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This volume of essays focuses on the meanings of the spirited and its navigation in the diverse, dynamic, and polarized creative environment of the 21^st century. The animation medium and its related subjects including fine art, comics, children literature, folklore, religion, and philosophy lead inter-disciplinary discussions, ranging from theory to practice, within the framework of an ever-changing media landscape and social-cultural-political environment. Working on different continents and coming from varying cultural backgrounds, the contributors are like-minded scholars, artists, curators, and educators demonstrating the insights of the spirited and how the spirited-oriented sub-themes, journeys and transformations are exemplified, examined, and interpreted in the context of visual representations. The publication also aims to appeal to a broader reading public interested in the ever expanding dimensions of mental health, culture, and related expressions of human living and interactions. In 2017, the theme of World Health Day (April 7) was mental health, and the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the year-long campaign slogan as “let’s talk”. As humans, getting back in touch with our spirited and spiritual sides is a craving many are unable to express or voice. The essays discussed in this collection speak to, and provoke a desired connection with something more meaningful beyond our material world. While the book recognizes and acknowledges the particularities of the spirited across cultures, it also highlights its universality, demonstrating how it is being studied, researched, comprehended, expressed, and consumed in various parts of the world in both similar and at once unique ways.

What is most intriguing in the Carnivals today is the substantial increase in the number of women who play mas’ with some figures estimating as much as 70% of all players. This volume, probably the first of its kind to concentrate solely on women in Carnival, normalizes the contemporary Carnival especially as it is playedin Trinidad and Tobago by demonstrating not only their numerical strength but the kind of mas’that is featured. The bikini and beads or bikini and feathers or 'pretty mas' is the dominant mas’ in today’s Carnival. The players of today, mainly women, are signifying or symbolizing by this form of mas’, their own newly found empowerment as females and their resistance to the older cultural norms of male oppression. Several chapters discuss in detail the commoditisation of Carnival in which sex is used to enhance tourism and provide striking visual images for magazines and websites. Several put the emphasis on the unveiling of the female body and the hip rolling sexual movements called “winin” or sometimes just “it” as in “use your it.” What most of these chapters have in common however is the emphasis on the performance of scantily clad female bodies and their movements and gyrations. This volume provides a feminist perspective to the understanding of Carnival today.

The Comics of Alison Bechdel is the first full-length volume dedicated to the comics art of Alison Bechdel, beginning with her early work on the long-running serial comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and including original scholarship on her acclaimed memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. The volume is organized into three sections. The first looks at Bechdel’s place in lesbian comics and considers her work in the context of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. The second looks at kinship, affect, and trauma in Bechdel’s work, with a focus on interiority and the artist’s experiments with comics form. The third looks at place, space, and community, considering the significance of rural queer life, topography and mapping, and forms of LGBTQ community. Archival research and theories of the archive provide new insight into Bechdel’s art, including the composition of Fun Home and the development of the lesser-known Servants to the Cause, which appeared in The Advocate in the late 1980s. An introductory essay orients readers to Bechdel’s career—her childhood in Beech Creek, her involvement in LGBTQ activism and lesbian comix, her move inward towards life writing, and the mainstream cultural recognition prompted by the adaptation of Fun Home into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical—as well as to current trends in Bechdel scholarship.

In the popular press of the early twentieth century, immigrant masses and the tenement districts were frequently portrayed as occasions for laughter rather than as objects of pity or problems to be solved. This distinctly comic sensibility, most visible in the form of the comic strip, merged the grotesque with the urbane and the whimsical with the cynical, representing the world of what Jacob Riis called the “Other Half” with a jaundiced, yet sympathetic, eye. Various forms of the comic sensibility emerged from a competitive, collaborative environment fostered at newspapers and magazines published by figures including William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and S. S. McClure. Characterized by a breezy, irreverent style and packaged in eye-catching typography, vibrant color, and dynamic page design, the comic sensibility combined the performative aspects of vaudeville and the variety of stage, the verbal improvisations of dialect fiction, and a multivalent approach to caricature that originated in nineteenth-century comic weeklies, such as Puck and Judge. Though it was firmly rooted in ethnic humor, the comic sensibility did not simply denigrate or dehumanize ethnic and racial minorities. Stereotype and caricature was used not just to make fun of the Other Half, but also to engage in pointed sociopolitical critique. Sometimes grotesque, sometimes shocking, at other times sweetly humorous or gently mocking, the comic sensibility ultimately enabled group identification and attracted a huge working-class audience.

Collectively the documents provide answers to the still unresolved existential question of Martin Delany historiography: Who was the real Martin Delany? Conflicting answers and interpretations compete for authenticity. Was Delany militant, anti-establishment, dogmatic and uncompromising; or, was he pragmatic, utilitarian, accommodating, and open to compromise when necessary? Could Delany have been a combination of some or all of these attributes? The documents show that he was not averse to reaching out across the racial and ideological divides to explore diverse political and social reforms strategies with political opponents, including erstwhile oppressors of his race (former slaveholders). They provide clarity to, and contextualize the “dualities” and ambiguities of his life and struggles, thereby enabling enhanced and informed understanding of the essential pragmatism and utilitarian underpinnings of his thought. Delany was a complex individual who defied ideological, political, and racial compartmentalization; always driven by considerations of what his reason and conscience dictated would best serve the interests of his race; even if it meant cooperating with former political adversaries. The documents also reveal a man who could at once appear unyielding in furtherance and defense of the interests of blacks, and yet not opposed to making concessions; a utilitarian and a pragmatist who when circumstances demanded, could be politically and ideologically resolute and dogmatic. The book highlights the ideological and political twists and turns of his Civil War and Reconstruction career and how these both endeared him to, and alienated him from, constituencies on both sides of the political and racial divides.

This book is a scholarly examination of the comic book character of the new Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, from multiple disciplinary approaches, including religious studies, gender studies, cultural studies, communication, and pedagogy. The essays cover topics from fashion, immigration history, technoculture, and fandom and are intended for a broad range of general and academic readers, from comics fans to comics scholars. The book’s four main sections—“Precursors,” “Nation and Religion, Identity and Community,” “Pedagogy and Resistance,” and “Fangirls, Fanboys, and the Culture of Fandom”—apply specific theoretical and cultural frameworks to their examination of the character. The book closes with a one-page comic by comics scholar and artist Jose Alaniz, as well as an exclusive interview with author G. Willow Wilson by gender studies scholar Shabana Mir. The editors’ wide-ranging expertise, from comics and religious studies to literature, gender, and popular culture, inform and shape this volume suitable for both undergraduate and graduate classrooms, as well as the general reader.

Professional wrestling is one of the most popular performance practices in the United States and around the world, drawing millions of spectators to live events and televised broadcasts. The displays of violence, simulated and actual, may be the obvious appeal, but that is just the beginning. Fans debate performance choices with as much energy as they argue about their favorite wrestlers. The ongoing scenarios and presentations of manly and not so-manly characters—from the flamboyantly feminine to the hypermasculine—simultaneously celebrate and critique, parody and affirm, the American dream and the masculine ideal. Sharon Mazer looks at the world of professional wrestling from a fan’s-eye-view high in the stands and from ringside in the wrestlers’ gym. She investigates how performances are constructed and sold to spectators, both on a local level and in the “big leagues” of the WWF/E. She shares a close-up view of a group of wrestlers as they work out, get their faces pushed to the mat as part of their initiation into the fraternity of the ring, and dream of stardom. In later chapters, Mazer explores professional wrestling’s carnivalesque presentation of masculinities ranging from the cute to the brute, as well as the way in which the performances of women wrestlers often enter into the realm of pornographic. Finally, she explores the question of the “real” and the “fake” as the fans themselves confront it. First published in 1998, this new edition of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle both preserves the original’s snapshot of the wrestling scene of the 1980s and 1990s and features an up-to-date perspective on the current state of play.

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women. Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or “witnessing”—trauma to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature, articulating a theory of reading (or “dual-witnessing”) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. The book then places its original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in American literature. This book also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.

The formalized study of southern literature in the mid-twentieth century is an example of scholars formalizing the study of modernist aesthetics in order to suppress leftist politics and sentiments in literature and art. This formalized, institutional study was initiated in a climate in which intellectuals were under societal pressure, created by the Cold War, to praise literary and artistic production representative of American values. This even in southern literary studies occurred roughly at the same time that the United States sought to extoll the virtues of America’s free, democratic society abroad. In this manner, southern studies and American studies become two sides of the same coin. Intellectuals and writers that promoted American exceptionalism dealt with the rising Civil Rights Movement and the nation’s complicated history with race and poverty by casting the issues as moral rather than political problems that were distinctly southern and could therefore be corrected by drawing on “exceptional” southern values, such as tradition and honor. The result of such maneuvering is that over the course of the twentieth century, “south” becomes more than a geographical identity. Ultimately, “south” becomes a socio-political and cultural identity associated with modern conservatism with no geographical boundaries. Rather than a country divided into south and north, the United States is divided in the twenty-first century into red and blue states. The result of using southern literature to present southern values as appropriate, moderate values for the whole nation during the Cold War is to associate these values with nationalism and conservatism today.

It’s been argued that every good superhero needs an equally compelling supervillain. The Supervillain Reader sheds light on why “it’s all about the villain.” The editors have assembled a collection of both reprinted and original essays that tries to answer the question, Why are we so fascinated with the villain in our storytelling? The obsession with the villain is not some new phenomenon, and in fact one finds villains who are “super” going as far back as ancient religious and mythological texts. This innovative collection brings together essays, book excerpts, and original content from a wide variety of scholars and writers, weaving a tapestry of thought regarding villains in all their manifestations, including film, literature, television, games, and, of course, comics and sequential art. While The Supervillain Readerfocuses on the latter, it goes beyond comic studies to show how the concept of the supervillain is part our larger historical and popular consciousness. The principal goal of this reader is to collect in a single volume articles that show how the villain is a complex part of any narrative regardless of original text. The villain must be compelling, stimulating, and pro-active, whereas the superhero (or protagonist) is most often re-active. Our reader brings into clear focus the unique aspects of villainy and shows why the villain is so compelling, while also providing a theoretical foundation for villainy in numerous media. The editors have carefully curated this collection, and we hope it will be of interest to professors teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, the students they teach, and serious observers of popular culture across professions.

Truth and Consequences interrogates the ways in which over two dozen works of fiction and film find meaning in the game show. Writers and filmmakers use the game show intermedially as a metaphor for what it means to be a person, a lover, a family, and a citizen in the media age. Despite media culture’s promises of global equality and connectivity (and one’s efforts to realize that promise), individuals wind up isolated by market-driven deception, wealth, or ethnicity. People use media to achieve greater intimacy with others, but the market nudges them to keep their distance from each other in the name of exploring options. Other networks can still assert themselves, such as the family, but can only sustain themselves if they openly defy and rewrite the rules of the media culture they inhabit. Although America espouses a commitment to democratic freedom, the state partners with imagemakers to make one’s lack of choice entertaining and resistance self-defeating. Amidst these obstacles, Americans still feel called upon to remember, to connect, to buzz in, to answer in the hopes that an escape awaits in the next round, behind the next door.

This collection sets out the stakes, definitions, and exemplars of contemporary comics pedagogy. From K-12 contexts to higher ed instruction to ongoing communities of scholars working outside of the academy, comics pedagogy is at the heart of the work of today’s “aca-fans.” Building off of the interdisciplinary interests and approaches to teaching comics and teaching with comics, this volume brings together diverse voices to share key theories and scholarship on comics pedagogy. By bringing together scholars, creators, and educators across various fields and in K-12 as well as university settings, this volume significantly expands scholarship on comics pedagogy.