bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Fousekis Natalie M.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of women's activism for child care in California. The efforts of mothers and educators to save child care in California put them at the center of state and local politics, and their struggle illuminates the nationwide contest after World War II over the contours of the social welfare state. The women conducted letter-writing campaigns, traveled to the capital to lobby their representatives and public officials, and coordinated statewide political action. Meanwhile, the female educators spoke passionately in defense of the program, emphasizing the benefits of education-based care to the children of working mothers and to society at large. Eventually, their political actions and claims for child care played a critical role in the shaping of public debate, the building of the modern welfare state, and the expansion of American democracy.
“We Need to Stand Together”
Authors: Fousekis Natalie M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on two women leaders, Theresa Mahler and Mary Young, and describes how they helped the coalition navigate female networks, create alliances with men inside and outside the legislature, and finally secure a permanent public child care program, even if only for California's low-income working mothers. As legislative chair for the Northern California Association for Nursery Education (NCANE), Mahler served as the key spokeswoman for nursery school educators and child care supervisors throughout the postwar struggles to secure permanent, publicly funded child care. A soft-spoken, unassuming woman who became president and later legislative chairman of the California Parents' Association for Child Care (CPACC), Young spoke on behalf of California's low-income working families, particularly single mothers.
“We Do Not Consider Ourselves Welfare Cases”
Authors: Fousekis Natalie M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores what happened to child care coalition when the federal government provided new child care funds. Child care did not have the same meaning for federal officials and for the early childhood educators and mothers. The federal government's goal was to provide compensatory education to poor children through programs such as Head Start and to reduce welfare rolls with the Public Welfare amendments to the Social Security Act. Unfortunately, these programs symbolically and practically linked child care to “welfare mothers” and their children. Advocates, who by this time has confidence in their influence, effectiveness, and place in the democratic process, encountered a federal government that considered child care an appropriate service only for the poorest Americans.
Becoming Ray Bradbury
Authors: Eller Jonathan R.
Published: May 2017

This book chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury's childhood and early years of his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. It measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Ray Bradbury's imagination throughout his first three decades. This biography follows Bradbury's development from avid reader to maturing author, making a living writing for the genre pulps and mainstream magazines. Unprecedented access to Bradbury's personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years. They also provide insight into his very conscious decisions, following the sudden success of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, to voice controversial political statements in his fiction. The book illuminates the sources of Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind, the human condition, and the ambiguities of life and death—themes that became increasingly apparent in his early fiction. It elucidates the complex creative motivations that yielded Fahrenheit 451. Revealing Bradbury's emotional world as it matured, the book highlights the emerging sense of authorship at the heart of his boundless creativity.
Exploring the Human Mind
Authors: Eller Jonathan R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind during the war years and how it reflected in his writings. As he embarked on an exploration of personality disorders, Bradbury discovered Karen Horney's The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937). Horney's book enabled Bradbury to understand the often destructive cycle of anxiety and hostility that underlies all neuroses. His characters, both in his genre fiction and in the broader fantasy fiction that followed, represent the full range of neurotic behavioral manifestations. This chapter discusses Bradbury's readings related to psychology, including Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, recommended to him by Henry Kuttner. It also considers Bradbury's incorporation of a wide range of psychoanalytical scenes into his stories and novels as he continued to search for answers to two questions: how do we know what is real, and how do we know what is human?
New Stories and New Opportunities
Authors: Eller Jonathan R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Ray Bradbury's new short stories and the new opportunities that became available to him as a writer during the war years. In the spring of 1945 Bradbury wrote his first quality novella-length story. Although he had written long stories for both the detective and the science fiction pulps, only “Chrysalis” had staying power in the genre. His next project, “Eight Day World,” sold to Planet Stories in June 1945, and reached print a year later in the Fall 1946 issue, as “The Creatures That Time Forgot.” This chapter considers Bradbury's venture into radio and film, including an original play for the CBS show Dr. Christian and the writing assignment for the Hollywood movie Catman of Paris. It also looks at Bradbury's relationship with August Derleth, who became his de facto advisor through the middle 1940s, and his decision to take a trip to Mexico with Grant Beach.
Dark Carnival
Authors: Eller Jonathan R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Ray Bradbury's revisions and last-minute reconfigurations for Dark Carnival prior to its May 1947 publication. According to August Derleth, Dark Carnival cost more in press corrections than all his previous Arkham House titles combined. But it was clear that Bradbury pushed as hard as he could to update it as it moved toward the May 1947 publication date. For instance, he replaced “The Poems” with a newer story, “The Coffin”; cut two stories from the page proofs (“The Watchers” and “Trip to Cranamockett”); and tried to make significant revisions in seven other short stories. This chapter considers the reception of Dark Carnival following its official release, citing reviews such as those of Anthony Boucher of the San Francisco Chronicle, Will Cuppy of the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, and Arthur Hillman of Britain's Fantasy Review. It also looks at the continuing marketing friction between Bradbury and Derleth, along with other projects spun off by Bradbury's original concept for Dark Carnival.
New Worlds: Graphic and Television Adaptations
Authors: Eller Jonathan R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on graphic and television adaptations of some of Ray Bradbury's science fiction stories in the 1950s. Bookstores continued to provide a favorite recreation for Bradbury. He and his wife Maggie were beginning to buy more books for their home library. His newer reading discoveries now included the works of Sean O'Casey, Luigi Pirandello, and Marcel Aymé. This expansion of Bradbury's reading favorites coincided with the opportunity to extend his rather limited interaction with the world of television and film. Perhaps the most significant event of 1951 for Bradbury was a dinner with John Huston. This chapter examines graphic adaptations of Bradbury stories, including comic strips that were possible “lifts,” as well as television adaptations such as the broadcast of “Zero Hour” on NBC's Lights Out and Sidney Lumet's direction of “The Rocket” for CBS Television Workshop. It also discusses the problem of rights over many Bradbury pulp stories sold during the early and mid-1940s that complicated negotiations for other deals.
Fahrenheit 451
Authors: Eller Jonathan R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the changes, revisions, delays, compromises, and other issues, not to mention Ray Bradbury's own concerns, that Fahrenheit 451 had to go through before it could be finally released. As early as January 18, 1953, Bradbury already had a working title—Fahrenheit 270—for a book that would allude to the temperature at which book paper burns. He began to work with Joe Mugnaini on cover illustrations. For his part, Don Congdon was able to convince Doubleday not to interfere with Ballantine's Fahrenheit collection while also handling media negotiations for a Bradbury Showcase concept that was still at play with CBS Television. This chapter provides the background for Fahrenheit 451 and looks at some of the people who worked behind the scenes, including Mugnaini, Congdon, and Stanley Kauffmann.
Introduction
Authors: Gellman Erik S. , Roll Jarod
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter tells the story of how two preachers challenged racial divisions in the United States. Southern history, even American history generally, is too often told in white stories and black stories that seldom connect; yet the chapter asserts that the intertwined stories of Owen Whitfield and Claude Claude Williams challenges students of the history of the southern working class to take seriously the dynamic power and centrality of religious ideas in social and political movements, which raises new questions about the assumptions scholars have made about race, respectability, politics, and even gender in the Depression and World War II era. Their careers, in part, tell the story of the recovery of a southern common ground strong enough to support a working-class social movement for greater democracy in Depression-era America.
Prophets in the Storm
Authors: Gellman Erik S. , Roll Jarod
Published: May 2017

This chapter chronicles the activism of both Claude Williams and Owen Whitfield as both men embarked on parallel courses to preach the working-class gospel and organize demonstrations and similar campaigns in order to help the poor. It also charts developments within the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU), its eventual alliance with the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), and the internal disputes that later arose within the STFU–UCAPAWA ranks, which both Williams and Whitfield had to contend with, to varying degrees. Ratcheting up these internal tensions even further was the looming threat of communism. In addition, the chapter discusses the 1940 speech Whitfield addressed to the Third National Negro Congress in Washington, D.C.
Locomotive to Aeromotive
Authors: Short Simine
Published: May 2017

French-born and self-trained civil engineer Octave Chanute designed America's two largest stockyards, created innovative and influential structures such as the Kansas City Bridge over the previously “unbridgeable” Missouri River, and was a passionate aviation pioneer whose collaborative approach to aeronautical engineering problems helped the Wright brothers take flight. Drawing on a trove of archival material and exclusive family sources, this book is the first detailed examination of Chanute's life and his immeasurable contributions to the fields of engineering and transportation, from the ground transportation revolution of the mid-nineteenth century to the early days of aviation. This book brings to light many previously overlooked facets of Chanute's life, in both his professional accomplishments and his personal relationships. Through the reflections of other engineers, scientists and pioneers in various fields who knew him, the book characterizes Chanute as a man who believed in fostering and supporting people who were willing to learn. This biography cements Chanute's place as a preeminent engineer, pioneer, and mentor in the history of transportation in the United States and the development of the airplane.
Encouraging Progress in Flying Machines
Authors: Short Simine
Published: May 2017

This chapter details Octave Chanute's contributions to the effort to develop flying machines. By the early days of the twentieth century, the ancient taboo of flight slowly emerged as a thoroughly modern inquiry of science. To realize his personal goal of witnessing sustained mechanical flight, Chanute freely shared what he had learned; for him, technical information was a public commodity and he impressed on his correspondents the need to share what they had discovered so that future investigators could avail themselves of the known and take problems to the next level. By linking his many correspondents into an informal network, Chanute provided motivation and became the focal point of a far-reaching international community of flying machine experimenters.
Between Fiction and Experience
Authors: Chakkalakal Tess
Published: May 2017

This chapter reads William Wells Brown's preoccupation with marriage through both his fictional and autobiographical accounts of slavery. Generally believed to be the first novel by an African American, Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter continues to be the subject of considerable critical controversy and debate. Of course, the source of the novel's controversy rests not on marriage but rather on its absence. Purporting to tell the stories of Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress, daughters, and granddaughters, Clotel provides one of the earliest fictional accounts of the now scientifically verified conjugal relationship between the nation's founding father Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Moving from this scandalous piece of the nation's history, Brown's romance provides something of an antidote to history. Relying, in part, on the lessons of Brown's own marriages, this chapter's analysis of his fiction rests on the disjunction between his autobiographical and fictional accounts of slave-marriage.
The Useless Mouths and Other Literary Writings
Authors: Beauvoir Simone de , Le Bon de Beauvoir Sylvie
Published: May 2017

This book brings to English-language readers literary writings—several previously unknown—by the author. Culled from sources including various American university collections, the works span decades of the author’s career. Ranging from dramatic works and literary theory to radio broadcasts, they collectively reveal fresh insights into the author’s writing process, personal life, and the honing of her philosophy. Highlights of the volume include a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, the unpublished 1965 short novel “Misunderstanding in Moscow,” the fragmentary “Notes for a Novel,” and an eagerly awaited translation of the author’s contribution to a 1965 debate among Jean-Paul Sartre and other French writers and intellectuals, “What Can Literature Do?” ALso available in English for the first time are prefaces to well-known works such as Bluebeard and Other Fairy Tales, La Bâtarde, and James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years, alongside essays and other short articles. A landmark contribution to Beauvoir studies and French literary studies, the volume includes informative and engaging introductory essays by prominent and rising scholars.
The Useless Mouths
Authors: de Beauvoir Simone , Stanley Liz , Naji Catherine
Published: May 2017

A play in two acts and eight tableaux

To my Mother

The events take place in the 14th century, in Vaucelles, a town in Flanders.

The play was performed for the first time in November 1945 under the directorship of MICHEL VITOLD, in the Théâtre des Carrefours....
Notes for a Novel
Authors: de Beauvoir Simone , Gendron Sarah , Sarrot Justine , de Beauvoir Sylvie Le Bon , Gendron Sarah , Altman Meryl , de Beauvoir Sylvie Le Bon
Published: May 2017

I

3rd part: decides to write—8 days pass: realizes as she sets herself before

her table that she has not made up her mind—had thought she would

write who she was and that the act of writing would express a being against

which she could do nothing—realizes that she is free to choose herself...
“The Feeble Strength of One”
Authors: Cloud Dana L.
Published: May 2017

The period after the 1995 strike was one during which management regrouped and the Boeing workforce settled in after their victory. To some extent, managerial and official union intimidation, along with the ongoing pressure on workers in the plants, can explain the difficulty that activists had in sustaining their reform organizations. This chapter describes how the activists themselves were caught up in the dilemmas of representation. Their commitment to democracy informed their critique from below of the discourse and practices of union leadership. Yet their taking on the tasks of leading a rank-and-file movement put them in a position to replicate, in form if not in goal, some of the habits they decried. In particular, focusing on getting elected to powerful union posts, making decisions on behalf of members of rank-and-file organizations, using top-down and double-edged legal tools to reform the official union, and decrying the passivity of the membership all contributed to the burnout and eventual retreat from dissident activity of many of the activists whose voices are chronicled here.
Communication and Clout
Authors: Cloud Dana L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter speaks to scholars in the field of communication studies, surveying literature on organizational democracy, storytelling, and worker voice. It first discusses the unique contributions of the present case study, unusual in its focus on labor unions as sites of activity and agency, to academic work on worker voice and democracy in workplace institutions. The gains won during contract struggles and strikes reveal how, ultimately, worker agency is a function of both communicative practice and economic clout. Second, it brings the author's past scholarship in rhetorical studies to bear on the union dissident activity at Boeing. This part of the chapter emphasizes the importance of a dialectical theory regarding the interaction of structure and agency. It argues that the gaps and contradictions between lived experience of exploitation and the discourses that justify or overlook that exploitation are resources for critique and action. For both organizational communication and rhetorical studies, the present case forces the recognition that worker agency is a combination of communication and clout.
Interview with Mike Leigh
Authors: O'Sullivan Sean
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a distillation of a series of interviews conducted by the author. Two of these took place in London in July 2004; the third took place in New York City in October 2004. Topics discussed in these interviews include Mike Leigh's views about generations of film movements based in certain countries, such as Italian cinema during and after World War II, or German cinema in the twenties; three clear clusters in British cinema; whether he has ever felt the urge to be more literal about being a northern filmmaker; how he turns improvisations into a story; how the visual, or cinematic, enters into his process; if there is anything he misses about working in television; and the issue of closure in his films.
Trafficking in Trauma
Authors: Underwood Doug
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the pressures of the journalists' job and the traumatic experiences of women, minorities, and journalist–literary figures from historically marginalized groups as well as those who have investigated social problems and/or used journalistic literature to advance social reform causes. More specifically, it considers the role that women's rights, civil rights, and sensationalism have played to push social justice issues. After discussing how journalism, and particularly novel writing, became a pathway for minority writers to produce protest literature, the chapter looks at the emergence of naturalism and sensationalism as tools for journalist–literary figures to cope with traumatic life experiences. It also explores the fictionalization of the conditions of joblessness and economic misery during the Great Depression and concludes with an analysis of how traumatic emotions connected to a journalist's job could come out in themes of fiction.
An Algorithmic Criticism
Authors: Ramsay Stephen
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents an “algorithmic criticism,” which seeks, in the narrowing forces of constraint embodied and instantiated in the strictures of programming, an analogue to the liberating potentialities of art. It proposes that we create tools—practical, instrumental, verifiable mechanisms—that enable critical engagement, interpretation, conversation, and contemplation. The chapter furthermore proposes that we channel the heightened objectivity made possible by the machine into the cultivation of those heightened subjectivities necessary for critical work. Moreover, this chapter argues that scientific method and metaphor (or, more precisely, the use of these notions within the distorted epistemology we call “scientism”) is, for the most part, incompatible with the terms of humanistic endeavor.
Potential Literature
Authors: Ramsay Stephen
Published: May 2017

This chapter turns to the scientific imaginary as it appears in the realm of art. It asserts that art has very often sought either to parody science or to diminish its claims to truth. Within this important post-Romantic strain of critique, this chapter isolates another voice that has sought to find a common imaginative ground between art and science. The chapter begins with Alfred Jarry's inauguration of the “science of 'Pataphysics” and ends with the literary refraction of Jarry's Gedankenexperimenten in the work of the Oulipo. The latter, in which the terms of art and criticism are uniquely joined, informs algorithmic criticism's emphasis on the liberating forces of (computationally enforced) constraint. Moreover, the chapter argues that this important modernist genealogy points to the primacy of pattern as the basic hermeneutical function that unites art, science, and criticism.
Potential Readings
Authors: Ramsay Stephen
Published: May 2017

This chapter takes up the literary critical analogues to the poetics of constraint. It examines how the notion of “deformance” provides the critical framework for a discussion of conventional criticism as an activity dependent upon the notions of constraint, procedure, and alternative formation. It is in this light that computationally enacted textual transformations reveal themselves most clearly as self-consciously extreme forms of those hermeneutical procedures found in all interpretative acts. In addition, close analysis of several apparently diverse critical works—from readings of the I Ching and Saussure's anagrams to medieval poetry and Shakespearean sonnets—reveals the essential deformative nature of critical reading.
’Patacomputing
Authors: Ramsay Stephen
Published: May 2017

This chapter surveys some of the newer text-analytical tools—claiming them, unabashedly, as potential instruments of algorithmic criticism. It demonstrates that the degree to which the text-analysis systems WordHoard, Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR), HyperPo, and MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) show the way forward, they do so largely by embracing the contingencies that once threatened the discipline of rhetoric, but that, like rhetoric, may come to form the basis for new kinds of critical acts. In an age when the computer itself has gone from being a cold arbiter of numerical facts to being a platform for social networking and self-expression, one may well wonder whether those new kinds of critical acts are in fact already implicit in the many interfaces that seek only to facilitate thought, self-expression, and community.
The Business of Consciousness
Authors: Emerich Monica M.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter begins by discussing the international marketplace known as Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability or LOHAS for short. Created by two market organizations and embraced by the entities that it seeks to describe as a way to reorder the marketplace for alternative, natural, and environmentally friendly goods and services, LOHAS continues to take shape through market and media through various “texts.” Texts refer to the commodities, advertising, events, regulatory policies, marketing efforts, market organizations, lectures, conversations, and agencies that align with the term. The remainder of the chapter describes the methodology and terminology used in this book, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.
LOHAS, Social Reform, and Good Capitalism
Authors: Emerich Monica M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter takes up with the healed self, the newly “conscious” change-agent, now interpellated as global “citizen” as he and she move from inner work to externalized work in the world. It focuses on social reform and the idea of “good capitalism” in LOHAS narratives. Capitalism must be exonerated in LOHAS culture, and to do so means that certain perceptions and practices that have been treated as economic and cultural axioms need to be reworked. LOHAS begins with the idea of success. The chapter investigates how the texts attempt to juggle a new meaning of success that entails doing with less—but better things—while still promoting the interests of capital. It historicizes LOHAS discourse to reveal how it is informed by various social movements including early American Christian Reform, the European Green Party of the 1960s, and the social movements occurring in the 1960s in the United States, including environmentalism, feminism, and civil rights.
Gender, Solidarity, and Symbolic Capital
Authors: McNeil Bryan T.
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers the significance of prominent women's leadership in the movement to stop mountaintop removal. The prominence of women in leadership positions is a signature characteristic of Appalachian community activism, including the CRMW and the Friends of the Mountains (FOM) networks. However, the role of women is related to the decline of the union and the shifting sites of organizing within the community. Though women have always been active in social issues in the coalfields, the union's historically dominant role in organizing activism limited women's ability to rise to leadership positions. Organizing outside of the union affords women greater flexibility to link together social issues that a labor perspective may not have addressed directly. As such, women are able to forge a more comprehensive approach to social justice built upon different symbolic capital foundations.
Commons Environmentalism and Community Activism
Authors: McNeil Bryan T.
Published: May 2017

This chapter studies how a commons approach to environment and community sets the mountaintop removal movement apart from other environmental and activist positions. The commons approach includes humans as active participants in the environment. In contrast, the narratives that have greatly influenced modern discourses of environment—industrial progress and wilderness protection—both exclude humans from the environment. A commons perspective allows activists to create a more comprehensive discourse in which environment and economy are not opposed, but are necessary and complimentary components of any community. The discussion of the commons is heavily indebted to Mary Hufford, who has written extensively on the commons, based on years of very public ethnography in the Coal River region.
Gender Deviants
Authors: Ramirez-Valles Jesus
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores compañeros' experiences of stigmatization related to their nonconforming gender behavior. Collectively, the life stories show that childhood is the period in which most stigmatization is experienced—and perhaps causes the most lasting consequences. At this time in life, family and school are the most salient sources of stigma, as they are the main socializing agents. Some of these compañeros internalized such stigma, but most of them have been able to overcome the internalization in the course of their lives. Yet, they speak of depression, failed suicide attempts, and dislocation as consequences of the stigma they endured. The experienced stigma and its consequences are particularly severe for those activists who identify as drag queens, transexual, or transgender. Since they were children, their actions were perceived by others as flagrant transgressions of gender norms.
Getting Involved
Authors: Ramirez-Valles Jesus
Published: May 2017

This chapter addresses how Latino GBT activists actually became part of the AIDS and gay movements. A significant number of compañeros became active in the AIDS and gay movement as a result of approaching organizations searching for social services. They first were “clients,” in the language of many of these organizations. Afterward, they became volunteers and activists. The transformation from client to volunteer or activist is partly due to reciprocity. Recipients of services frequently feel obligated to work on behalf of the organization, because of the benefits they have received from the organization or because they do not want to be passive recipients of services. Two types of services are notable here: those related to LGBT issues and those related to HIV and AIDS.
Analysis of Black American Voters in Barack Obama’s Victory
Authors: Kilson Martin
Published: May 2017

This chapter probes the electoral attributes of a special political dynamic that contributed significantly to Barack Obama's victory in both the 2008 Democratic primary contests and in the national presidential election. That special political dynamic involved the unique contribution of African American voters (hereafter referred to as the Black Voter Bloc or BVB) in facilitating Obama's election as the first African American President of the United States. It argues that the BVB played a critical electoral role in the Obama campaign's delegate count victory in the Democratic primaries by early July 2008 and in the Obama–Biden Democratic ticket's victory over the McCain–Palin Republican ticket in the November 4, 2008, presidential election.
Dead Certain
Authors: Walton Hanes , Allen Josephine A. V. , Puckett Sherman C. , Deskins Donald R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter demonstrates how the common assumptions of many political scientists and pundits were found to be false during Senator Obama's campaign. It identifies one link and commonality that few observers have acknowledged or even delineated, and that is the African American electorate as voters. Most observers either overstated and/or overdemonstrated via statistical voting models a single characteristic of African American voters, their heavy Democratic voting, to the exclusion of all other characteristics such as turnout, the increase of which in this election proved to be decisive. In this election, the African American voter characteristics have had to take an epistemic back seat to an endless emphasis on either the nation's clamor for change or a biracial and post-civil rights candidate, an emphasis that rarely acknowledged or spoke to this community, their political issues, or their progressive public policy concerns. Barely anything was said about turnout.
The Ambivalent Embrace of Barack Obama
Authors: Karenga Maulana
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that at the heart of Obama's attractiveness as a candidate was his being a representative of a people whose historical and ongoing role as a social and moral vanguard serves at least four fundamental functions for the established order in spite of the paradoxical and mystified meanings that race and racialized discourse and the social apprehension attached to Blackness play in this. First, for the established order, Obama serves as a moral mask to “correct” society's image internationally and domestically, camouflage its continuing imperial thrust, restore respect and hope among its citizens, allies, and the other peoples of the world by being a representative of a people who are a world-recognized moral and social vanguard, and give redeeming evidence of a rise from enslavement in the country to leadership of it. Second, Obama emerges as a counterargument and counterweight to social justice claims of African Americans and claims of racism, discrimination, and deficient opportunities against the established order. Third, there is an evolving tendency of his election to mute, alter, or invite suspension of progressive criticism, given his identity and the investment African Americans and other social forces have made in him as an alternative to prior administrations and a promise of the opening of new social possibilities and a new horizon of history. Finally, for the established order, the presidency of Obama offers an opportunity to facilitate an increased Americanization without rightful respect for the multicultural character of society and without necessary discussion of or dealing effectively with existing inequities in wealth, power, and status of the groups that compose society.
Obama, Black Religion, and the Reverend Wright Controversy
Authors: Jackson John L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the controversy surrounding Obama's former, prophetic pastor Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. as it relates to Black identity. The controversy surrounding the comments of Rev. Wright can be traced to black religion's unsolicited interjection into the American public discourse on diversity during an unprecedented presidential campaign, when white America had begun to feel a measure of self-satisfaction about its capacity to transcend historic white supremacy and elect a black man to the high office of the U.S. presidency for the first time in American history. Public questions were raised about Obama's church and faith as well as the patriotism of Rev. Wright and the racial inclusiveness of black religion. Perhaps the controversy would have been less pronounced had black religion's public, “civil,” face been foregrounded. But it came by way of the culturally specific space of the Black Church, not just a context for movement organizing and racial unity, but the setting for challenging moral hypocrisy in an oppressive society.
Race, Religion, and the Race for the White House
Authors: Hopkins Dwight N.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the controversy surrounding Obama's former, prophetic pastor Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. One of the fascinating developments in the 2008 presidential election has been the insertion of black religion and black theology into the discourse. For instance, on February 10, 2007, Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the White House. Shortly after, the New York Times published an article suggesting that Obama was beginning to distance himself from his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and that Obama might be linked to a radical form of black Christianity. The chapter argues for a need for a nationwide conversation on black religion, the black church, and black liberation theology.
The Legacy of the Obama Era
Authors: Allen Robert L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that African Americans, despite being critical to Obama's election, will not get specific attention to issues of discrimination and equity unless they unite in a social movement that compels the president and Congress to take up these issues. Whether Obama is avoiding “race” issues from a desire not to alienate white voters or he is motivated by commitment to a “colorblind” approach to policy, African Americans will get the president's attention only to the extent that there is an independent social movement that can bring political pressure to bear. The chapter goes on to discuss three occasions in U.S. history that stand out as historical moments when African Americans, independently organized and mobilized and with militant, progressive leadership, made successful interventions with U.S. presidents that resulted in major civil rights gains, and sometimes economic and political gains: Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation; Franklin Roosevelt and Executive Order 8802; and the Kennedy–Johnson administration and civil rights legislation.
The Flag and Three Rican Artists
Authors: Zimmerman Marc
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Puerto Rico: 98, an art exhibit at Chicago's Puerto Rican Cultural Center and then at the Chicago Art Institute commemorating one hundred years of U.S. control over Puerto Rico and featuring visual meditations with respect to the Puerto Rican flag and the island's problematic nationhood. The exhibition was a manifesto in relation to the flag as well as flagism—banderismo. The three artists, Elizam Escobar, Ramón López, and Juan Sánchez, are independistas who have all led lives of political as well as artistic struggle. Their visions go far beyond any narrow nationalism or even the frustrated national aspirations of their colonized space of imagination and aspiration. From their barrio and prison worlds, these artists can see what amounts to a fascination of Puerto Ricans with their flag as a form of affirmation and resistance. However, they can also see this fascination as an obsession.
U.S. Puerto Rican Literature
Authors: Zimmerman Marc
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses U.S. Puerto Rican literature, which can be divided into three phases, preceded by a kind of “pre-phase.” The pre-phase, extending from the last century, consists of exiles from the independence struggle against Spain. These include major intellectuals who mainly wrote about their Caribbean struggles and reflected critically on the New York experience of arriving Puerto Rican nationals. The first phase, extending from 1917 to 1945, is mainly of autobiographical and journalistic works expressing the efforts of first-generation migrants to adjust to U.S. life. The period of migration from 1945 to 1965 constitutes the second phase, when radical exile writers mainly wrote a literature of exile with hardly any bilingualisms and only limited reference to the migration experience. Lastly, the third phase “effectively draws together the firsthand testimonial of the ‘pioneer’ stage and the fictional, imaginative approach of the writers of the 1950s or 1960s.”
Cuban–Puerto Rican Relations and Final Projections
Authors: Zimmerman Marc
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter traces the portrayal of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican–Cuban relations. It studies Miguel Barnet's La vida real (1986) to reflect on the negative treatment of Puerto Ricans in Cuban American and other Latino writing. In spite of the many positive qualities of La vida real, its negative portrayal of Puerto Ricans in no way contradicts the Cuban American model, even as Barnet's text purports to be sympathetic to Puerto Rican problems and the falsification of their reality. This is a negativity that prevents a truer, deeper portrayal of U.S. Puerto Rican cultural realities such as may be found in the work of Juan Flores, Edna Acosta-Belén, Frances Aparicio, Arlene Dávila, and Agustín Laó-Montes—indeed, two successive generations of U.S. Puerto Rican specialists.
Ngillanwen
Authors: Course Magnus
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the aspect of the person created through maternal descent—what the Mapuche call küpal ñuke püle. Whereas paternal descent creates relationships of obligation and solidarity that frequently give rise to aggregates of persons, maternal descent is primarily a source of difference. The relations that people have with their matrilateral relatives are mainly affinal. This sociality of affinity is a kind of midway point between the sociality of exchange and the sociality of descent discussed in the previous chapters. The chapter also analyzes the different kinds of relations created by marriage, relations that, despite their capacity for inequality, are portrayed as essentially equal.
Palin
Authors: Course Magnus
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at the ritual hockey game of palin. Ritual hockey constitutes an engagement with “potential affines”—potential friends and enemies—in a number of different ways and at a number of different levels. This engagement may be one of symbolic warfare or of reciprocal exchange, which can perhaps be viewed as structurally equivalent forms—a fact suggested by the interchangeability of the terms for “friend” and “enemy.” By constructing and elaborating on difference, ritual hockey functions as a key way Mapuche people expand their social networks; and it is through this expansion of relations with others that they create themselves.
Ngillatun
Authors: Course Magnus
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the ngillatun fertility ritual. The mechanisms by which Mapuche people set about achieving productive relation with certain divinities and with people from other ritual congregations are remarkably similar to the mechanisms by which they set about achieving productive relations in the everyday context. The communal nature of the ngillatun addresses a problem particular to societies in which forms of social organization occur primarily at a personal level, namely, that of how ideas about the construction of sociality come to be shared. However, this is but one facet of the meaning the ritual has for the people who participate in it. Its primary meaning is that which its participants hold it to be: an act of giving thanks and a request for providence in the coming year, as well as a party.
From Treatment to Script
Authors: Raubicheck Walter , Srebnick Walter
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Hitchcock's involvement in creating the plot and text of his scripts. It studies the various drafts of the films under consideration, revealing three distinct objectives as Hitchcock monitors them: the removal of what he called “no scene” scenes; the addition of some strongly visual shots or the elaboration of a scene to provide increased insight into a character, usually without new dialogue; and the removal of dialogue that did not add anything substantial to characterization or merely indicated some idea that the camera had already conveyed. Between the first draft and the shooting script, the screenplay would often be rewritten substantially at least three times, as the collaboration between the director and his writers continued. At the same time, Hitchcock would begin his preproduction work, which would often influence later drafts of the script.
Conclusion Documenting Black Performance
Authors: Mitchell Koritha
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter utilizes archival evidence to argue that scholars must rethink how we identify a powerful theatrical space. Trees, telephone poles, and bridges became stages upon which lynchings occurred, but mobs were not alone in repurposing the spaces over which they had control. African Americans redefined spaces (including their own living rooms) to accomplish identity-sustaining theatrical work. In such a racially charged climate, blacks could not use existing dramatic conventions or rely on American theater's aesthetic tendencies. They had to transform theatricality in the United States from a mode that solidified blacks' position as noncitizens to one that further asserted their right to citizenship.
Reading Maya Angelou, Reading Black Internationalist Feminism Today
Authors: Higashida Cheryl
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines selections from Maya Angelou's autobiographies, identifying late-twentieth-century legacy of the post-World War II anticolonial Black Left. On one hand, Angelou's autobiographies contest the historiographic erasure of African Americans' internationalist identifications in the Bandung era, especially as they were animated by Black women. On the other hand, Angelou contributes to this erasure by emphasizing personal triumph and individual identity formation over sociohistorical narrative. Indeed, Angelou's remarkable popularity and cultural capital come at the expense of the revolutionary politics shared with comrades who have been exiled, persecuted, or otherwise banished from public memory. The chapter then considers how her writings and career provide an avenue for reclaiming Black feminism's postwar internationalist routes.
Queer(y)ing Masculinities
Authors: Alexander Bryant Keith
Published: May 2017

This chapter tests the limits of understanding what masculinity means or tries to mean. It insists that queer masculinities are those that are not only suspicious, resistant, or out of the ordinary, but are also those that elude while stabilizing meaning. In other words, at the moment we examine the Rocky Horror Picture Show or an online dating site, we establish a set of assumptions regarding who people are; yet, we develop this interplay of subjectivities that presumptively iterates binaries without ever challenging how heterosexuality is nothing more than a construction of the masculine ideal. The chapter beckons us to not get too comfortable with our learned sense that we know what masculinity is. It turns our assumptions regarding masculinity topsy-turvy and forces us to recognize that whether you are a Rasta, rude boy, martial artist, womanizer, athlete, or soldier, masculinities are defined social constructions that vary across culture, context, and community.
Representing Aboriginal Masculinity in Howard’s Australia
Authors: Konishi Shino
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the way in which the Howard government and its supporters revitalized colonial tropes about Aboriginal masculinity in order to progressively dismantle and undermine indigenous rights and sovereignty, culminating in the quasi-military intervention into supposedly dysfunctional Aboriginal communities towards the end of Howard's fourth term. It critiques and historicizes a range of demeaning representations that assume Aboriginal men are violent and misogynistic. These representations can be traced back to initial encounters between European and indigenous men. The aim is to bring academic, media, and governmental discourses about Aboriginal masculinity into conversation with masculinity studies, which means contextualizing notions of Aboriginal masculinity in ways that avoid unreflective colonial conceptions. Finally, the chapter examines the public response of Aboriginal men to this demonization, and how they negotiate their own masculine identities in the face of a colonial culture that disparages them for their race and gender.
Gleanings of Freedom
Authors: Grivno Max
Published: May 2017

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. The Upper South during this period presents a unique perspective on how free and slave labor systems coexisted and interacted during a time when slavery and free labor were moving apart both geographically and ideologically. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line in the decades preceding the Civil War. The book closely examines a handful of counties in northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania to illustrate how these rural local communities represented issues of national historical significance, including the dynamic, multifaceted relationship between slave and free labor, the lives of free black and white farmhands, the domestic slave trade's impact on the people of the Upper South, and the struggles of enslaved and free blacks to liberate themselves and their families from bondage through immediate and delayed manumissions. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, the book reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.