bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Toni Morrison’s Ethics of Attention
Authors: Battersby Doug
Published: November 2022

Chapter 3 argues that the late modernist character of Toni Morrison’s fiction resides not in allusions or even stylistic debts to William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, but in her repurposing of modernist forms—especially the focalizing resources of free indirect narration—to engender disturbing intimacies between readers and characters in the grip of the most destructive forms of sexual desire. It begins by illustrating that Morrison’s mobilization of modernist aesthetics is far more troubling than critics have tended to recognize through a reading of a famously disquieting passage of Beloved (1987), which has been the focus of some of the most incisive and influential analyses of Morrison’s prose. The chapter focuses principally, however, on The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison’s debut, and arguably her most emotionally and ethically disturbing novel. It illustrates that the formal intricacies of her famously lyrical prose do not promote an ethically salutary world view, as other critics have troublingly suggested, but rather work to affectively involve readers in philosophical questions about the kinds of narratives the novel form is capable of encompassing and the ethical ramifications of the interest we are invited to take in different people’s narratives. The third chapter presents Morrison as a writer who surprisingly resembles the Vladimir Nabokov of Lolita (1955), both in the obsessive probing of inadmissible desire, and in openly challenging readers to at once succumb to and resist an aestheticization that risks aggrandizing the most egregious of sexual acts.
Homeric Grammar
Authors: Weaver William P.
Published: November 2022

Homer and Homeric speech were central to Philip Melanchthon’s vision for reforming education when he became the first professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg in 1518. This chapter examines his early theory and defense of poetry and illustrates his lifelong view of Homer’s poetry as divinely inspired. It examines the influence of Quintilian, Plutarch, and Strabo on his early Homer portrait. Homer was a teacher as well as a philosopher. He spoke truth because he used words in their proper senses. Learning Greek consequently meant learning Homeric Greek, with a strong dose of etymology and the Greek dialects. Melanchthon’s elementary Greek grammar, written in Tübingen and published in 1518, is truly a Homeric grammar, illustrating some key aspects of his language philosophy.
Homeric Eloquence
Authors: Weaver William P.
Published: November 2022

Marginal notes in Philip Melanchthon’s early teaching copy of the Iliad illustrate the ambitious and novel reform of Christian learning that he attempted in his inaugural lectures as professor of Greek in Wittenberg. They illustrate Homer’s excellence in the “teaching kind” (genus didaktikon, genus didacticum), a new genre of oratory that Melanchthon introduced in his first textbook of rhetoric begun in Tübingen and completed in Wittenberg. This chapter compares Melanchthon’s early Homer notes with his Greek grammar, his first rhetoric, and his choice of the New Testament Epistle to Titus as an elementary text for reading Greek. Paul and Homer alike excelled in character description, a chief example of the teaching kind.
The Wittenberg Scholia on the Homeric Poem
Authors: Weaver William P.
Published: November 2022

This chapter is a study of comprehensive marginal notes on the Iliad and the Odyssey dating from the University of Wittenberg in the 1550s. It argues attribution of the notes to Philip Melanchthon and credits their transmission to his successor in the chair of Greek, Vitus Winshemius. The notes give an unparalleled illustration of the Wittenberg school of interpretation as applied to Homer in a period of turmoil, following the defeat of Protestant princes by Charles V in 1547. The Wittenberg scholia represent an attempt to read Homer as the ancients read him. Virgil was the most authoritative ancient reader. His imitation of Homeric passages in the Aeneid guided rhetorical and dialectical study of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Wittenberg. The chapter illustrates creative uses of principles and terms established in ancient scholia, including novel approaches to heroic similes and heroic prayers.
Rightly Dividing the Word
Authors: Weaver William P.
Published: November 2022

This chapter illustrates the theological significance of reading Homer in Wittenberg. In his theology of prayer developed in 1543 and 1544, Melanchthon articulated anew the significance of the Homeric poem. First, reading Homeric speech trained the literate Christian to distinguish between the voices of law and gospel, the two premier utterances of Scripture. Second, reading Homeric speech furthermore trained the literate Christian to engage in what Melanchthon called a learned debate (disputatio) between faith and doubt on the threshold of every Christian prayer. To illustrate this training, the chapter compares Melanchthon’s and Winshemius’s divergent readings of the pseudo-Homeric Battle of the Frogs and Mice. It concludes with a reflection on Melanchthon’s theology of commonplaces (loci communes).
Dead in Banaras
Authors: Singh Ravi Nandan
Published: November 2022

Ethnographies fatefully rely on chance encounters, and mysteriously so such encounters come true. ‘Dead in Banaras’ is an instance of just such a fateful chance encounter. In its inception, it set out to follow the ‘dead’ across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue, and the aghorashram in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well-known North Indian city of Banaras. The crematoria in plural because the open-air manual pyres and close-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic ‘inside’ of the city. Hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the ‘local moral world’ the city is a medical metropolis anchored by a famed university hospital and storied through real-life dramatic narratives of medical emergency, saving, and untimely death. Aghorashram, on the other hand, as an urban Shaivite clinic and hermitage for sexual and reproductive cures works with funerary substances as pharmacopeia. Then, early on in fieldwork, these funerary journeys of the ‘dead’ had a chance encounter with my father’s death in the city. The same set of places henceforth spoke through a sensory logic of my father’s death. Dead in Banaras is then both an ethnography of being in the dead centre of the funerary city and an autobiographical funeral travelling (shav yatra) that narrates the city through a mourner’s logic of using the pyre to illuminate the dead as multiplicity.
Good, Bad Death
Authors: Singh Ravi Nandan
Published: November 2022

Chapter 3 unfolds the scrambled chronology of my initiation into fieldwork that coincided with the death of my father in the same city. As it turned out, he was hospitalized and cremated at the places that I went on to do my fieldwork. This chance encounter with his death produced a methodological impasse as the field sites became overdetermined by the biographical events. Eventually, I could recover the field through the writing of this ethnography, ironically, by turning my father’s death at the hospital into an ethnographic account. The autobiographical notes of being a son and a mourner brought me to think of my father’s survivors as fellow kin and mourners, and at another level, they allowed me to think of mourning as a way of relating with the place/city. Much literature exists on the people who seek moksha and ‘good’ deaths in the city, this chapter contributes to a more mixed and shaded event of a good, bad death.
Introduction
Authors: Stecopoulos Harilaos
Published: November 2022

The introduction begins with an overview of how cold war modernism figures prominently in US cultural diplomacy studies and argues for a broader understanding of literature’s relationship to propaganda in the postwar era. This necessitates a discussion of propaganda as transmission. The next section of the introduction analyses the relationship between liberal internationalism and cultural diplomacy in the US context with a particular focus on the idealistic concept of a Parliament of Man. I then shift to a general discussion of US literary ambassadors and US literary propagandists from Sherwood Anderson to Amy Tan. The final portion of the introduction summarizes each of the book’s chapters.
“Chau-vin-ism! Con-form-ity! Self-de-termi-nation! Freeeeeeeeee-dom!”
Authors: Stecopoulos Harilaos
Published: November 2022

This chapter takes as its inspiration a portion of Three Days Before the Shooting… (2010) in which Ellison critiques Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) by depicting a Boston writer’s misbehavior at a Salzburg, Austria restaurant. The chapter first provides a historical portrait of the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization, and then turns to each writer’s experience teaching American literature at the school. Ellison and Lowell were eager to combat Communism through cultural means, but for all their willingness to serve as literary ambassadors, they both expressed skepticism that US cultural democracy could foster democracy abroad. Instead of endorsing the seminar, Lowell and Ellison identified in Jim Crow segregation, abundantly evident in a proximate US Army base, ample reason to criticize the nation they were tasked with representing overseas. They articulated this critique through competing literary representations of an African American soldier stationed in Europe. Lowell’s poem “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich” (1953, 1959) re-inscribed the very racism the poet sought to decry. However, Ellison challenged this offensive portrayal of a Black enlisted man in Three Days, thus re-affirming the importance of African Americans to US democracy and the ongoing battle with world communism.
People to People, Writers to Writers
Authors: Stecopoulos Harilaos
Published: November 2022

This chapter demonstrates that William Faulkner developed an interest in middlebrow internationalism from his work with the People-to-People program, a state-facilitated cultural diplomatic project. I chronicle the history of the program and its connection to the Eisenhower Administration, and then examine Faulkner’s work directing the program’s literary committee. Hostile to administrative labor, Faulkner didn’t last long as a PTP chairman, but he was influenced by the program’s idea that ordinary Americans might be able to contribute to global community. The Town (1956) and The Mansion (1959), the two novels written during Faulkner’s experience with the People-to-People program, reflect this vision by highlighting the important role of culture in bringing together strangers and enemies. The chapter concludes by linking Faulkner’s work on behalf of the PTP program to his decision to create the William Faulkner Foundation in 1960.
‘For a Social Europe’
Authors: Andry Aurélie Dianara
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines the efforts undertaken by the then rising European Left—especially European socialist parties—to finally outline a concrete programme for a ‘social Europe’ in the run-up to the adoption of the European Community’s (EC’s) first Social Action Programme (1972–4). First, it explains how European socialists, communists, and trade unions converged (despite a few exceptions) on the conviction that socialism needed to be achieved through ‘Europe’, and to organize to this end. Second, it examines the socialist parties of the EC’s Bonn Congress in April 1973, when they adopted despite some disagreements their first programmatic platform ‘For a Social Europe’—a redistributive, market-correcting, workers-oriented, democratized one. Third, it assesses how the European Left attempted with moderate success to influence the drafting of the 1974 Social Action Programme at the dawn of the 1970s economic recession.
Introduction
Authors: Dimitrova Diana
Published: November 2022

Chapter 1 constitutes the introduction and states the research question, the main themes that the book discusses the aims, and the methodology. It introduces the main topics of the following chapters. While Chapter 2 deals with issues of cultural identity, several Hindu discourses of cultural identity, and questions of myth and gender, Chapter 3 studies the history of Hindi drama and the literary biography of seven representative playwrights. Chapters 4 and 5 present an in-depth analysis of selected works of the playwrights, and Chapter 6 represents the conclusion.
Cultural Identity in Hindi Plays of the 1880s–1940s
Authors: Dimitrova Diana
Published: November 2022

Chapter 4 deals with the representation of cultural identity and gender in the period 1880–1940 and discusses the work of several representative playwrights of the time.
Conclusion
Authors: Dimitrova Diana
Published: November 2022

Chapter 6 summarizes the inferences of this study, and reflects on the interface of identity, culture, nation, and gender in Hindi drama. It concludes that there are multiple ways of looking at these important questions, as different authors present different interpretations, thus reflecting the plurality and complexity of Hindi literary and cultural traditions. It also revisits the postcolonial contentions voiced in the works of several Indian intellectuals, and the striking absences of women in the national and cultural narratives that they present. While some critics send to the inner sphere and leave them there, other thinkers do not even mention women. Similarly, in their studies, there is no place for Dalits or Dalit women or other communities, disadvantaged because of caste, gender, or ethnicity. It is therefore important to underline the great importance of the seven playwrights studied in my book, whose works deal with questions related to women’s education and agency centre-stage. Many of the playwrights discussed are feminists and modernists who open up new interpretative venues and theatrical modes of expression in order to express a pluralistic and inclusive narrative of cultural identity.
Introduction
Authors: Mulhall Stephen
Published: November 2022

The Introduction contextualizes the approach taken in the rest of the book by summarizing key elements of the author’s previous work on other Coetzee texts, from which that approach derives and by which it is decisively shaped. Most fundamental is the assumption that Coetzee can be read as a modernist realist, and that his encounters with philosophy are informed by a vision of the relation between ideas and reality that he has previously articulated in terms of ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’. This book is predicated on the assumption that a new inflection of these ideas—the idea of ‘translation’, with its linguistic, literary, religious, and ontological connotations—orients and conditions the ‘Jesus’ trilogy.
Estrella
Authors: Mulhall Stephen
Published: November 2022

This chapter focusses on the second volume of the ‘Jesus’ trilogy, The Schooldays of Jesus. It shows how Coetzee identifies and elaborates on themes and issues arising from the way Wittgenstein’s conception of counting discloses the strengths and the limitations of the distinctive world view of Western European modernity, which identifies the real with that which can be quantified. The discussion pivots around Coetzee’s invocation of Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, which proves to relate this volume of the trilogy to a wide range of philosophical and literary matters—theatricality, self-consciousness, absorption, melodrama, and original sinfulness.
Estrella
Authors: Mulhall Stephen
Published: November 2022

This chapter focusses on the third volume of the ‘Jesus’ trilogy, The Death of Jesus. It argues that the central character David’s conception of reading is internally related in Wittgensteinian ways to his conception of counting, and that his relation to Don Quixote amounts to Coetzee’s way of envisioning how a religious impulse might manifest itself in a world from which the institutions and practices of religion have vanished. In so doing, the novel addresses the significance of death in religion, literature, and philosophy; and its characterization of David’s mode of reading presents us with a model of how Coetzee invites us to read his own work—an invitation this book has attempted to accept.
Recognition and Recollection
Authors: Brandom Robert B.
Published: November 2022

Hegel anticipates the challenge to the very idea of objective reality as providing norms for thought that Rorty thought required us to enact a second phase of the Enlightenment. Unlike Rorty, Hegel presents a detailed, constructive, anti-authoritarian, nonfetishistic, social pragmatist account of the representational dimension of conceptual content. At its heart is an account of the social dimension of discursive normativity in terms of reciprocal recognition, and an account of the historical dimension of discursive normativity in terms of a distinctive new conception of reason: the recollective rationality that turns a past into a tradition. His idealism thereby offers a concrete pragmatist alternative to Rorty’s global semantic and epistemological anti-representationalism.
Interventions in Central Europe II: 1618–1645
Authors: Milton Patrick
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines the interventions that took place in central Europe during the Thirty Years War (1618–48). The geopolitical goals of these interventions are identified, along with their public and private justifications and legitimations. Whether or not they were successful in terms of the interveners’ goals and the consequences for the subjects will also be assessed. The chapter takes a look at the crucial moments of intervention including the Palatine intervention in Bohemia (1619); the counter-interventions in support of the Emperor (1619); the Danish (1625), Swedish (1630), Transylvanian (1619 and 1644), and French (1635) interventions in support of the anti-Habsburg rebels.
How To Be a Poet
Authors: Orgel Stephen
Published: November 2022

None of the major poetic figures of the 1580s and 1590s—Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, the young Donne—was a professional poet. Moreover, for Donne, Marlowe, and (for ten very productive years) Spenser, nothing was printed. Manuscript circulation, like poetry, was an extension of the personal and social life. But Shakespeare published his poetry, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, in small, elegant, carefully edited volumes. One would say that for Shakespeare, writing narrative poems was a logical extension of writing plays, except that the poems look so little like the plays. Clearly Shakespeare turned to poetry because plague had closed the theaters throughout much of 1592–4; but this does not account for the character of the two poems he published, or for the way he went about it.
The Politics of Minority Government
Authors: Field Bonnie N. , Martin Shane
Published: November 2022

Approximately one-third of parliamentary democracies are governed by a minority government. Minority governments are governments in which the party or parties that hold cabinet posts in the executive do not simultaneously hold a majority of seats in the legislature. This chapter introduces the volume, setting out more closely what a minority government is and is not. It then examines the rate of minority governments more precisely, and how this varies over time and from country to country. It offers an important innovation in how cabinet composition and cabinet change is counted by scholars, suggesting the need to take account of cases where gaining legislators or losing legislators owing to, for example, party switching, can flip a government from majority to minority status, or vice versa, with implications for how the rate of minority government is calculated. We set out the context and motivation for this comparative volume on minority governments, and the questions we are seeking to answer—in particular why they form, how they operate, and how well they perform. Finally, we explain why we selected the thirteen countries for an in-depth study of minority government.
Minority Governments in Romania
Authors: Anghel Veronica
Published: November 2022

What explains Romanian parties’ preference to form minority cabinets? Does the minority status of cabinets affect stability or performance? First, this chapter presents empirical evidence in favor of the important role of the country’s semi-presidential regime structure in minority cabinet formation. Second, the chapter finds that individual political goals and informal institutions—such as corruption and clientelism—play a fundamental role in making and breaking parliamentary alliances. These latter phenomena often shape legislative majorities, making individuals highly dependent on state resources and loosely bonded to a specific party. Third, this chapter comes in support of more recent scholarship that minority cabinets are neither situational nor do they necessarily perform poorly. However, even in this high volatility environment, minority cabinet duration and performance may improve when parties sign a substantive agreement that signals long-term commitment to shared governance, or when they have the support of the main ethno-regional parties.
Minority Governments in Canada
Authors: Godbout Jean-François , Cochrane Christopher
Published: November 2022

Minority governments frequently occur in Canada. Ten of the last twenty-four elections held between 1945 and 2020 have produced hung parliaments. What makes the Canadian case interesting, however, is that all of the governments during this period have been controlled by a single party, even when there was no clear majority winner in the House of Commons. This lack of formal coalition agreement between the parties implies that minority governments have to rely on temporary or ad hoc voting alliances to remain in power. Our analysis confirms that this bargaining approach reduces both the lifespan and the legislative productivity of single-party minority governments. However, we find that these differences are relatively small, and comparable in scope to what we observe in other parliamentary systems as well. Our goal in this chapter is to understand how minority governments form and govern in Canada, but also to explain why Canadian parties are so reluctant to enter formal coalition agreements. We argue that the answer to this puzzle lies in Canada’s federal structure and plurality electoral rule, which tends to promote the regional fragmentation of the party system and increase the number of potential supporters for the government.
Minority Governments in Poland
Authors: Zubek Radoslaw
Published: November 2022

This chapter studies minority government formation, governance, and performance in Poland over more than twenty years since 1997. During this period, five out of fifteen Polish governments had a minority status, and such governments remained in office for more than one fifth of the time. Three key points are made about the Polish experience with minority governments. First, most of the minority cabinets started life in the wake of major political crises when majority coalitions broke down and governments slipped into minority status. Many of such minority cabinets had a weak position in policy terms, leaving them vulnerable to alternative legislative majorities in parliament. Second, a complex interplay of electoral, office, and policy motivations discouraged the formation of stable support arrangements, and minority cabinets typically governed by building ad hoc legislative coalitions. Third, Polish minority cabinets have had a mixed record in legislative performance, with supported minority cabinets and unsupported cabinets formed by disciplined core parties demonstrating high effectiveness.
Reclaiming Regulatory Autonomy from the Investment Treaty Regime in Africa
Authors: Dagbanja Dominic Npoanlari
Published: November 2022

Chapter 2 develops the imperatives theory as a theoretical and analytical framework based on theories on constituent power, constitutionalism, and the role of the state in general international law. It reviews and interprets the basic rights of citizens and corresponding duties of various African states under their constitutions, international environmental treaties, and international human rights treaties. Based on this analysis, the chapter emphasises the central role of African governments in protecting the public interest, which must limit their competence in investment treaty-making. It argues that the competence of African states studied to conclude investment treaties are limited and must be guided by their duties to regulate in the public interest as guaranteed under their constitutions and recognised in general international law for at least two reasons. First, African states derive their powers from the people through their constitutions to be exercised in the name of and for the good of the people and within constitutional limits. Second, investment treaties presuppose the existence of norms necessary for them to come into existence and have legal effect. These norms include national constitutions and general international law. The chapter develops the constitutional-general law imperatives test for determining the limits to the capacity of states to conclude investment treaties.
The European Union as a Community of Super Wicked Problems and Its Ambition–Authority Deficit
Authors: Chalmers Damian
Published: November 2022

The European Union has an ambition–authority deficit. Its ambition is to deal with problems that are too difficult for member states in a way that requires them to grant considerable authority to foreigners. Its limited legitimacy restricts how it does this and wider acceptance of its solutions. This deficit’s unmanageability threatens the Union with collapse. The Union has therefore developed four strategies—legislative compacts, administrative coordination, resourced co-option, and discounting—to temper this mission’s demands. However, only one, legislative compacts, both plausibly manages this deficit and allows the Union to realize its mission. The challenge is therefore to generalize this strategy but address its central limitations, most centrally its legal formalism and collective action problems, in a way that does not harm its operational effectiveness. This will involve granting member states some autonomy, but paradoxically it protects the Union from its current slow-motion collapse rather than threatening that collapse.
Overcoming Crisis in the European Union
Authors: Schimmelfennig Frank
Published: November 2022

In an ever more heterogeneous and contested European Union, differentiated integration has facilitated substantially the deepening and widening of European integration. It has been particularly effective in kick-starting the integration of new policies and the admission of new member states. Differentiation proves less suitable, however, to address the main current challenges to the EU: the repair and reform of crisis-ridden highly integrated policies. Theoretically, the chapter argues that the supply conditions of differentiated integration are most favourable in a context of no or shallow prior integration of regulatory or distributive policies, in which a large group of states agrees on further integration and externalities between them and the outsiders are low. By contrast, demand for differentiation is most difficult to realize when constitutional and redistributive issues are at stake in deeply and uniformly integrated policies and differentiation threatens to shrink the size of the insider group and create significant externalities between them and the outsiders. To illustrate the difficulties, the chapter applies key theoretical and empirical insights from past differentiation to areas of EU crisis: the Eurozone, Schengen, Brexit, and the rule of law.
Misfire
Authors: Miller-Melamed Paul
Published: November 2022

Shot through the neck, choking on his own blood with his beloved wife dying beside him, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, managed a few words before losing consciousness: “It’s nothing,” he repeatedly said of his fatal wound. It was June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. One month later, what most Europeans also took for “nothing” became “something” when the Archduke’s uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph, declared war on Serbia for allegedly harboring the criminal elements and tolerating the propaganda that prompted the assassination. The First World War—the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century—had begun not with the bang of Gavrilo Princip’s gun, but with the whimper of European statesmen unable to resolve the diplomatic crisis that ensued. The history of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins of World War I rest on a rude irony: the vast disproportionality between a single deadly act and an act of war that would leave ten million dead. Consequently, the Archduke’s murder has assumed mythic proportions—the “first shots of the First World War” fired by a “fanatic Serb nationalist” backed by the “secret” Black Hand “terrorist” society in the “primitive, violence-ridden Balkans.” This book brings Sarajevo back to earth. By narrating the assassination in a broad historical context bereft of its usual embellishments and distortions, Misfire reminds readers that the real causes for the world war lie in “civilized” Europe rather than an amateurishly organized, if eternally fascinating, political murder.
The House Where My Soul Lives
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

Nikki Giovanni called Margaret Walker “the most famous person nobody knows.” This biography aims to correct that imbalance. Walker’s inner life was marked by bouts of poor health and a difficult marriage that stand in sharp contrast to her public persona, which revealed only lively intellectual engagement and deep commitment to the radical political forces at work during her lifetime (communism in the 1930s, and Black nationalism in the 1960s, both of which merged into her brand of humanism). This biography also reveals her connection to an even longer history as she took up the cause of educational reform, a mission that had motivated her parents in their lifetime. She is perhaps best known for her novel Jubilee from 1966, a historical narrative based on her maternal grandmother’s memories. Scholars often view the novel as a Black writer’s response to America's problematic fascination with Gone with the Wind (1936). The novel has enjoyed tremendous popularity, despite some scandal after Walker accused Alex Haley of plagiarism. Throughout her life Walker had an astonishing series of relationships with other writers, artists, and activists—Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ruby Dee, Myrlie Evers, and Sonia Sanchez among them. She was the only member of her generation to insist upon living in the South and she had a full and sometimes chaotic home life. The resulting career slumps contrasted with her driven-ness as an unacknowledged intellectual and cultural force in the twentieth century. In these respects her biography is a portrait of the shifts between exceptional and everyday life—a tension that rippled across Walker’s eighty-three and informed her unique view of the world.
In This Place Where I Was Born
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter starts with the birth of Margaret Walker on July 7, 1915, in the west end area of Birmingham, Jefferson County, Alabama. Her father, Sigismund Constantine Walker Sr., was a well-educated minister who pastored churches before pursuing a better-paying job as a college teacher. Her mother, Marion Dozier Walker, was a well-bred young woman headed toward a successful career in music when she fell in love with the persuasive young minister just out of seminary. Walker came to know the world through her father, toward whom she felt the stronger connection. Indeed, it was Sigismund Walker who fed his daughter's belief about the perfect family. However, a contributing factor to Walker's identity as a woman was the woman-centered household in which she grew up, one where Marion’s dominating presence went unmediated. The experience would figure prominently in her developing ideas about womanhood that would mature in the novel Jubilee and become the subject of later essays. While her future social status as a Black woman was being cultivated at home and at school, she became aware of tensions having to do with class and gender distinctions uniquely tied to place and the particular dynamics within her own family.
The Fire Burning Within
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter details the arrival of Margaret Walker's family in New Orleans. New Orleans University had two preparatory programs, the Model Grade School and Gilbert Academy. Early in January 1927, Margaret moved from the Model Grade School directly to Gilbert Academy’s freshman class. During the four years she spent at Gilbert Academy, her favorite classes were literature and English composition. Despite, or perhaps because of her precociousness, Margaret’s willfulness and outspokenness continued to draw the ire of her mother. Margaret’s father continued to disapprove of whipping his children, but Marion had come to understand it as a necessary evil, the only way she could hopefully redirect the energy of a difficult child. The Bible was where Walker could turn inward, finding stories and explanations that helped to diffuse her anger and calm her restlessness. The chapter then looks at Walker’s emotional and physiological struggles as she entered puberty. Her initial efforts at writing corresponded with, or perhaps more accurately, were driven by, the desperate need to capture and express those experiences that alternately frightened and captivated her.
As Low Down as the Blues Will Let You Be
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines how, despite what Margaret Walker thought about herself in 1939 after she returned to Chicago, the literary world had opened its doors to her. “For My People” continued to attract major attention. She was no longer a struggling young poet, but one with a growing reputation, which no one could question after Poetry published two more of her poems, “The Struggle Staggers Us,” and “We Have Been Believers.” Their successful placement affirmed her poetic talent, making the fiction she thought she needed to write much less important. Despite her interest in women’s writing, Walker was not prepared at this point to identify more closely with women artists and writers, preferring to admire them from afar. After the three poems had appeared in Poetry, she began to feel a stronger connection with, if not comparison to, some of the more popular women poets. The chapter then looks at the infighting in the Writers’ Project, which brought on by the growing resistance to WPA reformism and Democratic control in Congress, as well as Walker’s visit to New Orleans.
All My Roots Are Gathered in One Place
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter illustrates how the promise of employment at Jackson State College in Mississippi shook Margaret Walker out of her disheveled state, since it required her to plan a major transition for herself and her family in a short period of time. Her parents seemed to be satisfied that she would be gainfully employed, and with her promise to send them money from her paycheck regularly, they readily agreed to keep all three children, with the help of a housekeeper, and a schedule of visits to New Orleans. She was fortunate to have all of her classes on Tuesday and Thursday, which allowed her to dedicate Wednesdays and Fridays to her writing. Having a job, the ability to control her own money, the privacy and peace that a room brought, and seeing her children as often as she could gave her a new sense of independence, which her parents had expected and in fact reared her to have. If 1949 was the year that Margaret Walker chose an unlikely place to rebuild her life, no one could have predicted what she could and would do with that choice, as she transformed herself from a writer to the voice of an age. While planning Jubilee, she found the courage to do everything else she wanted and needed to do to bring her real and ideal worlds together.
A Woman of Ideas
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter shows that had it not been for the telltale signs of an aging body, at fifty-three, Margaret Walker would have seen herself as beginning her life rather than counting down the days before she would be “over the hill” as a Southern woman. She was comfortable, and with book royalties steadily coming in, her family had more financial stability than they had ever known. Translation requests for Jubilee were mounting, and Yale had agreed to reissue For My People, which had gone out of print. Walker was fortunate to be both a poet and a novelist at a time when the interest in Black history and culture was never higher. She became one of the most popular speakers, because she could alternate between the writers and traditional historical figures and speak cogently about contemporary affairs. Meanwhile, Walker’s interest shifted from occasional journal entries about the racial turmoil in the nation during the early 1960s to full engagement. Feeling a deep kinship with the new generation, she began to express her ideas more openly, many of which she later compiled and published as essays.
The Institute
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter recounts how, while Margaret Walker continued to be bombarded with offers to leave Jackson State for a predominantly white institution (PWI), she had come to the conclusion that the Institute was a critical component of her intellectual legacy. She had the support she needed and a community it served. And it was also true that her popularity was greater than ever, for in addition to Jubilee, “For My People” had reestablished itself as the “rallying cry of the civil rights movement.” The fact is that she had too many ideas that could ensure that legacy off the page, ideas that she needed to become reality to conquer any fear she might have had of becoming invisible. As a New Deal Democrat who viewed the world through the prisms of racism and fascism, Walker had a broad-based understanding of global and US politics. But by and large it was her mastery of the double-conscious identities required of the modern race woman that made her who she was, an outwardly conservative appearance that easily disguised her grounding in a much longer, Black radical tradition.
Call Me Cassandra
Authors: Graham Maryemma
Published: November 2022

This chapter highlights Margaret Walker’s completion of her autobiography. Her first task was to frame her story and identify its themes. Early notes show that she considered the psychological condition of Black women in America: oppression, stress, anxiety, sexism, racism, and fascism. Five other approaches emerged as a way to frame her thoughts: mythological, twentieth-century American history, war and world revolution, sociological, geography and the physical environment, and a more purely aesthetic approach. She eventually settled on “Call Me Cassandra” after abandoning “The Vision Splendid” as a first title. The preference for mythology was decidedly tactical, and choice of Cassandra rhetorical. Greek mythology was a favorite class she taught at Jackson State, but her firm belief in the African origins of civilization always gave her an opportunity to make her point. That the autobiography of a Black writer could not be divorced from the history of the African American literature tradition made sense. The choice of Cassandra makes clear Walker’s understanding of cultural syncretism that became African American culture, formed out of European, African, and Indigenous elements in the Americas. It was the kind of story that could draw readers into a web of facts and good storytelling.
Destabilization of Established Journalism Practices
Authors: Kosterich Allie
Published: November 2022

Chapter 2 considers the technological, economic, and social events that contributed to the destabilization of the established news industry practices. Drawing on analysis of interviews with industry practitioners and a large body of industry documents, the evidence suggests that these changes created an opportunity space for the entrance of new players outside the traditional boundaries of the news industry. These new entrants came in the form of emergent actors and organizations bringing in new skills and expertise that led to further deinstitutionalization of the profession. The chapter then turns to the case study of journalist employment networks, which show that early news nerd hires came from industries external to news such as technology and marketing; however, as the institutional change process progressed, news nerd hires were increasingly driven from within the news industry itself.
Gaining Decision Advantage in the Anglo-Spanish War
Authors: Sims Jennifer E.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores whether the English or the Spanish were relatively more empowered by intelligence at three levels of decision-making: strategic, operational, and tactical. The key decisions that shaped the eventual outcomes were King Philip’s decision as early as 1571 to topple Queen Elizabeth in a series of covert actions and invasions known as the “Enterprise of England”; the queen’s decision for war against Spain in 1587; the English decision to redesign the queen’s navy; the Spanish decision to maintain traditional galleons and invade the English Channel with them; the queen’s decision to embed pirates and privateers in her newly redesigned navy and, in 1588, to prevent them from leaving the Channel; the king’s decision to sustain his complex invasion plan, despite bad weather, logistical issues, and poor communications.
Gaining Advantage
Authors: Sims Jennifer E.
Published: November 2022

The Union had in 1861 significant opening advantages in competitive knowledge, but still lost the first major battle of the war at First Manassas. By midwar, Union commanders had engineered improved intelligence architectures, yet lost again at Chancellorsville (1863). The discussion in this chapter explores what role intelligence played in key decisions on both sides. Did the South just get lucky, engineer intelligence advantages, or reap the benefits of bad intelligence flowing to decision-makers in the North? The study finds that intelligence failures in Washington and among Union generals handed over advantages that the Confederates fully exploited in both cases. In addition, however, the Confederates also generated intelligence advantages, especially for Generals Joe Johnston and Beauregard at First Manassas, that were probably essential to their success.
The European Context
Authors: Börsch-Supan Axel , Ferrari Irene , Pasini Giacomo , Salerno Luca
Published: November 2022

Abstract: To understand the potential future of working longer in America, we compare trends in health and employment in Europe with those in the United States. While health in Europe improved between 2004 and 2018 among older adults (aged 65 to 85), we find the opposite for middle-aged adults (aged 50 to 64). In this respect, Europe is experiencing negative developments similar to those in the United States. In terms of employment, however, Europe is different than the United States. We do not find any sign that employment rates of middle-aged individuals are stagnating or falling. On the contrary, employment has increased steadily since the late 1990s. It is too early to conclude what implications the stalling health trend of the middle-aged cohorts will have for labor force participation among older Europeans in 10 or 15 years. We argue that economic considerations, such as public pension and disability insurance policies, are likely to continue to have a greater influence on rates of early retirement than health.
The Link between Health and Working Longer
Authors: Berger Ben , Lopez-Garcia Italo , Maestas Nicole , Mullen Kathleen
Published: November 2022

Abstract: Good health is important for employment at older ages. However, little is known about how health-related functional abilities interact with occupational demands to shape work capacity. Using new data, we quantify individuals’ functional abilities, combine that information with occupation-specific ability requirements, and create new measures of individuals’ potential occupations and earnings. We find that average functional abilities, potential occupations, and potential earnings decline only slightly with age, indicating that many Americans maintain work capacity into their late 60s. Gaps in work capacity by race/ethnicity and gender are small, suggesting health is not a major driver of observed earnings disparities. However, gaps in work capacity by education are large and increase with age, suggesting diminished prospects for working longer among those with less education. Although work capacity among Black respondents improves across cohorts, today’s middle-aged white Americans have lower work capacity than those now at retirement age, suggesting rising rates of work disability as these cohorts age.
Dying with Your Boots On
Authors: Gatta Mary , Horning Jessica
Published: November 2022

Abstract: For many older workers, retirement, in the traditional sense of a financially secure period of leisure after a lifetime of work, is elusive. This chapter examines the experiences of low-wage older workers who try to stay employed – both for the ready cash and in order to increase their monthly Social Security benefits by delaying claiming – and the economic consequences for those who stop working. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we examine the reality of low-wage older workers’ lives. First, we explore how economically secure low-wage older workers would be if they no longer worked, and how this security varies across career income levels, cohorts, and age of claiming Social Security benefits. Then, using ethnographic data, we share the lived experiences of older workers including the challenges they face as they age and the strategies they use to make ends meet at and beyond traditional retirement ages.
Ad Hoc, Limited, and Reactive
Authors: Berg Peter , Piszczek Matthew M.
Published: November 2022

Abstract: The economic and social consequences of population aging depend in large part on how employers respond to an aging workforce. Although previous research offers aspirational suggestions about what management and labor organizations should do to help older workers, remarkably little is known about what they are actually doing to manage an older workforce. We use both survey data and in-depth qualitative interviews at manufacturing firms to explore the organizational response to workforce aging in the United States and Germany. We find that organizations do not see workforce aging as a major threat to human capital. As a result, organizational responses are largely ad hoc, limited, and reactive. They tend to focus on strategically important workers, thus increasing occupational inequalities in retirement flexibility. However, we also find that older workers in Germany have more flexibility in later working lives than those in the United States due to institutional differences in worker representation, working time arrangements, and social policy, demonstrating that productive responses to workforce aging are possible.