bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Disputing the Supreme Court Decision, 1857
Authors: Moore William F. , Moore Jane Ann
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy's criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the case of Dred Scott. The Dred Scott decision, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, affirmed that slaves were not citizens and indeed “had no rights which a white man was bound to accept.” Lincoln and Lovejoy denounced the Supreme Court's interpretation that the Constitution provided federal authority to reduce human beings to property without rights, accusing it of political abuse of judicial power. This chapter begins with a discussion of the Illinois Supreme Court's previous rulings in connection with the slave transit law, along with Lincoln and Lovejoy's argument that humans could not legally be reduced to property under the Constitution. It then considers the two men's views on religion and politics as well as their response to the Dred Scott decision. It also looks at Lincoln and Lovejoy's preparations for the 1858 elections.
Binding Up the Nation’s Wounds, 1864
Authors: Moore William F. , Moore Jane Ann
Published: May 2017

This chapter summarizes some of the accomplishments of Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy's unusual but remarkable collaboration that continued until the latter's death in 1864. It first considers Lovejoy's support for Francis Carpenter in creating a life-size portrait of Lincoln depicting the moment when he read the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. It then recounts how, in the last ten years of their lives, Lincol and Lovejoy had relied on each other, working together to unite the divergent factions in the Illinois Republican Party, to keep the Republicans united in Congress, and to convince moderate and radical members of Congress to pass emancipation legislation. It argues that Lovejoy and Lincoln had acted from the perspectives of both radicalism and pragmatism in their quest to end slavery, that as radicals, they collaborated pragmatically to make major and lasting contributions to the process of emancipation. Their ability to collaborate was enhanced by a common religious approach, which was also a source of their mutual trust and respect.
Fiction, Newsreels, and Social Documentary in the Sound Era
Authors: Williams Tami
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces Dulac's transition to nonfiction filmmaking in the early 1930s, in her work as founding director of one of the most important news reel companies of the period (France-Actualités-Gaumont, 1932–35). It examines the aesthetic and social dimensions of her conception of the newsreel and its capacity for objectivity, as well as its ability to reveal reality and inner meanings beyond that which is visible with the human eye. The chapter also considers Dulac's socially and politically engaged nonfiction films and projects of the Popular Front, particularly her unique newsreel-based, pacifist documentary feature, Le Cinéma au service de l'histoire (1935), which investigates cinema's role as an actor within history.
Creating a Cursed and Sanctified Temple, 1965–1984
Authors: Howlett David J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the transformation of the Kirtland Temple as a site of interest into a site of contagion, only then to be blessed along with the surrounding land as a place of promise. While the Kirtland Temple still remained an ambiguous site for many Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pilgrims, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints agents on the ground in Cleveland worked out a story that could explain Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' possession of the temple while still embracing it as a holy site. This resanctification of sacred space offers several insights into the study of sacred space that may be “useful to think with.” First, this case study illustrates the power of middling agents in creating and sustaining sacred spaces. Second, it illustrates that the creation and maintenance of sacred space may be one strategy that religious groups use to answer theodical questions, or questions about the presence of evil.
The Destroyer and the Peacemakers, 1984–1990
Authors: Howlett David J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the 1980s Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' schism by the ways individuals mapped the Kirtland Temple within their sacred universes. Such mapping involved revelations about temples, conferences at or near the building, the construction of worship spaces near the temple, the creation of eschatological maps about the temple and its role in the end of history, and the creation of collective memories through commemorative rituals. In this, Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints members followed practices that had helped establish their church's collective identity in previous decades. What was different, of course, was the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' schism that allowed for an opening to extreme, even violent, mappings of the Kirtland Temple. The chapter then recounts the history of Jeffrey Lundgren, his apocalyptic group, and his violent mapping and actions.
Tour Guiding, 1959–2012
Authors: Howlett David J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that the evolution of tour guiding at the Kirtland Temple reflects select and crucial changes within the Community of Christ/Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints denomination over the course of the late twentieth century. Specifically, tour performances offer a window into the historical memories that the church deemed important, show how it desired itself to be known by the wider world, and reflect how the denomination interacted with its competitors and changing allies. The Kirtland Temple tours tell as much about the Community of Christ's general leftward turn in the late twentieth century as they reveal about changing academic knowledge of the Kirtland Temple's past. Indeed, guides constantly were correcting or changing tour content to reflect new understandings of the history and the meaning of the temple.
Introduction
Authors: Whitmire Ethelene
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter uses a black feminist theory perspective, and demonstrates how Regina Andrews negotiated her personal, creative, professional, and civic lives by refusing to be limited by traditional roles because of either her race or her gender. The central argument is that Regina resisted racial stereotypes and to a lesser degree challenged expected gender roles too. The chapter argues that her social class (upper-middle) helped to give her the strength, the connections, and the tools to defy the expected conventions of her times. While Regina's biography tells the story of one woman's life, it is illustrative of other New Negro women who belonged to what W. E. B. Du Bois called the Talented Tenth—the small minority of upper-class, educated African Americans whom he believed could uplift the masses out of poverty.
Harlem Renaissance Women and 580 St. Nicholas Avenue
Authors: Whitmire Ethelene
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at how Regina became part of the Harlem Renaissance upon her arrival in New York City. Events collided to put Regina at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement marked by increased literary, musical, and artistic creativity by African American artists who wanted to challenge the prevailing stereotypical representation of their image. Writers and artists came from all over the United States to participate. In Los Angeles, writer Wallace Thurman encouraged fellow post-office worker Arna Bontemps to go to Harlem. Opportunity editor Charles S. Johnson encouraged Zora Neale Hurston to move to New York City. All of these great thinkers, writers, and artists would pass through the 135th Street Branch, where Regina was assigned.
The New York Public Library
Authors: Whitmire Ethelene
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Regina's decades-long battle with the New York Public Library (NYPL). For all that she was doing for the NYPL, Regina believed that she was neither being paid a wage that recognized her contributions nor being afforded the opportunities for promotion she deserved. Her relationship with Ernestine Rose deteriorated as Regina frequently asked W. E. B. Du Bois, representing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to intervene on her behalf with the NYPL administration. In order to understand Du Bois' involvement with Regina, the chapter examines his earlier dispute with the NYPL administration on behalf of librarian Catherine Latimer—the first African American librarian in the system. Du Bois was particularly galled by the situation at NYPL, which limited African American librarians to a few branches.
War, with Interludes (1991–1995)
Authors: Miller Leta E.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Kernis's music in the years 1991–1995, a period marked by a proliferation of dark, brooding works responding to world conflicts. These works include the Second Symphony (1991), a reaction to the first Gulf War; Still Movement with Hymn (1993), provoked by the war in Bosnia; Colored Field (1994), inspired by his 1989 visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau; and Lament and Prayer (1995), a memorial to the Holocaust. Was it the self-confidence brought on by increasing fame that in some sense empowered Kernis to take on these greater-than-life themes or to imagine that in some way he could, by his art, effect a change in the world around him? Such a viewpoint in no way indicates a misplaced self-importance. Rather, it is essential to the very art of composition, to the communicative goal that most composers pursue: the reaching out, through personal self-expression, to move and commune with listeners, and ultimately inspire a transformation in them.
Lively Dance Currents
Authors: Spalding Susan Eike
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Appalachian region's rich dance heritage. It begins with a historical background on the Appalachian region, showing that it was never as homogeneous, as poor, or as isolated as was once believed, and that many kinds of social and theatrical dance were available to local residents as early as the 1790s. The chapter then cites evidence to prove that the people of Appalachia had rich resources to draw upon in terms of movement vocabulary and have made reciprocal contributions to dancing elsewhere. It also considers the Appalachian residents' continual access to a wide range of forms of social dance and theatrical dance; how rivers, railroads, roads, and airports have facilitated performers traveling across the region; dance education and opportunities for those interested in dancing; and the evolution of square dancing and footwork dancing.
Afterword
Authors: Spalding Susan Eike
Published: May 2017

This book has explored what has given life and meaning to old time dancing in six communities in Eastern Kentucky, Northeast Tennessee, and Southwest Virginia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through interviews, it has identified a variety of circumstances responsible for the appearance of dancing in these dance communities, and the ways that residents of each community experienced and responded to industrialization and other societal changes. It has also examined how decisions made by individuals and groups shaped dancing and how decision making was affected by factors such as culture and cultural exchange. Finally, it has discussed the decline and revival of old time dancing in the six communities as well as change and continuity as evidence of the power of local tradition in the Appalachian region. The book concludes with an afterword, which expresses the hope that all six stories will stimulate thinking and exploration and pave the way for future projects on American dance traditions.
The Movement Makes the News
Authors: Dow Bonnie J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter begins the story of 1970's “grand press blitz,” when a barrage of print stories on the movement set the stage for network news' first reports on women's liberation. It couples a discussion of all three networks' first, brief, hard news reports on feminist protest in January—the disruption of the Senate birth control pill hearings by a women's liberation group—with an extensive analysis of two series of lengthy soft feature stories on women's liberation broadcast by CBS and NBC in March and April. On one level, both network series created a sort of moderate middle ground of acceptable feminism anchored by their legitimation of liberal feminist issues related to workplace discrimination, but they diverged sharply in other ways that indicated key differences in their purposes and their imagined audiences. The CBS and NBC series provide a sort of baseline for national television representations of the movement in 1970; between them, they display the wide range of rhetorical strategies contained in early network reports. The CBS stories offered a generally dismissive and visually sensationalized narrative about the movement, particularly its radical contingent, displaying the gender anxiety assumed to afflict its male target audience. In contrast, the NBC series presented a generally sympathetic narrative about the movement's issues that unified radical and liberal concerns rather than using the latter to marginalize the former.
Magazines and the Marketing of the Movement
Authors: Dow Bonnie J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the March 18, 1970, sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ), a crucial episode in feminist media activism that had dramatic internal and external consequences for women's liberation. Conceived as a radical action by a small group of women incensed at the demeaning portrayal of women in a publication that touted itself as “the magazine women believe in,” the LHJ protest was an unpredictable success, precipitating significant changes in editorial and employment practices at women's magazines. That outcome was the product of several factors, including the emphases of the print and broadcast coverage of the LHJ events as well as the action's timing among a wave of protests and discrimination complaints launched in 1970 by women employees of major media institutions. Equally important was the recognition of the magazine's editors—and those of their sister publications—that incorporating and commodifying women's liberation was more profitable than resisting it, processes that would soon escalate across all forms of mass media.
Tone and Stroke
Authors: Wolf Richard K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the importance of tone and stroke melody in the rhythmic patterns of South Asian drumming traditions. Many musicians and listeners in South Asia are interested in the relation of what they consider classical music to what they consider folk music. Some emphasize the distinction when wishing to make a point about what constitutes true musical knowledge (usually knowledge associated with the “classical”). This chapter explores the practice of naming and defining drum patterns based on the author's fieldwork in a number of cities, towns, and rural regions in India and Pakistan. It also discusses the role of melody and rhythm in the definition of patterns by looking at examples of (tone-) melodies accompanied by drums, such as functionally specific genres that combine wind-instrument melodies with drum patterns. The chapter highlights the complex ways in which tone and stroke melodies may vie for primacy within a genre or across different items in the drum repertoire.
Muharram in Multan
Authors: Wolf Richard K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes Muharram Ali's observations of the drumming and other music traditions of Multan during his journey to the Pakistani city. Ali's journey begins when he attended a majlis at Imambarah Māsumīn, Haweli Murīd Shah, followed by his experience with Muharram; the seventh of Muharram is traditionally associated with rituals commemorating the wedding of Qasim, and special music was often central to these rituals. The Tenth of Muharram, the climax in remembrance of Imam Husain's martyrdom. Ali also encountered mārū; the drumming on the battlefield; and the so-called bāzār-e-husn—the “bazaar of beauty”—in the Lodhipura neighborhood, where the families of the reputed courtesans were the custodians of a rich and varied repertoire of classical music.
Madho Lal
Authors: Wolf Richard K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes Muharram Ali's observations of drumming and music traditions linked to the Madho Lal Husain shrine in Lahore, Pakistan. Muhammad Mushtaq, Ali's shalwār, summarized Shah Husain's story. According to him, “The kāfīs of Shah Husain are very powerful for setting human beings on the straight path.” The chapter considers poetry and sayings attributed to Shah Husain as well as the ʻurs, a multifaceted event that drew pilgrims from many religious backgrounds, including Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians. It shows that, in Pakistan, understanding music, movement, poetic recitation, and other forms of action in Sufi shrines involves more nuanced categories than those of “scriptural Islam” and “Islam on the ground.” Even a rough map of the Madho Lal Husain complex would suggest this with its dedicated malang space, with its centers and peripheries created through performance.
Producing Noir
Authors: Spicer Andrew
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on three prominent noir figures: Jerry Wald, Adrian Scott, and Mark Hellinger—the “pragmatist,” the “ideologue,” and the “realist,” respectively—each of whom significantly impacted the development of classic noir as a creative and commercial production cycle. What unites the work of these very different men was a shared sense that film noir was a vehicle through which to realize their ambitions and a way to engage contemporary audiences whose tastes were changing. Moreover, each saw the producer's role as pivotal, straddling the worlds of commerce and creativity, positioned to make the key decisions that shaped a film—choosing source materials, collaborating closely with writers and directors, and overseeing casting and locations.
A Little Larceny
Authors: Osteen Mark
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at the '50s heist picture—a subgenre of '50s gangster noir—examining John Huston's Asphalt Jungle (1950). In Huston's film, the criminal gang resembles nothing so much as a corporation that mimics the increasing organization and alienation of the “age of anxiety.” Subsequent noir heist films elaborate on this topic, dramatizing the conflict between the individual and the crime syndicate. In these “capers,” the “foot soldier” frequently finds himself caught between the police and the boss—the Law and “Murder, Inc.”—a dire predicament where, as always seems to be the case in the overdetermined universe of classic noir, there's no way out.
Hukihuki
Authors: Carr James Revell
Published: May 2017

This chapter deals with the antagonistic relationship between American missionaries and American sailors, in which Hawaiians were caught in the middle. It shows how that conflict literally played out on theatrical and musical stages in Hawaii and on the mainland. It frames this struggle using the indigenous Hawaiian term hukihuki, which means “the constant, opposing emotional pull two or more persons in conflict may exert on a third person, ostensibly to win his love, loyalty or influence but actually to gain supremacy in the two way power struggle.” Missionaries sought to keep Hawaiians attached to their islands, working on plantations that fed the missionary families' wealth and power. At the same time, sailors encouraged Hawaiians to leave the islands and enter into a global economy where, with their new cosmopolitan identities, they were treated as skilled laborers and given freedoms unavailable to plantation workers.
“Honolulu Hula Hula Heigh”
Authors: Carr James Revell
Published: May 2017

This chapter illustrates how the relationship between sailors and Hawaiians helped to foster the new sound of Native Hawaiian culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hawaii's last king, David Kalākaua, was influenced by sailors' songs and minstrelsy, and his maritime adventures contributed to his policy of promoting indigenous Hawaiian music. The chapter also examines the works of the early hapa haole songwriter Joseph K. A'ea, a close friend of Queen Lili'uokalani and member of the Royal Hawaiian Band, who based at least one of his earliest popular songs on the lyrical, rhythmic, and melodic characteristics of the nineteenth-century sea chantey.
“We Are Americans, Too”
Authors: Lucander David
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the contours of interorganizational cooperation between the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) and other protest organizations during the period when MOWM transitioned into a permanent institution. Randolph tried to carve a niche for MOWM and its organizational identity as an all-black vehicle for a form of protest that it called “nonviolent goodwill direct action” galvanized around the slogan “We Are Americans, Too.” The demonstrations and rallies occurring in this period suggest that numerous grassroots activists and indigenous institutions such as churches and labor unions were involved in making Randolph's threat to march matter locally. Unfortunately, important local chapters, including the one in Washington, D.C., were sometimes wracked with disorganization, rendering them functionally useless. MOWM's failure to develop logistically crucial branches such as the one in Washington was a major reason this organization faded from the national limelight so quickly.
Wartime St. Louis and the Genesis of MOWM in the Gateway City, 1942
Authors: Lucander David
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides a historical background to the outpouring of African American protest in wartime St. Louis. In May 1942, A. Philip Randolph and Milton Webster called a meeting at the St. Louis YWCA, during which they proposed that a local March on Washington Movement (MOWM) unit be established. T. D. McNeal, David Grant, Sallie Parham, Nita Blackwell, and Jordan Chambers are introduced as pioneers of protest in this upstart organization. When available, biographical information of key MOWM supporters illustrates how participating in wartime protests fitted within the arc of an individual's life. There was no singular path toward MOWM, but the people who associated with this organization shared an optimism that the war presented an opportune moment to effectively challenge Jim Crow's insidious multiplicity of forms.
Conclusion
Authors: Lucander David
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter assesses the March on Washington Movement's (MOWM) accomplishments and shortcomings. MOWM did not achieve most of its stated goals, but the organization did give its members a place to refine their skills as leaders. Many of those individuals would use their experiences of fighting racism in World War II to jump-start a lifetime of activism that outlasted the organization they coalesced under during the war years. It is here, in the individual lives of certain members, that MOWM made its greatest impact—and it is at the personal level that this long-defunct organization has the most to teach about sustaining movements for social change.
Out of Place in the Domestic Space
Authors: Mallapragada Madhavi
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the textual, discursive, and networking politics of Indian immigrant women residing in the United States on the H-4 temporary visa, through a close reading of the discussion forum by and about these women on the community website, indusladies.com. It argues that the politics of household and networking evidenced through the discussion cultures and online practices of forum participants exemplifies the repurposing of the virtual network to foreground a particular immigrant formation articulated along relations of gender and visa-defined immigrant class. H-4 women make visible their diverse and embodied experiences of feeling like outsiders in the immigrant space. They narrate their histories of migration from India and relocation in the United States, culminating in their becoming out of place in the nonresident Indian (NRI) household. In turn, their testimonials unsettle idealized discourses of gendered NRI belonging, which mostly by absence of representation assume that the H-4 wives of H-1B professionals are happily ensconced in domestic bliss as NRI householders.
The Wired Home
Authors: Mallapragada Madhavi
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the idealized construction of the Indian immigrant home and household in online grocery stores, shopping sites, and banking sites. Through close readings of these sites, it reveals how the textual, cultural, and institutional politics of a diverse set of Indian and Indian immigrant players has shaped the production of an idealized version of the immigrant home as a household organized around elite imaginations of mobility, the reproduction of the filial thorough the financial, and the agency and labor of male technology professionals. It situates the idealization of the immigrant home in the context of the ideologies of e-commerce and online financial transactions that first emerged in the late 1990s, and continue to be mobilized around the domestic and transnational needs and desires of Indian immigrants in the United States.
Desi Networks
Authors: Mallapragada Madhavi
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how desi activism reimagines the Indian immigrant location and seeks to mobilize the politics of citizenship around issues of race and class. Using drumnyc.org, the homepage of New York-based organization Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), as a case study, it foregrounds a particular mode of citizenship among South Asian immigrants wherein belonging and rights are negotiated through technologies of race and immigration and through network cultures. The site represents its immigrant members as active political subjects in the U.S. homeland who craft a cultural location for themselves by engaging, resisting, and responding to the disciplinary strategies of the technologized racial state. In doing so, the activists of DRUM reveal how belonging is produced and enacted through the transnational online media and through immigrant, labor, and racial coalitions. Desi is here articulated to labor struggles, racial alliances, and immigrant collectives to produce desi networks as brown, working-class spaces of political leadership.
Ghost Stories for Darwin
Authors: Subramaniam Banu
Published: May 2017

A stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, this book explores how the author's dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. The book reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, the book uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.
Legacy, 1926–1929
Authors: Faith Thomas I.
Published: May 2017

This chapter evaluates the successes and failures of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) during the second half of the 1920s, in light of the organization's ultimate incapacity to influence foreign policy. By 1926, the CWS was a well-established organization capable of supporting the continuation of poison gas work into the foreseeable future. It had successfully influenced public policy to continue chemical warfare research after World War I. However, the CWS and its supporters failed to convince people to believe that gas warfare was humane. Public hostility toward chemical weapons ultimately led to the signing of international agreements prohibiting chemical warfare. This chapter discusses the CWS's sustained accomplishment during the period 1926–1929, with particular emphasis on its new chemical weapons initiatives in partnership with other departments and branches of the military; the United States' continued support for international efforts to prevent chemical warfare; and the CWS's reorganization into the U.S. Army Chemical Corps after World War II.
Two Strong Voices: The Making of Women Leaders in Afghanistan
Authors: Kitch Sally L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter details the path to leadership for the conference women in general, and for Marzia Basel and Jamila Afghani in particular. It is in the area of leadership development that Marzia's and Jamila's life stories emerged as evocative but diverse case studies. Both had spent their lives from early ages on working to effect changes in Afghan women's opportunities and to enhance women's understanding of their rights within Islam and Afghan traditions. Given their advantages and backgrounds, both could have had easier lives, but neither ever considered such a choice. Rather, they both volunteered for enormous challenges and sought meaning in attempting to meet them.
Afghan Marriage Practices
Authors: Kitch Sally L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Marzia's and Jamila's marriages since their last interviews. Their changed status was made quite visible in Jamila's case by the presence of her husband and children. The author was curious about why she had gotten the news through the grapevine that both had gotten married in 2006 and why neither had mentioned her marriage in their e-mail exchanges before 2009. What followed was a detailed discussion about the two women's particular perspectives on the way marriage worked in Afghanistan. During that discussion, it was clear that they were focusing on their own variations as urban Afghans and as educated professional women. At the same time, their discussion indicated that they recognized other variations on marriage practices depending on region, economic capacity, age, education, and individual family practices.
Were They Pushed?
Authors: Corsino Louis
Published: May 2017

This chapter paints a picture of the major structural and cultural disadvantages the Italians in Chicago Heights faced in their struggle. In essence, it attempts to show how these forms of discrimination boxed most Italians into a spatial and social isolation in Chicago Heights. However, they also had the unintended consequences of transforming the prosaic features of the Italian culture and social structure into a rich supply of social capital. Specifically, they enhanced the possibilities that Italians would turn to their paesani next door, their cugini on the next street over, their amici at the corner bar as resources for organizing a union, establishing ethnic businesses, recruiting members to mutual-aid societies, and for running a criminal organization. Structural and cultural disadvantages, on the one hand, and consequential social capital resources, on the other, are joined in an attempt to provide a more encompassing and integrated understanding as to how Italians may have been pushed, but also were able to leap into organized crime.
Conclusion
Authors: Corsino Louis
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter presents a more general discussion of the interrelationships between ethnicity, organized crime, and social capital, especially as it may apply to the contemporary context in Chicago Heights. This study connected the decades-long ‘success’ of the organized crime operation in Chicago Heights to the persistent balancing act between the resources of closure, violence, and brokerage. Too much or too little of one or another would be potentially damaging to this long-term success. Closure brings value to the organization because it promotes a familiarity and assumed level of trust between individuals. However, when there are strong ties binding groups together, certainty and predictability triumph over variability and innovation. Individuals are unaware of or reluctant to think through or even see new opportunities because the social networks place a premium on routine beliefs and behaviors. An antidote to the excesses of closure is violence. New ideas and new approaches were pushed forward by force and the elimination of opposition. Today, although Italian organized crime presence in Chicago Heights has significantly diminished, organized crime in Chicago Heights persists. African Americans and Latinos have largely taken over the vice operations.
Excerpts from “An Experimental Investigation of Timbre—the Violin”
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

James Tenney presents excerpts from his 1966 essay “An Experimental Investigation of Timbre—the Violin.” The research was carried out at the School of Music and the Computation Center at Yale University. Tenney first provides a description of the experiment as well as the equipment and computer programs he used in his investigation. In particular, he discusses the basic approach to sound analysis and synthesis that employs a digital computer with peripheral equipment for translating a signal from “analog” to digital form (for analysis) and from digital to analog form (for synthesis). The analysis programs used in this study comprise a “pitch-synchronous” system, while the sound-generating program used to synthesize violin tones is Max V. Mathews's “Music IV Compiler.” Tenney then explains the experimental results and concludes with a proposal for further research and a request for continued support by the National Science Foundation, laying special emphasis on spectral parameters and envelope and modulation parameters.
The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggregates
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

James Tenney discusses the structure of harmonic series aggregates and provides a detailed explanation of the genesis of his HD function. He describes, through first principles (perception, simple mathematics), what happens when “two or more compound tones are sounded simultaneously.” Using simple properties of relatively prime (reduced) ratios, the harmonic series, and least common multiples and greatest common divisors, Tenney approaches harmony in the way he had suggested some thirty years earlier: “to start if possible at the very beginning, to clear the mind of loose ends whose origins are forgotten; loose ends and means become habits.” After exploring harmonic intersection and disjunction, Tenney concludes with an analysis of harmonic distance and pitch distance.
Reflections after Bridge
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

James Tenney focuses on the “reconciliation” of two musical worlds: formal and aesthetic ideas inspired by John Cage, and harmonic possibilities suggested by Harry Partch. Using the computer as a compositional partner, Tenney examines notions of intentionality (the Cagean part) and the formative gestalt ideas of Meta + Hodos. He correlates new developments in harmony with the design of new tuning systems and considers one of the new directions taken by some composers after 1910 involving the expansion of the pitch resources beyond a tuning system tempered by twelve-tone music. He argues that such expansions did not—and could not—solve the problem that had arisen with the “exhaustion” of tonality. According to Tenney, the real problem with the 12-set is not the relatively small number of pitches it makes available, but the fact that a very large tolerance range has to be assumed even for it to be regarded as a “fair approximation” of the basic intervals of the 5-limit—and even greater ranges are involved with those of the 7- and 11-limits.
Darmstadt Lecture
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

In his “Darmstadt Lecture,” one of the few published examples of his public lectures, James Tenney talks about problems of harmony, which he breaks down into a number of other, smaller problems, namely: the historical problem, the problem of the role of theory in general in musical activity, the phenomenological problem, the psychoacoustic problem, the semantic problem, and the compositional problem. Tenney goes on to discuss each of these problems in detail before describing his conception of music in general as activity in harmonic space. His lecture concludes with Tenney responding to audience questions on a variety of topics, such as the relationship between theorists or theory and composition; Tenney's Platonic concept of the semanticity of nonjust intervals on the piano; the function of musical materials in relation to form; the relationship between harmony and form; the necessity for pitches in order for the harmonic dimension to arise; consonance/dissonance; and degrees of transposed intervals.
Fashioning the Nation
Authors: Shome Raka
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the relationships among fashion, white femininity, multiculturalism, and the nation. More specifically, it asks how a “fashionable” white female body comes to signify a nation's modernity given the link between fashion and newness, and how shifts in dominant fashion styles signify shifts in a nation's temporality. Focusing on Princess Diana's changing fashion style, the chapter considers the relationship between fashion and cultural politics as well as fashion as a citizenly discourse in New Britain. It also situates the engagement of Diana's body (as well as the body of other white national women such as Cherie Blair) with Asian and particularly Indian fashion, paying attention to the emerging phenomenon of celebrity black (Western) women and Indo-fascination. By analyzing the link between contemporary multiculturalism and fashion, the chapter shows how (white) female fashion functions as a site through which shifting spatiotemporalities of the nation are narrated while raising several interrelated issues regarding national modernity and gendered appearance.
From Geopolitics to Social and Political Struggle
Authors: Schiller Dan
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines some of the larger forces that propelled digital capitalism into what was evidently a fraught future. It first considers how the historical movement of the political economy is shaped both within and beyond a top-down, state-oriented geopolitics before discussing how the onset of the digital depression brought changes to the interstate system, indicative of altering political–economic relations. It then describes attempts by numerous states to multilateralize control of U.S.-centric internet in relation to structural changes in the interstate system and to competing efforts to regenerate the political economy in ways that might capture an outsized share of overall profits for specific units of capital and particular fractions of the capitalist class. It also explains the concept of accumulation by dispossession and concludes with suggestions for resolving the digital depression on terms favorable to capital.
Excess, Spectacle, Sensation
Authors: Pravadelli Veronica
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines 1950s cinema in terms of family melodrama. It interprets the genre in light of the convergence between the decade's new spectacular visual style and the image of the suburban family, which is the dominant lifestyle of 1950s America. By discussing in particular the discourse on masculinity, it argues that melodrama's visual style and narrative contradictions endorse the belief that sexuality is an essential component of human nature. Meanwhile, family melodrama is not a critique of the suburban ideology, as critics have often argued. Rather, it expresses the “difficulty of gender.” The genre's tendency to focus on a community rather on an individual or a couple is instrumental to the representation of competing models of identity, for men and women alike.
Cannibal Love
Authors: Githire Njeri
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the juxtaposition of cannibalism and sexual appetites in Maryse Condé's Histoire de la femme cannibale (hereinafter referred to as Story, reflecting the 2007 English translation) and Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004). It argues that while the ideologically fraught figure of the cannibal has long offered a fertile ground on which to construct a counter-hegemonic aesthetic of Caribbean discourses, few if any writers explore the equation between two major constructs—the sexual and alimentary transgressions—that define the cannibal. Story and Small Island evidence that (post)imperial panics have consistently framed a range of (post)colonial conflicts in the vocabulary of alimentary and sexual deviance as a ploy to mask these very same appetites in the (neo)imperial venture. In Small Island, cannibalism is a hidden theme that lurks beneath the surface of seemingly mundane and insignificant moments of encounter. In Story, Condé deconstructs the presumed benevolence of France toward Guadeloupe through an astute critique of the dominant imagery of France as mother who nurtures and sustains her children.
Edible Écriture
Authors: Githire Njeri
Published: May 2017

This chapter links the themes of cannibals, pirates, and colonial conquest of islands to the consumption of literary texts as a commodity embedded within paradigms of domination and control. It specifically explores Comme un vol de papang' by Monique Agénor and La montagne des signaux by Marie-Thérèse Humbert, and relates these texts to questions of island specificity as base for discussion. The reading of Agénor's Comme un vol de papang' underscores the movement and dispersal of peoples within the Indian Ocean, and more precisely on the formation of the Afro-Malagasy diaspora in the Reunion Island. The reading of Humbert's La montagne des signaux explores the representation of the tourist as a power-hungry conqueror whose appetite for spectacle and illusion can only be sated by appropriation and more appropriation. Through an exploration of women writers, the chapter also highlights the gendering of the desert-island story as a male-centered text.
Muddying the Waters
Authors: Nagar Richa
Published: May 2017

This book uses stories, encounters, and anecdotes as well as methodological reflections, to grapple with the complexity of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while involved in politically engaged scholarship. Experiences that range from the streets of Dar es Salaaam to farms and development offices in North India inform the discussion of the labor and politics of co-authorship, translation, and genre blending in research and writing that cross multiple—and often difficult—borders. The book links the implicit assumptions, issues, and questions involved with scholarship and political action, and explores the epistemological risks and possibilities of creative research that bring these into intimate dialogue. It reveals a politically engaged researcher and writer working to become “radically vulnerable,” and the ways in which such radical vulnerability can allow a re-imagining of collaboration that opens up new avenues to collective dreaming and laboring across sociopolitical, geographical, linguistic, and institutional borders.
Bhojpuri Diasporic Music and the Encounter with India
Authors: Manuel Peter
Published: May 2017

This chapter is devoted to the more general topic of the Indo-Caribbean Bhojpuri legacy's confrontation with music flowing from North India itself in the postindenture period, in the form of mass-mediated film music and other pop, including panregional Hindi devotional songs. Of particular relevance is the influence of these imported sounds on wedding songs, Kabir-panthi music, and Ramayan singing. It argues that most Indo-Caribbeans do not regard imported Indian music as a stultifying hegemon; they see it, rather, as an inexhaustible potential resource that can provide a cultural depth and continuity unavailable to Afro-creoles, alienated as they are from the traditions of their African forebears.
Reconstruction’s Revival
Authors: Hughes Brandi
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how missionary work that began as evangelical outreach developed into a system of shared grievances when African Americans began to see the meaningful parallels and symmetries between their own limited political influence in the Reconstruction South and African communities affected by colonialism. Drawing on the minutes of the annual meeting and publication records of the Mission Herald, the National Baptist Convention's monthly newsletter, the chapter traces African American engagement with Africa in the late nineteenth century through the transformation of a historically decentralized religious denomination into a collective space for civic mobilization, shaped by diasporic identification and linked social circumstances.
African American Representatives in the United Nations
Authors: Morris Lorenzo
Published: May 2017

This chapter seeks to identify the assumptions and expectations that have historically surrounded African Americans in the United Nations, and determine whether they significantly affect or have affected African Americans in senior positions in the United Nations in the execution, interpretation, or evaluation of their responsibilities. The chapter focuses on the role of the ambassador, but it begins with Ralph Bunche, whose role as a “first” and whose breadth of responsibilities in the U.N.'s foundation helped define the parameters in which race is likely to pass between insignificance and prominence. Building on continuing issues exposed by Bunche's experience, the experiences of the three African American U.S. ambassadors to the U.N.—Andrew Young, Donald McHenry, and Susan Rice—can each be examined on the basis of similar issues.
The Art of a Romantic Trickster
Authors: Bertellini Giorgio
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides an overview of the political background that has shaped Emir Kusturica's films. Generationally and critically, Kusturica is the most renowned filmmaker associated both with the old Cold War's divide and its post-1989 aftermath. His work emerged out of a context that proved to be resiliently unlike any other within the Eastern European bloc. As one of few directors capable of thriving before and after 1989 (and between East and West), Kusturica appears to have adjusted his poetic pitch multiple times, just as critics on both sides of the Iron Curtain have felt compelled to reassess their judgment about his work. In reality, the chapter argues that his productions and activities have revolved around a poetic core that, in a dialogue with pressing historical occurrences, has undergone an expansion in terms of public political engagement and intermedial reach without altering itself.
Slavery and the Politics of Erasure
Authors: Godreau Isar P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at benevolent renderings of the institution of slavery, and silences that have contributed to its interpretation as inconsequential for the construction of national identity in Puerto Rico. Such interpretations support national “scripts” that construe blackness as an exceptional, geographically contained, and fading element of the Puerto Rican nation. Indeed, a politics of erasure in historiography was common in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when scholars interpreted slavery as a benevolent and unimportant institution in Puerto Rico that facilitated racial integration, race mixture, and blanqueamiento at both the biological and cultural levels. This interpretation of slavery was and continues to be deployed to differentiate Puerto Rico from the United States. In contrast to Puerto Rico's so-called soft brand of slavery, upholders of this politics interpret U.S. slavery as a harsher system that created impermeable racial barriers and institutionalized racial segregation.