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Breaking the Blockade: The Bahamas during the Civil War

Charles D. Ross

On April 16, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued a blockade of the Confederate coastline. The largely agrarian South did not have the industrial base to succeed in a protracted conflict. What it ... More

On April 16, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued a blockade of the Confederate coastline. The largely agrarian South did not have the industrial base to succeed in a protracted conflict. What it did have — and what England and other foreign countries wanted — was cotton and tobacco. Industrious men soon began to connect the dots between Confederate and British needs. As the blockade grew, the blockade runners became quite ingenious in finding ways around the barriers. Boats worked their way back and forth from the Confederacy to Nassau and England, and everyone from scoundrels to naval officers wanted a piece of the action. Poor men became rich in a single transaction, and dances and drinking — from the posh Royal Victoria hotel to the boarding houses lining the harbor — were the order of the day. British, United States, and Confederate sailors intermingled in the streets, eyeing each other warily as boats snuck in and out of Nassau. But it was all to come crashing down as the blockade finally tightened and the final Confederate ports were captured. The story of this great carnival has been mentioned in a variety of sources but never examined in detail. This book focuses on the political dynamics and tensions that existed between the United States Consular Service, the governor of the Bahamas, and the representatives of the southern and English firms making a large profit off the blockade. Filled with intrigue, drama, and colorful characters, this is an important Civil War story that has not yet been told.Less

Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space

James Gordon Williams

This book provides an interpretive framework for understanding how African American creative improvisers think of musical space. Featuring a Foreword by eminent scholar Robin D.G. Kelley, this is the ... More

This book provides an interpretive framework for understanding how African American creative improvisers think of musical space. Featuring a Foreword by eminent scholar Robin D.G. Kelley, this is the first critical improvisation studies book that uses Black Geographies theory to examine the spatial values of musical expression in the improvisational and compositional practices of trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill. Bar lines in this book serve as a notational and spatial metaphor for social constraints connected to systemic and structural white supremacy. Crossing them therefore applies not only to conceptions of Black spatiality in musical practices but also to how African American musicians address structural barriers to fight the social injustices that obstruct freedom and full citizenship for African Americans and other marginalized groups. Defined by both liminal and quotidian reality, Black musical space, like Black feminist thought, is about theorizing through the lived experiences of Black people which reflect different genders, sexual identities, political stances, across improvisational eras. Using this theory of Black musical space, the book explains how these dynamic musicians explicitly and implicitly articulate humanity through compositional and improvisational practices, some of which interface with contemporary social movements like Black Lives Matter. Consequently, Crossing Bar Lines not only fills a significant gap in the literature on African American, activist musical improvisation and contemporary social movements, but it gives the reader an understanding of the complexity of African American musical practices relative to fluid political identities and sensibilities.Less

Improvising Sabor: Cuban Dance Music in New York

Sue Miller

The term ‘salsa’ has come to stand for a particular standardized set of performance practices and the dominant narrative of its origins, particularly through the lens of the Fania Records story, has ... More

The term ‘salsa’ has come to stand for a particular standardized set of performance practices and the dominant narrative of its origins, particularly through the lens of the Fania Records story, has tended to over-simplify Latin music history in the USA. This book documents an understudied period of Latin music history across the divide of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 to demonstrate a wider narrative which includes the history of the influential charanga orquestas of 1960s New York. A típico aesthetic is shown to be an important one with the combination of charanga and conjunto stylings giving rise to a plurality of ensemble types, each with a distinctive sabor and varying degrees of cubanía. In this book Miller thus examines the New York contexts for Cuban dance music performance in the first part of the twentieth century before considering the mid twentieth-century developments. The text makes its argument for a distinctive New York sabor through interviews with performers and through the sensitive transcription and analysis of recordings by Orquesta Broadway, Pacheco y su Charanga, Charlie Palmieri’s Charanga Duboney, Eddie Palmieri’s La Perfecta, and Ray Barretto’s Charanga Moderna, amongst others. Analytical transcriptions of improvisations, in dialogue with musicians’ own perspectives, highlight a specific Latin music performance aesthetic or sabor that is rooted in both Cuban dance music forms and the rich performance culture of Latin New York.Less

Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Zoe Jaques (eds)

While differences and conflicts between younger and older generations have been frequently studied in children’s literature criticism, this book breaks new ground by arguing for the fundamental role ... More

While differences and conflicts between younger and older generations have been frequently studied in children’s literature criticism, this book breaks new ground by arguing for the fundamental role of children’s and YA literature and film in propagating and facilitating a culture of generational interconnections. The collection highlights the potential of children’s literature studies as a site of intergenerational solidarity and opens possibilities for a new socially significant inquiry into the culture of childhood that addresses urgent challenges posed by the rapid aging of the global population. The sixteen contributions—by international scholars from Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the UK and the US—explore representations of intergenerational relations in classical texts and contemporary ones to show the importance of intergenerational bonds for the sustainability and welfare of societies. Some of the contributions also focus on writing children’s literature as an intergenerational practice of empathy between adult authors and young audiences.Less

Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity

Zack Kruse

Steve Ditko (1927–2018) is one of the most important contributors to American comic books. As the cocreator of Spider-Man and sole creator of Dr. Strange, Ditko made an indelible mark on American ... More

Steve Ditko (1927–2018) is one of the most important contributors to American comic books. As the cocreator of Spider-Man and sole creator of Dr. Strange, Ditko made an indelible mark on American popular culture. Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity resets the conversation about his heady and powerful work. Always inward facing, Ditko's narratives employed superhero and supernatural fantasy in the service of self-examination, and with characters like the Question, Mr. A, and Static, Ditko turned ordinary superhero comics into philosophic treatises. Many of Ditko's philosophy-driven comics show a clear debt to ideas found in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Unfortunately, readers often reduce Ditko's work to a mouthpiece for Rand's vision. Mysterious Travelers unsettles this notion by theorizing a major strand of liberal thought yet to be explored in academic discourse. Conscripting the popular mind power and New Thought movements into the rhetoric of libertarianism and later, Reagan-era neoliberalism, Ditko’s work provides access to a “mystic liberalism” that leverages the so-called power of positive thinking for political and philosophic aims. Mysterious Travelers also provides a critical reexamination of Ditko’s “right to kill” for fictional characters as well as significant insights into the racial history of Dr. Strange.Less

New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990

Benjamin Lapidus

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the ... More

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. This book seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, the book examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. The book studies this sound in detail and in its context. It offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, the book treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, it recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally.Less

Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process

Allen H. Redmon (ed.)

Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process explores the ways in which cross-cultural adaptations often stage a collusion between competing cultural capital. The collusion conceals and ... More

Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process explores the ways in which cross-cultural adaptations often stage a collusion between competing cultural capital. The collusion conceals and reveals commonalities and differences between these cultural traditions before giving way to the differences that can distinguish one textual expression from another, just as it ultimately distinguishes one set of readers from another. An adaptation of any sort, but especially those that cross accepted stereotypes, or geographic or political boundaries, provide spectators space to negotiate attitudes and ideas that might otherwise lay latent in the text. Spectators are left to parse through each, often with special attention to the differences that exist between two expressions. Each new set of readers, each generation, distinguishes itself from an earlier set of readers, even as they exist along the same family tree. Given enough time, some new shared organizing strategy emerges until a new encounter or new expression of a text restarts the adaptational process every adaptation can trigger. Taken together, the chapters in Next Generation Adaptation each argue that the texts they consider foreground the kinds of space that exists between texts, between political commitments, between ethical obligations that every filmic text can open when the text is experienced as an adaptation. The chapters esteem the expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples, two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase another.Less

Ode to Gen X: Institutional Cynicism in Stranger Things and 1980s Film

Melissa Vosen Callens

Even for the casual viewer, the Netflix series Stranger Things will likely feel familiar, reminiscent of popular 1980s coming-of-age movies. While Stranger Things and these classic 1980s films are ... More

Even for the casual viewer, the Netflix series Stranger Things will likely feel familiar, reminiscent of popular 1980s coming-of-age movies. While Stranger Things and these classic 1980s films are all tales of childhood friendship and shared adventures, they are also narratives that reflect and shape the burgeoning cynicism of the 1980s. Throughout Ode to X: Institutional Cynicism in “Stranger Things” and 1980s Film, Melissa Vosen Callens explores the parallels between iconic 1980s films featuring children and teenagers and the first three seasons of Stranger Things, moving beyond the 1980s Easter eggs to a common underlying narrative: Generation X’s (Gen X) growing distrust in American institutions. Throughout, Vosen Callens demonstrates how Stranger Things draws on popular 1980s popular culture to pay tribute to Gen X’s evolving outlook on three key and interwoven American institutions: family, economy, and government.Less

Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900-1965

Justin Mellette

Peculiar Whiteness argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have ... More

Peculiar Whiteness argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as ‘white trash’ have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety-inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or with other troubling conditions such as physical difference. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., ‘white trash,’ tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, the book analyzes how we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to re-categorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of ‘white trash.’Less

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Derritt Mason

This book considers the recent surge in queer young adult literature publishing and argues that this explosion of queer representation has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about ... More

This book considers the recent surge in queer young adult literature publishing and argues that this explosion of queer representation has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. In particular, critics of queer texts for young people seem concerned with the following questions: what makes for a good “coming out” story? Will increased queer representation in popular culture teach adolescents the right lessons, and help queer youth live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? Although these concerns spring from a particular contemporary moment, Mason illustrates how the history of adolescence is itself a history of anxiety, and how young adult literature emerged, in part, as a way of managing various cultural and social anxieties. Mason suggests that “queer YA” is usefully understood as a body of trans-media texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect—specifically, anxiety—instead of content. To clarify this point, Mason draws on criticism about a range of texts for and about queer adolescents, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture, Mason argues—queer visibility, risk-taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, the promise that “It Gets Better” and the threat that it might not—challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people’s media.Less

R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

David Stephen Calonne

Robert Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self is the first monograph to explore the intersection between Crumb’s love of literature, his search for the meaning of life and the ways ... More

Robert Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self is the first monograph to explore the intersection between Crumb’s love of literature, his search for the meaning of life and the ways he connects his own autobiography with the themes of the writers he has admired. Crumb’s comics from the beginning reflected the fact that he was a voracious reader from childhood and perused a variety of authors including Charles Dickens, J.D. Salinger, and, during his adolescence, Beat writers like Jack Kerouac. He was profoundly influenced by music, especially the blues, and the ecstatic power of music appears in his artwork throughout his career. The first chapter explores the ways Robert Crumb illustrates works by William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Charles Bukowski. The book continues with individual chapters devoted to Crumb’s illustrations of biographies of blues musicians Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton; Philip K. Dick; Jean-Paul Sartre; Franz Kafka; and concludes with an exploration of Crumb’s illustrations to the book of Genesis. In all his drawings accompanying literary texts, Crumb returns to a number of key themes regarding his personal spiritual quest such as suffering and existential solitude; the search for romantic and sexual love; the impact of entheogens such as LSD on his quest for answers to his cosmic questions. We discover that Crumb gradually embraces a mysticism rooted in his studies of Gnosticism. In the final chapter on the book of Genesis, readers may observe the ways Crumb continues his critique of monotheistic religion in a variety of subtle ways. Robert Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self concludes with an Epilogue which discusses Crumb’s present-day life in France and the ways he has continued to engage with spiritual and philosophical themes in his later work.Less

Racial Terrorism: A Rhetorical Investigation of Lynching

Marouf A. Hasian Jr. and Nicholas S. Paliewicz

This book provides readers with a critical rhetorical study of Montgomery, Alabama’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Using critical genealogical methods, the authors argue ... More

This book provides readers with a critical rhetorical study of Montgomery, Alabama’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Using critical genealogical methods, the authors argue that the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), led by Bryan Stevenson, uses these particular sites of memory for a variety of rhetorical functions, including the recovery of forgotten lynching pasts as well as reparatory efforts. The book takes the stance that Stevenson and the EJI are not only interested in helping American communities remember lynching histories but are also interested in using lynching legacies for modern-day mass incarceration reformation. Using the concept of “racial terrorism” the EJI uses places like the Legacy Museum to try and convince American audiences who may not have confronted fraught lynching pasts that they need to acknowledge these pasts if they hope to ever become involved in true reconciliation with those who suffer from the ravages of genocidal histories and traumatizing pasts.Less

The Sacred Language of the Abakuá

Lydia Cabrera

Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres (eds)

In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. ... More

In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first ‘insiders’ view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, this volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history.Less

Scattered Musics

Martha I. Chew Sánchez and David Henderson (eds)

This book brings together eleven chapters on the musics of migrant and diaspora populations around the globe. Their authors are engaged with and sensitive to the nuances of struggles over identities ... More

This book brings together eleven chapters on the musics of migrant and diaspora populations around the globe. Their authors are engaged with and sensitive to the nuances of struggles over identities and representations through musical expression, and they give account of some of the ways in which musicians, fans, promoters, and others use music and other media (including social media) to negotiate, transcend, or create solidarities with different normativities and nationalisms. How have diasporas transformed the musical expressions of their home countries as well as those in the host communities? How do musical performances provide a space for play in seeking to understand one’s identity? How do some communities recreate home away from home in musical performances, and how do some use music to critique and refine their senses of home? What are some of the ways in which musical performance can help reconstruct and redefine collective memory and a collective sense of place? With chapters by ethnomusicologists, sociologists, historians artists, and others, Scattered Musics is an interdisciplinary plunge into these questions.Less

Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture

Marilisa Jiménez García

Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, American youth culture and literature grew up with Puerto Rico. The contemporary US tradition of youth literature and media, along ... More

Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, American youth culture and literature grew up with Puerto Rico. The contemporary US tradition of youth literature and media, along with how young people, as authors, narrate their part in social struggle, is inseparable from Puerto Rican thought and writing. Youth literature, media, and youth-led movements have played a prominent role in portraying the political and cultural relationship between the US and Puerto Rico—from the US acquisition to Puerto Rican writer’s pleas for a place in US letters and culture. During the early colonial encounter, children’s books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US’s role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the American public. Subsequently, youth literature and media was an important tool of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought for negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance.Less