bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Performing Genealogies
Authors: Caronan Faye
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers how education is deployed in Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican performance poetry as a tool in decolonizing activist projects. It cites the work of Los Angeles-based Filipino American and New York-based U.S. Puerto Rican performance-poet activists such as Bonafide Rojas, Rebecca Baroma, and Napoleon Lustre to show how they teach their local communities to disidentify with narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and multiculturalism in order to recognize global power hierarchies that reproduce racial and class inequality. By connecting disparate subjugated knowledge, they construct a history of oppression and resistance that they make available to their local communities. Inside and outside the classroom, they promote disidentification as a repertory strategy to challenge institutionalized histories that privilege narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and marginalize alternative narratives.
The Science Fiction
Authors: James Edward
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the science fiction of Lois McMaster Bujold. Bujold has written about fourteen science fiction books and a number of short stories: approximately six thousand pages of text. Almost all of her science fiction stories have been set in the universe sometimes known by her fans as the Vorkosiverse after its central character, Miles Vorkosigan. Although her writing as a whole has expanded beyond that universe, her science-fictional universe has remained unusually restricted. One explanation for her decision to restrict herself in this way is that Bujold is interested above all in character. While some science fiction writers are interested in developing different “what-if” scenarios and focusing on how that “what-if” changes a society, Bujold has shown herself to be concerned primarily in how her characters and the society they live in develop over time. She has built up a large and devoted fan base not because they want to see her develop numerous new universes and explore all the boundaries of her genre, but because they share the author's own fascination with her characters and want to see how they change and grow.
Introduction
Authors: Macleod Beth Abelson
Published: May 2017

This book delves into the life and times of piano virtuoso Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler. When Fannie Bloomfield embarked on her career as a pianist in 1883, she was greeted with a very different and much smaller musical world. There were fewer music conservatories. The primary path to professional eminence ran narrowly through elite European training and mastery of the German–Austrian repertoire. This book explores Bloomfield-Zeisler's life and career and how she became one of the foremost pianists of her generation. It presents anecdotes that humanize Bloomfield-Zeisler and make her more than a public figure. It also offers insights into her personality in ways that would only be possible if someone knew her well. This introduction discusses a number of historical trends that coalesced to make Bloomfield-Zeisler's career more achievable than it would have been even a few decades earlier: the most significant of these were the increasing presence of classical music in U.S. life and the rise of the “new woman.” It also provides an overview of the chapters that follow.
Beginnings
Authors: Macleod Beth Abelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Blumenfeld family's emigration from Europe in 1867 (Fanny Blumenfeld's name was changed to Fannie Bloomfield soon after), their reasons for leaving, and their eventual establishment of a home and business in Chicago. It describes the discovery of Fanny Blumenfeld's talent and its nurturing by noted German immigrant musicians such as Bernhard Ziehn and Carl Wolfsohn. Wolfsohn founded Chicago's Beethoven Society, which provided the initial opportunities for Fannie Bloomfield's public performance. The chapter also recounts the “discovery” of Bloomfield in 1876 when she visited Russian virtuoso Annette Essipoff, who advised that she study in Vienna with noted pedagogue Theodor Leschetizky. Family conflicts and money considerations initially made this impossible, but when financial difficulties were alleviated by a wealthy Jewish benefactor, Blumenfeld set out for Vienna in 1878 with her mother and grandmother; she was fifteen at the time.
We Are What We Drink
Authors: Meyer Sabine N.
Published: May 2017

This book eschews the generalities of other temperance histories to provide a close-grained story about the connections between alcohol consumption and identity in the upper Midwest. The book examines the ever-shifting ways that ethnicity, gender, class, religion, and place interacted with each other during the long temperance battle in Minnesota. The book's deconstruction of Irish and German ethnic positioning with respect to temperance activism provides a rare interethnic history of the movement. At the same time, it shows how women engaged in temperance work as a way to form public identities and reforges the largely neglected, yet vital link between female temperance and suffrage activism. Relatedly, the book reflects on the continuities and changes between how the movement functioned to construct identity in the heartland versus the movement's more often studied roles in the East. It also gives a nuanced portrait of the culture clash between a comparatively reform-minded Minneapolis and dynamic anti-temperance forces in whiskey-soaked St. Paul—forces supported by government, community, and business institutions heavily invested in keeping the city wet.
“Putting on the Lid”
Authors: Meyer Sabine N.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Anti-Saloon League's (ASL) impact on the temperance movement in Minnesota during the period 1898–1915. The turn of the century witnessed a nationwide expansion of temperance activism. The election in 1898 of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Lind, a Swedish immigrant, inaugurated the Progressive era in Minnesota and marked a turning point in the state's temperance history. This chapter considers how the tenets of Progressivism combined with the work of the ASL boosted the passage of County Option Laws not only in Minnesota but also throughout the country. It shows that the ASL's activism and its intense collaboration with the Prohibition Party, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and other reformers led to liquor law enforcement campaigns and slowly increased the general sentiment in favor of County Option. Due to severe resistance to County Option, particularly by the politically powerful liquor interests, but also by German Americans, workers, and other opponents of temperance reform, it took until 1915 until the reformers' combined efforts showed the promised effect.
Fixed Flow
Authors: Starosielski Nicole
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the relationship between media content and the capacity of hard infrastructure, offering a framework for understanding how particular technologies, social practices, and natural environments can be conceptualized as media infrastructures. It then develops a relational approach to media infrastructure that delineates the multiple routes and effects of global undersea cable networks. There are five ways undersea cables function as a media infrastructure: they become resources for media activity; alter everyday experience of media temporarily; shape one's susceptibility to media censorship and surveillance; solidify global relationships of media power; and serve as a platform where publics can affect the dissemination of media content.
The Internet as the Anti-Television
Authors: Sandvig Christian
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the architecture used to distribute video over the Internet. The unprecedented volume of online video that now circulates suggests that this distribution had “enabled a radical approach” by generating forms of labor and content that traditional media industries have never seen before. Embedded in this transformation were competing ideas about what content and which audiences are valuable, and indeed how culture itself ought to work. The chapter then explores how computer pioneers thought about television in the 1960s and charts a path to more recent practices of caching, streaming, and multicasting. Ultimately, the case of Internet video distribution reveals how crucial the study of infrastructure is to understanding the shape, form, and function of media technologies.
Immigrants against the State
Authors: Zimmer Kenyon
Published: May 2017

From the 1880s through the 1940s, tens of thousands of first- and second-generation immigrants embraced the anarchist cause after arriving on American shores. This book explores why these migrants turned to anarchism, and how their adoption of its ideology shaped their identities, experiences, and actions. The book focuses on Italians and Eastern European Jews in San Francisco, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey. Tracing the movement's changing fortunes from the pre-World War I era through the Spanish Civil War, the book argues that anarchists, opposed to both American and Old World nationalism, severed all attachments to their nations of origin but also resisted assimilation into their host society. Their radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity instead embraced diversity and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. Though ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of Americanism and other nationalisms, the anarchist movement nonetheless provided a shining example of a transnational collective identity delinked from the nation-state and racial hierarchies.
“All Flags Look Alike to Us”
Authors: Zimmer Kenyon
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that anarchism was strongest among San Francisco's Italians, but the city's diversity, mixed neighborhoods, and the Italian community's small size relative to the total population meant that multiethnic alliances were both easy to forge and necessary to sustain radical activity. The result was the emergence of a pan-ethnic “Latin” movement encompassing Italian, French, and Spanish-speaking anarchists and syndicalists. By the First World War, San Francisco's anarchist groups had amalgamated into a loose coalition that extended across virtually the entire ethnoracial spectrum, and the city had become a major nexus of global radicalism that rivaled Paris in its myriad of international revolutionaries and progressives of all sorts.
Revolution and Repression
Authors: Zimmer Kenyon
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the First World War and its aftermath fundamentally altered global politics. Empires crumbled, socialist and nationalist revolutions erupted, and millions perished. Meanwhile, in the United States, rising patriotic fervor and wartime demands for “100 percent Americanism” marked immigrant anarchists as doubly dangerous, and Russia's October Revolution amplified antiradical fears. America was distressed by widespread racial violence, its first Red Scare, and a colossal postwar strike wave. In this context, the federal government proved willing to suppress radical speech and deport politically undesirable immigrants, efforts that were met with an unprecedented upsurge in anarchist violence, itself both a result and a cause of increasing repression.
“No Right to Exist Anywhere on This Earth”
Authors: Zimmer Kenyon
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at how anarchist groups throughout the country maintained their functionality, with International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) organizer Anna Sosnovsky noting “a general revival amongst the Comrades.” By 1933, one anarchist newspaper counted seventy-five anarchist groups across the country, while a U.S. military intelligence agent reported a keen revival of anarchistic activities on the East Coast. This modest resurgence is reflected in available circulation figures from the era, which shows that the American anarchist press retained approximately three-quarters of its prewar readership. The spread of multiethnic, English-speaking international groups led to the unprecedented growth of the English-language anarchist press, while Italian-language anarchist periodicals maintained a higher combined circulation between 1925 and 1933.
Why Consciousness Matters
Authors: Fraleigh Sondra
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines consciousness, or more accurately “extending whole body consciousness,” as the core purpose of somatic studies. It first considers the notion of ethereality in dance, noting how contrasting subtle ethereal movement would be solid strongly delineated movement, restrained and earthy; some of these strong qualities are found in the invigorating stamping dances of India and Africa. The chapter goes on to discuss somatics in terms of somatic affectivity and phenomenological awareness, arguing that how self and community are cultivated makes a difference in somatic contexts for performance; the important role of the teacher in transformational dance somatics, insisting that she and her consciousness are a living part of it; dualism from a gender perspective; and the use of phenomenology in terms of its critique of dualist theories of body and mind.
Environments for Self-Learning
Authors: Lester Kelly Ferris
Published: May 2017

In this chapter, the author contributes to the definition of somatic pedagogy as a means to encourage self-learning in students in different learning environments, from somatic movement lessons to dance technique and online dance appreciation, by drawing on the pedagogical philosophies of Howard Gardner and Paulo Freire. Her discussion includes approaches to facilitate self-learning through various somatic experiences and classrooms, including online learning. She emphasizes that the focus of somatics is always on the individual having the experience leading to the discovery (or rediscovery) of the wisdom of the self. Also certified in Bill Evans Method of Teaching Dance, the author describes the transformative somatic principles at work in his teaching of dance technique. She concludes by arguing that the theories she presents can be interwoven and considered in a cyclical process.
Trauma in the Theater of the Body
Authors: Biehl Richard
Published: May 2017

In this chapter, the author talks about his teaching of somatic yoga for relief of trauma, supporting this with current research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and including parts of his own story with PTSD. He has been practicing yoga since 1992 and expands his bodily pursuits through an active intellectual life. Here he offers an in-depth discussion based on research and his personal experience of the role of body consciousness in trauma and traumatic illnesses. He explores various ways to develop conscious embodiment in focused, restorative, and ultimately safe ways through engagement of the wisdom of the natural body and thereby to recover and potentially heal from traumatic stress and illness. In conclusion, he emphasizes that simple somatic methods anchored on breath and movement with mindfulness make it possible to heal traumatic illness and can provide immediate relief to experiences of both acute and chronic distress.
Parallel Tracks and Fraught Encounters
Authors: Bueno-Hansen Pascha
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the struggles and gaps between the protagonism of rural Andean women, or campesinas, and the priorities of the human rights and feminist movements in Peru as they try to address the ever-growing number of victims and survivors of the internal armed conflict. The armed conflict pitted the armed forces versus the Shining Path; both sides demanded allegiance from rural communities. From the beginning, campesinas were at the forefront of local efforts to denounce human rights violations and address the needs of affected people with the help of church groups and human rights advocates. Peruvian human rights and feminist movements presented the strongest potential for taking on the defense of campesinas' rights. This chapter considers how social exclusions marginalized campesina voices in the transitional justice process and how and why, despite campesina protagonism and human rights and feminist movements' best intentions, the gender-based violence directed at campesinas during the armed conflict slipped through the cracks. It also looks at the founding of the Women for Democracy, or Mujeres por la Democracia (MUDE), in 1997.
Introduction
Authors: Martin Lou
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter argues that studies of the industrialization of rural places like Hancock County can help in understanding the nature of industrial capitalism, particularly the relationship between capital mobility and the working class. Industries periodically entered periods of crisis that required a general restructuring for companies to remain profitable, and relocations were a key component in the process. In “undeveloped” rural areas, some manufacturers believed that they could create new environments free of discord and find grateful and compliant pool of rural laborers—often women and other low-wage workers—to surround the core of handpicked skilled workers. Thus, manufacturers' old labor problems and their high hopes for an improved workforce figured prominently in the migration of capital to rural places. Eventually, rural migrants and young people from local farms brought their own ideas, goals, and culture—distinct from those of the skilled craftsmen—and came to constitute a truly rural-industrial workforce.
Building Factories in the Country
Authors: Martin Lou
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the relocation of industrialists to rural places. Industrialists saw in Hancock County an undeveloped countryside where they could create factories and factory towns that would give their businesses a fresh start. Indeed, relocating allowed them to adopt new organizations and new technologies, to reshape their workforces and labor relations, and to have greater control over their business. The erection of the steel mills and potteries on grassy fields along the Ohio River also transformed the local economy. By 1910, the county's population had grown to 10,000, and tin mills and potteries now stood on the bank of the Ohio River, surrounded by small factory towns on what had once been farmland. In the decades that followed, the county's population would triple, but much of the rural nature of the place and rural habits of the people remained intact.
Movements for Equality in a Time of Industrial Restructuring
Authors: Martin Lou
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the movements for equality during another round of industrial restructuring in the steel and pottery industries. At the same time foreign competition and shifting capital threatened local jobs, historic national movements for equality, coalescing around black freedom and women's rights, played out at the local level. Locally, African Americans and women demanded greater access to factory jobs in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race and gender. In the local potteries that had survived the 1950s, the workforce changed little, but pay scales and the sex typing of jobs changed in subtle but important ways. In contrast, workers at Weirton Steel experienced a radical redrawing of gender and racial divisions even while class-action lawsuits for discrimination were still working their way through the court system.
Introduction
Authors: Robolin Stéphane
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the literary relationships between black South Africans and African Americans during the years of South African apartheid (formally, 1948–1994). It offers a literary history informed by spatial and cultural theory. On the one hand, it advances a mode of cultural analysis that foregrounds the geographic in black lives and cultural imaginaries and, in doing so, models a way of reading black South African and African American writing attuned to the relevance of race, space, and place. On the other hand, this study interprets the two literary traditions in relation to one another. Bringing attention to underaccounted-for cultural traffic that has shaped both traditions in the latter half of the twentieth century, it develops a literary history based on defining moments of cross-cultural engagement.
Humane Insight
Authors: Baker Courtney R.
Published: May 2017

In the history of black America, the image of the mortal, wounded, and dead black body has long been looked at by others from a safe distance. This book questions the relationship between the spectator and victim and urges viewers to move beyond the safety of the “gaze” to cultivate a capacity for humane insight toward representations of human suffering. Utilizing the visual studies concept termed the “look,” the book interrogates how the notion of black humanity was articulated and recognized in oft-referenced moments within the African American experience: the graphic brutality of the 1834 Lalaurie affair; the photographic exhibition of lynching, Without Sanctuary; Emmett Till's murder and funeral; and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Contemplating these and other episodes, the book traces how proponents of black freedom and dignity used the visual display of violence against the black body to galvanize action against racial injustice. An innovative cultural study that connects visual theory to African American history, the book asserts the importance of ethics in our analysis of race and visual culture, and reveals how representations of pain can become the currency of black liberation from injustice.
“A Bunch of Fellows Who Have Taken the Declaration of Independence Seriously”
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how Harold Gibbons gained credibility as a union leader in St. Louis and discovered a group of workers with whom he could begin to implement his emerging vision of total person unionism, as well as how Ernest Calloway's odyssey took a more dramatic turn with his refusal to serve in a Jim Crow military during World War II. The chapter first considers Gibbons's leadership of St. Louis's warehouse workers and his conflict with the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). It then discusses accusations that Gibbons was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) due in part to his denunciations of the wartime labor relations regime, insistence on the need for direct action, and attacks on the Communist Party (CP). It also describes how Calloway became one of the first African Americans to seek conscientious objector status solely on the basis of racial discrimination, and how he actively red-baited Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union Local 22.
“The Most Powerful Union in America”
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the merger of Harold Gibbons's union with the Teamsters in 1949 as well as his teamup with Ernest Calloway to develop new strategies for cementing member attachment to the union and boosting its standing as an advocate for working-class interests in St. Louis. The chapter first considers the factors that influenced Gibbons's decision to merge with the Teamsters and describes the merger as his boldest response to the changed circumstances he and the St. Louis warehouse workers now faced. It then discusses the strategies employed by the Teamsters in an attempt to improve the conditions and living standards of St. Louis workers, including strikes and secondary boycotts. It also looks at the increase in Teamsters' membership between 1933 and 1941, Gibbons's commitment to the pursuit of racial justice, and the challenges he and Calloway would encounter in trying to gain member support for total person unionism and sustaining the sense of organizational attachment they had witnessed within the mine workers and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
“Fuck Him, He Wasn’t With Us”
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the convergence of events that thrust Harold Gibbons into the maelstrom of national politics and led to his estrangement from the Teamsters's hierarchy. It first considers how Gibbons's rifts with Teamsters played out among Local 688's membership in St. Louis, which helped oust Gibbons in the summer of 1973, terminated his political partnership with Ernest Calloway, and signaled the demise of their quest for total person unionism and working-class citizenship. It then discusses Calloway's gradual withdrawal from direct involvement in civil rights activism and union affairs by the end of the 1960s, assuming instead the role of respected community elder. It also describes Gibbons's opposition to the Vietnam War and his difficulty in finding outlets for political expression during the last years of his career, even as he continued with his advocacy of interracial politics and comprehensive strategies for urban revitalization. Finally, it reflects on Calloway's death on December 31, 1989.
“A Day More Dreadful Than Any That We Have Yet Experienced”
Authors: Campney Brent M. S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter maps out the tortured state of race relations in Kansas during the 1890s. It documents further episodes of lynchings and other forms of black-targeted violence. While lynching continued to provide a barometer for race relations, other types of sensational violence—always present in the state—played a highly publicized role in the savagery that defined the decade. Mobbing was one of these, and homicide another. This chapter shows how public and dramatic mobbings and homicides played roles and produced results similar to those of lynchings and riots, reinforcing a narrative of intimidation against blacks. Such sensationalized forms of violence, however, have obscured the fact that said incidences of violence were also in decline during this period.
“Peace at Home Is the Most Essential Thing”
Authors: Campney Brent M. S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter chronicles the long “Red Summer” and persistent racial violence throughout the 1920s. With America's entry into World War I, black populations swelled in response to labor shortages, thus precipitating racial conflict over jobs and housing between white residents of northern industrial cities and the black newcomers. These tensions would culminate in the “Red Summer,” a season of race riots, conflagrations, and other types of spectacular violence. Though the wartime surge in violence would subside after 1921, racial prejudice and violence continued on. Despite these setbacks, however, black resistance likewise persisted; and this period marks the ascent of a new generation of civil rights activists, as well as a few other notable milestones such as the Thurman-Watts v. Board of Education of Coffeyville and Brown v. Board of Education decisions and the establishment of the Kansas City branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Women Musicians of Uzbekistan
Authors: Merchant Tanya
Published: May 2017

Influences by women's distinct influence on Uzbekistan's music, this book ventures into Tashkent's post-Soviet music scene to place women musicians within the nation's evolving artistic and political arenas. Drawing on fieldwork and music study carried out between 2001 and 2014, the book challenges the Western idea of Central Asian women as sequestered and oppressed. Instead, the book notes the ways Uzbekistan's women stand at the forefront of four prominent genres: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. The book's recounting of the women's experiences, stories, and memories underscores the complex role that these musicians and vocalists play in educational institutions and concert halls, street kiosks and the culturally essential sphere of wedding music. Throughout the book, the book ties nationalism and femininity to performances and reveals how the music of these women is linked to a burgeoning national identity.
Introduction
Authors: Merchant Tanya
Published: May 2017

This book explores issues of gender performance and national identity as they are personalized and individualized and then themselves performed by women musicians of Uzbekistan. It considers the rich relationship that dutar music has with women's culture and history in Uzbekistan but shows that the performance of national identity, of femininity, and of a sense of tradition that engaged the modern world was not limited to the dutar but encompassed a wide range of professional musical activities. The book demonstrates the central place of women in the musical project of nationalism, not only as symbols but also as agents, actors, and innovators; they are the drivers of much of the musical activity that supports Uzbekistan's new national project and they engage in a variety of strategies of identity to make a place for themselves in these musical styles, musical worlds, and, ultimately, in Uzbekistan.
Conclusion
Authors: Merchant Tanya
Published: May 2017

This conclusion considers the border-crossing process involved as women come together as a community, applying educational theorist Etienne Wenger's ideas about learning as engaged by a community of practice to musical activity—specifically to the musical activities of professional women musicians both inside and outside institutions. By contrasting practices within and beyond the Uzbek State Conservatory and by putting the rhetoric surrounding each of these musical styles into conversation, the diverse nature of women's musical contribution to the Uzbek national project comes into sharper focus. The more everyday context of a social gathering allows not only border crossing, but also an emphasis on the pleasure of music making and the joy of singing along. Institutions define musical genres, not musical experience. The conclusion emphasizes the complex relation of national identity to individual feminine experiences.
White Man’s War
Authors: Boje John
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Boers’ involvement in, and labors during, the South African War. It first considers the Boer–black relations, citing the Boers’ racist attitude toward blacks before and during the South African War. It then looks at blacks in Boer service; black resistance to Boer hegemony fostered by Ethiopianism and manifested in the activities of armed gangs; and blacks’ service with the British troops, particularly Bergh’s Scouts. It also discusses the black concentration camps and concludes with an analysis of the claims that blacks murdered and mutilated whites, contextualized in the colonial mythology of black savagery and recontextualized in terms of a general descent into murderous brutality.
The Aftermath of War
Authors: Boje John
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the aftermath of the South African War, focusing on the period from the conclusion of peace, when Lord (Horatio) Kitchener shook hands with the Boer delegates and pledged, “We are good friends now,” to the establishment of the National Party with anti-British and anti-black bias. The chapter begins with a discussion of the postwar reconstruction, the reintegration of hendsoppers (surrendered Boers) and joiners, and the consolidation of Afrikaners’ national identity. It then considers the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in rebuilding community, along with the political resurgence of the adversaries of “protected burghers” in the Free State. It also looks at the 1914 rebellion that articulated a republican protest against the modernizing state. Finally, it highlights the postwar trauma suffered by blacks, their political marginalization, and the establishment of the African National Congress (ANC).
Fifty Shades of Postfeminism
Authors: Click Melissa A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the meaning of Fifty Shades of Grey to the women who read it, within the context of a postfeminist sexualized culture. Like the Twilight series upon which it is based, Fifty Shades has resonated deeply with readers around the world. To investigate Fifty Shades' appeal, the chapter presents interviews of thirty-six readers and grounds their reflections with feminist media research that explores women's use of romance reading. In the process, this chapter explores the series' messages about gender roles, romance, and sexuality, bringing crucial attention to the cultural and social aspects of the Fifty Shades phenomenon. Overall, it argues that Fifty Shades' appeal is rooted in women's use of the series' recurrent themes of fantasy, romance, and sex to make sense of the sexualized cultural environment in which they are immersed.
Mothers, Fathers, and the Pregnancy App Experience
Authors: Ley Barbara L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the “usability” of pregnancy apps, particularly in terms of their usefulness and user satisfaction, to understand their appeal to a growing number of expectant parents, most—but not all—of whom are women. To this end, the chapter analyzes the aesthetic, therapeutic, and technical design of nine pregnancy apps available in the iTunes store. It also looks at the user reviews that accompanied the apps. On the one hand, the chapter reveals that the architecture and design of pregnancy apps enhance satisfaction among many expectant parents, especially women, by providing them with a range of support tools, options for personalization, and the ability to access support whenever and wherever they need it. On the other hand, the gendered and heteronormative assumptions built into the apps' designs perpetuate hegemonic discourses regarding pregnancy and parenting that can leave some expectant parents, especially fathers, frustrated with their app experience.
Women’s Nail Polish Blogging and Femininity
Authors: White Michele
Published: May 2017

This chapter demonstrates the ways nail polish bloggers have conceptualized the limits and the limitations of femininity without narrowly defining femininity. Nail polish bloggers, informed by general cultural perceptions, understand polish as feminine. In a related manner, society identifies nail polish as a low form. Yet nail bloggers also trouble cultural conceptions of normative femininity through their inability and resistance to wholly describing and identifying the feminine. These bloggers critique some aspects of feminine culture and identify the expectations that prevent them from moving beyond certain applications and norms. They emphasize the produced aspects of their nails and bodies and thereby undermine the idea that women and femininity are natural states.
In Search of Our Mama’s Porn
Authors: Stallings L. H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter begins with a brief analysis of the sexual and racial politics of the Life Always antichoice billboard campaign. It argues that black women writers' participation in what might be considered pornographic industries promotes a form of guerilla warfare, whose objective is to protect and secure women's erotic sovereignty and reproductive freedom. While funk and porn have each been hystericized as the province of men, funk is also viewed as an affective technology that can sustain reciprocal interactions that would improve the lives of women and, in the end, the men and children in their lives. The chapter shows how the way women pursue the terms of their liberation underscores the radical possibilities of what it means to desire versus to be an object of desire, and to create versus to produce.
Marvelous Stank Matter
Authors: Stallings L. H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter reviews the importance of sacred subjectivity to various black sexual cultures. In its proposal of nonmonogamy as an alternative practice for funk's genealogy of affection, relationality, and sexuality between human and nonhuman beings, the chapter addresses M. Jacqui Alexander's question about sacred subjectivity. Using queer legal theory, debates about the marriage crisis in black communities, and cultural depictions of nonmonogamy in the science fiction of Octavia Butler and the erotica of Fiona Zedde, the chapter reveals how funk attends to alternative models of family and community to challenge the heteropatriarchal recolonization that happens with capitalism and the Western model of family.
Sexuality as a Site of Memory and the Metaphysical Dilemma of Being a Colored Girl
Authors: Stallings L. H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses partying as an alternative model of intimacy, black aesthetics, and art inclusive of nonhuman being. It studies eroticism and representations of sex work through the plays of Lynn Nottage and the films of feminist pornographer Shine Louise Houston as cultural recognitions of sex that is mediated through “demonic grounds.” Nottage and Houston devise fictional plots and women characters that confirm how and why sexuality exists as a site of memory for some black women. Women's bodies and sexualities are their canvases and creative tools. Although the end result may become representations for national ideology or products to be consumed, the process of creating out of the body and sexuality is in and of itself evidence of power that exceeds the human.
From the Freaks of Freaknik to the Freaks of Magic City
Authors: Stallings L. H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that funk produces mythologies about the body, labor, leisure, and pleasure, and that these occur in music as well as in black fiction, art, and performance centered on the potential force or energy that excites or that neutral sexual pleasures might yield. Adding to Tony Bolden's “Groove Theory: A Vamp on the Epistemology of Funk,” where he argues that the sensing techniques that black dancers employ have been central to innovations in black musicianship generally, the chapter discusses how funk's sensing techniques innovate sexual cultures as sites of memory. It brings three disciplines together—literature, performance, and dance—to theorize nonhuman agency in the street party Freaknik, as well as black strip clubs.
Introduction
Authors: Margaretten Emily
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter presents ethnographic vignettes to demonstrate the institutional inequalities and interpersonal abuses characterizing the lived experiences of youth homelessness in South Africa. These vignettes exhibit how plans of “rehabilitation” essentially equate to evictions and arrests, by means of which poor black youth—deemed unfit for urban citizenship—are expelled from the city center. The chapter also introduces Point Place, a five-story apartment complex located between Durban's beachfront and central business district. In many respects, the youthful occupation of Point Place reflects the shifting demographic of South Africa's inner cities. It reveals the uneasy transitions of the lifting of repressive influx-control laws and the subsequent flight of white residents and capital from the city centers.
Love, Respect, and Masculinity
Authors: Margaretten Emily
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines nakana from the perspective of the Point Place males. Whereas the females link nakana to material goods, a shared living space, and emotional support, the young men of Point Place conceptualize it through another ideological framework. They associate nakana with the domestic production of patriarchal control: to obedience, discipline, and respect. For them, the organizing principles of nakana relate not to models of sexual exchange, but rather to models of masculinity, which they enact as strategies of meaningful survival on the streets. The chapter studies the presence of two dominant masculinities—the isoka and umnumzana—that take shape within Point Place. Both masculinities uphold patriarchy, not through the use of direct force, but through the coercive powers of consent.
Residing with the Spectral
Authors: Margaretten Emily
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the psychological turmoil of street life under a roof. Rather than speak of their losses outright—the losses of kin, friends, and lovers to the violence of poverty and HIV/AIDS—the Point Place youth speak of uGogo, a ghostly grandmother who torments youth to their death by enticing them to jump out of windows. Drawing on the youth's narratives of despair and destruction, the chapter explores the various significations of uGogo's presence—a witch, an ancestor, or a drug-induced hallucination. It studies a symbolic analysis of uGogo, linking her floating associations to a broader discussion of spirituality, witchcraft, and death in post-apartheid South Africa.
Cultural Melancholy
Authors: Singleton Jermaine
Published: May 2017

A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, this book explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and film, the book demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform grief discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. It also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts. The book develops the concept of “cultural melancholy” as a critical response to scholarship that calls for the clinical separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis; excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures; and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic inquiry and theorization. In doing so, the book weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency.
Queering Celie’s Same-Sex Desire
Authors: Singleton Jermaine
Published: May 2017

This chapter places psychoanalytic theories of melancholia in conversation with Walker's The Color Purple to show how “deviant” desire is engendered within and maintained by racialized subject-formations, as they are conceived and regulated by the ongoing process of racialization and gender order that guarantees the reproduction of the white heteropatriarchal familial structure that attends a melancholic, normative American nationhood. It explores the transformative possibilities theories of melancholia carry for the intervention into and the interpretation of received fictions of race and sexuality. A rereading of The Color Purple through the psychoanalytic paradigm of melancholia aims to not only depolarize sexual and racial distinctions within the reductive gazes of psychoanalysis and race studies, but also integrates racial difference into the project of queer studies by casting them as mutually constitutive dimensions of the process of subject formation within the broader context of the unconscious processes that attend racialization.
Coda
Authors: Singleton Jermaine
Published: May 2017

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book has attempted to demonstrate that America continues to suffer from the immaterial dimensions of the legacy of slavery and ongoing racial subjugation it claims with great difficulty. The preceding chapters worked in concert to elucidate the affective claims of the history of slavery and ongoing racial subjugation through a theory of cultural melancholy. In writing thw book through a close reading of American and African American literatures and cultures, it is hoped to reveal a culturally and historically specific paradigm that explains how unresolved racial grievances are transmitted transgenerationally by way of ritual practice, and uncover a paradigm for understanding racialized subject formation that is simultaneously individualistic and interpersonal.
Women against Government
Authors: Shaw Carolyn Martin
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the functioning of the feminist NGO Associated Women of Zimbabwe (AWZ) to highlight varieties of feminism and the influence of a political and economic crisis on a feminist organization in Zimbabwe at the turn of the twenty-first century. After providing a brief history of AWZ, the chapter considers its experiences to demonstrate how women consciously organize to fight sexism in Zimbabwean society. It then explores AWZ's role in the political process as it advocated for women and promoted women's civil rights in the context of increasing political competition, electoral violence, and a declining economy. It also discusses cosmopolitan feminism in Zimbabwe and the relationship between AWZ and the state—especially in relation to the politics of inclusion, state-sponsored violence, and economic decline; explains how an organization that once stood against government lost its edge, even as government became more oppressive; and analyzes the fiction of Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga. The chapter concludes by showing what happens to an NGO dependent on international donors when the money stream begins to dry up.
Frederik Pohl
Authors: Page Michael R.
Published: May 2017

One of science fiction's undisputed grandmasters, Frederik Pohl built an astonishing career that spanned more than seven decades. In publishing novels, short stories, and essays, Pohl won millions of readers and seemingly as many awards while leaving a lasting mark on the genre. This book traces Pohl's extraordinary journey from discovering books as a boy at the Brooklyn Public Library to publishing the novel All the Lives He Led at age 91. A first-of-its-kind study, the book delves into the iconic works of fiction like The Space Merchants, Jem, and the tales of the Gateway universe, as well as Pohl's creative alliances with the likes of C. M. Kornbluth, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. But the book also examines Pohl's as-essential contributions in other areas. He represented many of the major science fiction writers as a literary agent in the 1940s and 1950s. He helped professionalize the field by midwifing science fiction publishing at Ballantine and Ace Books. Finally, while working at Galaxy and If, he aided countless careers as, in Gardner Dozois' words, “quite probably the best SF magazine editor who ever lived.”
Camille
Authors: Duckett Victoria
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how Camille adapted and changed the speed, structure, and meaning of Sarah Bernhardt's live play. La Dame aux Camélias was a film made by the French Film d'Art in late 1911 and released to French, American, and English audiences in early 1912. In America, Canada, and Mexico, it was released as Camille and sold with Madame Réjane's Mme. Sans-Gêne on a states' rights basis as part of a double bill. With Bernhardt at the helm of Camille, cinematized theater became an art nouveau product par excellence. This chapter argues that Bernhardt's use of the spiral in physical action and her taste for oriental colors and objects is evidence of the broader impact that japonisme was having on the fine arts in France. It also contends that the different classes, generations, and national audiences that celebrate Camille are proof of Bernhardt's international fame just as they are evidence of her capacity to realize and express contemporary tastes and fashion.
Spatial Politics of Kriolu Presence in Lisbon
Authors: Pardue Derek
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the politics of space of Kriolu presence in Lisbon by focusing on the demolition and relocation campaigns engineered by city urbanization agencies. Space is an irreducible dimension of presence. Kriolu presence refers to the various manifestations of Cape Verde and Cape Verdeans in the metropole. Ths formation is one signifcant influence in the sentiment and management of what it means to be Portuguese and, by extension, European. Cape Verdean presence is historical and linguistic in nature, and forms part of a grounded politics, a struggle for recognition and enfranchisement based in the everyday realities of improvised infrastructure, state campaigns of relocation, and dynamic views on belonging. This chapter argues that there is a “Creole citizenship” emerging in Lisbon and that Kriolu plays an important role in elucidating the differences between autoconstructed neighborhoods and social or state-sponsored project housing. It emphasizes the significance of migration and housing by focusing on the processes of displacement and “emplacement.”