive competition in the urban access market, and corporate disincentives to expanding networks in the countryside, continue to hamper broadband from becoming the strategic public infrastructure that state leaders hope to make it.
Making a Home-Base Strategy
Authors: Hong Yu
Published: September 2017

This chapter traces the evolution of mobile communications as a site of China’s “home-base” industrial strategy and, after the 2008 global economic crisis, as part of intensified geopolitical struggle in the techno-economic realm. This chapter, first, historicizes telecom development through successive network generations, starting from fixed-line networks to second-generation and then third-generation mobile networks. As the business ecosystem includes network-equipment production, handset production, and content development and distribution, this chapter, then, explores market-specific trajectories, dynamics, and challenges so as to make sense of varying state actions and the obstacles they faced under the general 3G developmental framework. Lastly, to underscore the state’s diluted interventionist capacity, the coda explores how the 3G mobile communications development has affected state strategies and competitive structures in the 4G era.
Zombies, Migrants, and Queers
Authors: Fojas Camilla
Published: September 2017

The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse among zombies in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, migrants, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to explore the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She examines how racial capitalism persists through the proliferation of diverse forms of racial domination and non-European imperialism in the neoliberal era. Racial hierarchies are supplemented by other typologies, ones that are racialized but contain different symbolic capacities, particularly that between migrant or refugee or displaced person and citizen and global North and global South. Zombies, Migrants, and Queers shows how racial capitalism creates new tributaries of oppression in its neoliberal imperial form.
Introduction
Authors: Fojas Camilla
Published: September 2017

The story of U.S. power is revised after the economic crisis, creating an entirely new story form that begins, not with decline, but with an exhilarating freefall and ends with new ways of revitalizing white America. The postcrisis stories of class descent, sexual deviance, racial oppression, ruination, and disaster explore the contradictions and tensions exposed by the economic freefall. Popular culture of the Great Recession contributes to a social order shaped by economic precariousness and generates stories that encourage and enable publics to adapt to this new condition. These stories must not cross a certain threshold, one that would lead to insurrection. Perhaps all it takes is a little nudge to push these stories over the line, to reinterpret them and reframe their revolutionary and liberatory potential.
Border Absurd
Authors: Fojas Camilla
Published: September 2017

The postcrisis flattening of the social order spurred a flurry of anxiety-ridden stories of extralegal endeavors to maintain a middle-class lifestyle against further ruin. Ruin and personal devastation put the white protagonists of Arrested Development, Weeds, and Breaking Bad at the limits of the United States in proximity to the U.S.-Mexican border where crossing over is the final stop on their personal freefall. The border is the end of the line. The southern frontier offers ready symbols for the end of capitalism, signified as a geographical limit. Capitalism reaches its limit when it no longer serves white supremacy, when whiteness loses its value as capital and needs new forms for survival.
Migrant Domestics and the Fictions of Imperial Capitalism
Authors: Fojas Camilla
Published: September 2017

Filipino domestic labor occupies the visible geographies of global popular culture and capitalism in ways that demand reckoning. They work in the homes of major figures who represent significant coordinates of the economic crisis of 2008: David Siegel, the time-share king, and Alexandre de Lesseps, the global investment banker specializing in microfinance. The Filipina domestics enable the everyday lives of the Siegels and the de Lesseps, cooking and cleaning, acculturating and nurturing their children. They are moral counterpoints to the profligacy and vacuity of the affluent classes; each has a worldview that is potentially disruptive to the overarching narrative of capitalist accumulation. They are ambivalent figures, representing many things at once, and they are also protagonists in their own alternate story of global capitalism.
Zombie Capitalism
Authors: Fojas Camilla
Published: September 2017

The zombie terror evokes the devastating impact of the economic crisis and the capitalist debt economy. The debt economy, like the zombie, is experienced as ubiquitous, ruinous, and capable of producing economic refugees the world over. Zombie media capture and contain audience outrage, fear, and anxiety about capitalism in crisis while they imagine the destructiveness of capitalism through debt, indebtedness, and forms of indentured servitude. These stories are replete with contradictions. They are about the end of a system and the destruction of a way of life based in capitalism. The zombie captures a social mood about the persistence of debt--the global proliferation of debt as a viral contagion that threatens the complete annihilation of humanity.
Afterword
Authors: Fojas Camilla
Published: September 2017

Postcrisis U.S. popular culture generated stories that put the capitalist social order in question by engaging the dialectics of personhood and dehumanization, normativity and deviance, freedom and imprisonment, and mobility and stasis. Many of these stories merely revise capitalism and reignite its appeal, offering outcomes that promise renewal and a return to financial and moral stability. Even the Great Gatsby returns after the Great Recession as a permutation of the many cautionary narratives about overweening economic ambition leading to inevitable failure and ruin. These postcrisis stories also contain moments of liberation from the coercive power of capitalism--moments that, if drawn together, might create an entirely new way of imagining the social order and, perhaps, encourage fantasies of liberation that might lead to their realization.
“We Ought to See What We’re Buying”
Authors: Oates Thomas P.
Published: September 2017

This chapter details how the mediated NFL draft emerged out of a set of contingencies produced by shifts in sport media industries during the early 1980s. The event grew in popularity by presenting the thorough, extended, and systematic assessment of NFL prospects as entertaining. But this fun has a profound political edge. By framing NFL prospects as transparent, knowable docile bodies, the discourses of the draft present them explicitly as commodities to be compared with each other. Thus positioned, prospects, the vast majority of prospects of whom are black, circulate in ways that revive looking practices that connect the male body, race, commerce, and pleasure. To unpack this process, the chapter proceeds in three parts. The first details how the draft came to be a televised spectacle. This is followed by a discussion of the process by which prospects are presented as docile bodies and explicitly imagined as useful, malleable commodities. I then consider how the dynamics of this market mobilize expressions of erotic desire for commodified black male bodies.
Male Order
Authors: Oates Thomas P.
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the works of prominent NFL coaches who have recently been figured as “experts of subjectivity” by publishing houses targeting the masculine market. The chapter offers a close reading of the books authored or co-authored by five coaches. These books are often the centerpieces of multimedia projects, these books are crafted to recommend carefully branded approaches to management, using football as an example, but asserting wide applicability. These works offer insights into how masculine wisdom about management and self-development is packaged for popular consumption. The analysis first considers example of Vince Lombardi, then turns to works by two major publishing houses that have produced works on the topic of leadership by NFL coaches. The chapter considers two books from Penguin’s “Portfolio” imprint and two from the evangelical publisher Tyndale.
The End of Football?
Authors: Oates Thomas P.
Published: September 2017

The concluding chapter examines narratives that threaten to disrupt both professional football’s immense profits and the ideological formation that has been advanced through its image. This challenge to dominant meanings, which has become increasingly pronounced in recent years, is a reassessment of football’s violence in the wake of revelations of devastating brain injuries among former players and of acts of sexual violence by NFL players.
Introduction
Authors: Ruberto Laura E. , Sciorra Joseph
Published: September 2017

This introductory essay documents the data of Italian migration to the United States from 1945 to the present and offers organizational categories through which to better conceptualize these seventy years of migration. Post-World War II Italians were mostly working class immigrants and constituted town-based Italian diasporas, while the last four decades have witnessed elite immigrants, or professionals considered a brain drain, leaving Italy for the United States (and elsewhere). Immigrant replenishment by new or “real Italians” greatly impacted the preexisting and still-developing sense of Italian American identity with its changing notions of race and style, and patterns of consumerism. By reconceptualizing migration history, this essay seeks to assess more generally how ongoing European migration is related to the continual development of postmodern notions of Italian ethnicity.
Italy, Italian Americans, and the Politics of the McCarran-Walter Act
Authors: Luconi Stefano
Published: September 2017

This chapter reconstructs the eventually fruitless efforts by which the Italian government of Alcide De Gasperi and Italian Americans pursued changes to the U.S. legislation that would have let a larger number of Italian immigrants move to the United States in the early 1950s. It focuses specifically on the exploitation of the anti-communist climate of the Cold War during the Truman administration in a campaign to prevent the passing of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, a measure that reaffirmed the national origins system discriminating against prospective Italian newcomers. The essay concludes that this operation ultimately failed because Washington allowed exceptions to its restrictive immigration laws almost exclusively for expatriates from countries under Communist rule, which was not the case of Italy.
“In the name of God … and in the interest of our country”
Authors: Marinari Maddalena
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses how Cold War geopolitical exigencies provided long-time immigration reform advocates like Italian Americans with a narrow window of opportunity to challenge the draconian immigration system in place in the United States since the Immigration Act of 1924 and mobilize for reform. After two decades of failed attempts, Italian Americans, thanks to the help and support they received from the American Catholic Church, finally created a successful immigration reform advocacy organization, the American Committee on Italian Migration (ACIM), which subsequently emerged as one of the leading actors for the immigration reform overhaul of 1965. The Church provided the group with the ideology, the resources, and the connections to be successful, while simultaneously shielding it from accusations of disloyalty.
Immigrants and Ethnics
Authors: Pasto James S.
Published: September 2017

This chapter presents post-World War II Italian immigration to Boston’s North End against tropes of mafia, racial conflict, and white flight in favor of analysis in terms of segmented assimilation and ethnic replenishment. It describes the following differential pattern: Italian immigrants replenished the Italian American population as younger immigrants “Italian Americanized” into the ethnic group; or, Italian immigrants “transnational Americanized” by maintaining a more linear Italian ethnicity. The former limited mobility and exposed the new immigrant to an oppositional culture; the latter enhanced mobility and limited contacts with the Italian American group. Transitional Italian Americans were thus well positioned to refashion the italianità of the neighborhood in conformity with post-War images of Italian culture and the gentrification of the “North End” into Boston’s “Little Italy.”
The Kingmakers of Fresh Pond Road
Authors: Cappelli Ottorino , Praino Rodrigo
Published: September 2017

This work provides an analysis of ethnic politics in the context of Italian American politics by focusing on the political activities and the rise and fall of one group of post–World War II Italian citizens who immigrated to New York City between the 1950s and the 1970s. For a few decades until the 2010s, these people were politically active in local and state politics in the area of the NYS 15th senatorial district, Queens County, and instrumental in the twenty-year career of Italian American New York State Senator Serphin Maltese. We define these individuals dual or binational ethnic-political brokers who utilize resources as Italian American community leaders in order to influence both American politics and Italian politics.
Women against Abortion
Authors: Haugeberg Karissa
Published: September 2017

Women from remarkably diverse religious, social, and political backgrounds made up the rank-and-file of the American antiabortion movement. Empowered by--yet in many cases scared of--the changes wrought by feminism, women prolife activists founded grassroots groups, developed now-familiar strategies and tactics, and gave voice to the movement's moral and political dimensions. Drawing on clinic records, oral histories, organizational records, and interviews with prominent figures, Women against Abortion examines American women's fight against abortion. It also elucidates the complicated relationship between gender politics, religion, and politics as notions of equality, secularism, and partisanship were recast in the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960s, it looks at Marjory Mecklenburg's attempt to shift the attention of anti-abortion leaders from the rights of fetuses to the needs of pregnant women. Moving forward, it traces the grassroots work of Catholic women, including Juli Loesch and Joan Andrews, and their encounters with the influx of evangelicals into the movement. The book also looks at the activism of Shelley Shannon, a prominent evangelical Protestant pro-life extremist of the 1990s. Women against Abortion explores important questions, including the ways people fused religious conviction with partisan politics, activists' rationalizations for lethal violence, and how women claimed space within an unshakably patriarchal movement.
Introduction
Authors: Haugeberg Karissa
Published: September 2017

This chapter traces the history of anti-abortion activism before Roe v. Wade. It also considers how the rise of the New Right transformed American abortion politics and remade the Republican Party. The introduction introduces readers to the key women profiled in the book, including Marjory Mecklenburg, Joan Andrews, Juli Loesch, Mildred Jefferson, and Shelley Shannon. It offers that women have engaged multiple strategies to end abortion, ranging from consciousness-raising campaigns to violence against providers and clinics. It concludes with a discussion of the federal and state subsidies that enabled antiabortion activism to flourish during the late twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.
Feminist Catholic Women’s Grassroots Antiabortion Activism
Authors: Haugeberg Karissa
Published: September 2017

This chapter addresses the history of socially progressive—and feminist-identified—Catholic women who mobilized to fight abortion in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing upon oral history interviews, organizational records, arrest dockets, and newspaper clippings, it reveals that lay Catholic women initially welcomed evangelicals into the grassroots anti-abortion movement, but were unprepared for the patriarchal worldview that evangelicals would impose on the movement. Although they were ultimately pushed out of leadership positions, lay Catholic women’s influence on the character of abortion protest continued to flourish long after they had withdrawn from the movement. When progressive Catholic women, including Juli Loesch, left leadership posts, anti-abortion support for welfare programs, peace, and social justice waned.
Women and the Rescue Movement
Authors: Haugeberg Karissa
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines Joan Andrews, a shy, conservative Catholic from Tennessee who engaged in some of the first violent campaigns against abortion providers in the early 1980s. Frustrated by conventional activists’ failure to overturn Roe, Andrews toured the nation firebombing clinics, chaining herself to obstetrical equipment, and teaching activists how to disrupt clinic operations. Andrews and other antiabortion “rescuers,” rarely served lengthy prison terms, even on those rare occasions when district attorneys pressed charges against them for trespassing, vandalism, or assault. This chapter clarifies that the federal government’s indifference to anti-abortion violence enabled extremists to organize operations intended to intimidate abortion providers and women.
Women and Lethal Violence in the Antiabortion Movement
Authors: Haugeberg Karissa
Published: September 2017

The chapter traces the career of Shelley Shannon, whose work in the far right wing of the prolife movement reached its apex when she shot Dr. George Tiller in 1993, outside his Wichita clinic. Like many women who joined grassroots antiabortion groups, Shannon was energized by the immediacy of direct action protest. But Shannon’s particular circumstances, including her troubled childhood, her proximity to white supremacists activists near Grants Pass, Oregon, and her membership in conservative evangelical Christian Church framed her choice of tactics. While the Reagan and Bush administrations had refused to authorize the FBI to investigate whether anti-abortion extremists were part of an organized effort to terrorize abortion providers, President Clinton authorized Attorney General Janet Reno to protect the nation’s abortion clinics. But Shannon’s plan to shoot Dr. Tiller, designed with the assistance of the cryptic prolife extremist group Army of God, had been carefully planned before Clinton took office.
Introduction
Authors: Lindsey Treva B.
Published: September 2017

In search of greater educational, employment, social, political, and cultural opportunities, many African American women migrated to Washington with formerly unimaginable aspirations and expectations for themselves. Colored No More establishes this search as formative to a New Negro ethos.The introductory chapter defines “New Negro” and constructs a gender-specific understanding of this historical era and identity, while introducing Washington as both a unique and a representative site for the emergence of New Negro womanhood. Challenging the temporal primacy on the Interwar period in New Negro studies, the introduction asserts the importance of examining the lives of African American women to revisit how we conceptualize the “New Negro.” This chapter also deconstructs our understanding of “colored” as simply a racial marker- gender mattered in how Blackness was experienced during the New Negro era. In search of greater educational, employment, social, political, and cultural opportunities, many African American women migrated to Washington with formerly unimaginable aspirations and expectations for themselves.
Conclusion
Authors: Lindsey Treva B.
Published: September 2017

This book focuses on African American women, and more specifically, African American womanhood to complicate a masculinist conceptualization of “New Negro,” both historically and historiographically. The usage of a feminist historical approach to the New Negro era and to the early twentieth century urban upper south uncovers a new history of African American struggles for freedom and equality through exploring Jim and Jane Crow exclusionary practices. Applying this approach to explorations of historically marginalized communities can reveal untold stories. Moreover, African American women’s expressivity and creation of counterpublics remain ripe sites for critical interventions for women’s historians and feminist scholars. By challenging and expanding how we think about expressivity, we enrich our understandings of the historical experiences and the distinct political and cultural contributions of African American women in the shaping the United States.
Introduction
Authors: Murphy Patrick D.
Published: September 2017

This introduction situates the book within an apparent paradox: In this age of climate change, internationally networked media systems and mobile technologies increasingly serve as the purveyors of environmentally “progressive” themes designed to awaken eco-consciousness and engender citizen based action. However, despite the rise in eco-driven plots in entertainment, green advertising and green voices in the blogosphere, citizens from countries both rich and poor around the world continue to be enmeshed in mediascapes designed to encourage consumption. To engage these contradictions and developments, this chapter outlines why it is important to make sense of the media’s circulation of ideas and issues regarding the environment around the globe, setting the tone for the following chapters by suggesting how the study of media and globalization can expose the links between corporate agendas, state agendas, consumer culture, resource depletion, food security, environmental risk, anthropogenic climate change, and public life.
Amazonian Indigenous Green
Authors: Murphy Patrick D.
Published: September 2017

Drawing from the cultural survival efforts of the Kayapó and the Paiter-Suruí, this chapter traces how indigenous rights and Western environmentalism have shaped each other. At the core of analysis is how, through the different periods of Amazonian activism, indigenous actors have been both framed by and drawn from the notion of the “Ecologically Noble Savage.” The political currency of this reoccurring trope has informed the creation of alliances between indigenous communities and Western eco-conscious actors to “save the rainforest.” While these partnerships have benefited both the “First World” and “Fourth World” actors involved, they have often been built on the false assumptions and divergent agendas. This shifting ground has produced very different environmental discourses over the last 40 years, moving the place of native Amazonians from one of confrontational eco-conscious cultural activists aligned with Green Radicalism to the shared market-based, scientifically validated indicators consistent with Ecological Modernization.
Logos Endiathetos
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

A distinction between logos endiathetos (internal discourse) and logos prophorikos(uttered discourse) was widely accepted in later Greek philosophy and contrary to what is often believed, nothing indicates that it was of specifically Stoic origin. Its occurrence and significance is studied in various authors of the first three centuries A.D. (especially Philo of Alexandria), as well as in the Greek theologian John Damascene. An intriguing theory of the ‘five movements of the soul’ is introduced and discussed.
Oratio Mentalis
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

From the third to the seventh centuries, Neoplatonist philosophers such as Porphyry and Ammonius used the idea of internal discourse in their commentaries to Aristotle. Boethius acted as a transmitter to the Latin world in this regard, especially by quoting an earlier threefold distinction between spoken, written, and mental discourses. The question as to whether he endowed the latter with a grammatical structure is discussed in some details—and answered negatively. The Greek notion of internal discourse is also shown to occur in some influential Islamic thinkers, especially al-Fârâbi and Avicenna.
Triple is the Word
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the use of the idea of mental discourse in Latin medieval philosophy from the late `eleventh to the mid-thirteenth century. A crucial passage from Anselm of Canterbury is first examined in some details. It is then shown how the idea occurred within a surprising variety of threefold distinctions in quite a number of authors. The notion that the object of grammar as a science is some sort of ‘language in the mind’ (sermo in mente) is also discussed. What comes out is that the Ancient philosophical tradition of the logos endiathetosand the Augustinian tradition of the verbum in mente are now being brought together in various ways and that an important Augustinian distinction between internal discourse properly speaking and the mental representation of spoken words and sentences has become commonly accepted.
Concept and Sign
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

An important component of the full-fledged idea of mental language was that concepts would come to be considered as signs. The Augustinian definition of a sign, however, was an obstacle to this since it required that a sign be perceivable by the senses. This chapter examines how the notion that there are purely intellectual signs was developed in the thirteenth century and what role concepts were attributed in general semantics. It reviews in particular the discussions of the period on whether the significates of words are concepts or external things and on whether angels use signs to communicate with each other.
What is Logic About?
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

Another lively debate of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century that played a significant role in the development of the theory of mental language was the discussion over the object of logic as a science, and whether it is primarily concerned with thought or language. It was held by various philosophers that the structure of mental language is what logic deals with. But they did not all agree on what mental language was: some said (as Ockham would) that it is composed of concepts, others (such as Walter Burley) that it is composed of real external things, and others again (such as Richard Campsall) that it is composed of the mental representations of external words. This chapter reviews these various positions and the arguments which supported them.
Futile Pleasures
Authors: McEleney Corey
Published: September 2017

Futile Pleasures examines the contradictory role that pleasure played in early modern English writers’ attempts to justify the utility and value of poetry. Drawing on the methodological resources of deconstruction and queer theory, the book offers close readings of works by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, exploring the ambivalence these writers displayed toward the possibility of poetry’s vain futility. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, the book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, the book both theorizes and performs the pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, the book argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.
Pleasure without Profit
Authors: McEleney Corey
Published: September 2017

The first chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the study by pursuing three goals: it offers a preliminary investigation of the utility and value that early modern writers intended for their work, examines how and why pleasure disrupts those intentions, and establishes how this issue persists in the context of contemporary theoretical debates. Through close readings of passages from texts by early modern writers such as Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert, as well as contemporary theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Stephen Greenblatt, this chapter demonstrate the complexities and contradictions that pleasure instantiates within the standards of utility to which poets attempt to adhere. The use of pleasure as a means to valuable ends is constantly belied by its volatile contingency, which provides no guarantee that poetry can deliver the goods that it advertises. Extending its readings into the modern era, the chapter follows the dynamics of abjection and dialectical recuperation with which modern thinkers have attempted to master such contingency, often by projecting it onto questionably futile forms of desire embodied in queer sexualities.
Bonfire of the Vanities
Authors: McEleney Corey
Published: September 2017

Chapter Two extends the work of the previous chapter by offering a more focused critique of the rhetorical and ideological strategies by which aesthetic pleasure has been devalued in both Renaissance and contemporary humanism. The chapter engages in an intensive analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard II in order to reveal how the forceful abjection of vain pleasures, as personified in King Richard and his sodomitical counselors, animates the play’s ideological machinery. It demonstrates further that, as a play, Richard II is itself a manifestation of the forms of futile pleasure that the dramatic world within the play aims to scapegoat. It ends by turning to the remainder of the second tetralogy to trace the plays’ reconstitution of pleasure’s vanity in the form of Prince Hal so that it can be reformed as useful once the prince is redeemed and assumes the throne as Henry V. This reading of Shakespeare’s texts is framed by an argument against commonplace narratives about the legacy of deconstructive theory. Just as Shakespeare’s second tetralogy stages and reinforces the submission of pleasure to use and vanity to virtue, so have critics tended to redeem the forms of queer pleasure for which deconstruction has been routinely vilified.
Coda
Authors: McEleney Corey
Published: September 2017

The coda identifies the double binds that the book attempts to grapple with. Specifically, it explains the performativity of the study and argues that rethinking the pleasures and literariness of criticism offers one way of moving beyond the impasses that mark current debates over the value of literature and the humanities.
Introduction
Authors: Anderson Judith H.
Published: September 2017

The word issues derived from Latin exire, “to go out,” “to go forth,” embraces meanings that include “outflows,” “problems,” and “extensions.” The figuration of death flows into contrasting figurations of life and light, and light extends to its use specifically in analogies of vision and being: Fiat lux. Poiesis, “making, producing, creating,” is fundamental to insight in the sign systems of mathematics and verbal language, both of which use analogy constructively. Traditionally, analogy is the connector between the known and the unknown, the sensible and the infinite, this earth and what is beyond it. The first three chapters of this book treat evil, sin, and death in Spenser, Donne, and Milton, and these treatments open into questions of mortalism, individuation, self-knowledge, and the means by which we represent and consider them. Chapter 4 turns to the history and theory of analogy, and subsequent chapters examine analogy, light, and death in the science and poetry of Kepler, Donne, and Milton.
Connecting the Cultural Dots
Authors: Anderson Judith H.
Published: September 2017

This chapter engages the history and structure of analogical figuration. It enables a theorized broadening of concerns from negation to construction, sin and death to life and light, and puts poetry and religion under the same canopy of creativity as science. Analogy, alternatively named proportion, is equally familiar to mathematicians, scientists, and poets. The theorized roots of analogy are Aristotelian—a subcategory of metaphor with a basis in mathematics. Early modern analogy has drawn the attention of contemporary scholars from many disciplines—historians of science, rhetoric, literature, philosophy, and religion—but often in isolation from one another. Instead, my argument emphasizes the bond among disciplines in their use of analogy for exploration, experiment, and discovery. It also addresses continuity and change between early modern and ancient uses of analogy and frames them with modern ones. Science and rhetoric are two of its major foci.
Proportional Thinking in Kepler’s Science of Light
Authors: Anderson Judith H.
Published: September 2017

Light is at the center of Kepler’s optics, astronomy, and cosmology. Verbal and mathematical analogy, whether as concept, proportion, or both, is crucial to his methodology and his habits of thought. Kepler is an intellectual hybrid who combines Neoplatonic and perspectivist ideas about light with mathematical and physical discoveries anticipating those of Descartes and Newton. Kepler is strikingly engaged with the interface of the immaterial with the material that light effects, as well as with correspondences and other connections between the celestial and terrestrial realms. Analogy, the salient means of linking the known with the unknown, the abstract with the sensible, is conspicuous throughout his work. This chapter focuses on Kepler’s study of light, geometric optics, and their bearing on the observation of astronomical phenomena. Both Donne and Milton were acquainted with Kepler’s ideas (as with Spenser’s).
Introduction
Authors: Tran Ben
Published: September 2017

Elaborating upon the concept of the “post-mandarin” and its historical context, the introduction draws the connection between post-mandarin intellectuals, masculinity, and altered gender and sexual relations during colonial modernity, while situating these claims within the fields of Vietnam and Southeast Asian studies, as well as modernist and postcolonial studies.
Conclusion
Authors: Tran Ben
Published: September 2017

To consider modern Vietnamese literature and its politics through questions of gender and sexuality is to challenge Vietnamese Marxist criticism that was made orthodox and inflexible by the machinations of state power and partisan politics. This book has aimed to contribute to this reassessment with its primary arguments: that the post-mandarin engagement with and representation of colonial sex and gender fostered an inclusive field of cultural representation and, more broadly speaking, a democratic national culture from which Vietnamese Marxism emerged. Vietnam’s anticolonial national movement during the twentieth century was not the singular Marxism narrated and codified by the state but was rather conditioned and formed in conjunction with modernity’s sociohistorical transformations, various political ideologies, and, most pertinent here, an aesthetic modernity attending to questions of gender and sexuality.
The Techne of Giving
Authors: Campbell Timothy C.
Published: September 2017

Techne of Giving intervenes in two debates: the first, the relation between an affirmative biopolitics and biopower; and the second, how cinema, Italian cinema especially, can provides fresh perspectives on how to engage generously with biopolitical apparatuses. In so doing, the book brings together contemporary philosophy and film studies in order to argue for the generous features of the cinematic apparatus. Not all apparatuses are the same—some are more generous than others to the degree that they allow the spectator to experience, in the workings of the visible and invisible, a mode of non-mastery able to respond to biopower. As the canon of biopolitical critique solidifies, Techne of Giving therefore pushes back against thanatopolitical readings of biopolitics. Drawing on authors as diverse as Adorno, Winnicott, Metz, Irigaray, and Lyotard, Techne of Giving skirts the fields of visual studies and contemporary thought to imagine a generous form of life. In so doing, the book is intended to jumpstart discussions of what it means to be generous and what part gratitude plays when considering different forms of being in common. The hope is to short-circuit neoliberal models of giving with their buyers and sellers, and instead to posit forms of non-giving and non-receiving. In addition the book follows the visual traces of such a model of generosity and giving across a number of classic Italian films. By so doing, it sketches a sensibility in which protagonists neither give nor receive in any traditional sense.
Freeing the Apparatus
Authors: Campbell Timothy C.
Published: September 2017

The second chapter is an attempt to read the cinematic apparatus as offering an affirmative response to biopower and mythic violence through the interplay of the visible and invisible. Beginning with a number of classic readings of the cinematic apparatus from Bazin, Heath, and Mulvey, among others, the possibility is explored that the cinematic apparatus can on occasion create generous forms of life that are able to give without requiring the mastery of what appears on screen. A techne of giving is found in the practice of generous attention, or what is referred to creative spectatorship.