bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
PARAMETRIC MODELLING FOR HBIM: DESIGN OF WINDOW LIBRARY FOR RURAL BUILDING
Authors: Poloprutský Zdeněk
Published: January 2020

This article deals with parametric modelling of three types of windows from the 19th and 20thcentury. All three types of windows are fitted in the same set of buildings – a coaching inn.The article describes the design and creation process of library for Historic Building InformationModelling (HBIM). The design and development of the window-library are based on the analyses ofavailable metric survey documentation - photo documentation, point cloud, drawings of groundplan. The characteristics of the final Building Information Model (BIModel) are derived from thenature of the case study, respectively type of historical building, Level of Details (LoD) of surveys,purpose of modelling and required Level of Development (LOD). Based on these specifications, itis possible to realize three different types of BIModel - simplified, detailed and shape-faithful. Theaim of this modelling was to design a library usable for detailed BIModel.
Retcon Game
Authors: Friedenthal Andrew J.
Published: January 2020

This book argues that the narrative/world-building technique known as retroactive continuity, often overlooked by literary scholars and media historians alike, has become a naturalized and ubiquitous part of popular culture. A careful look at the history of retroactive continuity–or retconning– reveals how its growing acceptance as a part of popular narratives has led to a complex, complicated understanding of the ways in which history and story can interact, ultimately creating a cultural atmosphere that is increasingly accepting of revisionist historical narratives. This can be seen most potently in the way that the editable hyperlink, rather than the stable footnote, has become the de facto source of information in America today. The groundwork for this major cultural shift has been laid for decades via our modes of entertainment. To embrace the concept of retroactive continuity in fictional media means accepting that the past, itself, is not a stable element, but rather something that is constantly in contentious flux. Thus retconning, on the whole, has a positive impact on society, fostering a sense of history itself as a constructed narrative and engendering an acceptance of how historical narratives can and should be recast to allow for a broader field of stories to be told in the present.
Promises of Citizenship
Authors: German Kathleen M.
Published: January 2020

Considering their historically marginalized place in American democracy, one wonders why African Americans bothered to fight in any American conflict. This conundrum is especially perplexing in World War II, a war to free millions from tyranny. Scholars have neglected to ask the fundamental question; why did the African American community send thousands of men to fight for a democratic way of life in which they could not fully participate? The answers to this question, and there are undoubtedly multiple responses, may shed light on contemporary quandaries–situations that involve military mobilization for the good, not of the whole society, but of narrow constituencies. This is the central question of this book. The chapters explore the cultural context where citizenship for African Americans was negotiated through military service.
Steelpan Ambassadors
Authors: Martin Andrew R.
Published: January 2020

“Maybe you won't like steel band. It's possible. But it's been said that the Pied Piper had a steel band helping him on his famous visit to Hamelin.” When the US Navy distributed this press release, anxieties and tensions of the impending Cold War felt palpable. As President Eisenhower cast his gaze toward Russia, the American people cast their ears to the Atlantic South, infatuated with the international currents of Caribbean music. Today, steel bands have become a global phenomenon; yet, in 1957 the exotic sound and the unique image of the US Navy Steel Band was one-of-a-kind. From 1957 until their disbandment in 1999, the US Navy Steel Band performed over 20,000 concerts worldwide. In 1973, the band officially moved headquarters from Puerto Rico to New Orleans and found the city and annual Mardi Gras tradition an apt musical and cultural fit. The band brought a significant piece of Caribbean artistic capital—calypso and steelband music—to the American mainstream. Its impact on the growth and development of steelpan music in America is enormous. This book uncovers the lost history of the US Navy Steel Band and provides an in-depth study of its role in the development of the US military's public relations, its promotion of goodwill, its recruitment efforts after the Korean and Vietnam wars, its musical and technological innovations, and its percussive propulsion of the American fascination with Latin and Caribbean music over the past century.
China in the Mix
Authors: Xiao Ying
Published: January 2020

Scarce attention has been paid to the dimension of sound and its essential role in constructing image, culture, and identity in Chinese film and media. China in the Mix fills a critical void with an original, pioneering study of the connections and intersections of film, media, music, and popular culture in contemporary China under postsocialist reform, capitalist globalization, and hybridization. It explores fascinating topics, including appropriations of popular folklore in the Chinese new wave of the 1980s; Chinese rock ’n’ roll and youth cinema in fin de siècle China; the political-economic impact of free market imperatives and Hollywood pictures on Chinese film industry and filmmaking in the late twentieth century; the reception and adaptation of hip hop; and the emerging role of Internet popular culture and social media in the early twenty-first century. This book examines the articulations and representations of mass culture and everyday life, concentrating on their aural/oral manifestations in contemporary Chinese cinema and in a wide spectrum of media and cultural productions. The research offers the first comprehensive investigation of Chinese film, expressions, and culture from a unique, cohesive acoustic angle and through the prism of global media-cultural exchange. It shows how the complex, evolving uses of sound (popular music, voice-over, silence, noise, and audio mixing) in film and media reflect and engage the important cultural and socio-historical shifts in contemporary China and in the increasingly networked world.
Mulata Nation
Authors: Fraunhar Alison
Published: January 2020

Mulata Nation traces the figure of the mulata, the woman of mixed racial heritage in Cuban artwork and performance from the colonial era through the modern to the contemporary. While perhaps most widely linked with sensuality and sexual desirability, the mulata also serves as the embodiment of Cuba’s spirituality, and as emblematic of Cuban identity. Through close readings of representations of the mulata in fine and graphic art, mulata performers and the performance of mulata characters at distinct historical and ideological moments, the book claims that far from being a static, flat figure, images of the mulata have shifted over time and continue to find new expressions.
Different expressions of the mulata are linked to specific historical moments. Representations of the mulata on cigarette packaging, marquillas cigarreras, and in the musical theater form zarzuela of the late colonial era, cabaret performance, fine art and popular magazine covers during the Republic, as an icon of Mexican cinema in the first wave of the diaspora of Cuban artists and Cuban cultural forms, and as an icon of the new (wo)man of revolutionary Cuba in Cuban cinema of the 1960s and 70s all figure the mulata as crucial figures in national culture.
At present, both the significant diaspora of Cuban artists and others to the US and other countries have been re-inscribing the mulata and mulataje to bear, contest and sometimes reinforce the tropic positions explored in previous chapters. Furthermore, the performance of mulataje on and off the island is no longer limited to women; the performance of mulataje is prominent in highly popular drag shows and film in contemporary Cuba.
Introduction
Authors: Fraunhar Alison
Published: January 2020

The Introduction maps out the scope of the case studies in the book and defines and discusses key terms including mulata, representation and performance. It devotes particular attention to the tropes and the stakes of national identity, especially in relation to ideological, political and economic issues. While the mulata is most prominent among tropic figures of national identity, the guajiro, the white peasant, the negrito, the comic black, and the gallego, or Spanish immigrant are also considered.
Discussion of relevant literature on Cuba, the mulata, visual and performative studies, postcolonial studies and identity politics is contextualized. Introduction of case studies taken up in later chapters analyze the representation of the mulata in relation to current events, asking “what work is the figure doing?” and also linking the mulata to the three cardinal positions: national icon, embodiment of desire, and patron saint.
Superman in Myth and Folklore
Authors: Peretti Daniel
Published: January 2020

Many artists draw upon folklore to craft films, music, literature, and other elements of popular culture. This book examines how the opposite phenomenon occurs: the use of popular culture in the expressive culture called folklore. Superman is an ideal focus for such as study because of his ubiquity. Though Superman is under the control of a corporation, fans nonetheless have developed a sense of ownership of him, often because of an affinity they feel toward him. Early chapters of this book explore the varieties of this affinity as experienced by individuals and as understood through interviews. Later chapters delve into specific events, such as the Superman Celebration in Illinois, and other modes of expression such as humor, personal narrative, and myth. Superman in Myth and Folklore explores the idea that a fictional character can be foundationally important in morality through fieldwork and interviews. In other words, fans use Superman to think through complex issues in their personal lives, and this book explores how. Despite the focus on fieldwork, there is some attention to the extant literature on Superman, ranging from educational works on science to psychology and history. There is also attention to the mythical aspects of Superman, with analyses of the character through several theories such as structuralism and functionalism. By examining jokes, festival, costuming, and narrative, this book explores the impact a fictional character can have.
Sowing the Wind
Authors: Pratt Dorothy Overstreet
Published: January 2020

This book examines the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890 and argues that it became the crucible of change in the state, creating a cultural shift from a society based on class to one based on race, though both remained important in the culture. State leaders called the convention to address the threat from outside the state – the Lodge Elections Bill – as well as the rising violence within the state. The convention delegates created layers of qualifiers for voting: payment of the poll tax, literacy, the Understanding Clause, no felony convictions, and lengthy residency requirements. In addition, the delegates utilized reapportionment to further strengthen provisions to disfranchise not only African Americans, but also a number of poor white voters. The newly promulgated constitution then withstood attacks by Congress during the debates over the Lodge Elections Bill and appeals to the federal courts, especially with Williams v Mississippi. The delegates succeeded in their charge to disfranchise, but in doing so unleashed new violence and a struggle to control the state that held it back economically and politically for seven decades.
Subversive Spirits
Authors: Roberts Robin
Published: January 2020

The supernatural remains extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. But one figure has remained in the shadow, the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits presents a history of the figure in the United States and the United Kingdom from the 1920s to the present, focusing on the female ghost in heritage sites, theatre, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions and roles. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles. Comedic female ghosts in literature and film disrupt gender norms through humor (Topper and Blithe Spirit ). Terrifying and vengeful female ghosts in England and America draw on horror and death to present a challenge to restrictions on mothers (The Woman in Black and La Llorona). The female immigrant experience and the horrors of slavery provide the focus for ghosts who expose history’s silences (The Woman Warrior and Beloved ). Heritage sites use the female ghost as a friendly and inviting but structurally subordinated narrator (The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle ). In the twenty-first century, the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity (Being Human , U.K. and U.S.) Subversive Spirits brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in popular culture.
Epilogue
Authors: Loza Steven
Published: January 2020

This epilogue presents the author's account of attending the eighteenth annual Central Avenue Jazz Festival in Los Angeles in the summer of 2013. The Gerald Wilson Orchestra was the main feature and closing act of the day, and the author says that describing the music, the people, the dancing, and the magical vibes of the orchestra's performance is an eternal description of Wilson and his life. He concludes that Wilson made sense in a world too often beyond sense, and goes on to explain that he inspires the author and so many others to always go beyond, to always believe, to always love, and to “always tell the truth”.
The Mississippi Blues Tradition and the Origins of the Blues
Authors: Shaw Arnold
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the Mississippi blues tradition and the origins of the blues through the lives and music of Charley Patton, Bukka White, Son House, and Robert Johnson. All are part, of course, of what is recognized as Mississippi Delta blues—a style fathered by Charley Patton. Although bluesmen have come from many southern states, the largest and most impressive group of blues singers came from Mississippi. In Delta blues, there was also the ultimate flowering of a personalized, localized style of expression. What has become evident from this brief glance at the work of four Delta bluesmen is that each has to one degree or another employed his songs as a chronicle of his experiences and each has emerged, however sketchily, as an identifiable individual. The chapter then demonstrates the power of Patton's poetic voice in “High Water Everywhere” as he sings of the flood's victims.
Louisiana Country Blues: A Comparison with the Delta Country Style of Charley Patton and Followers: Mutual Influences
Authors: Broven John
Published: January 2020

This chapter compares Louisiana country music with the Mississippi Delta country style of Charley Patton. The influence of the Mississippi Delta blues can be found in Louisiana through artists such as Robert Pete Williams and other rural performers. As if to emphasize the fragmented nature of the Louisiana blues scene, Williams did not start to assert himself until the blues revival years of the 1960s. Like Patton and Blind Lemon, he did have an individualistic style, as can be heard on his classic recording of “Prisoner's Talking Blues.” Williams was an intensely personal artist, an introvert lost in his own music. He was not the sort of man to influence young contemporaries, as Patton did in Mississippi. Indeed, it seems that there was no reciprocal influence from Louisiana to Mississippi.
Memories of Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett and Willie Johnson
Authors: Shurman Dick
Published: January 2020

This chapter begins by looking at the musical link between Charley Patton and one of his musical protegés, Chester Burnett, the Howlin' Wolf. Of course, Wolf was a product of the Mississippi Delta blues tradition, with personal contact with Patton and a strong Tommy Johnson influence. Wolf recorded Patton's “Pony Blues” as “Saddle My Pony,” and later did a classic version of “Spoonful” more related through vocal style than lyrics. It's easy to hear Patton's growl in Wolf's vocals, and some of Patton's clowning obviously left a strong impression on young Chester. The chapter then focuses on Willie Johnson, which was one of Howlin' Wolf's best-known associates in the South and Chicago, and one of the most electrifying and exciting guitarists of the 1950s.
Jack Kirby
Authors: Smith Andrew Alan
Published: January 2020

Ben “The Thing” Grimm of the Fantastic Four is portrayed as a working-class “guy,” despite the vast amount of money at his disposal as a principal in Fantastic Four, Inc. However, his origins go back further than his first appearance in 1961, to the childhood of his co-creator and original artist, Jack Kirby. Kirby, a working-class Jew from the slums of Lower East Side New York City in the early part of the twentieth century, patterned Grimm after himself. Even after both Kirby and cocreator Stan Lee left Fantastic Four, successive writers and artists would include new pieces of background information about the character cementing the direct correlation between the fictional Thing and his real-world creator and alter ego, Jack Kirby.
The Working Class PI (AKA Jessica Jones)
Authors: Wandtke Terrence R.
Published: January 2020

This chapter initially discusses the literary origins of Jessica Jones, the superheroine introduced in Alias by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos. In the comic book series, Jones is a blue-collar hero clearly tied to hard-boiled detective fiction: a genre about and for a working class audience. This chapter then presents the way Bendis and Gaydos use Jones’ identity as a private investigator to subvert traditional superhero stories that are written with little concerns for class. In addition, Alias uses Jones’ identity as a woman to subvert the male bias of both traditional superhero stories and hard-boiled detective fiction.The resultant mix creates a meandering path for Jones: a woman’s narrative of “quiet desperation” that is largely lost in purposeful arc of its Netflix adaptation, Jessica Jones.
Into the Between
Authors: Raeburn Bruce Boyd
Published: January 2020

“Into the Between” explores the strategies adopted by New Orleans jazz musicians to negotiate sound in various urban situations, ranging from dance halls and riverboats to streetscapes, and how technological change affected their calculations in producing an essentially participatory sound. The author traces the ways that early musicians adapted elements of African and European musical traditions to contemporary settings, audiences and instrumentation, relying on improvisation to create unique and evolving soundscapes, including brass bands and New Orleans’ second lines.
The Cultural Democracy of the Second Line
Authors: Dinerstein Joel
Published: January 2020

There has been a weekly Sunday African-American second-line parade for 150 years in New Orleans--a diffused democratic street ritual of performativity enacted through dance, music, and stylin'. The main action focuses on the sponsoring Social Aid and Pleasure Club, who parade between the ropes with their hired brass-band, on-stage and for public consumption. Yet the so-called second-liners rolling and dancing outside the ropes provide the peak moments of aesthetic excellence in their claiming of interstitial spaces: on the sidewalks between the street and house-lines; on church-steps, atop truck beds or along rooftops; on porches, stoops, and billboards. Drawing on a living tradition of New Orleans African-American expressive culture, individuals display creative style as both personal pleasure and social invigoration. The physical gestures and non-verbal messages of this vernacular dance are here analysed through a series of images by second-line photographer Pableaux Johnson.
Invisible Ball of Dreams
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when they consider the story of race and racism in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), black baseball was a long-standing, if underdocumented, staple of African American communities. This book examines creative portraits of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Divided into three literary waves, the book is especially attentive to the archival contributions (and at times drawbacks) of imaginative representations of black baseball. Specifically, the book argues that African American and Euro-American novelists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers fill in gaps and silences in recorded baseball history; democratize access to archives by sharing their research with readers; and advance countermythologies to whitewashed baseball lore. Reading representations across the literary color line also opens up a propitious space for exploring black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Thus, while this book’s particular focus is black baseball, the comparative, archival mode of analysis utilized herein provides a model for analyzing literary interventions in other marginalized cultural histories as well.
The Second Wave
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

In his The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (1984), Amiri Baraka effuses about bygone days of watching his beloved Newark Eagles: “In the laugher and noise and colors and easy hot dogs there was something of us celebrating ourselves. In the flying around the bases and sliding and home runs and arguments and ...
Selective Amnesia in Hollywood’s Imagined Sixties
Authors: Hoerl Kristen
Published: January 2020

This chapter introduces this book’s central contention that Hollywood film and television have taught audiences that capitalism and the traditional family have triumphed over Sixties-era resistance to corporate culture, structural racism, and patriarchy. Hollywood’s fictionalized portrayals of late sixties dissent routinely depicts radical protesters as problems that must be overcome to preserve national unity and the nuclear family. This introduction explains how fictionalized portrayals of Sixties-era dissent are forms of public memory that offer lessons about appropriate models of civic engagement in late-capitalist democracy. These portrayals are forms of selective amnesia, public discourse that routinely omits events and issues that defy seamless narratives of national progress and unity. The last section of the introduction provides an overview of the book’s case study chapters which are organized by recurring narrative patterns and character types across different media products since the early eighties.
The Sixties in History and Entertainment Memory
Authors: Hoerl Kristen
Published: January 2020

This chapter briefly reviews the range of dissident movements that were active during the last half of the 1960s. Attending to Black Power, Third World activism, the New Left, anti-war movement, counterculture, women’s liberation, and GLBT radicalism, this chapter explains why dissident groups became increasingly radical and alienated from mainstream politics and society. This chapter also summarizes the variety of Hollywood films and television programs that have featured the counterculture, Black Power and anti-war movements from 1966 to the present decade. These films and TV shows illustrate how late sixties radicalism influenced entertainment television. Although movies and television programs have provided a wide range of depictions, they have tended to foreground the spectacle of dissent and countercultural lifestyles over nuanced attention to radical politics or the motives underlying protesters’ actions.
Traumatic Victimhood or Black Rage? Contrasting Visions of Black Power
Authors: Hoerl Kristen
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines contrasting depictions of the Black Power movement in Hollywood film and television that either confirmed or resisted what Herman Gray refers to as the “civil rights subject.” The first half of the chapter explains how nineties-era movies Malcolm X and Panther presented affirmative images of radical black protest but anchored these images to traumatic counter-memories of black victimhood. The second half of this chapter critically reviews a variety of negative portrayals of the Black Panthers in media products between 1994 and 2013 including the movies Forrest Gump, Barbershop 2, and The Butler, the miniseries ‘The 60s, and an episode of the television program Law & Order to argue that Hollywood has routinely depicted black rage, not structural racism or white violence as the central problem requiring tough-on-crime solutions. The chapter interprets these portrayals in the context of the political backlash against civil rights gains and racial inequities within the criminal justice system.
Walking Raddy
Authors: Leathem Karen Trahan
Published: January 2020

Since 2004, the Baby Doll Mardi Gras tradition in New Orleans has gone from an obscure, almost-forgotten practice to a flourishing cultural force. The original Baby Dolls were groups of black women, and some men, in the early Jim Crow era who adopted New Orleans street-masking tradition as a unique form of fun and self-expression against a backdrop of racial discrimination. Wearing short dresses, bloomers, bonnets, and garters with money tucked tight, they strutted, sang ribald songs, chanted, and danced on Mardi Gras Day and on St. Joseph feast night. Today’s Baby Dolls continue the tradition of one of the first street women's masking and marching groups in the United States. They joyfully and unabashedly defy gender roles, claiming public space and proclaiming through their performance their right to social citizenship. Essayists draw on interviews, theoretical perspectives, archival material, and historical assessments to describe women’s cultural performances that take place on the streets of New Orleans. They recount the history and contemporary resurgence of the Baby Dolls while delving into the larger cultural meaning of the phenomenon. Over 140 color photographs and personal narratives of immersive experiences provide passionate testimony of the impact of the Baby Dolls on their audiences. Fifteen artists offer statements regarding their work documenting and inspired by the tradition as it stimulates their imagination to present a practice that revitalizes the spirit.
When They Blew the Levee
Authors: Lawrence David Todd , Lawless Elaine J.
Published: January 2020

In this ethnography of a destroyed town in southern Missouri’s Bootheel region, authors David Todd Lawrence and Elaine J. Lawless examine two conflicting narratives about the flood of 2011—one promoted by the Corps of Engineers that boasts the success of the levee breach and the flood diversion, and the other gleaned from oral narratives collected from the displaced Pinhook residents, stories that reveal a lack of concern on the part of the government for the destruction of their town. Receiving inadequate warning and no evacuation assistance during the breach, residents lost everything. Many still seek restitution and funding for relocation and reconstruction of their town. The authors’ research traces a long history of discrimination and neglect of the rights of the Pinhook community, beginning with migration from the Deep South to the southern-most counties in Missouri, through purchasing and farming the land, up to the Birds Point levee breach. Their stories relate what it has been like for the former residents of this stable African American town to be displaced dispersed in other small towns, living with relatives and friends while trying to negotiate the bureaucracy surrounding Federal Emergency Management Agency and State Emergency Management Agency assistance. Ultimately, the stories of displaced citizens of Pinhook reveal a strong African American community, whose bonds were developed over time and through shared traditions, bonds that will persist even if the town is never rebuilt.
Introduction: Finding Pinhook
Authors: Lawrence David Todd , Lawless Elaine J.
Published: January 2020

The Introduction provides an overview of what happened in southern Missouri in 2011 when the Army Corps of Engineers breached the levee at the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway in Mississippi County. Two opposing narratives are discussed: the one published and celebrated by the CORPS as a successful diversion of the waters from Cairo, Illinois, to southern Missouri, and the counter-narrative of anger and frustration told by the displaced former residents of the destroyed town, Pinhook. The Introduction discusses the field research done by the authors to document the flooding and follow the former residents to their current homes, now six years later with no government assistance. The authors utilized oral history and documentary filmmaking to tell the Pinhook story.
Living in Pinhook
Authors: Lawrence David Todd , Lawless Elaine J.
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses mainly on an evening, like many, that the authors spent talking to members of the Robinson Family about what it was like to grow up and live in Pinhook in the years before the flood and levee breach. The stories of all of these individuals provide a foundational understanding of the kind of place Pinhook was, the extraordinary challenges its citizens encountered during the process of building and developing it, and how they came to live where they did.
Pinhook Day A Traditional African American Homecoming
Authors: Lawrence David Todd , Lawless Elaine J.
Published: January 2020

This chapter centers on the celebration of Pinhook Day, which has taken place as long as anyone can remember, and still continues to this day over six years after the breach. Detailing the celebration itself as a homecoming event, this chapter explores the importance of this annual tradition in helping to reconstruct the idea of home and to shape memories of the collective history of the community and its residents. This kind of gathering is particularly important in light of what was lost in the aftermath of the breach. Many Pinhook residents, faced with very little time to move and store their belongings, lost precious keepsakes – pictures, family bibles, certificates, books, Bibles – that marked important events among families and in the larger community. Pinhook Day provides a venue for remembered events, people, and lives when Pinhook was a thriving town.
The African American Sonnet
Authors: Müller Timo
Published: January 2020

Some of the most famous African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “First fight. Then fiddle.” Few readers realize that these poems come from a rich tradition of more than a thousand sonnets written by African American poets over a century and a half. The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research, the study demonstrates that closer attention to the sonnet modifies our understanding of key developments in African American literary history. Each chapter addresses such a development: the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the post-war period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and the disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. Throughout this rich history, the study argues, sonnets have been “troubling spaces” in more ways than one. The sonnet became a contested space when black poets appropriated the “scanty plot of ground” (Wordsworth) from which they had long been excluded. The sonnets written by these poets troubled the material and discursive boundaries African Americans have been facing in a society organized around racial inequality. The confrontation and subversion of boundaries is inscribed into the very structure of the sonnet, which made it a preferred testing ground for such strategies in the literary realm.
The Opium Wars
Authors: Marlow Eugene
Published: January 2020

In the late 1910s, 1920s, and even into the 1930s, “jazz” was the music of the age in the Republic of China, especially and primarily in Shanghai on China's east coast. It was enjoyed equally by sophisticated Chinese gentry and upper-class people in the many dance halls dotting various parts of Shanghai, and by the many Europeans, Russians, and Americans living and working in the so-called “Paris of the East.” These same foreigners also owned pieces of Shanghai, literally. This chapter asks how several foreign nations came to own sections of Shanghai, and have unrestricted access to numerous key ports throughout China's eastern coast? The answer to these questions can be found in a conflict initially between the British (and ultimately the French, Russians, and Americans) and the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century: the Opium Wars, two wars that had roots in late eighteenth-century China.
Shanghai’s Leading Indigenous and Expat Jazz Musicians
Authors: Marlow Eugene
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on jazz musicians in Shanghai. Once called the “Paris of the East,” today Shanghai represents the economic and entrepreneurial center of China; Beijing is the political heart of China. Both cities have their own vibe: Beijing—spread out like Los Angeles, is clogged by an increasing number of cars and life-threatening smog; Shanghai—compact like Manhattan, New York City, is cosmopolitan and eclectic. Both cities boast their own jazz scene. Beijing is full of expats and the jazz bands tend to be more uniformly Asian. Shanghai, on the other hand, reflects a much greater international mix of musicians.
“I Was Never the Hero That You Wanted Me to Be”
Authors: Nadkarni Samira
Published: January 2020

Jessica Jones’ trajectory primarily concerns gendered sociopolitical issues —including rape, rape culture, and patriarchal oppression. The show uses signifiers of film noir such as dark visual stylization, psychological representation, disturbed and obsessive sexuality, and complex gender politics as a way to critique the entrenched values of the white American elite. Jessica Jones depicts and engages with perceived threats to masculine identity such as invading and colonizing aliens from other worlds and super-powered beings on Earth who threaten conventionally understood ideas of “humanity”.
From Princess to Protagonist
Authors: Hemovich Vanessa
Published: January 2020

The rise of global communication and the pervasive nature of mass media entertainment has led to stark increases in the popularization of video games. With increases in popularity, socio-cultural representations of video gamers are also changing, particularly as more women take up game controllers and consoles to play. This rise in diversification of player demographics has, in part, spearheaded an upheaval of vocal reactions across the gaming community concerning the resounding lack of positive portrayals of female game characters and persistent criticisms of profound misogyny in the video games industry. This chapter interrogates the changes in characters and fandom amid the controversy of #gamergate.
Desegregating Dixie
Authors: Newman Mark
Published: January 2020

This book draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the multifaceted and complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining Africans Americans to the back of white churches and black schools and churches. However, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ in the mid-1940s, pressure from some black and white Catholics and secular change brought by the civil rights movement, sometimes with federal support, increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination behind and outside its walls.
Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South divided between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began segregation before or in anticipation of secular change, while elsewhere, and especially in the Deep South, they often tied Catholic to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than often assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation seldom brought integration.
Progressive White Catholics in the South and Civil Rights
Authors: Newman Mark
Published: January 2020

A progressive minority of white Catholics in the South strove to counter segregationist arguments and, when necessary, to persuade and pressure southern prelates to inaugurate and enforce desegregation. The progressive minority included some ordinaries, religious and diocesan priests, nuns, editors of diocesan newspapers, faculty and students at seminaries and Catholic and secular higher educational institutions, and laity. Progressives disseminated their message through pastoral letters, sermons, classes, editorials, articles and letters in the diocesan press, pamphlets and newsletters. With the approval of their ordinaries, progressives often formed Catholic organizations, most commonly interracial councils, to disseminate their message. Sometimes progressives cooperated with or joined civil rights organizations, and a few participated in civil rights protests. Despite the opposition of militant Catholic adherents of Jim Crow, progressive prelates positively influenced the views of some Catholic segregationists. Although progressive priests and laity lacked the authority of prelates, they also helped change some segregationists.
Delivered by Midwives
Authors: Luke Jenny M.
Published: January 2020

Delivering babies was merely one aspect of the broad role of African American midwives in the twentieth-century South. Yet little has been written about the type of care they provided, or how midwifery and maternity care evolved under the increasing presence of local and federal health care structures. Using evidence from nursing, medical, and public health journals of the era; primary sources from state and county departments of health; and personal accounts from varied practitioners, Delivered by Midwives: African American Midwifery in the Twentieth-Century South provides a new perspective on the childbirth experience of African American women and their maternity care providers during the twentieth century. Moving beyond the usual racial dichotomy, the monograph exposes a more complex shift in childbirth culture to reveal the changing expectations and agency of African American women in their rejection of a two-tier maternity care system, and their demands to be part of an inclusive, desegregated society. This book identifies valuable aspects of a maternity care model that were discarded in the name of progress. Today concern about maternal mortality and persistent racial disparities have forced a reassessment of maternity care and elements of the long-abandoned care model are being reincorporated into modern practice, answering current health care dilemmas by heeding lessons from the past.
Out of Slavery
Authors: Luke Jenny M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter reaches back into slavery to underpin our understanding of African American childbirth culture and the specific cultural motifs that have persisted for generations. It describes a relational concept of health brought from Africa that clashed with the Western medical philosophy and the complexity of practice that emerged as a result. Enslaved midwives were granted authority to practice based on their spirituality and ancestry, both features of the relational vision of wellness, and became revered figures in the slave community and often in the white community too. Beyond establishing the centrality of the lay midwife’s role, this chapter shows how slave women resisted their owners’ attempts to usurp their bodies and how they adopted their own methods of controlling their fertility. This chapter sets the historical and cultural backdrop for the book.
Problems of Racism and Challenges to Professionalism
Authors: Luke Jenny M.
Published: January 2020

Despite their recognized importance to maternity care African American nurse-midwives experienced both racial and professional discrimination. This chapter underscores the unyielding obstacles of racism. Issues of segregation, unequal pay for black nurses, and lack of funding led to the closure of the Tuskegee School of Nurse-Midwifery, and the American Association of Nurse-midwives determined that whiteness was central to its concept of the professional midwife. Physician-centered maternity care was advocated as a solution to what was termed racial dualism in health care and ultimately the implementation of the wartime Emergency Maternal and Infant Care accelerated the shift toward hospital birth.
Overcoming Challenges
Authors: Luke Jenny M.
Published: January 2020

As one explanation for the longevity and centrality of lay midwifery in southern childbirth culture, chapter 11 focuses on the lack of medical support and hospital facilities available to African Americans in the Jim Crow South. It reaches back to the early twentieth century and examines the challenges faced by black medical schools and hospitals, and the establishment of the National Medical Association. The problems associated with segregated facilities and the consequences of the Hill-Burton Act failed to ease the pressures on the black medical profession. The Slossfield Community Center in Birmingham Alabama is used as a case study to emphasize the both the obstacles faced by black hospitals and physicians, and the benefits of a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to wellness.
Midwifery Today and Its Potential for Tomorrow
Authors: Luke Jenny M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores the strengths of modern midwifery and identifies areas of concern for the future. A strong interconceptual role is vital to improving women’s health but the lack of diversity in the profession is hindering its potential. The chapter focuses on the work of the American College of Nurse-Midwives’ Midwives of Color Committee, the United States Midwifery Education, Regulation, and Association, and the International Center for Traditional Childbirth to explore the ways in which midwifery can stake a permanent claim in the lives of American women and maternity health.
Epilogue
Authors: Luke Jenny M.
Published: January 2020

The epilogue brings hope of positive change as the American College of Nurse-Midwives and the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynaecology work on common ground to solve the pressing issues of American maternity care. A reassessment of the essential inclusion of both macro-level and micro-level components of care leads to the conclusion that Dr. J. Edward Hill subscribes to: good health care is local and when community activism is supported by state and federal funding and integrated into the structures of medicine and politics change will happen.
Pariah and Dying to Live
Authors: Lanzendörfer Tim
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that zombie fictions enable us to reflect upon the meaning and possibility, and especially the conditions of possibility, for community. Read through Zygmunt Bauman and Jean-Luc Nancy, community becomes central to two novels less frequently read by critics, Bob Fingerman’s Pariah and Kim Paffenroth’s Dying to Live, novels which also share a thematic concern with humans who are not in danger from zombie attack. The two novels ultimately present nearly opposite versions of how community may be reconstituted in the wake of a zombie apocalypse, and so are instructive of our contemporary concern with the possibility of community.
“So Many Unmentionables About”
Authors: Lanzendörfer Tim
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its prequels. It suggests that critical disdain of mashup fiction to the contrary, the three novels deserve close attention to the things they do, and to foreground their work as parody. In engaging their original text’s complicated relation to race, class, and gender issues, they act directly on Jane Austen’s fiction; but at the same time, they also foreground the limits of the contemporary engagement with Austen. What the novels do is reflect simultaneously on the historical Austen text, the reception of Austen, and the contemporary moment’s systemic exclusions and violences.
Quentin Tarantino
Authors: Roche David
Published: January 2020

An in-depth study of all Tarantino’s feature films to date (from Reservoir Dogs to The Hateful Eight), Quentin Tarantino: A Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction argues that, far from wallowing in narcissism and solipsism, a charge directed not only at Tarantino but at metafiction in general, these self-conscious fictions do more than just reflexively foreground their status as artefacts; they offer metacommentaries that engage with the history of cultural representations and exalt the aesthetic, ethical and political potential of creation as re-recreation and resignification. By combining cultural studies and neo-formalist approaches, this book seeks to highlight how intimately the films’ poetics and politics are intertwined. Each chapter explores a specific salient feature, some of which have drawn much academic attention (history, race, gender, violence), others less so (narrative structure, style, music, theatricality). Ultimately, Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction places Tarantino’s films firmly in the legacy of Hawks, Godard, Leone and the New Hollywood, and revises the image of cool purveyor of pop culture the American director cultivated at the beginning of his career by foregrounding the breadth and layeredness of the films’ engagement with cultural history, high and low, screen and print, American, East Asian and European. The films produced by the Tarantino team are formal invitations for viewers to similarly engage with, and reflect on, the material, and delight in doing so.
“Black Man, White Hell”
Authors: Roche David
Published: January 2020

Pursuing arguments made by Adilifu Nama in Race on the QT, it demonstrates that the films foreground and criticize the racialized and racist terms of the material they are working with. In reflecting on past representations, the films are also reflecting on present representations, and thus on contemporary culture. They testify to an awareness of the historicity of all representations. The chapter argues that the films’ awareness of the complexity of racial representations, of their history, of the racial construction of all bodies, of the multiplicity of identities, of the difficulty of establishing a relationship with another without excluding someone else, of the necessity and limitations of deconstruction and resignification, prove that they are not instances of shameless white appropriation but problematized engagements with racial politics.