Jennifer Donahue
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496828637
- eISBN:
- 9781496828743
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496828637.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Caribbean women have long utilized the medium of fiction to break the pervasive silence surrounding abuse and exploitation. Contemporary works by authors such as Tiphanie Yanique and Nicole ...
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Caribbean women have long utilized the medium of fiction to break the pervasive silence surrounding abuse and exploitation. Contemporary works by authors such as Tiphanie Yanique and Nicole Dennis-Benn illustrate the deep-rooted consequences of trauma based on gender, sexuality, and race, and trace the steps that women take to find safer ground from oppression. Taking Flight takes a closer look at the immigrant experience in contemporary Caribbean women’s writing and considers the effects of restrictive social mores. In the texts examined in Taking Flight, culturally sanctioned violence impacts the ability of female characters to be at home in their bodies or in the spaces they inhabit. The works draw attention to the historic racialization and sexualization of Black women’s bodies and continue the legacy of narrating Black women’s long-standing contestation of systems of oppression. Arguing that there is a clear link between trauma, shame, and migration, with trauma serving as a precursor to the protagonists’ emigration, the work focuses on how female bodies are policed, how moral, racial, and sexual codes are linked, and how the enforcement of social norms can function as a form of trauma. Taking Flight positions flight as a powerful counter to disempowerment and considers how flight, whether through dissociation or migration, operates as a form of resistance.Less
Caribbean women have long utilized the medium of fiction to break the pervasive silence surrounding abuse and exploitation. Contemporary works by authors such as Tiphanie Yanique and Nicole Dennis-Benn illustrate the deep-rooted consequences of trauma based on gender, sexuality, and race, and trace the steps that women take to find safer ground from oppression. Taking Flight takes a closer look at the immigrant experience in contemporary Caribbean women’s writing and considers the effects of restrictive social mores. In the texts examined in Taking Flight, culturally sanctioned violence impacts the ability of female characters to be at home in their bodies or in the spaces they inhabit. The works draw attention to the historic racialization and sexualization of Black women’s bodies and continue the legacy of narrating Black women’s long-standing contestation of systems of oppression. Arguing that there is a clear link between trauma, shame, and migration, with trauma serving as a precursor to the protagonists’ emigration, the work focuses on how female bodies are policed, how moral, racial, and sexual codes are linked, and how the enforcement of social norms can function as a form of trauma. Taking Flight positions flight as a powerful counter to disempowerment and considers how flight, whether through dissociation or migration, operates as a form of resistance.
Glen Donnar
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496828576
- eISBN:
- 9781496828620
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496828576.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The association of the attacks of 9/11 with Hollywood science fiction and disaster spectacle was immediate and pervasive. Succeeding calls in media and politics for the reassuring return of ‘strong’ ...
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The association of the attacks of 9/11 with Hollywood science fiction and disaster spectacle was immediate and pervasive. Succeeding calls in media and politics for the reassuring return of ‘strong’ masculine types—predominantly drawn from Hollywood westerns, action and war films—were widespread, revealing renewed cultural fears of threats to America from both within and without.Troubling Masculinities is the first dedicated multi-genre study of representations of masculinity in encounters with terror in post-9/11 American cinema. The book examines the impact of “terror-Others”, from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, across a broad range of sub-genres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, post-apocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and ‘home invasion’ horror, action-thrillers and ‘frontier’ westerns—especially in relation to cinematic representations of masculinity in previous periods of national turmoil.
The book demonstrates that the supposed reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Engaging critical arguments about how Hollywood cinema attempts to resolve male crisis in part through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this unraveling reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they encounter. The book concludes by showing how interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nation continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, Troubling Masculinities offers an important counternarrative in this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.Less
The association of the attacks of 9/11 with Hollywood science fiction and disaster spectacle was immediate and pervasive. Succeeding calls in media and politics for the reassuring return of ‘strong’ masculine types—predominantly drawn from Hollywood westerns, action and war films—were widespread, revealing renewed cultural fears of threats to America from both within and without.Troubling Masculinities is the first dedicated multi-genre study of representations of masculinity in encounters with terror in post-9/11 American cinema. The book examines the impact of “terror-Others”, from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, across a broad range of sub-genres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, post-apocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and ‘home invasion’ horror, action-thrillers and ‘frontier’ westerns—especially in relation to cinematic representations of masculinity in previous periods of national turmoil.
The book demonstrates that the supposed reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Engaging critical arguments about how Hollywood cinema attempts to resolve male crisis in part through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this unraveling reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they encounter. The book concludes by showing how interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nation continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, Troubling Masculinities offers an important counternarrative in this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.
Meghann Meeusen
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496828644
- eISBN:
- 9781496828699
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496828644.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Adaptation studies scholars suggest that no matter how interesting it may be to pick apart a film’s consistency with and departure from its source, these approaches can be limiting because books and ...
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Adaptation studies scholars suggest that no matter how interesting it may be to pick apart a film’s consistency with and departure from its source, these approaches can be limiting because books and movies operate as two very different mediums. Children’s Books on the Big Screen moves away from this approach by tracing a pattern across films for young viewers to highlight a consistent trend: when films are adapted from children’s and YA books, concepts like self/other, male/female, and adult/child become more strongly contrasted and more diametrically opposed in the film version. Children’s Books on the Big Screen describes this as binary polarization, suggesting that more stark opposition between concepts leads to shifts in the messages that texts send, particularly when it comes to representations of gender, race, and childhood.
After introducing why critics need a new way of thinking about children’s adapted texts, Children’s Books on the Big Screen uses middle-grade fantasy adaptations to consider the reason for binary polarization and looks at the ideological results of polarized binaries in adolescent films and movies adapted from picturebooks. The text also explores movies adapted from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to dig into instances when multiple films are adapted from a single source and ends with pragmatic classroom application, suggesting teachers might utilize this theory to help students think critically about movies created by the Walt Disney corporation. Drawing from numerous popular contemporary examples, Children’s Books on the Big Screen posits a theory that can begin to explain what happens—and what is at stake—when children’s and young adult books are made into movies.Less
Adaptation studies scholars suggest that no matter how interesting it may be to pick apart a film’s consistency with and departure from its source, these approaches can be limiting because books and movies operate as two very different mediums. Children’s Books on the Big Screen moves away from this approach by tracing a pattern across films for young viewers to highlight a consistent trend: when films are adapted from children’s and YA books, concepts like self/other, male/female, and adult/child become more strongly contrasted and more diametrically opposed in the film version. Children’s Books on the Big Screen describes this as binary polarization, suggesting that more stark opposition between concepts leads to shifts in the messages that texts send, particularly when it comes to representations of gender, race, and childhood.
After introducing why critics need a new way of thinking about children’s adapted texts, Children’s Books on the Big Screen uses middle-grade fantasy adaptations to consider the reason for binary polarization and looks at the ideological results of polarized binaries in adolescent films and movies adapted from picturebooks. The text also explores movies adapted from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to dig into instances when multiple films are adapted from a single source and ends with pragmatic classroom application, suggesting teachers might utilize this theory to help students think critically about movies created by the Walt Disney corporation. Drawing from numerous popular contemporary examples, Children’s Books on the Big Screen posits a theory that can begin to explain what happens—and what is at stake—when children’s and young adult books are made into movies.
Anne Gessler
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496827616
- eISBN:
- 9781496827562
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496827616.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development intervenes in southern labor, civil rights, and social movement histories to counter the misconception that cooperatives are ...
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Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development intervenes in southern labor, civil rights, and social movement histories to counter the misconception that cooperatives are merely proto-political entities serving as training grounds for or as ancillary to institutionalized social justice movements critiquing capitalism and its fraught connections to gender, race, and class. To historically and theoretically anchor the book, the book examines seven neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice activists animated successive generations of locally-informed, regional cooperative networks stimulating urban growth in New Orleans. Debating alternative forms of social organization within the city’s plethora of integrated spaces, women, people of color, and laborers blended neighborhood-based African, Caribbean, and European communal traditions with transnational cooperative principles to democratize exploitative systems of consumption, production, and exchange. From utopian socialist workers unions and Rochdale grocery stores to black liberationist theater collectives and community gardens, their cooperative businesses integrated marginalized residents into democratic governance while equally distributing profits among members.Less
Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development intervenes in southern labor, civil rights, and social movement histories to counter the misconception that cooperatives are merely proto-political entities serving as training grounds for or as ancillary to institutionalized social justice movements critiquing capitalism and its fraught connections to gender, race, and class. To historically and theoretically anchor the book, the book examines seven neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice activists animated successive generations of locally-informed, regional cooperative networks stimulating urban growth in New Orleans. Debating alternative forms of social organization within the city’s plethora of integrated spaces, women, people of color, and laborers blended neighborhood-based African, Caribbean, and European communal traditions with transnational cooperative principles to democratize exploitative systems of consumption, production, and exchange. From utopian socialist workers unions and Rochdale grocery stores to black liberationist theater collectives and community gardens, their cooperative businesses integrated marginalized residents into democratic governance while equally distributing profits among members.
Frederick Luis Aldama (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496828019
- eISBN:
- 9781496828002
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496828019.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia brings together scholarship that interrogates mainstream comic book traditions that have negatively stereotyped as well as positively ...
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Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia brings together scholarship that interrogates mainstream comic book traditions that have negatively stereotyped as well as positively complicated Indigenous identities and experiences of terra America and Australasia. It also includes scholarship that analyzes how Indigenous comic book creators are themselves clearing new visual-verbal narrative spaces for articulating complex histories, cultures, experiences, and identities. Here, the volume also seeks to shed light on how the violent wounds of colonial and imperial domination across the globe connect Indigenous comic books creators in their expressions of survival, resistance, and affirmation. Comics analyzed include, but are not limited to, the following: The Phantom, Uncanny X-Men, Comanche Moon, Captain Canuck, Alpha Flight, Fighting Indians of the West, Footrot Flats, Ngarimu Te Tohu Toa, Turey el Taíno, La Borinqueña, Manuel Antonio Ay, Zotz, Will I See?, Super Indian, Deer Woman, Moonshot, Trickster: Native American Tales, Pablo’s Inferno, Supercholo, La Chola Power, Turbochaski, and Supay. This volume reminds the world of the ways pop culture has violently misrepresented Native and Indigenous peoples. It reminds the world of the significant presence of Native and Indigenous artists in creating counter-narratives that powerfully shape global histories and cultures.Less
Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia brings together scholarship that interrogates mainstream comic book traditions that have negatively stereotyped as well as positively complicated Indigenous identities and experiences of terra America and Australasia. It also includes scholarship that analyzes how Indigenous comic book creators are themselves clearing new visual-verbal narrative spaces for articulating complex histories, cultures, experiences, and identities. Here, the volume also seeks to shed light on how the violent wounds of colonial and imperial domination across the globe connect Indigenous comic books creators in their expressions of survival, resistance, and affirmation. Comics analyzed include, but are not limited to, the following: The Phantom, Uncanny X-Men, Comanche Moon, Captain Canuck, Alpha Flight, Fighting Indians of the West, Footrot Flats, Ngarimu Te Tohu Toa, Turey el Taíno, La Borinqueña, Manuel Antonio Ay, Zotz, Will I See?, Super Indian, Deer Woman, Moonshot, Trickster: Native American Tales, Pablo’s Inferno, Supercholo, La Chola Power, Turbochaski, and Supay. This volume reminds the world of the ways pop culture has violently misrepresented Native and Indigenous peoples. It reminds the world of the significant presence of Native and Indigenous artists in creating counter-narratives that powerfully shape global histories and cultures.
Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496828347
- eISBN:
- 9781496828392
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496828347.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature surveys food’s function in children’s texts, showing how the socio-cultural contexts of food reveal children’s agency through examining texts that vary from ...
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Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature surveys food’s function in children’s texts, showing how the socio-cultural contexts of food reveal children’s agency through examining texts that vary from historical to contemporary, non-canonical to classics, the Anglo-American to multicultural traditions, including a variety of genres, formats, and audiences: realism, fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, YA novels, and film.
The first chapter tracks children’s cookbooks over 150 years to show how adults’ expectations change based on shifting ideologies of child capability. Subsequent chapters survey canonical authors. Social work theory, British rural and urban cultures, and poverty inform the analysis of the foodways that underlie Beatrix Potter’s animal tales. Investigating Jewish immigration and foodways, food manufacturing, and roadside/programmatic architecture reveals Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen as an immigrant Jewish and natively American work. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books work as a künstlerroman; Mary Douglas’s semiotic analysis and the history of honey and bees show Pooh as a poet who celebrates food. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books contrast with Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark series: differing foodways showcase competing cultural and environmental values.
The final chapters examine intersections of geography, history, and food in contemporary texts. Francesca Lia Block’s Dangerous Angels reflects Los Angeles culture. Disney•Pixar’s Ratatouille showcases French haute cuisine in its story of otherness. In One Crazy Summer and its sequels, Rita Williams-Garcia tracks the movement of African American internal diasporas, through southern foodways, soul food, and the Black Panthers’ breakfast program. Refugee Studies demonstrate how food is a primary signifier of the difficulties posed by forced migration in Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again.Less
Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature surveys food’s function in children’s texts, showing how the socio-cultural contexts of food reveal children’s agency through examining texts that vary from historical to contemporary, non-canonical to classics, the Anglo-American to multicultural traditions, including a variety of genres, formats, and audiences: realism, fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, YA novels, and film.
The first chapter tracks children’s cookbooks over 150 years to show how adults’ expectations change based on shifting ideologies of child capability. Subsequent chapters survey canonical authors. Social work theory, British rural and urban cultures, and poverty inform the analysis of the foodways that underlie Beatrix Potter’s animal tales. Investigating Jewish immigration and foodways, food manufacturing, and roadside/programmatic architecture reveals Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen as an immigrant Jewish and natively American work. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books work as a künstlerroman; Mary Douglas’s semiotic analysis and the history of honey and bees show Pooh as a poet who celebrates food. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books contrast with Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark series: differing foodways showcase competing cultural and environmental values.
The final chapters examine intersections of geography, history, and food in contemporary texts. Francesca Lia Block’s Dangerous Angels reflects Los Angeles culture. Disney•Pixar’s Ratatouille showcases French haute cuisine in its story of otherness. In One Crazy Summer and its sequels, Rita Williams-Garcia tracks the movement of African American internal diasporas, through southern foodways, soul food, and the Black Panthers’ breakfast program. Refugee Studies demonstrate how food is a primary signifier of the difficulties posed by forced migration in Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again.
Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496827623
- eISBN:
- 9781496827678
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496827623.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
Many studies of the monster and monstrosity have focused on women, and most do so (at least in part) in relation to some type of visual culture. However, few have examined the appearance of monstrous ...
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Many studies of the monster and monstrosity have focused on women, and most do so (at least in part) in relation to some type of visual culture. However, few have examined the appearance of monstrous women in comics in particular. Like horror films, sequential art has an abundance of monsters and fantastical beings. No less important to this volume than the sheer abundance of monsters within comics is the fact that they are often marked by gender, race, and disability in complex ways. Each chapter provides a text-critical analysis of a particular (or perhaps several) comic, manga, or graphic novel in order to ask how the monster makes meaning within the text(s) and, what it means for the monster to be coded as a woman. Further, building on the work of monster studies scholars, such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Barbara Creed, Margrit Shildrick, and Julia Kristeva, each author also reflects on the various ways their analysis of the comic, and the meaning made by the monstrous woman therein, connects to the broader cultural context in question. In order to further converse with existing scholarship on monsters, on gender, and to further enable dialogue between chapters, this book is organized along a number of common themes: power, embodiment, child-bearing, childhood, and performance. Women are often called monsters. With this collection, authors use comics to try to figure out what that monstrosity means and what women, scholars, and comics have done and should do about it.Less
Many studies of the monster and monstrosity have focused on women, and most do so (at least in part) in relation to some type of visual culture. However, few have examined the appearance of monstrous women in comics in particular. Like horror films, sequential art has an abundance of monsters and fantastical beings. No less important to this volume than the sheer abundance of monsters within comics is the fact that they are often marked by gender, race, and disability in complex ways. Each chapter provides a text-critical analysis of a particular (or perhaps several) comic, manga, or graphic novel in order to ask how the monster makes meaning within the text(s) and, what it means for the monster to be coded as a woman. Further, building on the work of monster studies scholars, such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Barbara Creed, Margrit Shildrick, and Julia Kristeva, each author also reflects on the various ways their analysis of the comic, and the meaning made by the monstrous woman therein, connects to the broader cultural context in question. In order to further converse with existing scholarship on monsters, on gender, and to further enable dialogue between chapters, this book is organized along a number of common themes: power, embodiment, child-bearing, childhood, and performance. Women are often called monsters. With this collection, authors use comics to try to figure out what that monstrosity means and what women, scholars, and comics have done and should do about it.
Matthew Teutsch (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496827821
- eISBN:
- 9781496827876
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496827821.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
During his career, Frank Yerby wrote 33 novels, numerous short stories, and poetry, making him one of the most prolific and financially successful African American authors of all time. However, while ...
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During his career, Frank Yerby wrote 33 novels, numerous short stories, and poetry, making him one of the most prolific and financially successful African American authors of all time. However, while some critics such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps initially praised Yerby, many began to become frustrated with his lack of overt engagement with segregation and racial oppression in his work and personal statements. Infamously, Robert Bone called Yerby “the prince of the pulpsters” in his 1958 The Negro Novel in America. Reconsidering Frank Yerby positions Yerby within the African American literary tradition and emphasizes his role, as Darwin Turner puts it, as the “debunker of myths.” Reconsidering Frank Yerby achieves these goals by highlighting Yerby’s shifting perceptions regarding his role as a writer throughout his career and through an examination of his work in relation to the social protest novels and literature of writers such as Richard Wright, the reactions of his readers, his exploration of religion and existentialism, his deconstruction of race, his transnational focus, and other topics.Less
During his career, Frank Yerby wrote 33 novels, numerous short stories, and poetry, making him one of the most prolific and financially successful African American authors of all time. However, while some critics such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps initially praised Yerby, many began to become frustrated with his lack of overt engagement with segregation and racial oppression in his work and personal statements. Infamously, Robert Bone called Yerby “the prince of the pulpsters” in his 1958 The Negro Novel in America. Reconsidering Frank Yerby positions Yerby within the African American literary tradition and emphasizes his role, as Darwin Turner puts it, as the “debunker of myths.” Reconsidering Frank Yerby achieves these goals by highlighting Yerby’s shifting perceptions regarding his role as a writer throughout his career and through an examination of his work in relation to the social protest novels and literature of writers such as Richard Wright, the reactions of his readers, his exploration of religion and existentialism, his deconstruction of race, his transnational focus, and other topics.
Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Alane Wilson (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496827135
- eISBN:
- 9781496827180
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496827135.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
While the critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, the texts selected for discussion in both classrooms and ...
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While the critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, the texts selected for discussion in both classrooms and scholarship has remained static and small. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give dominate conversations among scholars and critics—but they are far from the only texts in need of analysis.
Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limited perspective by bringing together a series of essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have been overlooked and under-discussed until now. The collection tackles a diverse range of subjects—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice—but is united by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting glimpse of a field that continues to grow and change even as it explodes with popularity, and would make an excellent addition to the library of any scholar, instructor, or reader of young adult literature.Less
While the critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, the texts selected for discussion in both classrooms and scholarship has remained static and small. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give dominate conversations among scholars and critics—but they are far from the only texts in need of analysis.
Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limited perspective by bringing together a series of essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have been overlooked and under-discussed until now. The collection tackles a diverse range of subjects—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice—but is united by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting glimpse of a field that continues to grow and change even as it explodes with popularity, and would make an excellent addition to the library of any scholar, instructor, or reader of young adult literature.
Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496827456
- eISBN:
- 9781496827500
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496827456.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx Young Adult Literature signals a much-needed approach to the study of Latinx young adult literature. This edited volume addresses themes ...
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Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx Young Adult Literature signals a much-needed approach to the study of Latinx young adult literature. This edited volume addresses themes of outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx children’s and young adult literature. The collection insists that to understand Latinx youth identities, it is necessary to shed light on outsiders within an already marginalized ethnic group: nerds, goths, geeks, freaks, and others who might not fit within Latinx popular cultural paradigms such as the chola and cholo, identities that are ever-present in films, television, and the Internet. In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks, the through-line of being an outsider intersects with discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The volume addresses the following questions. What constitutes “outsider” identities? In what ways are these “outsider” identities shaped by mainstream myths around Latinx young people, particularly with the common stereotype of the struggling, underachieving inner city Latinx teen? How do these young adults reclaim what it means to be an “outsider,” “weirdo,” “nerd,” or “goth,” and how can the reclamation of these marginalized identities expand much-needed conversations around authenticity and narrow understandings of what constitutes Latinx identity? How does Chicanx/Latinx children’s and YA literature represent, challenge, question, or expand discussions surrounding identities that have been deemed outsiders/outliers?Less
Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx Young Adult Literature signals a much-needed approach to the study of Latinx young adult literature. This edited volume addresses themes of outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx children’s and young adult literature. The collection insists that to understand Latinx youth identities, it is necessary to shed light on outsiders within an already marginalized ethnic group: nerds, goths, geeks, freaks, and others who might not fit within Latinx popular cultural paradigms such as the chola and cholo, identities that are ever-present in films, television, and the Internet. In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks, the through-line of being an outsider intersects with discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The volume addresses the following questions. What constitutes “outsider” identities? In what ways are these “outsider” identities shaped by mainstream myths around Latinx young people, particularly with the common stereotype of the struggling, underachieving inner city Latinx teen? How do these young adults reclaim what it means to be an “outsider,” “weirdo,” “nerd,” or “goth,” and how can the reclamation of these marginalized identities expand much-needed conversations around authenticity and narrow understandings of what constitutes Latinx identity? How does Chicanx/Latinx children’s and YA literature represent, challenge, question, or expand discussions surrounding identities that have been deemed outsiders/outliers?
Jockomo
The Music of the Netherlands Antilles
Black and Brown Planets
Race and the Obama Phenomenon
Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance
The Origins of Comics
Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation
