Browse

Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction

Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Alane Wilson (eds)

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 ... More

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

Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties

Lisa M. Corrigan

In Black Feelings, Corrigan traces the surging optimism of the Kennedy administration through the Black Power era’s dynamic and powerful circulation of black pessimism to understand how black ... More

In Black Feelings, Corrigan traces the surging optimism of the Kennedy administration through the Black Power era’s dynamic and powerful circulation of black pessimism to understand how black feelings were a terrain of political struggle for black meaning, representation, and agency as black activists navigated the physical violence and psychological strain of movement disappointment, particularly with liberals (both black and white). Black Feelings demonstrates how racial feelings emerged, ebbed, flowed, disappeared, and re-emerged as the Long Sixties unfolded and finally ended. Black Feelings investigates how politicians, activists, and artists articulated the relationship between feeling black and black feelings to chart the affective energies that animated and troubled liberalism’s tropes of progress, equality, exceptionalism, perfection, and colorblindness. Black Feelings pays special attention to hope, hopelessness, impatience, brotherhood, rage, shame, resentment, disgust, contempt, betrayal, and melancholy and metaphors like the “powederkeg” that helped propel the affective racial landscape in the Long Sixties. Consequently, Black Feelings maps how black intellectuals described, animated, located, solicited, and projected feelings that shaped their political affiliations and their rhetorical strategies in opposition to dominant constructions of white feelings.Less

Children's Books on the Big Screen

Meghann Meeusen

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 ... More

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

Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development

Anne Gessler

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 ... More

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

Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia

Frederick Luis Aldama (ed.)

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 ... More

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

Jockomo: The Native Roots of Mardi Gras Indians

Shane Lief and John McCusker

This book represents the very first publication to explore how Native American traditions have influenced the history of New Orleans music over the past three centuries, specifically how this ... More

This book represents the very first publication to explore how Native American traditions have influenced the history of New Orleans music over the past three centuries, specifically how this connection has culminated in the Mardi Gras Indian cultural system. In addition to including the perspectives of the cultural participants themselves, this book draws upon manuscripts and archives from the earliest days of the French colony of Louisiana, providing a range of views on how the Mardi Gras Indian tradition developed. A number of linguistic analyses focus on Native terms which are significant for regional language history. By showing these Native roots, the authors give empirical evidence for a much earlier origin for the Mardi Gras Indian tradition than has previously been recognized in conventional New Orleans historiography. A series of archival images and contemporary photographs help the reader to visualize the transformations of public life in New Orleans, including musical processions in the streets of the city during Mardi Gras celebrations. The complex background of the “American Indian” icon is also recognized as a component in how Mardi Gras Indians have developed their cultural practices over time. Key political events and time periods, such as the Civil War and the Reconstruction era that followed, are indispensable to understanding how the Mardi Gras Indians emerged in New Orleans during the nineteenth century. This book features rare images, such as the first known photograph of Mardi Gras Indians, giving the reader a more complete audiovisual journey through New Orleans history.Less

Monstrous Women in Comics

Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody (eds)

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 ... More

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

Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature

Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera (eds)

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 ... More

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

Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays

Matthew Teutsch (ed.)

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 ... More

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

Reminiscences of an Active Life: The Autobiography of John Roy Lynch

John Roy Lynch

John Hope Franklin (ed.)

Born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation, John Roy Lynch (1847–1939) became an adult during the Reconstruction Era and lived a public-spirited life for over three decades. His political career ... More

Born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation, John Roy Lynch (1847–1939) became an adult during the Reconstruction Era and lived a public-spirited life for over three decades. His political career began in 1869 with his appointment as justice of the peace. Within the year, he was elected to the Mississippi legislature and was later elected Speaker of the House. At age twenty-five, Lynch became the first African American from Mississippi to be elected to the United States Congress. He led the fight to secure passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1875. In 1884, he was elected temporary chairman of the Eighth Republican National Convention and was the first black American to deliver the keynote address. This, his autobiography, reflects Lynch's thoughtful and nuanced understanding of the past and of his own experience. The book, written when he was ninety, challenges a number of traditional arguments about Reconstruction. In his experience, African Americans in the South competed on an equal basis with whites; the state governments were responsive to the needs of the people; and race was not always a decisive factor in the politics of Reconstruction. The book provides rich material for the study of American politics and race relations during Reconstruction. Lynch's childhood reflections reveal new dimensions to our understanding of black experience during slavery and beyond. An introduction puts Lynch's public and private lives in the context of his times and provides an overview of how Reminiscences of an Active Life came to be written.Less

Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature

Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard

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 ... More

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

Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad

Jennifer Donahue

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 ... More

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

Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed

Allan Amanik and Kami Fletcher (eds)

This book questions the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along lines of race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing. It asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon, so often ... More

This book questions the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along lines of race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing. It asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon, so often taken for granted, can tell us about American history broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, it looks to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they laid their dead to rest in locales spanning the northeast to the Spanish American southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Catholics, Protestants, or various whites of European descent, one thing that united these Americans was a drive to keep their dead apart. While burial spaces have reflected and preserved cultural and communal identity, particularly in a society as diverse as the United States, this collection argues that the invisible and institutional borders built around them (and into them) also tell a powerful story of the ways in which Americans have negotiated race, culture, class, national origin, and religious difference in the United States during its formative century.Less

Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11

Glen Donnar

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’ ... More

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 War on Poverty in Mississippi: From Massive Resistance to New Conservatism

Emma J. Folwell

When President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty arrived in Mississippi in 1965, it was met with a ferocious response. The federally-funded war against poverty—the embodiment of 1960s ... More

When President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty arrived in Mississippi in 1965, it was met with a ferocious response. The federally-funded war against poverty—the embodiment of 1960s liberalism—clashed explosively with Mississippi’s closed society. In the years between 1965 and 1973, the opposing forces of the war against poverty and a war against the war on poverty transformed the state. Through a state-level history of the war on poverty, this book traces the attempts of white and black Mississippians to utilize antipoverty programs to address the desperate poverty in the state. The war on poverty was, at times, a powerful tool for black empowerment. But more often, antipoverty programs became a potent mechanism of white resistance to black advancement. Through the war on poverty, both black activism and white opposition to black empowerment evolved following the momentous events of 1964. White Mississippians used massive resistance as a template for resistance to black economic empowerment, forging antipoverty programs into tools to marginalize black political and economic power. This book traces the grassroots war against the war on poverty that laid the foundation for the fight against 1960s liberalism, as Mississippi became a national model for resistance to social change through its evolving resistance to the war on poverty that lay at the heart of the emerging new conservatism. Many white Mississippians forged this resistance into the political, economic, and social structures of the state, contributing to the development of the state’s Republican Party and articulating a new conservatism.Less