bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art
Authors: Cherny Robert W.
Published: September 2017

Victor Arnautoff, an artist, was born in 1896 in the Russian empire. After serving as a cavalry officer in WWI and then in the White Siberian army during the Russian Civil War, he became part of the Russian diaspora, working for a Chinese warlord, studying art in San Francisco, and working with Diego Rivera in Mexico. Returning to San Francisco, his art was acclaimed during the 1930s, especially his public murals, most financed by New-Deal art programs. He joined Stanford University’s art faculty. He and his wife became citizens and secretly joined the Communist party (CP). They threw themselves into work for Russian war relief during WWII and became active in Communist front groups. After WWII, the rise of abstract expressionism marginalized Arnautoff’s social realism, and he found a new cultural home in the California Labor School. Arnautoff’s activities in Communist front groups brought FBI surveillance. He was called before a HUAC sub-committee, and the Stanford administration tried unsuccessfully to terminate him in a case involving standards of academic freedom. After retiring from Stanford and the death of his wife, Arnautoff emigrated to the Soviet Union. There he created several large public murals before his death in 1979.
“Under Rivera’s Guidance,” 1929–1931
Authors: Cherny Robert W.
Published: September 2017

When Arnautoff’’s student visa was expiring, Stackpole arranged an introduction to Diego Rivera, and Victor, Lydia, and their two sons spent 1929-1931 in Mexico. There Arnatuoff assisted Rivera at the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca and the National Palace in Mexico City and encountered both the PCM (Mexican Communist Party) and Rivera’s idiosyncratic version of communism. In 1930, Rivera went to San Francisco to paint murals there, leaving Arnautoff in charge at the National Palace. Ione Robinson’s letters provide information both about life in Mexico City and about Arnautoff. In 1931, the family returned to the US as permanent residents eligible for citizenship.
Art, Politics, and War, 1941–1945
Authors: Cherny Robert W.
Published: September 2017

During World War II, Victor and Lydia threw themselves into organizing and fund-raising for Russian War Relief, organized the Russian American Society, and took active parts in the American Russian Institute, all in support of the Soviet war effort. Becoming more active in the Communist party, they met Soviet consular officials, including at least one KGB agent. The FBI opened a file on Arnautoff. The Arnautoffs applied for permission to emigrate to the Soviet Union but were turned down.
“I Am Home,” 1962–1979
Authors: Cherny Robert W.
Published: September 2017

Arnautoff emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1963 and lived there until his death in 1979. Living first in Mariupol (then called Zhdanov), he again created large public murals, this time using small ceramic tiles. In adjusting to Soviet society under Khrushchev and then Brezhnev, Arnautoff was privileged by his status and his American dollars from his small Stanford pension, and his marriage to a Soviet art critic. He and his second wife moved to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) where he continued to paint until his death.
A Different Kind of War
Authors: Guo Weiting
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, Weiting Guo examines the history of extralegal executions in modern China. From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, China witnessed the largest number of summary executions annually in its history. The extensive use of this extraordinary procedure in conjunction with the regular public executions by political regimes, local officials, and militia had considerable influence on modern Chinese legal culture. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Guo challenges the view that the prevalence of summary execution constituted merely instances of “lawlessness” and “abuses” of punishment. Guo argues by contrast that the approach of judicial economy, the competition between central and local governments, the continued trend of local militarization, and the ideology of popular justice all contributed to the “sanctioned” practice of summary execution. Moreover, Guo asserts that after the late 1830s, the practice of summary execution transformed from merely “expediency” in judicial procedure to extensive “exclusion” of local roughs or subversives that were perceived as evil or worthless.
Public Anger, Violence, and the Legacy of Decolonization in India
Authors: Dutta Nandana
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, Nandana Dutta examines the turn to collective violence, especially lynching, in postcolonial India, tracing it to “the forms of agency that emerged in the peculiar understanding of issues of modernity, the rule of law, and the indigenous Gandhian form of self rule known famously as swaraj during and after the Independence movement.” Dutta reflects on the connotations of the word lynching as it has been used in recent years in India to refer both to the taking of life by a mob or group, and to also refer to occasions of mob fury/action where death may not actually occur but the dynamics of the individual/mob victim-perpetrator relationship are similar. Noting the influence of American culture in the spread of the term lynching in India, Dutta argues that Indian collective violence “has emerged alongside or in the wake of movements for autonomy, identity, and territory that have become independent India’s most significant problem because these provide both occasion and site for the exercise of agency in the form of extralegal violence.”
“Free Shops for Free Men”?
Authors: Pearson Chad
Published: September 2017

Chad Pearson explores the multidimensional ways anti-union activists worked to break strikes and bust unions while attempting to turn “scabs” into “heroes.” He examines this process from different angles: from above, from below, and from somewhere in-between. Traditional employers’ associations were joined by unions of non-union workers and supposedly class-neutral Citizens’ Associations. Open-shop movement spokespersons frequently insisted that they were not engaged in a “class movement,” but Pearson disputes this claim by showing these organizations were formed by employers’ or by their middle-class allies.
Race, Unionism, and the Open-Shop Movement along the Waterfront in Mobile, Alabama
Authors: Woodrum Robert H.
Published: September 2017

Robert Woodrum examines the clashes between waterfront employers and black longshore workers in Mobile, Alabama during the era of World War I. The regional Marine Employers’ Association, committed to upholding open-shop conditions, enjoyed support from the U.S. Shipping Board and local vigilantes, including the Ku Klux Klan. During strikes, the employers benefited from the mobilization of white strikebreakers.
Through a Glass, Darkly
Authors: Janiewski Dolores E.
Published: September 2017

Dolores Janiewski illustrates that organized employers continued to struggle against labor and the left, broadly defined, during the 1930s, a high-time for the labor movement. This was a time when labor-supporting politicians like Wisconsin’s La Follette oversaw the creation of an investigation committee, which helped shed light on the long history of employer thuggery. But organized employers helped to shape another investigation committee, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which was formed in 1938. Let by Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, an ally of anti-union bosses, this anti-leftist committee overshadowed the La Follette committee, and helped set the stage for McCarthyism more than a decade later. HUAC’s success in tarring labor activists as communist agents illustrates how employers actively shaped state support even at their lowest moment of power.
Americanization and Anti-Americanism in Poland
Authors: Delaney Kate , Antoszek Andrzej
Published: September 2017

This essay explores Polish exceptionalism vis-à-vis both Americanization and anti-Americanism. It argues that this is evident during the Cold War period as well as in the post-Cold War eras (1945-1989 and 1989-present). It examines Poland’s experience adapting U.S. cultural influences and how it differs from most of its European counterparts. This essay focuses on how U.S. culture entered Poland, especially through music, literature, film, sport, and popular culture, in the years between 1945 and 2006. Not surprisingly, it also entails forms of resistance to U.S. culture, and thereby examines forms of anti-Americanism in Poland during this lengthy period.
Americanization and Anti-American Attitudes in South Africa and Georgia
Authors: Nas Loes
Published: September 2017

This essay compares processes of “Americanization” and “anti-American” attitudes in South Africa and the Republic of Georgia. The author, originally from the Netherlands, focuses on these two countries because of her long-term personal experiences in these countries and because they are two emerging democracies. But she makes a point of drawing on survey materials in order to extend her personal experiences. While Nas argues that both countries, like probably most countries, have to contend with the economic, political, and military power of the U.S. today, the essay ultimately argues that the Republic of Georgia is moving from being anti-American (and anti-Western) to being pro-American, whereas South Africa is moving from being generally pro-American to being increasingly anti-American.
Westward Ho with Kholiwood
Authors: Ellis Richard
Published: September 2017

This essay focuses on what Richard Ellis sees as three of the main overlapping trends of transnational “New American Studies.” He contemplates an intra-hemispheric approach to American Studies, a contingent hemispheric approach to American Studies, and a more recent approach attending to globalizing changes in the world order, precipitated by the necessary recognition of a new closeness between the postindustrial state and late corporate capitalism. All rethink space and spatialization, but Ellis also wants to stress the powerful omnipresence of the U.S. state, U.S. multinationals, and U.S. export culture. In order to illustrate his approach, Ellis offers a comparative, inter-hemispheric analysis of two international film co-productions, one Hollywood-style, the other Bollywood-style (Sofia Coppola’s 2003 Lost in Translation and Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 Bride and Prejudice). He ultimately argues that a new kind of approach to USAmerican Studies is necessary, stressing processes of contact, hybridity, exchange, flow, and migration.
Introduction Finding Mexico’s Chinese, Encountering the Mestizo State
Authors: Chang Jason Oliver
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces the subject of the Chinese presence in Mexico through their distorted representation in a state museum. The history of Chinese Mexicans provides new ways to analyze the formation of mestizo national identity in Revolutionary Mexico. This chapter introduces the significance of the 1917 constitution by linking its legal definition of the government’s obligation to protect the population with the historical development of racial domination. The methodological approach of an Asian Americanist critique is explored to show why attention to the discursive and ideological construction of racialized Asian difference is important to conceptions of the Mexican national state. In showing the centrality of race in the Mexican governance, the chapter lays out a comparative racial formation approach that examines the role of anti-Chinese politics in the reformulation of citizenship, state power, and national identity after the 1910 revolution.
The Politics of Chinese Immigration in the Era of Mexican National Colonization
Authors: Chang Jason Oliver
Published: September 2017

This chapter tells the history of Mexican colonization policy through the nineteenth century to provide a detailed context to understand the integration of Chinese immigration. Attention to national colonization reforms shows how racial ideology governed the relationship between land, indigenous people, and the state. With a large population and rich resources government officials blamed the lack of economic success on the racial inferiority of the majority indigenous population. When the political elites of Porfirio Diaz’s regime turned to Chinese immigration to address what they perceived as the republic’s racial deficiency they initiated a political drama that would shape the coming revolution in 1910 and deeply influence the reconstruction of the Mexican racial state. Because recruited Chinese labor was designed to alter the relationship between territory, Indians, and the government, racialized discourse about the Chinese reached right into the heart of Mexican politics.
Violent Imaginaries and the Beginnings of a New State
Authors: Chang Jason Oliver
Published: September 2017

U.S. consular reports on Mexican anti-Chinese activities document the uncoordinated, synchronous anti-Chinese activities that took place as a part of the revolutionary battlefield. This chapter traces the social relations that gave rise to cooperative violence, or grotesque assemblies, in the context of the revolution. Events like the massacre at Torreón in 1911 illustrate the emergence of new social ties based upon Porfian discontent and doing harm to Chinese. Individual cases of tactical assassinations and ritual violence against the Chinese bodies further illuminate the absence of mestizo nationalism as motivation. The chapter details reports of ritualized violence that present a battlefield where Chinese immigrants are under constant attack. These modes of popular violence against Chinese shifted the political identity of assailants, no matter their allegiance or affiliation, to patriotic revolutionaries. Peasants and Indians did not threaten the bourgeois military leaders of the revolution when they expressed antichinismo.
The “Fed-up Taxpayer”
Authors: Shelton Jon
Published: September 2017

This chapter chronicles the new reality faced by urban teacher unions after the emergence of austerity regimes in many American cities. It charts teacher strikes in St. Louis (1979) and Philadelphia (1980 and 1981). In each case, teacher unions faced staunch taxpayer resistance to salary increases, and in the case of Philadelphia, a mayor who dealt with massive budget deficits by reneging on a collectively-bargained contract. As importantly, in Philadelphia, opponents of the “unproductive” urban poor and unionized teachers began to imagine market reforms of the public education system. The chapter concludes by documenting the emergence of vouchers in order to understand the mounting challenge of neoliberalism to American public education.
Introduction
Authors: Ty Eleanor
Published: September 2017

While the hashtags #Asianfail, #failAsian and #Asianfailure on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter feature pictures and humorous anecdotes of Asians who "fail" at doing what Asians are supposed to be good at, cooking rice, using chopsticks, excelling in Math, playing the violin, they are poignant reminders of the ideological power of stereotypes. The myth of the model minority, with its stress on economic and professional success continues to influence the way Asian North Americans see themselves and are perceived by others. The first decade of the twenty-first century has been characterized by economic instability and political insecurity that has resulted in a life of precarity and unhappiness for young Asian Americans and Asian Canadians, but it has also given rise to books and films that contest normative scripts of ethnic identity.
Haunted Memories, Spaces, and Trauma: The Unsuccessful Immigrant
Authors: Ty Eleanor
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines two novels that portray the unsuccessful immigrant. Lê thi diem thúy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For and Madeleine Thien's Certainty feature protagonists from war-torn countries in Southeast Asia -- Vietnam and Borneo (later Malaysia) -- who start new lives in North America but who carry with them painful and traumatic memories that intrude upon their lives and threaten to overwhelm them. Both novels illustrate the precarity of everyday existence by revealing the ways in which war, death, and violence can lie just beneath a veneer of the ordinary and unremarkable. In Lê's novel, space and place are used to suggest a refugee family's state of contingency, both geographically and psychically. In Thien's book, memories and dreams are shown to be mediated by various kinds of technology that enable healing and global connections, even as they reawaken pain and reinforce alienation.
Representations of Aging in Asian Canadian Performance
Authors: Ty Eleanor
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at two contemporary texts by Asian Canadians that deal with aging and the aged. It discusses ways in which filmmaker Linda Ohama and performer/playwright Catherine Hernandez contest popular Western notions of aging by focusing on affective memories that forestall linear time. Instead of representing the aged woman's body through industrial or post-industrial metaphors of breakdown and wearing out, Ohama and Hernandez emphasize qualities such as energy and endurance in their female protagonists. Through the use of flashbacks, memories, magic realism, and motifs, these authors challenge not only the cultural view of the aged and aging but also our experience of time and understanding of how history is handled.
Building Trust and Respecting Suspicion
Authors: Bendix Regina F. , Bizer Kilian , Noyes Dorothy
Published: September 2017

Interdisciplinary success depends on participant willingness to take intellectual and professional risks. This chapter applies economistic accounts of trust and risk to the academic marketplace, with attention to inequality and differential identity. The economist's game experiments provide a productive analogy for the interdisciplinary project, a similarly reduced and temporary situation, though with real assets risked and payoffs envisioned. In the opening stages of a project, differences of disposition become apparent, heightening both social and intellectual suspicion. But the legitimate academic ethos of suspicion--taking no idea unexamined, including the slogan-concept of trust itself--must be balanced with a leap of faith in collaboration. Shared time, sociability, and explicit commitments can cultivate interpersonal trust that will increase risk tolerance at the higher levels.
Toward a Sustainable Interdisciplinarity
Authors: Bendix Regina F. , Bizer Kilian , Noyes Dorothy
Published: September 2017

The concluding chapter sums up the book's insights with practical recommendations regarding the material requirements, project design, and social process of interdisciplinary research projects. Recommendations to granting organizations and university administrators address funding priorities, resources required, technical assistance, and criteria for assessment. Recommendations to principal investigators address the selection and composition of the research team, the distribution and supervision of responsibilities, and the needs of junior researchers. Additional recommendations for all researchers cover project design and research objectives, the sequencing of activities, the cultivation of interdisciplinary interaction, the capturing of emergent insights, the stages of a project life cycle, and the range of project outputs and outcomes in a larger ecology of scholarly communication.
Lost in the USA
Authors: Gray White Deborah
Published: September 2017

“Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March” is a book about Americans’ search for personal tranquility at the turn of the twenty-first century. It argues that beneath the surface of prosperity and peace, ordinary Americans were struggling to adjust and adapt to the forces of postmodernity – immigration, multiculturalism, feminism, globalization, deindustrialization – which were radically changing the way Americans understood themselves and each other. Using the Promise Keepers (1991-2000), the Million Man March (1995), the Million Woman March (1997), the LGBT Marches (1993 and 2000), and the Million Mom March (2000) as a prism through which to analyze the era, “Lost in the USA” reveals the massive shifts occurring in American culture, shows how these shifts troubled many Americans, what they resolved to do about them, and how the forces of postmodernity transformed the identities of some Americans. It reveals that the mass gatherings of the 1990s were therapeutic places where people did not just express their identity but where they sought new identities. It shows that the mass gatherings reveal much about coalition building, interracial worship, parenting, and marriage and family relationships. Because its approach is historical it also addresses the continuing processes of millennialism, modernism and American identity formation.
Guns and Motherhood
Authors: Gray White Deborah
Published: September 2017

This chapter shows how the Million Mom March helped parents, especially mothers, heal from the loss of a loved one to gun violence. It compares past maternalist movements to this one and shows the uneasy coexistence of feminism and maternalism. It explores how suburban mothers who were mostly white and urban mothers who were mostly black and Hispanic, came to believe that American society was sick, that all mothers were the antidote, and that together they could get gun control adopted and stop gun violence. While demonstrating the possibilities for coalition this chapter argues that the color-blind approach failed against the National Rifle Association, which evoked images negligent mothers, over-indulgent mothers, bad black mothers and criminal black beast rapists to defeat the anti- gun crusaders.
Networking China
Authors: Hong Yu
Published: September 2017

This book examines the genesis, mechanisms, and dynamics of forging a network-based economy in China during the crisis and the restructuring act that followed. Through historical analysis of the entire range of communications, from telecommunications to broadband, from wireless networks to digital media, it explores how the state, entangled with market forces and class interests, constructs and realigns its digitalized sector. It argues that corporatization, networking, and investment within the state-dominated realm of communications intensified after the 2008 global economic crisis, to overcome the contradictions generated by the old investment-and-export dependent growth model, on the one hand, and to enhance China’s techno-economic capacities in the renewed global competition for command, on the other. Despite the qualitative changes it brought in communications, this strategy achieved limited results for economic restructuring, because the ensuing spending binges paid little attention to social needs. Ultimately, this book historicizes and theorizes China’s state-led model of digital capitalism, which contends, collaborates, and overlaps with the U.S.-dominated system of global digital capitalism. It reveals so-called cyber nationalism or networked nationalism as neither monolithic nor guaranteed but contingent upon specific political-economic relations. It also predicts the future: While China’s embrace of communications is likely to accelerate the country’s global rise, it is not going to be a simple rise to power but a continual effort to tamp down crises and manage contradictions.
Sinkholes and Seismic Shifts
Authors: Fojas Camilla
Published: September 2017

Disaster films and storylines overwhelm, shock, and immobilize publics. They offer little in the way of possibilities for social transformation or revolution. The individual crisis, the individualization of global catastrophe in its miniaturization in small disasters, like the sinkhole, personalizes ecological crisis and, quite literally, brings it home. Many of the popular media stories about sinkholes describe them as unpredictable and arbitrary events in which entire houses are consumed, streets and sidewalks cave in, and people and their pets are absorbed by hollow chasms in and around their homes. The sinkhole crisis demands expediency for the immediacy of its threat. The real threat of a sinkhole might be more effective in changing the relationship of individuals to the environment.
Imperial Ruins and Resurgence
Authors: Fojas Camilla
Published: September 2017

Detroit became a symbol of the economic freefall, and its ruins, deserted factories, abandoned houses, were a harbinger of the end of capitalism and a sign of “urban death.” Organic metaphors inform and drive the story of capitalism as the natural order of things, subject to the forces of entropy but always renewable. Even without infusions of capital, Detroit’s recovery was afoot, not in actual terms, but in the phantom speculations of storyville. The city became an emblem of death and rebirth in capitalism. Stories of recurrence and return are part of the mythos of capitalism. The boom and bust cycles of capitalism are merely moments in an ongoing and endless cycle of ruin and resurgence and of death and rebirth.
Football and Manliness
Authors: Oates Thomas P.
Published: September 2017

This book traces a quiet transformation in public life, in which a populist sense of white male aggrievement, and an admiration for deal-making sensibilities and an interest in remaking the self have combined to form a potent political formation. To understand it, the book identifies a central cultural site where aspects of this formation has been developed, refined, and occasionally contested: media texts about the National Football League (NFL). Deploying the tools of feminist media analysis, it seeks answers to a number of questions: How have the corporate-produced meanings of the league shifted to make football meaningful and compelling to its millions of fans in a purportedly “post-feminist” and “post-racial” era? What kinds of gender and racialized subjects do these texts imagine? What ethics do they express? These questions are addressed in chapters that focus on a theme and a particular media form: Dramas for cinema and television about the dynamics of pro football teams; sports journalism about the NFL draft, in which new talent is assessed; popular books by football coaches that offer guides to managing organizations and the self; and promotions for fantasy football that present budget-minded strategies as entertainment. The concluding chapter argues that journalism and other depictions of football that challenge the logics of hegemonic racialized masculinity offer possibilities for resistance and transformation.
Football, Manliness, and Populism
Authors: Oates Thomas P.
Published: September 2017

This prologue argues that the election of Donald Trump was made possible in part by the emergence of a new political formation. The formation promotes deal-making sensibilities, the amplifies white masculine anxieties, an fosters interest in self-improvement and organizational management. All three are unusually well-developed in the media culture surrounding professional football.
“This Game Has Got to be About More than Winning”
Authors: Oates Thomas P.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the anxious, deeply conflicted sense of besiegement characterizing dominant accounts of gender and race relations, as expressed in melodramas set around the NFL produced for television and cinema. The depictions of football’s male-defined spaces highlighted here are often fraught with anxiety and a sense of vulnerability. Real and imagined influences issue challenges to male power, and internal forces continually threaten to break it apart. In these narratives, male collectives are set in opposition to feminine forces, which threaten them (and their individual members) with emasculation. Though football is often celebrated as a symbol of the supposed transcendence of the racial past, narratives of the game are infused with profound ambivalence about black masculinity. The black athlete, celebrated for his impressive and admirable physical gifts, frequently challenges the cohesion of the group. Displays of “excessive” individualism and the homoerotic appeal of black bodies further complicate this racial ambivalence.
The Emergence of Crisis Pregnancy Centers
Authors: Haugeberg Karissa
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the history of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), where antiabortion activists encourage women not to have abortions. CPCs, which emerged in the late 1960s, offered prolife women opportunities to engage in professional tasks, to socialize, and to work directly with women with unwanted pregnancies. By the 1970s, CPC work had become the most commonplace way that women participated in the prolife movement. This chapter documents how federal and state money have subsidized this religious work, in which employees and volunteers distribute medically inaccurate information in order to persuade women not to have abortions.
The Invention of Postabortion Syndrome
Authors: Haugeberg Karissa
Published: September 2017

This chapter traces how crisis pregnancy center volunteers popularized medically inaccurate information about the health risks of abortion beginning in the 1970s. Anonymous tracts purportedly written by women who had abortions and regretted them circulated in prolife circles. By the 1980s, women who called themselves “abortion survivors” traveled the nation, speaking to church and prolife groups about their regret over having had abortions. Prolife physicians legitimized these anecdotes by writing articles that falsely claimed that abortion caused breast cancer and psychological trauma. By the twenty-first century, prolife physicians and women “abortion survivors” had convinced jurists—incorrectly—that the medical community was divided over the question of whether abortion harmed women. This constructed debate framed the Supreme Court’s 2003 majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart
Epilogue
Authors: Haugeberg Karissa
Published: September 2017

The manuscript concludes by examining the contemporary state of abortion activism in the United States. It considers the close friendship Scott Roeder struck with Shelley Shannon after she was incarcerated. In 2009, Roeder shot and killed Dr. George Tiller in the foyer of his Wichita church. I also detail the surge in state and federal legislation intended to restrict women’s access to abortion and birth control, despite Americans’ stable attitude about abortion. Finally, the book considers how women were instrumental to the antiabortion movement’s efforts to diminish women’s ability to secure legal abortions in the post-Roe era.
Climbing the Hilltop
Authors: Lindsey Treva B.
Published: September 2017

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Howard University emerged as the premier institution for higher learning for African Americans. Using the life of Lucy Diggs Slowe, a Howard alumnus and the first Dean of Women at Howard, this chapter discusses the experiences of African American women at Howard during the early twentieth century to illustrate how New Negro women negotiated intra-racial gender ideologies and conventions as well as Jim Crow racial politics. Although women could attend and work at Howard, extant African American gender ideologies often limited African American women’s opportunities as students, faculty, and staff. Slowe was arguably the most vocal advocate for African American women at Howard. She demanded that African American women be prepared for the “modern world,” and that African American women be full and equal participants in public culture. Her thirty-plus years affiliation with Howard makes her an ideal subject with which to map the emergence of New Negro womanhood at this prestigious university. This chapter presents Howard as an elite and exclusive site for the actualization of New Negro womanhood while simultaneously asserting the symbolic significance of Howard University for African American women living in and moving to Washington. Although most African American women in Washington could not and did not attend or work at Howard, this institution was foundational to an emergent sense of possibility and aspiration that propelled the intellectual and cultural strivings of African American women in New Negro era Washington.
Performing and Politicizing “Ladyhood”
Authors: Lindsey Treva B.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the suffrage activism of black women in Washington. As one of the most pressing political issues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fight for universal suffrage was an important part of black women’s political activism throughout the New Negro era. The road to suffrage ended in Washington and black women suffragists in the nation’s capital were keenly aware the unique role they could play in advocating for universal suffrage. To understand the political culture of black women’s suffrage activism in Washington, the chapter centers on the March 1913 suffrage march in the nation’s capital to uncover the various dynamics of the suffrage movement and to specifically engage how black women thought about and enacted distinct political identities. For black suffragists, performative and aesthetic politics were resistive strategies for contesting their subordinate status in the political arena.
The Media Commons
Authors: Murphy Patrick D.
Published: September 2017

Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, institutional analysis, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses, demonstrating how the media pushes us to save the whales even as we are encouraged to devour all the fish. By examining this paradox through case studies of the “greening” of cable TV, online corporate branding campaigns, indigenous media, and the globalization of commercial media, he shows how today's complex, integrated media networks draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination—and influences just who benefits. Analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. Murphy identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly—and ominously—individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.
Earth Discourses
Authors: Murphy Patrick D.
Published: September 2017

This chapter draws from the interpretive school of environmental policy analysis, especially John S. Dryzek’s The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford, 2005), to provide an overview of the environmental discourses that have historically held cultural currency around the world. It summarizes the ontological foundations of key and competing environmental discourses: the Limits discourse (Survivalism), the Promethean discourse, Democratic Pragmatism, Ecological Modernization, Green Radicalism (Eco-feminism, Environmental Justice) and Sustainable Development. Of primary interest in this overview is how the emergence of what Dryzek calls the “Promethean discourse,” an environmental discourse tied to abundance, limited government, and innovation, has been conversely related to the “Limits discourse,” which is grounded in the construct of scarcity and the “commons” and “tipping point” metaphors, and how the debate between the two has spawned a range of other, alternative environmental discourses.
Neo-Malthusian Entertainment: The Limits of Green TV
Authors: Murphy Patrick D.
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the resurgence of the Survivalism on cable and public TV, and how it is introducing a new generation of media audiences to the Limits discourse. Focus is placed on identifying the discourse’s defining characteristics through institutional practices, specific genres and reoccurring themes. The chapter traces two trajectories: “After Earth”/“Nature’s revenge” themed programming and more pedagogically-designed “Green lifestyle TV” in internationally networked cable channels like Animal Planet, NatGeo, and The Discovery Channel. The chapter argues that the revised rendering of the Limits discourse shifts emphasis away from over population and carrying capacity, primary concerns in the Limits discourse of the 1960s-70s, placing it instead on a more contemporary set of concerns. However, cable TV’s ability to translate the underlying concerns of a “new” Limits discourse has been limited, as entertainment programming that provides little actionable information has thrived, while a more instructive eco-conscious television has largely failed.
Mental Language
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

The notion that human thought is structured like a language, with a precise syntax and semantics, has been pivotal in recent philosophy of mind. Yet it is not a new idea: it was systematically explored in the fourteenth century by William of Ockham and became central in late medieval philosophy. This book examines the background of Ockham's innovation by tracing the history of the mental language theme in ancient and medieval thought. It shows the various contexts in which the idea was developed, the different uses it was put to, and the networks through which it was transmitted. Two ancient traditions are identified as relevant: one philosophical, stemming from Plato and Aristotle, which led to the emergence of a technical notion of ‘internal discourse’ in later Greek philosophy; and the other theological, rooted in the Fathers of the Christian Church and reaching its apogee in Augustine in the fifth century A.D. The study then focuses on the merging of the two traditions in the Middle Ages, as they gave rise to detailed discussions over the structure of human thought and its relations with signs and language. And it finally stresses the originality and significance of Ockham's doctrine of the 'oratio mentalis' (mental discourse) and the strong impression it made upon his immediate successors.
Introduction
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

The general idea of mental language is introduced. The resemblance between Jerry Fodor and William of Ockham’s ideas is stressed. The goal and the methodology of the research that led to this book is stated.
Plato and Aristotle
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

The most important relevant passages from Plato and Aristotle are scrutinized. Plato’s focus is on the soul’s dialogue with itself, while Aristotle sees internal discourse as the locus of logical relations. The problem of the compositional structure of thought is shown to arise from Aristotle’s work, without however being addressed by him.
Reactions
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how Ockham’s theory of mental language eventually won the field among his immediate successors. It first reviews a controversy among Dominican authors on whether there really is a mental language composed of concepts, and then another series of discussions over what syntactic structure exactly such a mental language could have. And it finally focuses on the idea of mental language in John Buridan, arguably the most important philosopher of the fourteenth century after Ockham.
Postscript to the English-Language Edition (2014)
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

Especially written for the English version, this Postscript discusses a number of recently published contributions on the history of mental language in connection with the claims made in the present book. Those are divided into five groups according to whether they have to do with (1) Ancient and Patristic sources, (2) Augustine and Boethius, (3) Abelard and the twelfth century, (4) Aquinas and the thirteenth century, and (5) Ockham and the late medieval period. It is shown that quite an amount of new material is now to be added to the picture, but that nothing of importance needs to be withdrawn.
Analogy, Proportion, and Death in Donne’s Anniversaries
Authors: Anderson Judith H.
Published: September 2017

The term proportion, a variant of analogy, occurs repeatedly in Donne’s two Anniversaries, epic commemorations of a young woman’s death. In The First Anniversarie, this word-concept extends to the loss of cosmic coherence, form, harmony, correspondence, and even comprehension. Donne’s dramatized speaker stages a performance that shows him to be stuck in the past, the Old Testament, the body, and this ruined world. In The Second Anniversarie, Donne’s speaker has a new lease on life, and he offers a dynamic renewal of vision that is fundamentally analogous. In this Anniversarie, unlike The First, the very physicality of death, captured in analogy, enables redemption. At its end, desire returns as the erotic, Christian-Neoplatonic connector between heaven and earth, between the soul’s longing for God and God’s for the soul. Desire has become the affective realization of analogical construction.
Post-Mandarin
Authors: Tran Ben
Published: September 2017

Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam redefines global modernism in terms of realism. The monograph challenges some of the central assumptions about the literary aesthetics of colonial modernity. The book has two interlocking arguments. First, it underscores the radical transformation of Vietnam’s literary field from a 1000-year-old Chinese-influenced mandarin system to the supply-and-demand market of 20th-century print culture—linguistically, from Examination Chinese to the Vietnamese romanized alphabet of quốc ngữ. Second, it shows that as much as this transformation was an intellectual disruption, it was equally a gendered historical upheaval. The book demonstrates how the dissolution of the all-male mandarinate and the simultaneous emergence of a female reading public underwrote the significant realist aesthetics of Vietnamese modernity. The project employs the term “post-mandarin” to describe how native intellectuals educated in the French baccalaureate system adopted European fields of knowledge, a new romanized writing script, and print media—all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. Post-mandarin intellectuals mediated their critique of colonial modernity through the various subjectivities of modern women, portraying these women as transgressive romantics, sex workers catering to European men, patients in colonial dispensaries, and readers of novels. The book’s focus on sexuality reveals how masculine anxiety undercut the purportedly objective genre of journalistic reportage, how Vietnam’s modernist turn was a turn toward literary realism, and how Vietnamese socialist realism derived from a queer internationalism.
Autoethnography and Post-Mandarin Masculinity
Authors: Tran Ben
Published: September 2017

Chapter 1 elaborates upon the relationship between the native intellectual’s vexed masculinity, analyzing reportage as a form of bodily knowledge indicative of the post-mandarin’s uncertain sexuality. The chapter focuses on Tam Lang and Thạch Lam’s writings on prostitution, a recurring theme in Vietnamese reportage. These native male chroniclers persistently gazed at commercial sex workers who were sexually intimate with European men. The prospects of such liaisons were threatening in so far as they gave Vietnamese women access to modern culture, while the male Vietnamese observers remained excluded from modernization, despite their active pursuit of modern knowledge. The chapter argues that reportage is not merely a case of the colonized subject writing back against the colonizer, but that it also points to the post-mandarin’s ambiguous masculinity and authorial predicament in the triangular relationship between the European male figure and the Vietnam sex worker.
The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature
Authors: Hui Andrew
Published: September 2017

When we think of ruins and literature, we usually think of Romanticism. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature dislodges this critical commonplace by locating European literature’s fascination with architectural decay in the aesthetic culture from Petrarch to Spenser. The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as category of discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. The ruin thus became the material sign—the broken cipher—that marked the rupture between the world of the humanists and their idealized classical past. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future. To make this case, Hui embraces a philological method, a venerable tradition that has recently undergone a resurgence of interest. Philology is particularly appropriate to the study of ruins, since philology and ruins are both fundamentally about imagining the whole through its parts. Specifically, the book traces three words in three authors as semantic case studies: vestigia in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser. By starting from the smallest unit of linguistic speech—the word—and enlarging our view to its larger cultural context, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature not only revises some of our most basic ideas about early modern texts and how they came to be, but also offers a new way for understanding the fundamental theme of survival in the classical tradition at large.
Introduction A Japanese Friend
Authors: Hui Andrew
Published: September 2017

The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse that became an inspirational force in the poetic imagination, artistic expression, and historical inquiry of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. The ruin functions as a privileged cipher or master topos that marks the rupture between the world of the humanists and the world of antiquity. The Renaissance sees a new understanding of both ruins and poetics, made possible by sustained meditation on the crumbled monuments of antiquity. The book imagines fluid multiplicity rather than fixed monumentalization as a survival strategy in the classical tradition. Its method is avowedly a philological one. This approach is particularly appropriate to the subject matter, since both philology and the study of ruins are fundamentally concerned with the figure of synecdoche, about imagining the whole through their parts. To make its case, the book uses three words with particularly rich semantic reach and deep etymological roots: vestigium in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser. They form “word clouds” in their authors’ œuvres: verbal constellations of associations that provide different iterations of the materiality of memory.
The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Erotics of Fragments
Authors: Hui Andrew
Published: September 2017

The erotics of ruins is the focus of this chapter. It examines the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an important text in Renaissance humanism not only because of its prominent treatment of ruins but also because it is one of the more poignant essays on how rekindling a relationship to the classical past is an enterprise fraught with a Petrarchan frustration. Traditionally translated as The Strife of Love in a Dream, the text recounts the phantasmagorical journey of Poliphilo as he searches for his Polia amidst a made-up world of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Etruscan antiquities.