bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Grasse Jonathon
Published: January 2023

Chapter one introduces the state of Minas Gerais as a unique cultural territory in Brazil and describes the chosen musical genres and how the book prioritizes traditionality over contemporary, global popular genres regarding regional musical identity. Discussions include indigenous populations, the gold rush and colonialism, the environment, and viewpoints shared by nativist-regionalist school of thought known as mineiridade. In addition to history and basic facts about the region, the introduction also conveys theoretical premises regarding regional identity such as “deep regionalism,” “embodiment,” and “traditionality.” This chapter summarizes theories on identity of place as expressed by twenty-first century ethnomusicologists. The book's approaches to race and racial identity are explained, as are the terms mixed-race and Afro-mineiro (black culture in Minas Gerais), with citations of scholars on race helping to frame the discussion. Part of this topic is the problematized notion of “African-derived.” The introduction ends with a chapter summary.
Sacred and Fine Art Music of the Colonial and Imperial Periods
Authors: Grasse Jonathon
Published: January 2023

This chapter foregrounds the development of the Minas School of Composers, a highly regarded group of mostly mixed-race church musicians born in Minas Gerais during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including José Joaquim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita. Also examined are traditions of choromeleiros, civic and military bands, fazenda bands, and private salons in the performances of “fine art” music. The essential work by musicologist Francisco Curt Lange is summarized, as are roles of archives and museums. In considering race, the chapter examines colonial music's role in accommodating and showcasing non-white professionals. The chapter is interlaced with first person passages entailing an interview with choral director Arnon Sávio Reis de Oliveira, and that connect the narrative to contemporary approaches to performing and publishing this repertoire. How this tradition still impacts current regional identity is a chapter thread.
“Today i had an Eye Appointment, and i’m Still Blind”
Authors: Milbrodt Teresa
Published: January 2023

This chapter investigates the potential of comic storytelling to shift social opinions around disability, and for disabled people to reclaim their narratives. The section analyzes interviews with seven people with disabilities regarding comic stories they like to tell and uses Bamberg’s idea of “narrative positioning” to suggest how people with disabilities are allowed or disallowed from being able to “fit” in the world. These storytellers employ narrative to help ease tensions around able-bodied people, “educate” able-bodied individuals about how to act around people with disabilities, serve as a social corrective regarding dominant cultural notions of disability, and deconstruct the dichotomy between disability and able-bodiedness. Key to the interpretation of these stories is the fact they are told by a disabled person, since different audiences may “read” the stories and their humor in a variety of ways.
Comically Cripping Sex in the Virtual Public
Authors: Milbrodt Teresa
Published: January 2023

Online environments have played an important role in the growth of disability communities and the formation of political disability identities. This chapter analyzes the writings of four bloggers, all of whom reflect on their disability identity and sexuality while incorporating humor into their writing. These individuals have created online spaces where they share their stories, express a positive disability identity, and explain the joys and frustrations of their everyday lives. These individuals also respond to dominant cultural notions of desexualized disabled people, constructing sexual identities through photographs they post of themselves. Presenting these images creates a tension, recalling how able-bodied audiences stared at disabled bodies in freak shows of the past and leaving us to ask how the bodies of these bloggers will be interpreted by viewers/readers. At the same time, these bloggers serve an important function as a touchstone for others who may not have physical access to disability communities.
“My Other Ride is my Vibrator”
Authors: Milbrodt Teresa
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses dominant cultural joking practices around sexuality and disability, which usually do harm to people with disabilities. The section begins with an analysis of sex jokes found online about disabled people, humor that generally reinforces stereotypes around disability. These jokes are contrasted to sex jokes told by male and female comedians with disabilities. Their routines have a wide range of possible audience interpretations and may break down or reinscribe disability and gender-related stereotypes. Sex jokes that involve disability are highly ambivalent, even when told by a disabled person. These jokes may reinforce heteronormativity and reveal how disabled women and men are regarded differently when it comes to their sexuality, yet they also have the potential to reshape definitions of disability and what it means to be sexy.
Epilogue
Authors: Milbrodt Teresa
Published: January 2023

This section reflects on the book's primary themes of the fluid nature of disability, humor, and sexuality, and how interpretations of all three subjects are audience and context-dependent. The chapter discusses how it may be difficult to accept one’s interdependence with others when living in a culture that predominantly values autonomy. This bias is another reason why it’s crucial for those in disability communities to celebrate the variability and adaptability of bodies, and encourage disabled individuals to show their bodies in public to cultivate wider acceptance of disability. It is likewise important to consider how disability has a wide range of social and political meanings internationally, as suggested in Eunjung Kim's contention that it is a matter of privilege to have a proud disability identity. That complexity must not be ignored in the broader field of Disability Studies and the disability rights movement.
Rev. A. W. Nix Historical Background
Authors: Brinegar Terri M.
Published: January 2023

Chapter One reveals Reverend A. W. Nix’s life history and career. This chapter also presents new archival information that clarifies misleading information written by other authors about Andrew and his brother William Nix, Jr., and their contributions to and influences on the “Father of Gospel Music,” Thomas A. Dorsey. An in-depth study of the voices and sermon in the film, Hallelujah, is discussed. The chapter includes a complete discography of Reverend A. W. Nix.
The Sermons
Authors: Brinegar Terri M.
Published: January 2023

Chapter Three addresses Nix’s recorded sermons and includes the textual transcription of ten specific sermons. The textual themes associated with each sermon, common titles of any spirituals or hymns that are included, and the textual forms are discussed. The main themes in the sermons are linked to both traditional topics and to current social issues pertinent in 1920s Chicago. The themes are also analyzed as related to themes of racial uplift and modernity.
Vocal and Musical Analysis
Authors: Brinegar Terri M.
Published: January 2023

Chapter Four analyzes the specific repertoire and vocal styles sung by Nix and his congregants on his recordings and their basis in older religious material as heard in the early Black church. The analysis of the sermon texts clearly demonstrates Nix’s affiliation with racial uplift themes. Vocal and musical analysis of the sermons demonstrates Nix’s unique vocal characteristics and how they compare with traditional sounds of the folk spirituals and other early vocal practices and serve as markers of traditional African-American vocal aesthetics.
Said Hermione Earnestly
Authors: Strand Emily
Published: January 2023

This chapter discovers complexity in Harry Potter’s prose, leading an interrogation of how “good” the novels are. Using the tools of aesthetic analysis, the chapter approaches the texts from the chapter author’s perspectives as novel writer, scholar, and parent. What do we do with Rowling’s overuse of adverbs, the way she apparently flouts the rules of good writing as taught in creative writing classes? This chapter’s disarming answer involves rabbits and dandelions.
Magical Medicine
Authors: Reeher Jennifer M.
Published: January 2023

This chapter approaches the novels through the discipline of medical humanities, comparing health care in Potter world and in our world of Muggles. The chapter also pays attention to spells and demonstrates how Harry consistently trusts Madame Pomfrey, a trained expert, to perform the Healing Spells—in effect, to say the words correctly.
Reading Harry with the Risk of Trust and a Hopeful Search for Meaning
Authors: McCauley Patrick
Published: January 2023

This chapter is an interrogation of the nature of the book’s literary critical work, written by Patrick McCauley, the founder (along with colleague Karen Wendling) of the first and longest-running recurring academic conference on Harry Potter in the United States. McCauley has been teaching the novels in an interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar for years and contemplating how they move students beyond the standard questions of literary criticism. Standing on a hermeneutical foundation and responding to the interests of his students, McCauley urges more consistent engagement with the novels’ meaning. He asks how such attention could shift the direction of literary studies, focused as the field has been on critique.
“Loony, Loopy Lupin”
Authors: Rose Jonathan A.
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on the space where character study meets queer theory, conducting a comparison of the werewolf characters Remus Lupin and Fenrir Greyback. Beginning with several critics who understand the werewolf as symbolically queer, it is argued that their queerness comes from being “inherently uncategorizable.” While “werewolf” may stand as a metaphor for homosexuality, this premise is pushed further toward insights about marginality and nonnormativity more generally.
“All Was Well”?
Authors: Lopes Juliana Valadão
Published: January 2023

This chapter’s comparative study of nonhuman characters—centaurs, goblins and house-elves—and the collective stance their communities take in response to wizarding domination forms a strong argument for a more attentive analysis of our anthropocentricism. The chapter’s Marxist approach calls attention to the place of subalterns in dominant political structures.
The Face of Evil
Authors: Camacci Lauren R.
Published: January 2023

Chapter thirteen conducts a study of the vestiges of the debunked science of physiognomy in the Potterverse. The effort to recognize the “bad guys” by how they look has deep cultural roots in a Western obsession with appearance, and the chapter demonstrates how this oversimplistic form of representation dances dangerously with eugenics and leads to the dehumanization of the novels’ characters.
Harry Potter and the Management of Trauma
Authors: Henderson Tolonda
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on Harry and his experience of trauma. The chapter’s meticulous reading opens new avenues for understanding the central character, particularly with Harry in the penultimate chapter of Deathly Hallows. Here, Harry finds himself in a liminal space working hard to construct his own trauma narrative and to overcome the barriers that would prevent his defeating Voldemort.
The Baby Picnic
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

A legend concerning the folklore of families. Jokers exchange babies at a picnic and the families do not realize the prank until they have made the long trip home. The legend's possible roots in fairy traditions are established as are the legend's possible origins in Scotland.
Beetle Eyes
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

A legend concerning the folklore of crime. Beetles are attached to a child's eyes to create a blind beggar. A blindfolded child is usually rescued screaming in the street by a well-meaning member of the public.
Child Pie
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

A legend concerning the folklore of crime and children with hints of cannibalism. A pie is brought to a baker to be baked: it is later found to contain a baby.
The Chimney Boy
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of children and crime. A child from a wealthy family is kidnapped and later returns to the family while cleaning their chimney.
Chloroformed!
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of crime and medicine. Chloroform, a newly-discovered drug, is used to knock someone out so that they can be robbed – but the details of how the person was rendered unconscious are quite impossible.
Devil Take Me!
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns supernatural folklore. Someone uses the phrase “may the Devil take me” and the wish comes true; often associated with dances and dancing.
Downie’s Slaughter
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This traditional legend associated with Aberdeen University (Scotland) concerns the folklore of death. A man is convinced that he is going to be decapitated and then dies when a wet towel is flicked across his neck by jesting students.
Drugged on a Train
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of crime and a new technology (railways). Travelers on trains were drugged by fellow passengers who stole their possessions or committed ‘outrages’ (rape).
Egg Ring
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of chance and coincidence. A valuable object is found in an egg: sometimes this object has been lost by the chicken's owner, e.g. a wedding ring.
Fish Ring
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of chance and coincidence. A ring is lost in the water and then is found in a fish: often the finder is the individual who has lost the ring.
Ghostly Donation
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend, told with humour, concerns the folklore of ghosts and the supernatural. A clergyman scares a ghost away by asking for a donation for the church.
Hands in the Muff
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of love, sex, and courting. A young woman tricks two young men into holding each other's hand on a winter evening, in her capacious muff. The double entendre is obvious.
Human Sausages
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of crime and cannibalism. A man is murdered and his flesh sold as meat to unknowing consumers. The story is particularly associated with London and other urban centres.
Message in a Hat
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of love and coincidence and is told with humour. A woman meets her future husband by placing a secret message in something she has made and that will be sold. On buying it, he contacts her. The story was particularly associated with the US.
The Mistletoe Bride
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of love and death. A bride, during a wedding game of hide and seek, closes herself in a self-locking chest. She is not found. The chest is only opened a generation later, when her skeleton is discovered.
A Modern Jonah!
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of death and the sea. A man is swallowed by a whale and survives.
The Nail in the Skull
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of death, crime, and justice. A nail is discovered in a skull and this leads an investigator to a murderer: usually a woman who hammered a nail into her drunk husband's head.
Paying for His Burial
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of crime and death and is told with humour. A philanthropist gives a poor woman money, after being shown her husband in a coffin; on forgetting something the philanthropist returns to the house and finds the ‘corpse’ sitting up and counting the money.
Prayers and the Thief
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of crime and religion. A burglar enters a woman's bedroom and is reformed after praying together with her.
She’s My Daughter?
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of family, incest and sex. Children, separated from family members early in life, accidentally marry parents or siblings in adulthood.
Tunnel Kissing
Authors: Young Simon
Published: January 2023

This legend concerns the folklore of a new technology (railways), love, and sex. A young man on a train takes advantage of the dark in a tunnel to kiss a young woman in the same carriage. There are many variants with different outcomes.
Introduction
Authors: Shaw John M.
Published: January 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Black fife and drum music. Black fife and drum music, as found in the Mississippi Hill Country today, is a predominantly rural form of instrumental music, usually played at picnics. Most fife and drum bands consist of at least three musicians, although bands can be larger, or occasionally smaller, such as one fifer and one drummer. One of the difficulties with all of the existing research about Black fife and drum bands is a lack of discussion of its past, or of its context. The chapter explains that the book demonstrates how African Americans, newly emancipated from slavery at the dawn of Reconstruction, chose Black fife and drum music as a representation of a developing self-image as Black Americans.
Unfinished Business
Authors: Ashford Evan Howard
Published: January 2023

The chapter examines the continued struggle for sociopolitical control within a settling Jim Crow society and serves as a continuation of the previous chapter to discuss how liberation and redemption played out through the onset of World War I. The chapter examines continued inequity in educational spending, educational setbacks for Central Mississippi College and Kosciusko Industrial College, the alleged boycott of Black domestics, the lynching of Leander Harmon, and the rise of the Black rural bourgeois that would come to represent the county's middle class for the next fifty years anchored by individuals such as Volina Cooper, Sarah Phillips, and Lee Boston Turner.
Contagious Imagination
Authors: Aldama Frederick Luis , Willmott Glenn
Published: January 2023

Lynda Barry (b. 1956) is best known for her distinctive style and unique voice, first popularized in her underground weekly comic Ernie Pook's Comeek. Since then, she has published prolifically, including numerous comics, illustrated novels, and nonfiction books exploring the creative process. Barry's work is genre- and form-bending, often using collage to create what she calls “word with drawing” vignettes. Her art, imaginative and self-reflective, allows her to discuss gender, race, relationships, memory, and her personal, everyday lived experience. It is through this experience that Barry examines the creative process and offers to readers ways to record and examine their own lives. The chapters in this book, study the pedagogy of Barry's work and its application academically and practically. Examining Barry's career and work from the point of view of research-creation, the book applies Barry's unique mixture of teaching, art, learning, and creativity to the very form of the volume, exploring Barry's imaginative praxis and offering readers their own. The book explores the impact of Barry's work in and out of the classroom. Divided into four sections—Teaching and Learning, which focuses on critical pedagogy; Comics and Autobiography, which targets various practices of rememorying; Cruddy, a self-explanatory category that offers two extraordinary critical interventions into Barry criticism around a challenging text; and Research-Creation, which offers two creative, synthetic artistic pieces that embody and enact Barry's own mixed academic and creative investments—the book offers numerous inroads into Barry's idiosyncratic imagination and what it can teach us about ourselves.
Lynda Barry’s Syllabus , Neuroscience, and “the Thing We Call Creativity”
Authors: Pines Davida
Published: January 2023

This chapter explains how Lynda Barry's Syllabus does not have a right way to read it because it encourages readers to notice, linger, and reflect on the pages. Barry shares the creative process and pedagogy in Syllabus to help readers achieve a certain state of mind that results in writing and image making. The chapter also looks into the relationship between the brain and creativity. It considers how Keith Sawyer's research on the neuroscience of creativity provides direct and indirect support to Barry's approaches to teaching writing and drawing. Additionally, Barry aims to help her students avoid evaluative mechanisms through the use of time limits. The chapter recognizes that self-evaluation impedes creativity as it promotes perfectionism, self-doubt, shame, and fear. It elaborates on Barry's creativity strategies being imposed in a college composition classroom.
In the Orbit of the Cephalopod: What It Is and Artistic Education
Authors: Pero Allan
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the attempt of Lynda Barry's What It Is to confront the issue of artistic education and writing. It explains Barry's pedagogy wherein memory and thought must be distinguished from each other. In its pedagogy, What It Is uses somatic repetition and metonymic movements to produce the necessary space of safety and concentration. The chapter clarifies that the act of writing is grounded in repetition, which is a kind of learning that is not governed by linearity. According to Barry, the evolution of experience is grounded in two primary paradoxes of memory and the demand of the work in a state of play.
Confusions So Horror-Bright: Class and Gender in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy
Authors: Luria Rachel
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the notion of class and gender within Lynda Barry's Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel. The world of Cruddy reflects the world of modern capitalism, which is divided between proletarians and the bourgeoisie. The chapter expounds on the literary and graphic expressions of the fictional world that literalize the alienating, dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Additionally, Cruddy offers a glance into middle-class capitalism that suggests the possibility of simultaneously living in comfort and serving people in need. The chapter notes the story would offer a glimmer of hope when viewed from a Marxist perspective. It mentions how class and gender did not necessarily protect the narrative's protagonists.
Me and Lynda Barry: An Autoethnographic and Artistic Response
Authors: Villacorta Elaine Claire
Published: January 2023

This chapter covers the influence of Lynda Barry on Elaine Claire Villacorta and her works. It notes the experience of Villacorta attending the Writing the Unthinkable workshop and reading What It Is. Villacorta acknowledges the flamboyant and accessible nature of Barry's paneling and art style. The chapter also looks into Barry's retelling of childhood stories featuring self-discovery, reacquaintance with history, and Filipina identification with Western upbringing. The chapter features a series of Barry's works, such as Bark and The Good Times Are Killing Me, which inspired Villacorta. Villacorta insists Barry is more than her Filipina heritage.
Intertextually Weaving a Home-Place
Authors: Jenkins Tammie
Published: January 2023

This chapter utilizes Danticat’s Breath, Eye, Memory and Untwine to investigate how she blends Haitian culture, social narratives, and family traditions with Black diasporic discourses. Employing Stake’s (1995) explanation of a case study “as the study of the particularity and complexity of a single case, coming to understand its activity within important circumstances” (p. xi), the author examines Breath, Eyes, Memory and Untwine as two case studies illustrating her ability to highlight the relationship between historicity, collective memory, and identity by retelling stories from the past using a present day lens. By viewing Breath, Eyes, Memory and Untwine as storied texts the author analyzes Danticat’s language use, word choices, accepted meanings, and reappropriated meanings through the characters of Grandma Ife, Martine, Gisele, and Isabelle. The chapter uses these characters as Danticat’s literary interpretation of Black people’s desire to learn their history, share memories, and construct a self-defined identity.
“The Listening Gets too Loud”
Authors: Dawkins Laura
Published: January 2023

The title of Danticat’s memoir, Brother, I’m Dyingsignificantly registers the first-person voice of Danticat’s Uncle Joseph. Danticat pieces stories together from the fragments available in the messages he transmits her. Throughout her memoir of her father and uncle, Danticat highlights the importance of the communal voice, defining her own role as that of a mouthpiece or messenger: “I am writing this only because they can’t” (26). Although communal storytelling is a familiar trope in all of Danticat’s works, what makes Brother, I’m Dyingdistinctive is the author’s self-conscious attentiveness to her process of composition—the means by which her uncle’s stories and her father’s words are transformed into a compelling, emotionally powerful portrayal of political injustice and enduring familial bonds.
Reading Edwidge Danticat’s Essays in Light of Her Fiction
Authors: Stecher Thomás
Published: January 2023

This chapter situates Edwidge Danticat’s essay writing within the broader frame of her literary work in order to discuss how she publicly reflects on her position as a diasporic writer, and the ethical and aesthetic proposals that such a stance entails. By focusing on Create Dangerously (2010) and The Art of Death(2017), the authors discuss the implications of writing about Haiti from the diaspora, such as the ethical dilemmas of representing Haitians and the aesthetic proposals of integrating oral forms of expression into written prose. The analysis highlights how Danticat’s essays revisit certain topics and discursive strategies that appear throughout her fiction, revealing consistencies and transformations that provide insight into her larger literary project.
“Quietly, Quietly”
Authors: Lozano Jennifer M.
Published: January 2023

This chapter overviews the Global South as a critical concept, and how Edwidge Danticat’s non-fiction writing and self-described “witnessing" engages with this concept in a way that can inform a critical pedagogy for the literature classroom. Danticat's approach to intertextual writing, reading, and witnessing—or what the author calls her “intertextual Global South thinking”—can provide a model for scholar-teachers to better understand the Global South as an epistemological and pedagogical project, and facilitate this project for students in the US. The focus is specifically on Danticat’s essay "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work” (2010) because of its multiple voices and stories that exemplify Danticat’s attention to listening and intimacy as much as to speaking and authority. The author refers to her larger body of work that includes a rich and regular publishing history in widely circulated periodicals and echoes her role as a Global South witness for marginalized voices and experiences.
More Than a Phrase
Authors: Gras Delphine
Published: January 2023

In Claire of the Sea Light(2013), Edwidge Danticat offers readers a novel anchored in Haitian history and culture. This return to the past is all the more pressing in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. The novel encourages readers to grapple with the ways Haiti’s past as a former French colony has far-reaching effects on its contemporary ecological and sociopolitical landscapes. Claire of the Sea Lightshows Haiti is not inherently home to disasters. More precisely, this essay explores how Danticat, an author who sees herself as one of the “storytellers of the world” (Create Dangerously 6), deploys her art to combat the mediatic vilification of Haiti and its inhabitants.
The Language of Food
Authors: Jones Michael Owen
Published: January 2023

The book begins with a chapter on the language of food. People communicate through what they eat, how they prepare and consume food, and with whom they partake of it. Their speech is sprinkled with food metaphors: carrot top, a hunk, a peach, a nut. Proverbs give us counsel, whether “too many cooks spoil the broth” or “cast your bread upon the waters and it will return to you a thousand fold.” Often food defines events, such as hotdogs at ball games, popcorn at the movies, and picnics on the beach. Particular fare may be invested with feelings, and it can console, reward, or be used to punish. The symbolic discourse involving foodstuffs is complex; there are multiple meanings, ambiguities, and conflicting messages and interpretations, along with the influence of circumstances and the impact of habits, customs, and identities.
Pork Bans Real and Rumored
Authors: Jones Michael Owen
Published: January 2023

The sixth chapter investigates efforts by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, as well as several institutions abroad, to ban pork products from the menu. Although swine are the most widely eaten animals in the world, several religions proscribe their consumption. The Bureau's prohibition of pork, which was based on faulty data and methods, was met with incredulity and sarcasm on one hand, and on the other, it was lauded as a means of adding to the punishment of prisoners. Moreover, pork sanctions in the U.S. and Western Europe engendered bigotry, Islamophobia, and a rise in culinary nationalism exploited by politicians claiming that various pork items define national character and symbolize their country's uniqueness. For many individuals, institutional restrictions represent an attack on their personal food habits, freedom to choose what to eat when they wish, and who they are.
Queer Youth and Gender
Authors: Miller Jennifer
Published: January 2023

Chapter Five considers LGBTQ+ children's picture books that challenge the binary sex-gender-system by representing transgender, nonbinary, gender-creative, and gender-free youth. The chapter introduces recent sociological studies about transgender children to historicize and contextualize the emergence of LGBTQ+ children's picture books about transgender and nonbinary children within a large-scale shift in the meaning of gender.
Queer Youth and Sexuality
Authors: Miller Jennifer
Published: January 2023

Chapter Six explores texts that gesture towards children's potential homosexuality, often coded through flamboyance or fabulousness. The chapter introduces Susan Sontag's reflections on camp as well as Madison Moore's recent theorizations of fabulousness to analyse explicit and implicit depictions of queerness in picture books. The chapter also explores representations of adult homosexuality that children can identify with as a result of characters being depicted as someone's child or as child-like.
Introduction
Authors: Kelley Robin D. G.
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the sheer volume of music created by Africans held in captivity, fugitives, and their abolitionist allies throughout the Atlantic World. It recovers and documents a fraction of the music created by the enslaved. The chapter also reviews how the hypervisibility of the singing and dancing slave contributed to the erasure of the African's repertoire, reducing the full breadth of music to select tunes—mostly spirituals. It then examines how the author sought to roll back the right-wing ascendance of neoliberalism with music and protest. The chapter seeks to understand the power of song as expressions of pain and joy, memory and morality, fear and faith, hope and humor, love, loss, and longing. It investigates how enslaved Africans forged America's first abolitionist political culture—a culture grounded in the realm of everyday life of work, family, religion, art, and a memory of the African past.
Afterword
Authors: Akuno Kali
Published: January 2023

This chapter emphasizes the historical importance of songs of slavery and emancipation. It argues that they have a direct bearing on today's movements for social and economic transformation. The chapter then explores how they bring inspiration and revolutionary clarity to contemporary struggles. One way the songs do this is by challenging fundamental misconceptions. This chapter also unfolds how Songs of Slavery and Emancipation brings to light this deeper history of unending resistance, which took many forms. The chapter elaborates on why the songs speak to specific issues in history: Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, the Haitian Revolution, Black soldiers in the Union Army. It stresses that these songs provide a popular art form that can help people understand all Americans' history and participate in our contemporary struggles.
Introduction
Authors: Abdul-Ghani Casarae Lavada
Published: January 2023

The introduction begins with a recent history of riots, particularly those spurred by moments of racial tension and resistance. This includes the 2014 unrest that followed the killing of Michael Brown Jr. by a Ferguson police officer, protests following the death of Freddy Gray, the revolt of white nationalism at Charlottesville, and the killing of George Floyd. It is argued that these recent happenings may be understood within a longer history of political acts in response to police brutality and poor economic conditions. Within this history, the introduction lays the foundation for future chapters, which explore the Black Arts Movement (BAM). The introduction concludes by suggesting that critical study of BAM era works engage a deeper understanding of civil unrest, both path and present.
The Crisis of Black Revolutionary Politics in Sonia Sanchez’S The Bronx is Next (and Sister son/ji )
Authors: Abdul-Ghani Casarae Lavada
Published: January 2023

Both The Bronx Is Next and Sister Son/ji are plays by Sonia Sanchez that focus on how acts of rioting oppress Black women and the poor in specific ways. She challenges chauvinistic impulses in Bronx of Black male revolutionaries who incite violence throughout the drama; while Sister Son/ji centers a Black woman’s voice to question the efficacy of Black rage as a productive means of safeguarding Black humanity. Together, both plays challenge riots and revolts as exercises of Black liberation. Sanchez’s investment in representations of rage center the divisive and destructive capacities of Black rebellion that reemphasize the dehumanizing nature systemic racism engenders. Ultimately, Sanchez draws attention to the Black Power Movement’s fractures in both dramatic works that interrogates gender, race, and class and details the contradictory and polarizing views that emerged from Black America trying to achieve liberation.
Black Politics and the Neoliberal Dilemma in Henry Dumas’s “Riot or Revolt?”
Authors: Abdul-Ghani Casarae Lavada
Published: January 2023

Henry Dumas’s short story “Riot or Revolt” depicts a riot that ensues following the deadly shooting of a Black male teenager by a white police officer. The representations of riots and revolts that appear reveals the primary obstacle to racial oppression – neoliberalism, which provides a cover for state-sanctioned violence and surveillance to prevail. The story is chiefly concerned with how Black communities move through the protest to arrive at a resolution. Focusing less on Black rage or critiquing the tenets of Black Nationalism, Dumas aims to dismantle the ideology of neoliberalism that situates racial solutions within the purview of Black American agency. Therefore, this chapter argues that the biggest hurdle is neoliberal politics, the idea that racial uplift is a matter of individual agency rather than structures of white supremacy that have, for centuries, conspired to strip Black Americans of personal agency and financial independence.
Arranging Stories as a Frame for Social Commentary
Authors: Fox Heather A.
Published: January 2023

The introduction establishes the importance of the arrangement of texts within a work. The term “framing” is defined, used in this book to describe a blended analysis informed by surface reading and feminist narratology. The chapters to follow will analyze not only the arrangement of the texts from select Southern women writers, but the historical, social, and theoretical contexts surrounding the writings.
Mapping Spatial Consciousness in Kate Chopin’S Bayou Folk (1894)
Authors: Fox Heather A.
Published: January 2023

This chapter traces the textual history of four stories—“Beyond the Bayou,” “The Return of Alcibiade,” “A Wizard from Gettysburg,” and “Ma’ame Pélagie”—from their initial publications in periodicals to their inclusion in Kate Chopin’s first short story collection, Bayou Folk (1894). These stories portray the aftermath of the Civil War in Louisiana between the 1860s and 1890s. When read together, they demonstrate a progressively deteriorating landscape, strategically revising northern magazine editors’ positioning of the South as sentimental and exotic to magnify the social concerns that continued to envelope a nation recovering from war. It demonstrates how Chopin challenges geographic boundaries through her narrative representations of them to develop a reader’s spatial consciousness about relationships between dominant power structures and regional exceptionalism.
Advocating For Social Justice In Ellen Glasgow’S The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923)
Authors: Fox Heather A.
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines how Ellen Glasgow repurposes sentimental narratives in order to illuminate injustices toward women in The Shadowy Third (1923). Glasgow refused to concede to a patronizing publishing culture, and in the first four stories of the collection— “The Shadowy Third,” “Dare’s Gift,” “The Past,” and “Whispering Leaves”—she situates deceased wives and mothers, ancestral plantations, and African American caretakers as ghostly characters, capable of disrupting tyranny. Each story’s ghost functions as a representation of gender and racial oppression, exposing how romanticized versions of sociocultural narratives maintain and perpetuate this oppression. Glasgow, in the only short story collection published during her lifetime, does not confine critique to the American South but magnifies injustices across topographical boundaries by systematically alternating between northern and southern geographic locations.
Preserving The Hammock In Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’S When the Whippoorwill (1940)
Authors: Fox Heather A.
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the short stories in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s When the Whippoorwill (1940), which fictionalize the rural Florida Cracker community, Cross Creek, in the 1930s. Writing from both the perspective of participant (resident at Cross Creek) and observer (a writer depicting a region’s culture to convey universal meaning), Rawlings envisions herself as an ethnographer, determined to portray a way of life through literary representations that convey its beauty to readers. Her selection and arrangement of four previously published magazine stories progressively positions the female Florida Cracker character’s voice—represented by Drenna in “Crop of Beans,” Florry in “Jacob’s Ladder,” Mattie Syles in “Gal Young ‘Un,” and Quincey Dover in “Cocks Must Crow”—at the center of a community’s interdependence and resiliency. These stories convey Rawlings’s efforts to preserve the Florida hammock and its inhabitants.
Harry and the Other
Authors: Horne Jackie C.
Published: January 2023

More than a decade after the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in Rowling's series, critics are still debating whether or not the Harry Potter books promote antiracist values. To definitively answer this question, this chapter explores “anti-racism” as a word and a concept. It then analyzes Rowling's depiction of the house elves and the goblins, using two different anti-racism frameworks: multicultural anti-racism and social justice anti-racism.
When the Subaltern Speak Parseltongue
Authors: Sims Jennifer Patrice
Published: January 2023

As the heir of Salazar “serpent-tongue” Slytherin, it is appropriate that Lord Voldemort, too, would have an affinity for snakes. When the Harry Potter spin off movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald revealed that his snake, Nagini, was an Asian woman earlier in her life, many fans called the revelation insulting and racist. Others, including Crimes screenwriter J.K. Rowling and Nagini actress Claudia Kim, defended it. Drawing on Orientalism and postcolonial feminism perspectives, this chapter is a media analysis of Claudia Kim as Nagini. It explains what the ensuring controversy over her casting and the public's response to it reveals about the strength of biased perceptions of Asians, and in so doing it demonstrates how Western thought can be so steeped in the illusion of its own superiority that it can lack the capacity to comprehend critiques thereof.
Half-Blood
Authors: Welty Tamai Lily Anne , Spickard Paul
Published: January 2023

The Harry Potter series fits into the classic tropes of how people of mixed backgrounds can embody hybrid degeneracy or hybrid vigor, the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds. J.K. Rowling presents pureblood supremacy in the series with examples challenging the race-based hierarchy and the hypocrisy behind blood purity and miscegenation. The authors examine the use of various half-blood and mudblood characters, and how their bloodlines operate to build tension and recreate the tragic mulatto trope using wizarding categories that symbolize racial ones. This chapter compares that racialized language of blood purity and the way it varies in cultural significance when it appears in young adult literature in English, in a non-English European language, in an indigenous language, and in an Asian language. This comparison provides us with a nuanced understanding of how mixed-race terms take on new meanings when they are borrowed, brought back, and translated.
Hermione Is Black
Authors: Thomas Ebony Elizabeth
Published: January 2023

This chapter showcases the ways that audiences respond to textual erasure and misrepresentation by using social media to create new worlds—and how creatives are in turn starting to think about the implications of race and difference in participatory culture. The author first returns to the beginning of this labyrinth by revisiting her experiences in Harry Potter fandom between 2000 and 2006. After reflecting on her experiences as a prominent participant in Harry Potter fandom in the early 2000s and her subsequent ostracism from the community, the author speculates on the implications of expanding canons and characters in science fiction, fantasy, horror, comics, and graphica across media forms, using Karin Kukkonen's theories about how readers of comics are able to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory, alternate storyworlds in their minds at once—and using it as a stepping stone toward a new way of including all kinds of characters in all kinds of stories.
Technique as Myth
Authors: Pitavy-Souques Danièle
Published: January 2023

This chapter finds previous attempts to understand the structure and mythological approach to the stories of The Golden Apples unsatisfactory and considers instead 1) the form of the narration of the whole beyond the level of dramatic action of the surface narrative, 2) the infractions to the narrative expectations, and 3) an appreciation of an awareness of the “protean figure of Death.” Welty’s deliberate use of Eliot’s mythical method has distracted readers from understanding the author’s subtle experiments with the symbolic framework. “Shower of Gold,” “Moon Lake,” “June Recital,” “Music from Spain,” “Sir Rabbit,” “The Whole World Knows” and “The Wanderers” are analysed to demonstrate that Perseus, Medusa, the mirror shield, and fascination/separation/death are the primary themes and techniques in Welty’s fiction from “A Curtain of Green” to The Optimist’s Daughter.
A Blazing Butterfly
Authors: Pitavy-Souques Danièle
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses Welty’s fascination with vaunting, vanity, masks, and frames—all evident in the central myth of Perseus, Medusa, and the mirror and in Welty’s artist figures—in “A Memory,” “Moon Lake,” “A Still Moment,” “Old Mr. Marblehall,” “Kin,” and The Optimist’s Daughter. Quoting first Baudelaire’s and Delacroix’s definitions of modernity as an awareness of one’s present cultural norms and a concurrent spirit of challenge and then variously citing Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, Heidegger, Freud, Scholes, Genette, and de Man, Pitavy-Souques demonstrates the postmodern techniques of representation, performance, defamiliarization, and the presence of an absence in Welty’s stories. In her fiction, Welty writes of the South even as she and her characters disavow the South with “comprehending love” and “a saving comic spirit.”
Of Human, Animal, and Celestial Bodies in Welty’s “Circe” (2005)
Authors: Pitavy-Souques Danièle
Published: January 2023

This chapter analyzes “Circe,” the core of The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, a collection that explores the “antagonistic forces at work in the relations between men and women.” “Circe” is about femininity and seduction, Circe’s denaturing nature, her attempt to appropriate death, and her submission to abjection (according to Kristeva). With an emphasis on the body, “Circe” reverses Odysseus’s point of view (and thus his power as storyteller in Homer’s epic) to tell a tale of femininity and the “mystery of its resilience, power, and capability to enforce and endorse transformation and change.”
“The Fictional Eye”
Authors: Pitavy-Souques Danièle
Published: January 2023

This chapter begins by exploring Eudora Welty’s view of the South wherein she is a stranger, an outsider, by virtue of her exposure to contemporary arts of all forms in her sojourns in New York City and Europe. In her fiction and photographs, Welty thus “subverts authority—the traditional discourse about the South—and displays the paradoxical independence of the mind of a foreigner.” She writes the South with a “new language” and thereby avoids “preconceptions.” The thesis is demonstrated with Welty’s short story “Livvie” and her photographs, primarily in One Time, One Place, to show Welty’s “dual vision” of Arcadia—the South of slavery and segregation and of the life force of humanity. Concepts developed by Simon Schama, Kristeva, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and Phillipe Sollers support the analysis.
Eudora Welty and the Merlin Principle
Authors: Pitavy-Souques Danièle
Published: January 2023

This chapter explains Yves Vadé’s Merlin principle to analyze desire and feminine sexuality in The Golden Apples, primarily with “A Whole World Knows” and painting and “Sir Rabbit” and sculptures. In “A Whole World Knows” Welty uses older texts—“Lord Randall,” Alice in Wonderland, The Great Gatsby—and paintings by Ernst and Mondrian to write of the fascination with death. Beyond acknowledged parallels with Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan,” the analysis of “Sir Rabbit” shows the significance of the Leda sculptures by Maillol and Brancusi to understand Welty’s experiments regarding narrative techniques to explore sex, death, and creation. The ambiguity between realism and the surrealistic dream world throughout the seven stories suggests reading The Golden Apples as a series of experiments in narration.