bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
An American Challenge
Authors: Threat Charissa J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how concerns about national security shaped the Army Nurse Corps's (ANC) response to male nurses' integration and the push to desegregate the U.S. military. In the decade following World War II, professional nursing viewed its responsibilities to the health and welfare of the nation as being bound to the global defense of democracy. Nursing became part of the “frontline” in maintaining America's strength against the perceived evils of communism. The chapter first considers black activism in early Cold War defense and the anti-discrimination campaign of the American Nurses' Association, along with the pursuit of equal opportunity between male and female nurses. It then explores how the Korean War turned into a battleground for testing race desegregation and debating gender roles within the context of the nursing profession. It also links the male nurses' integration campaign to the civil rights movement and concludes by showing how the ANC reinforced its gendered opinion on nursing within the nurse corps.
Conclusion
Authors: Threat Charissa J.
Published: May 2017

This conclusion reflects on how the integration campaigns and the history of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) over a thirty-year period help scholars understand a more inclusive civil rights story and the evolution of nursing into a modern profession in the latter part of the twentieth century. It shows how the U.S. Army, and by extension the ANC, often found themselves at the forefront of the social upheavals and social justice activities taking place in civil society. It also considers how gender and racial tensions persisted as the Vietnam War reached its peak in the late 1960s, noting that the 1966 admittance of male nurses to the regular army did not diminish the scrutiny faced by men who served or wanted to serve as nurses. The chapter argues that the integration campaigns pursued by female and male nurses expose a civil rights movement beyond the question of race.
City of Noise
Authors: Boutin Aimée
Published: May 2017

Beloved as the city of light, Paris in the nineteenth-century sparked the acclaim of poets and the odium of the bourgeois with its distinctive sounds. Street vendors bellowed songs known as the Cris de Paris that had been associated with their trades since the Middle Ages; musicians itinerant and otherwise played for change; and flâneurs-writers, fascinated with the city's underside, listened and recorded much about what they heard. This book tours the sonic space that orchestrated the different, often conflicting, sound cultures that defined the street ambience of Paris. Mining accounts that range from guidebooks to verse, the book braids literary, cultural, and social history to reconstruct a lost auditory environment. Throughout, impressions of street noise shape writers' sense of place and perception of modern social relations. As the book shows, the din of the Cris contrasted economic abundance with the disparities of the capital, old and new traditions, and the vibrancy of street commerce with an increasing bourgeois demand for quiet. In time, peddlers who provided the soundtrack for Paris's narrow streets yielded to modernity, with its taciturn shopkeepers and wide-open boulevards, and the fading songs of the Cris became a dirge for the passing of old ways.
Sonic Classifications in Haussmann’s Paris
Authors: Boutin Aimée
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates repeated attempts to control street noise in order to cleanse Paris of its antiquated soundscapes, which social policy makers associated with mendicancy, vagrancy, sedition, and economic parasitism. Conversely, amateur historians, preservationists, bibliophiles, collectors, and musicologists were enthralled by what Victor Fournel called the “plaintive cry of Old Paris,” which stood for the resistance to modernity. In their nostalgic writings, these members of the elite circulated shared cultural memories of street cries that erased peddlers' associations with sedition and revolution and fostered the picturesque charms of urban strolling. Fournel and Mainzer repeatedly refer to the need to preserve street cries for posterity, thus anticipating future documentary recording projects, such as Ferdinand Brunot's Archives de la parole. Fournel's attempt to render tradesmen mutedly picturesque, however, is not completely successful, as street cries resist complete co-optation.
Audience and Style in Brahms’s String Chamber Music
Authors: Lott Marie Sumner
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Johannes Brahms' string chamber music. Brahms' seven chamber works for strings alone fall neatly into three categories according to chronology and genre. They reflect the gradual changes evident in their composer's style at significant stages in his compositional development: the two sextets stem from his “first maturity,” the three string quartets represent what might be called a “high maturity” that flourished in Brahms' early Viennese years, and the two string quintets demonstrate a “late” style developing in the 1880s and 1890s. The chapter then looks at the connections between Brahms's systematic exploration of these genres and the audiences he chose to address in them.
“The hideous consequences”
Authors: Birk Megan
Published: May 2017

This chapter details the problems of abuse, neglect, and overwork that some children had to endure once they entered placement homes. Family violence, overwork, and child neglect were not problems new to the late 1800s, but in previous generations, propriety limited intervention into immediate families, and apprenticed relationships between children and unrelated adults could be policed by the child's parents. In the Progressive Era, placers and child welfare workers came to realize that suffering for placed-out children happened not only as a result of abuse. Whether through isolation and dependence on the farm family or overwork and seasonal placements, the farm contributed to the hazards facing placed-out children. This chapter first explains how multiple placements led to child overwork and neglect before considering the physical abuse suffered by children in placement homes, along with the resistance shown by some children to their placement.
“The right of the state to interfere is unquestioned”
Authors: Birk Megan
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines efforts to remedy the problems with farm placements. It looks at the state boards of charity, visiting agents, and courts as examples of methods used to improve placing out. As the state boards worked to legitimize their expertise and county officials tried to improve the care given to dependent children, work remained to standardize care and encourage placements. State boards recommended a second initiative in addition to better oversight of institutional care to secure more placement homes and supervision for children: hiring state visiting agents to supervise placed-out children. This chapter explores how the two-pronged issue of mistreatment of children in placement homes and the resulting efforts to increase supervision ultimately forced placers and visitors to make a number of proposals, including a return of direct aid and more involvement by the courts. It also considers the rise in paid foster care and how it affected all facets of dependent child care.
Cultural Critique
Authors: James Edward
Published: May 2017

The clash of cultures, between societies and within societies, with both negative and positive results, is an underlying theme in much of what Bujold has written. This chapter examines this theme primarily as it appears in Bujold's science fiction. It shows that one of the main purposes of the theme of culture clash in Bujold's works is to cast light upon the societies of her readers: satire, in its original and broadest sense, is thus one of Bujold's concerns. Satire invariably has an ethical or moral dimension (the humorous dimension is often there in Bujold, but critics have not seen humor as an indispensible element of satire); and the moral world that Bujold builds is a significant part of her achievement. In most, but not in all, cases, Bujold lets us know clearly whose moral point of view we are supposed to support.
Disability and Genetic Modification
Authors: James Edward
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the theme of disability, including attitudes toward disability and ideas about deviations from the bodily norm, that Bujold explores in her fictional work. While disability is rarely treated in science fiction and fantasy, it is ubiquitous in Bujold's work. Most visible is Miles Vorkosigan himself, whose fetus was damaged by an insurgent's attack and who struggles with his brittle bones and other problems throughout the early decades of his life. But to Miles can be added many other characters whose physical or mental disabilities are a crucial part of the narrative, from the brain-damaged Dubauer in Shards of Honor to the one-handed Dag in the Sharing Knife sequence, and Cazaril, with a mutilated hand and a demonic stomach tumor, in the first Chalion book. Bujold has declared that she was never writing books about issues: they are about character. The disabilities with which her characters have to cope “do not comprise the sums of their characters nor the reasons for their existences, but are just plot-things that happen to them and with which they must deal, daily or otherwise,” and she adds that the letters she gets from disabled readers suggest that they prefer that approach.
Sigmund Zeisler
Authors: Macleod Beth Abelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter takes a look at Sigmund Zeisler, a prominent Chicago attorney and one of the defenders of the anarchists in the Haymarket trial of 1886. Zeisler and Fanny Bloomfield advanced the friendship that had begun in Bielitz and were married in Chicago on October 18, 1885. Zeisler expressed the expectation that Fannie would give up performing when she married or had a child. By adapting to the reality of her wife's ambition and its impact on the potential success of their marriage, Zeisler was articulating a more unconventional and nuanced sensibility. This chapter provides a background on Zeisler's education, his ideas on marriage, and his influence on Fannie, as well as the roots of the Haymarket Riot.
On Tour before Domestic Audiences
Authors: Macleod Beth Abelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler's piano recitals in the United States. It begins with a discussion of the development of an almost sacred canon of composers and the elevation of classical music to a virtual religious status as articulated by critic and transcendentalist John Sullivan Dwight and others. It then considers the bifurcation of various U.S. cultural activities into separate spheres—popular and elite—as described by historian Lawrence Levine, and how recent scholars have modified Levine's position with regard to the evolution of music in nineteenth-century America. The chapter also chronicles the practical aspects of touring in the nation, such as train travel, itineraries, packing lists, and hotels. Finally, it describes Bloomfield-Zeisler's recitals and how they compared with those of her contemporaries, both male and female; the U.S. audiences during that time—their makeup, behavior, etiquette, and their reactions to Bloomfield-Zeisler's performances; and how Bloomfield-Zeisler played.
Water, Energy, Access
Authors: Parks Lisa
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes a particular rural configuration of Internet infrastructure in Zambia. It shows that access in this location is contingent on water resources, which not only generate hydroelectricity for the Zambian power grid but are also necessary for prospective Internet users' everyday survival in the community of Macha. Understanding the materialization of Internet infrastructure in rural Zambia works to destabilize dominant discourses that posit ICT (information and communication technology) diffusion and adoption in rural Africa as a straightforward path to “modernization,” “development,” and “global integration,” and instead points to local political, economic, and cultural challenges to the Internet's globalization. The chapter then foregrounds the struggles and contestations that are part of infrastructure development; the energy and biopower that infrastructures rely on; the relationality of water, transportation, and information systems; and the alternate ways that people imagine, use, or respond to infrastructure.
The Art of Waste
Authors: Miller Toby
Published: May 2017

This chapter addresses macrolevel environmental and resource questions that underpin the critical study of media infrastructures. It examines the “art of waste” and brings a discussion of e-waste. Electronic or e-waste artists use the freedom of art to demand secure labor and a sustainable environment. They translate scientific and activist ideas and found or invented materials, encouraging people to think of the imminent, not just the past and present. This engages popular culture in an avant-garde way that can feed back into the everyday and in turn be made sense of by public-interest intermediaries as well as opportunistic commerce. Ultimately, e-waste artists' creative reuse of waste as art challenges the upgrade society's culture of built-in obsolescence, while the curating of such work by museums can be part of a wider commitment against e-waste.
Consumer Electronics and the Building of an Entertainment Infrastructure
Authors: Acland Charles R.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter explores how Hollywood's “technological tentpoles”—films that strategically promote cross-media commodities and new generations of devices, platforms, and hardware—serve as vehicles for the advancement of a broader technological system. In light of this cross-media industrial circumstance, the highly visible, international, big-budget blockbuster production makes manifest the developing relationships among media forms. The blockbuster, in a time of expanding talk and exploitation of “long tail” microcultural economies, advances multiple products and devices at once, and it does so through the formal mechanisms of cross-media promotional deals as well as through indirect support by being the most highly valued content for various platforms. Moving between entertainment industry events and a proliferating field of consumer electronics, the chapter then shows how audiovisual infrastructure is a product not only of economic priorities, but also of the conceptual frames that are circulated about them.
“Yiddish Is My Homeland”
Authors: Zimmer Kenyon
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how Eastern European Jews migrated to the United States. More than half made their homes in New York City, where Yiddish-speaking anarchist and socialist movements emerged from the sweatshops and tenement houses of Manhattan's Lower East Side. From the 1880s until well into the 1920s, anarchists constituted a “vital minority” within the American Jewish labor movement; Yiddish anarchism then grew to become the largest section of America's anarchist movement by the eve of the First World War. Along the way, anarchists created a vibrant revolutionary subculture deeply embedded in the larger “cultures of opposition” developed by immigrant Jewish workers and intellectuals.
I Senza Patria
Authors: Zimmer Kenyon
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on how Paterson became the center of what is probably the most important Anarchist group in the world. Italian anarchists were at the forefront of persistent local labor unrest, including the violent 1902 silk strike and famous 1913 general strike conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). More infamously, a Paterson anarchist assassinated Italy's King Umberto I in 1900. However, by 1906, an exasperated Board of Aldermen threatened to bring charges of libel against publications that continued to equate the Silk City with anarchism. The chapter shows how behind the dramatic episodes that embarrassed city officials stood a dynamic radical subculture rooted in Paterson's Italian population and linked to major transnational revolutionary networks.
Radical Somatics
Authors: Braude Hillel
Published: May 2017

In this chapter, the author discusses the radical transformative power of somatics and the ways that somatics practice directly affects the precognitive sensibility of the Other; he calls this transformation of the Other “somatics affecting.” Drawing on his current research that integrates approaches to medicine and somatics in the emergent field of neuroethics, the author explains how somatics, especially through kinesthesia, provides a means of bridging the distinct realms of phenomenology and neuroscience. To this end, he analyzes the transformative qualities of somatics in terms of neurobiology and phenomenology, and especially the radical idea adapted from the phenomenological writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. He elucidates the relation between somatics and phenomenonology as disciplines of subjectivity by linking them to the natural sciences. Finally, he illustrates the transformative potential of somatics affecting through a comparison with the social neuroscience understanding of empathy.
Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru
Authors: Bueno-Hansen Pascha
Published: May 2017

This book elucidates the tension between the promise of transitional justice and persistent social inequality and impunity. In 2001, following a generation of internal armed conflict and authoritarian rule, the Peruvian state created a Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC). This book places the TRC, feminist and human rights movements, and related non-governmental organizations within an international and historical context to expose the difficulties in addressing gender-based violence. Its innovative theoretical and methodological framework based on decolonial feminism and a critical engagement with intersectionality facilitates an in-depth examination of the Peruvian transitional justice process based on field studies and archival research. The book uncovers the colonial mappings and linear temporality underlying transitional justice efforts and illustrates why transitional justice mechanisms must reckon with the societal roots of atrocities, if they are to result in true and lasting social transformation.
Introduction
Authors: Chung Sue Fawn
Published: May 2017

This book examines the role of the Chinese in the lumber trade in the American West during the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s to 1890s. It looks at Chinese laborers' contribution to the building of the American West by analyzing their migration, their communities and lifestyles, lived experiences, transnationalism, and their work in relationship to mining and railroad construction. It also considers the timber barons and companies that employed Chinese workers, their departure from the Sierra Nevada forests, and the anti-Chinese sentiment that they endured. It shows that Chinese immigrants new to North America were first attracted to mining, but they turned to other work, such as logging, when they met with resistance and opposition from miners. The book also challenges some of the popular stereotypes that developed during this period of emerging unionism, along with the assumption of “cheap Chinese labor” that has been used to interpret the Chinese experience in late-nineteenth-century America.
Of Wood and Mines
Authors: Chung Sue Fawn
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the link between mining and logging in the American West. It considers how the gold rush in California triggered new discoveries of mining areas in neighboring states of Nevada and Oregon; mining in turn ushered in large-scale western logging as wood products became a necessary supply for mines. It also looks at some of the Nevada counties that were involved in mining and logging in order to provide insights into Chinese workers, the environment, timber barons and their support of the Chinese, lumber companies, and opposition to the Chinese involved in this new industry. It shows that the need for Chinese laborers in logging diminished as the mines declined.
Of Wood and Trains
Authors: Chung Sue Fawn
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the employment of Chinese laborers in the construction of railroads, primarily to cut trees in order to clear the roads, make ties, and provide fuel for the trains. The intensification of western railroad construction that began in California around 1854 stimulated the rapid growth of logging. The passage of the Timber and Stone Act of 1878 gave both mining and railroad companies a great incentive to be involved in logging, paving the way for more frenzied cutting and for larger, better-capitalized companies. This chapter discusses the role of Chinese workers recruited from the lumber industry in helping to build standard- and narrow-gauge railway lines that connected the forests, rural areas, and transportation centers in the American West. It also considers how railroad construction created another boom in the lumber trade and the establishment of new towns.
Work and Identity in the Factory and at Home
Authors: Martin Lou
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the evolution of gendered division of labor in the factories and at home. In the 1940s and 1950s, potteries hired increasing numbers of women to fill more and more roles in the production process. The fact that pottery wages fell behind steel wages in these decades contributed to the declining percentage of men in the potteries as they sought a family wage. At home, women and men fell back into more familiar gender roles as they produced their own food, made their own clothing, and built their own houses. Rural-industrial workers believed in “making do” to stretch their family income, performing self-help activities that harked back to older work patterns on the farms that many of them had left behind. Thus, there were two gender divisions of labor operating in parallel: one at home and another in the factory, one derived from rural self-sufficiency and the other from industrial production.
Race, Place, and the Geography of Exile
Authors: Robolin Stéphane
Published: May 2017

This chapter takes up the early writing of Richard Wright and Peter Abrahams that starkly traces out the caustic terms of race and place in their formative years. The unmistakable similarities between Wright's and Abrahams' famed autobiographies, Black Boy and Tell Freedom, highlight the significant impact of their respective racial landscapes. The chapter reads both texts for the central role that racialized place played in forming the consciousness of these young men. Moreover, it argues that place also prominently affected the stylistic and aesthetic modes of the two autobiographies. This approach draws attention to rather different locales: for Wright, the American South from which he fled; and for Abrahams, the exilic space of Europe to which he fled. The resonances of their texts result from intersecting, rather than merely parallel, lives. As both writers fled the racism of their native lands, they crossed paths in 1940s Europe, a key locus of black transnational engagement. It was during their short-lived but generative friendship that Abrahams wrote and revised Tell Freedom, a process with which Wright was involved.
Cultivating Correspondences; or, Other Gestures of Belonging
Authors: Robolin Stéphane
Published: May 2017

Transnationalism is not the exclusive province of globe-trotting authors, but also includes the practices of those who could not access the means of transatlantic mobility. This chapter begins by considering Bessie Head's exilic life and her quest for belonging that motivated the grounded transnationalism she expressed. It then investigates one of its most exemplary practices: her letter writing, with particular attention to the set of letters between Head and her four African American correspondents: Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Michelle Cliff. Some of their epistolary exchanges and writing published around the same period feature repeated references to gardens, whose political and imaginative implications are considered at length. The chapter concludes by framing the practice of letter writing as a form of cultivation that re-centers our attention on the labor that transnational engagement requires, even as it yields a whole spectrum of outcomes.
Fighting for Total Person Unionism
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

During the 1950s and 1960s, labor leaders Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway championed a new kind of labor movement that regarded workers as “total persons” interested in both workplace affairs and the exercise of effective citizenship in their communities. Working through Teamsters Local 688 and viewing the city of St. Louis as their laboratory, this remarkable interracial duo forged a dynamic political alliance that placed their “citizen members” on the front lines of epic battles for urban revitalization, improved public services, and the advancement of racial and economic justice. Parallel to their political partnership, Gibbons functioned as a top Teamsters Union leader and Calloway as an influential figure in St. Louis's civil rights movement. Their pioneering efforts not only altered St. Louis's social and political landscape but also raised fundamental questions about the fate of the post-industrial city, the meaning of citizenship, and the role of unions in shaping American democracy.
“Those Fellows Back There Actually Hate You”
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the concerted political backlash against Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Teamsters Local 688 that gathered momentum following a dramatic confrontation between the union and St. Louis's criminal underworld. It first provides an overview of organized crime in St. Louis before discussing the circumstances that led Gibbons to forge an alliance with controversial Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. It then considers the 1953 strike waged by Local 682 concrete drivers, along with Gibbons and Calloway's development of the economic foundation central to total person unionism, mainly through their efforts to expand the boundaries of collective bargaining. It also explores how the St. Louis Teamsters's aggressive bargaining, assertive political forays, and seemingly unlimited ambitions triggered a powerful counterattack in the early 1950s, a local microcosm of a broader counterattack against the union that was occurring in many parts of the country.
“A Trade Union Oriented War on the Slums”
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the establishment of the St. Louis Civic Alliance for Housing rejuvenated Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway's vision of working-class citizenship and total person unionism. It begins with a background on the nine-month-long rent strike by public housing tenants in St. Louis and Gibbons's role in negotiating an end to the conflict, followed by a discussion on the Civic Alliance for Housing, a new entity that would help administer the city's public housing. It then considers the controversial NAACP election, focusing on questions raised about Evelyn Roberts's leadership and Calloway's role, and how the election exacerbated fissures among African American leaders. It also looks at two entities founded by Gibbons and Calloway, America 2000 and the Tandy Area Council, along with Calloway's unsuccessful bid for an area congressional seat in 1968.
This Is Not Dixie
Authors: Campney Brent M. S.
Published: May 2017

Often defined as a mostly southern phenomenon, racist violence existed everywhere. This book explodes the notion of the Midwest as a so-called land of freedom with an in-depth study of assaults both active and threatened faced by African Americans in post-Civil War Kansas. The book's definition of white-on-black violence encompasses not only sensational demonstrations of white power like lynchings and race riots, but acts of threatened violence and the varied forms of pervasive routine violence—property damage, rape, forcible ejection from towns—used to intimidate African Americans. As the book shows, such methods were a cornerstone of efforts to impose and maintain white supremacy. Yet the book's broad consideration of racist violence also lends new insights into the ways people resisted threats. African Americans spontaneously hid fugitives and defused lynch mobs while also using newspapers and civil rights groups to lay the groundwork for forms of institutionalized opposition that could fight racist violence through the courts and via public opinion. Ambitious and provocative, this book rewrites fundamental narratives on mob action, race relations, African American resistance, and racism's grim past in the heartland.
“Sowing the Seed of Hatred and Prejudice”
Authors: Campney Brent M. S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter chronicles how white businessmen and workers conspired to push blacks to the margins of the economy. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and particularly in the first decade of the twentieth, white conservatives faced a political reality highly conducive to their success. Reflecting on the growth of Jim Crow in the first decade of the twentieth century, an observer declared that the objective was “to set the colored people back a hundred years in their progress.” Thus, the chapter explores issues surrounding segregation in schools, businesses, and residential areas; racial intermarriages; and other instances of preventing blacks from attaining economic and political advancement. At the same time the chapter also documents a burgeoning civil rights movement.
An Imperfect Occupation
Authors: Boje John
Published: May 2017

The South African War (1899–1902), also called the Boer War and Anglo-Boer War, began as a conventional conflict. It escalated into a savage irregular war fought between the two Boer republics and a British imperial force that adopted a scorched-earth policy and used concentration camps to break the will of Afrikaner patriots and Boer guerrillas. This book delves into the agonizing choices faced by Winburg district residents during the British occupation. Afrikaner men fought or evaded combat or collaborated; Afrikaner women fled over the veld or submitted to life in the camps; and black Africans weighed the life or death consequences of taking sides. The book’s sensitive analysis showcases the motives, actions, and reactions of Boers and Africans alike as initial British accommodation gave way to ruthlessness. Challenging notions of Boer unity and homogeneity, the book illustrates the precarious tightrope of resistance, neutrality, and collaboration walked by people on all sides. It also reveals how the repercussions of the War’s transformative effect on Afrikaner identity plays out in today’s South Africa. The book provides a dramatic account of the often overlooked aspects of one of the first “modern” wars.
Introduction
Authors: Boje John
Published: May 2017

This introduction provides an overview of the Winburg town and district. On the eve of the South African War of 1899–1902, Winburg was the chief town of a large district. The Winburg district comprised five wards: Winburg, Vetrivier, Zandrivier, Taaiboschspruit, and Onder-Wittebergen. It included two towns, Winburg and Senekal, as well as the villages of Ventersburg and Smaldeel. With very few exceptions the people of the Winburg district were involved in agriculture. This introduction first discusses farming in the Winburg district before turning to social changes experienced by Winburg due to productive expansion in the 1880s and 1890s. It also describes Winburg’s cosmopolitan towns and its political background and concludes with a brief chronology of the South African War.
The Failure of Protection
Authors: Boje John
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the British proclamation, issued by Lord Roberts two days after the occupation of Bloemfontein in February 1900, which promised that those who “desist from any further hostility towards Her majesty’s Government … and who are found staying in their homes and quietly pursuing their ordinary occupations, will not be made to suffer in their persons or property on account of their having taken up arms in obedience to the order of their Government.” The chapter considers how the Boers’ disillusionment with the war made the proclamation extremely appealing to them and argues that the prospect of returning to a quiet life untouched by the war proved illusory because of Britain’s failure to keep the promise of protection made to those who had laid down their arms. Instead, surrendered burghers endured British harassment as a result of looting, requisitioning, the random operation of martial law, and the inability to differentiate between peaceable citizens and oath-breaking belligerents. This in addition to the problems presented by the return of commandos.
Conclusion
Authors: Boje John
Published: May 2017

This book concludes with a discussion of three critical variables that determine the success of any military occupation and whether they were all met in the case of Winsburg after the end of the South African War: the total devastation of a country that compels it to acknowledge its need for help in reconstruction; the perception of a common threat to both parties; and credible guarantees of the occupying power’s intention to withdraw. If an occupying power adds an ideological element to its primary concern of establishing a dispensation that poses no threat to its interests, occupation is prolonged and nationalism is stimulated. This conclusion also shows that blacks continued to suffer after the war, with the Boers and British both blocking any suggestion of advance. Finally, it considers the evolution of a system of racial oppression in South Africa that was to bedevil the country for much of the twentieth century, lending credence to the notion that Britain’s occupation of Winsburg was an imperfect one.
Introduction
Authors: Levine Elana
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter briefly tackles the broad scope of scholarly literature on feminized popular culture, and also provides an overview of this area in the twenty-first century. Its focus is on forms of early-twenty-first-century popular culture that are strongly associated with femininity—the social and economic forces that create such culture, the ways these cultural products speak to and about feminine identity, and the ways that audiences, readers, and users engage with and experience this culture. In addition, the chapter details in brief the influences, both current and historic, which inform the central themes of this volume, as well as the aims and specific lines of inquiry that this volume seeks to pursue.
Television for All Women?
Authors: Báez Jillian
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the content and reception of the first season of Devious Maids within an institutional context. In doing so, it views the series as a contested form of feminized popular culture that is emblematic of the cable television industry's incessant search for new audiences in the early twenty-first century. More specifically, the chapter considers: What do the production, content, and reception of Devious Maids reveal about Lifetime's strategies as “television for women”? In doing so, the chapter argues that while Devious Maids is a complex text that portrays Latina womanhood in some nuanced ways, the postfeminist and postracial sensibilities of the show discourage most audience members from engaging with the potentially transgressive aspects of the series.
Women, Gossip, and Celebrity Online
Authors: Meyers Erin A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers a brief analysis of the initial ascendency of celebrity gossip blogs into popular culture during the early twenty-first century. It establishes the notion of gossip as “women's talk” and as a form of shared social meaning-making—from which context arises the celebrity gossip blog as a unique form of feminized popular culture that speaks to the broader shifts in media cultures in the early twenty-first century. As such, this chapter explores the gossip blog as a particularly feminized form of new media through attention to the existing social practices of gossip that continue to shape the place of gossip blogs within the celebrity media industry and the everyday lives of their predominantly female readers.
Fashioning Feminine Fandom
Authors: Hunting Kyra
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers how the platform provided by fan-fashion blogs and the affordances of the technology allow fan-fashion bloggers to play with media and fashion in a way that is less constrained by a blogger's financial or physical limitations than previous engagements with fandom and fashion—like cosplay or collecting. Fan-fashion blogs can also destabilize some of the assumptions about scarcity, competition, and authenticity that accompanied these preceding fan practices. Furthermore, the chapter argues that the focus on fandom and its distinct set of values and priorities in these blogs shifts their orientation in relationship to several issues associated with fashion and fashion blogging more broadly, including displacing traditional approaches to issues like consumption, body policing, and “normative femininity.”
Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance All Night!
Authors: Smith-Shomade Beretta E.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Black women's Christian performance via contemporary television and the internet to gain insights into how screen audiences are invited to experience the Holy Spirit. It argues that in these moments, with Black women (and Black audience members and judges) performing, praising, and testifying, the Holy Spirit moves not only through the recorded, in-studio audience but also within screen audiences—both television viewers and internet users. And despite the justified rebuke of Black churches for their frequent dismissive dealings with women, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit allows for an exaltation of women in the revelation of the spirit.
Sexual Magic and Funky Black Freaks in Nineteenth-Century Black Literature
Authors: Stallings L. H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how funk as affect directs how some black people inhabit their bodies and imagine sexuality. It studies how Paschal Beverly Randolph's occult manuscripts on sexual magic, and conjoined twins Christine and Millie McKoy's autobiography as freaks, provide a foundation of how black funk freakery differs from the Victorian-era freak. The chapter utilizes funk's ideologies about labor, leisure, and imagination to counteract colonial meanings of freak, since black funk freakery remains a significant black intervention on white America's definition of sex, work, and sex work. Funky black freaks understand sexuality and sexual difference as originating from outside the body. On this plane, gender or sexual difference does not equate with or become sexual deviance as it does in sexology.
“Make Ya Holler You’ve Had Enough”
Authors: Stallings L. H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Chester Himes' and Hal Bennett's fictional representations of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism) and sex work in order to theorize other articulations of masculinity in the domestic sphere. Funk proposes a blend of parody, irony, communal intimacy, and temporal violence to critique masculine privilege and eroticize male submission that would embrace unpatriarchal traditions of family. The chapter demonstrates how black public spheres too reliant on nostalgia and respectability can be reinvented using cultural legacies of transaesthetics. Eliminating gender hierarchies and sexual colonialism in black communities hinges on black men and women accepting systems of knowledge that would teach them that forgoing masculine privilege and rethinking the feminine is not only morally and ethically right, but also that there is pleasure in it if everyone involved is willing to submit to funk's emphasis on The One.
Street Life under a Roof
Authors: Margaretten Emily
Published: May 2017

An exemplary ethnography of post-apartheid life: this book takes the reader to a place that few people know even exists—a self-run shelter for homeless young people in Durban. What emerges is a searing portrait of drugs, violence, and AIDS but also of compassion, love, loyalty, and humanity. Point Place (a self-run homeless shelter for the young homeless) stands near the city center of Durban, South Africa. Condemned and off the grid, the five-story apartment building is home to a hundred-plus teenagers and young adults marginalized by poverty and chronic unemployment. This book draws on ten years of up-close fieldwork to explore the distinct cultural universe of the Point Place community. The investigations reveal how young men and women draw on customary notions of respect and support to forge an ethos of connection and care that allows them to live far richer lives than ordinarily assumed. The book's discussion of gender dynamics highlights terms like nakana—to care about or take notice of another—that young women and men use to construct “outside” and “inside” boyfriends and girlfriends and to communicate notions of trust. The book exposes the structures of inequality at a local, regional, and global level that contribute to socioeconomic and political dislocation. But it also challenges the idea that Point Place's marginalized residents need “rehabilitation.” As the book argues, these young men and women want love, secure homes, and the means to provide for their dependents—in short, the same hopes and aspirations mirrored across South African society.
Reconstituted Melancholy
Authors: Singleton Jermaine
Published: May 2017

This chapter takes a closer look at the underpinnings of the cultural melancholy that claims post-Emancipation African American subject-formations and cultures. It does so by putting psychoanalytic theorizations of Sigmund Freud's concept of melancholia and Jacques Derrida's poststructuralist reading of Karl Marx's work on specters in conversation with August Wilson's Piano Lesson. Wilson's play traces racial melancholy sustained and reconstituted as a result of, and in resistance to, an enduring struggle with racial oppression as American nationhood nestled firmly into the industrial era and normative homogenization and consensus steadily rose against the backdrop of staggering European immigration statistics. The chapter shows how the play stages parallel trajectories of psychological restriction sustained by post-Emancipation black men and women through ritual practice as they struggle for inclusion in a segregationist society that has historically subjugated them. It extends theories of race and ethnicity by positing a reading of the racialized subject that shows how she/he is at once constituted through and distinct from the racial collective and its history of racialization.
The Melancholy of Faith
Authors: Singleton Jermaine
Published: May 2017

This chapter addresses the question of how unresolved racial grief works through the demands of capital, racialization, and sacred ritual practice to enact a gender hierarchy. It thinks through James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), to explore how testifying serves as a technology of black patriarchy—a ritual that arises out of the need for racial and economic redemption yet unfolds within and propagates gendered power relations. It examines how the content and structure of Baldwin's Bildungsroman, set in Harlem's Pentecostal community during the Great Depression, allegorizes the conversion of John Grimes, who embodies the “weak, feminine flesh” of his matrilineal line that is sacrificed to secure his “manchild” status of salvation. The chapter is punctuated by a section that situates Baldwin's novel as a form of sexual testifying on the part of Baldwin himself. In doing so, it places Baldwin's novel in conversation with its dramatic sequel, The Amen Corner (1954), to explore how both texts anticipate and extend queer theoretical conversations about the social construction of black, gay subject-formations.
Introduction
Authors: Shaw Carolyn Martin
Published: May 2017

This book examines the promise of feminism to empower women and bring social and political equality to both men and women in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was once celebrated by feminists and progressives in the West for its liberation ideology, which included principled stands in favor of economic justice and gender equity. While the rest of the world learned later of the dismal failure of Zimbabwe's promise, many women in Zimbabwe felt its betrayal early on. This book asks what happens to women when such promises fail. More specifically, it asks what the promises of feminism are, how a feminist outlook developed within the Zimbabwean context, and how it has led to innovation and conventionality. It considers the varied effects of feminism in Zimbabwean social life, focusing on instances that seemed to promise women a better life and led them to believe in their own potential to influence politics. This introduction explains the book's research methodology and how the author came to Zimbabwe.
“Our Prison”
Authors: Shabazz Rashad
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how carceral power was articulated in the kitchenettes—small, tight, cramped spaces that many Black migrants in the Black Belt were forced to live in between World War I and World War II—and shaped identity formation. Drawing on the literature of Richard Wright, it considers how the police power that functioned in the public space of Chicago's Black Belt moved into the homes of Black migrants. Decades before carceral power made it into the academic lexicon, Wright used his fiction and nonfiction to document and understand the effect the geography of containment had on Black masculinity. For Wright, carceral power was used as a mechanism both to punish and to contain Blacks in the Black Belt. He used this analysis to bring attention to the injustices Blacks were confronted with and to develop his most-well-known literary character. The chapter looks at Wright's novel Native Son, which tackles the consequence of Black prisonization within urban geography.
All the Lives He Led
Authors: Page Michael R.
Published: May 2017

This book chronicles the work of Frederik Pohl, one of the leading figures in the field of science fiction (SF). Pohl's literary output spans nine decades from his poem “Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna,” published in 1937, to his final book, All the Lives He Led, and The Way the Future Blogs. In between he wrote novels, short stories, story collections, and nonfiction books; edited anthologies and SF magazine issues; and wrote countless essays, editorials, and reviews. The book examines how Pohl's publishing activity and his work as a literary agent in the late 1940s and early 1950s shaped the SF field. It also considers the role played by Pohl in the development of SF as a more or less respectable area of academic study and in the creation and development of SF fandom.
Introduction
Authors: Duckett Victoria
Published: May 2017

This book interrogates Sarah Bernhardt's crossover from theater into film and what her films can reveal to us today. It contextualizes and explains Bernhardt's popular success on film, asking why audiences in the early twentieth century celebrated an actress on film who they might never have seen on the live stage. It also looks at the role that feminism plays in enabling us to make sense of Bernhardt's films. The book argues that Bernhardt's films do not offer proof of her theatrical stage action, and that their excessive theatricality are not evidence of her incommensurability with film but an unaccounted theatrical practice that reveals a different way of thinking about and relating to the cinema. It contends that Bernhardt's films challenge and change received ideas about what is and is not “cinematic”. Finally, it describes Bernhardt's film, with her as a protagonist, as a fluid and transformative art form. Bernhardt's association with art nouveau relates to her acting style—and beyond that to her lifestyle and to her very life itself.