Research & Innovation

Recognizing that the hemispheric slave trade is a piratical act in the context of the novel, I propose that Delany suggests that slaves too should engage in piracy as a response to the illegal commercial activities undergirding the peculiar institution. In the novel, Blake’s act of piracy exists both at the register of the material theft of property and at the level of the symbolic restructuring of social and political order. By exploring the economic impact of Blake as pirate, Delany presents a form of Black participation in the market that disrupts the proper operations of exchange and doubly creates a Black market. Read alongside the significant historical events of the mid-nineteenth century, Blake helps frame my interest in the intersections of economic freedom and liberal principles as they come to bear on the enslaved Black subject. This mode of analysis reinvigorates of the interplay between economics and literature, forcing us to engage with analyses of power that account for commercial subjectivities emerging in the context of slavery in the Americas, and surfaces the overlooked processes of illegal exchange in the novel.

from the publishers:

The chronicle of a fall and spring in Berlin during the peak influx of refugees into Europe in 2015-16, Joshua Weiner’s Berlin Notebook opens a new view on German society’s attempt to cope with an impossible situation: millions of people displaced by the Syrian civil war, fleeing violence, and seeking safety and the possibilities of a new life in the west. As some Germans, feeling the burden of the nation’s dark past, try to aid and shelter desperate asylum seekers, others are skeptical of the government’s ability to contain the growing numbers; they feel the danger of hostile strangers, and the threat to the nation’s culture and identity. Unlike other contemporary reports on the situation in Europe, Weiner’s sui generis writing includes interviews not only with refugees from the east, but also everyday Berliners, natives and ex-pats – musicians, poets, shopkeepers, students, activists, rabbis, museum guides, artists, intellectuals, and those, too, who have joined the rising far-right Alternative for Germany party, and the Pegida movement against immigration. Intermixed with interviews, reportage, and meditations on life in Europe’s fastest growing capital city, Weiner thinks about the language and literature of the country, weaving together strands of its ancient and more recent history with meditations on Goethe, Brecht, Arendt, Heidegger, Joseph Roth and others that inflect our thinking about refugees, nationhood, and our ethical connection to strangers.

"Hinc depicts the reality of a youth attempting to survive social unrest and political turmoil without guidance. Taher’s cousin, Ahmed, is recently released from an Egyptian prison on false charges of conspiring with fundamentalists. The years of imprisonment and severe abuse that Ahmed is forced to endure develop his fanatic beliefs. “We were one family in suffering and in the words of the Holy book. We supported each other, even, or maybe most of all, when we were forced to turn on each other.” Ahmed’s trauma leads him to join the community of fundamentalists that he is now bonded with. After listening to Ahmed’s stories of captivity, torture, and community, Taher resolves to accompany him to Afghanistan to tend to the wounded fighting the Russians. Ahmed insists that Taher cannot go without his parents’ permission, but both Taher’s mother and father have passed away. It is easy to give into the idea that Taher’s life, and the lives of countless others, may have been different, had one or both of his parents been alive to dissuade him from going to Afghanistan.”

-Ani Kazarian, Consequence Magazine

Read more about To Kill the Other.

 

Matt wears a black suit every day. No, not because his mom died - although she did, and it sucks. But he wears the suit for his gig at the local funeral home, which pays way better than the Cluck Bucket, and he needs the income since his dad can't handle the bills (or anything, really) on his own. So while Dad's snagging bottles of whiskey, Matt's snagging fifteen bucks an hour. Not bad. But everything else? Not good. Then Matt meets Lovey. Crazy name, and she's been through more crazy stuff than he can imagine. Yet Lovey never cries. She's tough. Really tough. Tough in the way Matt wishes he could be. Which is maybe why he's drawn to her, and definitely why he can't seem to shake her. Because there's nothing more hopeful than finding a person who understands your loneliness - and who can maybe even help take it away.

The author of the highly acclaimed Posthumous Keats, praised as “full of . . . those fleeting moments we call genius” (Washington Post), now provides a window into the lives of Keats and his contemporaries in this brilliant new work.

Simone C. Drake spent the first several decades of her life learning how to love and protect herself, a black woman, from the systems designed to facilitate her harm and marginalization. But when she gave birth to the first of her three sons, she quickly learned that black boys would need protection from these very same systems—systems dead set on the static, homogenous representations of black masculinity perpetuated in the media and our cultural discourse.

In When We Imagine Grace, Drake borrows from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to bring imagination to the center of black masculinity studies—allowing individual black men to exempt themselves and their fates from a hateful, ignorant society and open themselves up as active agents at the center of their own stories. Against a backdrop of crisis, Drake brings forth the narratives of black men who have imagined grace for themselves. We meet African American cowboy, Nat Love, and Drake’s own grandfather, who served in the first black military unit to fight in World War II. Synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies, Drake analyzes black fathers and daughters, the valorization of black criminals, the black entrepreneurial pursuits of Marcus Garvey, Berry Gordy, and Jay-Z, and the denigration and celebration of gay black men: Cornelius Eady, Antoine Dodson, and Kehinde Wiley. With a powerful command of its subjects and a passionate dedication to hope, When We Imagine Grace gives us a new way of seeing and knowing black masculinity—sophisticated in concept and bracingly vivid in telling.

A survey of the Byzantine tradition of tropes and figures, with a discussion of trope and figure function and an appendix of frequently references and used figures (with illustrations).

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Mary Shelley’s frightening fiend has a long tradition of visually thrilling movie audiences. Yet there is more to this hulking hodge-podge of human parts than meets the eye, lest we forget how linguistically savvy he is in the novel.

By focusing on the issues of double-consciousness, migrant assimilation, and the subjugation of women, Faradji demonstrates how select Middle Eastern characters embody quintessentially postcolonial predicaments and challenge global understandings of the Middle East.

Spain, 1977. Military rule is over. Bootleg punk music oozes out of illegal basement bars, uprisings spread across towns, fascists fight anarchists for political control, and students perform protest art in the city center, rioting against the old government, the undecided new order, against the universities, against themselves