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This book explains how Mississippi’s budget making process evolved and examines legislation and litigation, as well as those legislators and governors responsible for developing this process. This book explains in detail the significant actions taken by the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government that affected Mississippi’s procedures. Significant legislation covered includes the passage of Senate Bill 356, which gave the governor the authority to prepare and submit a budget recommendation in 1918; the passage of the Administrative Reorganization Act of 1984; the passage of the Budget Reform Act of 1992; and the passage of the Financial and Operational Responses That Invigorate Future Years Act (FORTIFY) during the First Extraordinary Session of 2017. The first two chapters provide a historical perspective and give the reader an understanding of how legislation and litigation contributed. The book also covers interventions by the courts, which led to the unprecedented separation of powers case Alexander v. State of Mississippi by and Through Allain (1983). In addition to discussing important laws and legislators, Pugh takes a detailed look at six of Mississippi’s recent governors—Bill Allain, Ray Mabus, Kirk Fordice, Ronnie Musgrove, Haley Barbour, and Phil Bryant—to examine their methods for getting the legislature to include their ideas in the often anguished process of making a budget.

Today, Hollywood cinema has made a striking turn regarding its portrayals of Russians, returning to the images of the Cold War. To explore the reasons for this sudden renewed interest in the Cold War, this book examines, among others, Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015), Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s Hail, Caesar! (2016), David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde (2017), Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018), and Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow (2018), as well as such TV shows as Comrade Detective (2017) and The Americans (2013-2018). Are these recent films and series attempting to interpret the tightened political relations between the United States and Russia, suggesting the beginning of “Cold War II”? The chapters in this collection investigate the revival of the Cold War movie genre under multiple angles, including questions of patriotism, national identity, otherness, gender, and corruption. They are sensitive to the cinematic aesthetics and ethics of these representations as they reveal how these new images of the Cold War shape audiences’ understanding of the Cold War in general as well as of the relationship between the U.S. and Russia in particular. This collection defies the traditional definitions of the Cold War film and invites readers to discover the new phase in the Cold War movie genre: Cold War II.

Over the last twenty years, the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world. This book is an introduction to the history and controversies that have shaped comics exhibitions, who the pioneers were, different ideas about comic art exhibits around the world, how the best practices for displaying comics have developed and why, and how artists and curators have found ways to display comics that break away from the “framed pages on the wall” format. Using long out-of-print reviews and new material from experts such as Art Spiegelman, Denis Kitchen, and Andrei Molotiu, Comic Art in Museums maps out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930’s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these shows. To borrow a phrase from Theirry Groensteen, it’s the story of one way that comics have finally achieved “cultural legitimization.”

Recent decades have seen a blossoming of academic and scholarly concern with comics. Within the ecosystems of this growth, dominant assumptions have taken root—assumptions around the particular methods and approaches used to approach the comics form, around the ways we should read comics, how its ‘system’ works, and the disciplinary relationships that surround this evolving area of study. But other perspectives have also begun to flourish amidst this verdant landscape of comics studies. These approaches seek to question the reliance on structural linguistics and the tools of English and cultural studies in the examination and understanding of comics. They turn instead to politics, to aesthetics, to law, to critical theory. This collection seeks to grow, and to grow within those more critical directions in comics studies; to fertilize and help sustain them, to multiply them, and continue to cultivate a healthy skepticism, creativity, and openness in the approach to comics knowledge. Accordingly, this volume contains a collection of indicative and provocative essays, accumulated and compiled for readers to explore and make meaning out of: to get lost in, and hopefully find new and enriching directions forward in their encounters with the rich possibilities that comics enable. Traversing phenomenological, existential, material, legal, contextual, political, and revolutionary meanings in their engagements with both comics form and examples of comics work, and interspersed with critical comics interludes, these essays seek to consolidate, exemplify, and open up potential futures for the fecund and amorphous fields of critical comics studies.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, American punk developed as a distinct musical style that reflected the tremendous upheaval in American society during this period. Raw and direct, punk presented an unvarnished view of changing ideas of race, the growth of American suburbia, and the heightened stakes of musical expressions of whiteness and Blackness. Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk traces the main factors at play in the punk style, including transformations to blues resources, experimental visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the rock and roll and R&B sounds of the late 1950s and early 1960s—all in all, a historically oriented approach to rock that is strikingly different from the common myths and conceptions about punk. Eventually punk became a forum for new versions of older exchanges between the US and the UK, and the style reflected even more changes to American metropolitan areas and a shift from the expressions of older baby boomers to that of younger musicians belonging to Generation X. The book also explores the discourses and contradictory narratives of punk history, which are often in direct conflict with the world that is captured in historical documents and revealed through musical analysis.

French on Shifting Ground introduces readers to the lower Lafourche Basin, Louisiana, where the land, a language, and a way of life are at risk due to climate change, environmental disaster, and coastal erosion. Louisiana French is endangered all around the state, but in the lower Lafourche Basin the shift to English is accompanied by the equally rapid disappearance of the land on which its speakers live. The book outlines the development of French in the region, highlighting the features that make it unique in the world, and including the first published description of the way it is spoken by the American Indian population. It then weaves together evidence from multiple lines of linguistic research, years of extensive participant observation, and personal narratives from the residents themselves to illustrate the ways in which language–in this case French–is as fundamental to the creation of place as is the physical landscape. It is a story at once scholarly and personal: the loss of the land and the concomitant loss of the language have implications for the scientific community as well as for the people whose cultures–and identities–are literally at stake.

This book argues that depression-era authors contributed to the development of modern environmental thought in three distinct ways. First, they began recognizing as never before the devastating and even apocalyptic effects that humans can have on the environment, particularly in response to the period’s dust storms, flooding, and other human-created ecological disasters. Next, they acknowledged the ecological importance of nonhuman nature, including animal “predators” and “pests,” as conservationists were beginning to do during the period. And lastly, they laid the groundwork for what we now refer to as “environmental justice” by directly connecting environmental exploitation with racial, economic, and gender inequality. To illustrate the reach of environmental thought during the period, the first three chapters of the book focus on different geographical landscapes, including the wilderness, rural, and urban. The last chapter examines the period’s growing concern over the effects of technology on the human and nonhuman world. Ultimately, The Green Depression illustrates the importance of depression-era literature to the development of the modern environmentalist and environmental justice movements. It also contributes to a growing body of scholarship that identifies the importance of environmental thought to the literature and culture of African Americans and other minority groups as well as in considering urban landscapes and other built environments. Finally, the book seeks to initiate a conversation to consider how experiences and ideas from the period have influenced and can inform responses to the intersections of environmental, social, and economic issues in our own time.

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Harmony and Normalization explores cultural relations between Cuba and the United States during the Presidency of Barack Obama, who restored diplomatic relations with the island. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. Policy shifts allowed US and Cuban performers to more easily traverse the Florida Straits than in the recent past and encouraged them to act as musical diplomats, and their performances served as a testing ground for political change that anticipated normalized diplomatic relations. While government actors debated these changes, music created connections between individuals on both sides of the Florida Straits. This book describes how musicians were among the first individuals to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. Through the analysis of both official and unofficial musical diplomacy efforts, including the Havana Jazz Festival, the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba’s first US tour, the Minnesota Orchestra’s trip to Havana, and the author’s own experiences in Cuba, this ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and the common desire to restore the once thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.

At the heart of America’s slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. This book considers how writers in works from 19th slave narratives to 21st century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Out of all of slavery’s perils, the definition of people as property is the central impetus for haunting because it allows the perpetration of all of the other terrors. Property becomes the engine for the white accumulation of wealth and power fueled by the destruction of black personhood. Specters often linger, however, to claim title, and haunting can be a bid for property ownership. Through examining works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey, this study reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession. The book thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional. Instead, gothic tales of slavery are the very distillation of the anxieties about race and property located in the larger American literary tradition.

In September of 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for war-mongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions in Europe. After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the gloves came off. Warner Bros. released the first directly anti-Nazi film in 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Other studios followed with films such as The Mortal Storm (MGM), Man Hunt (Fox), The Man I Married (Fox), and The Great Dictator (United Artists). While these films represented a small percentage of Hollywood’s output, senators took aim at the Jews in Hollywood who were supposedly “agitating us for war” and launched an investigation that resulted in Senate Resolution 152. The resolution was aimed at both radio and movies that “have been extensively used for propaganda purposes designed to influence the public mind in the direction of participation in the European war.” When the Senate approved a subcommittee to investigate the intentions of these films, studio bosses were ready and willing to stand up against the government to defend their beloved industry. What followed was a complete embarrassment of the United States Senate and a large victory for Hollywood as well as freedom of speech.

American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s 11^th novel, God Help the Child, released in 2015, set in contemporary times, explores the relationship between a financially successful, beautiful young Black woman with a haunted past and an intelligent disaffected young Black man who is equally alienated from his past. This collection of essays, edited by Morrison scholars Alice Knox Eaton, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, and Shirley A. Stave, and including essays by well-known Morrison critics Evelyn Schreiber, Mar Gallego, Susana Vega, Anissa Wardi, and Justine Tally, explores the novel’s themes and tropes through a multiplicity of critical and theoretical approaches. The first of the collection’s three sections focuses on the issue of trauma in the novel. The various essays featured here delve into the thorny topic of childhood neglect and sexual abuse, considering how the main characters carry the burden of the pain they experienced into adulthood. These essays probe the healing achieved in the novel through various approaches, all focused on arriving at an understanding of Morrison’s sense of what healthy adulthood entails. The collection’s second section considers Morrison’s narrative choices in her novel, concentrating on the formal experimentation that occurs within the text. The authors in this section reflect upon the myriad ways in which Morrison's novel relies upon intertextual play in the creation of a fictional cosmology that engages the reader on multiple levels. Essays included in the collection's final section turn attention to God Help the Child in terms of the novel's signifying relation with earlier Morrison texts, bringing into sharp focus the predominant concerns throughout Morrison's fictional canon, from her debut work of fiction, The BluestEye, until the present.

No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner is a rhetorical history of the public career of Bishop Turner during a critical point in American history—from 1896-1915—the “nadir of race relations.” It was during this period in history that African Americans lost many of the gains during Reconstruction. During this period, America adopted the “separate but equal doctrine,” lynching of African Americans went unabated, the convict leasing systems were on the rise, and the Jim Crow era had begun. In response to this, many African American leaders produced racial uplift narratives that focused on respectability politics. No Future argues that Turner opposed racial uplift and respectability politics as a panacea for what ailed African Americans. His answer was simple—emigration to Africa. While Turner did not see any bright and glorious future for African Americans during this time, he never gave up hope that African Americans would someday use their own agency to carve out a better future for subsequent generations. No Future argues that Turner does this within the African American Prophetic tradition by focusing in on Turner’s use of prophetic pessimism. In short, while many African American leaders were celebrating how far they had come from slavery, Turner reminded them and the nation that they had not come that far—indeed, in many instances, with conditions continuing to worsen, many felt they were still trapped, if not by slavery itself, then surely the lingering effects of slavery.

This book is the first full-length study of autobiographies and memoirs of white American jazz musicians, whose accounts reveal attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and gender across a wide range of twentieth-century jazz communities. White jazz autobiographers highlight their immersion in Black jazz environments as central to establishing their legitimacy as jazz musicians, claiming versions of masculinity shaped by these immersion experiences and positioning themselves in relation to colorblind or essentialist arguments that have dominated twentieth-century jazz discourse. Their accounts illustrate the triumphs and failures of jazz interracialism, displaying the contradictory attitudes of reverence and entitlement, deference, and insensitivity that remain part of the white response to Black culture to the present day. The book examines sixteen autobiographies published between 1926 and 2010. Its thematic approach includes chapters that examine the collaborative process in jazz autobiography, Jewish American jazz musicians, and race relations in the New Orleans jazz revival and on Los Angeles’ Central Avenue. Its focus on male instrumentalists and bandleaders provides opportunities for revisiting some of the classic depictions of the “white Negro” in contemporary cultural criticism. While informed by the insights of critical race theory, the book argues that viewing these texts simply through the lens of white privilege does not do justice to the sustained relationships with Black music and culture described by these autobiographers. It both insists upon the value of insider perspectives and holds the texts to rigorous scrutiny, while embracing an expansive interpretation of white involvement in Black culture.

The past decade or so of media promotion has seen a recurring trope of Fanboy to the Rescue—have no fear, it says, this revered franchise is being taken over by a writer, director, or producer who is a “fanboy.” In this trope—which, following Suzanne Scott, the book discusses in terms of the “fanboy auteur”—the fan credentials of writers, directors, and producers are presented as a guarantee of quality media-making. This is a strategy of marketing and branding; it is a claim, from the auteur himself or industry PR machines, that the presence of an auteur who is also a fan means the product is worth consuming. Such claims that fan credentials guarantee quality are often contested, with fans and critics alike rejecting various auteur figures as the true leader of their respective franchises. That split, between assertions of fan and auteur status and acceptance (or not) of that status, is key to unravelling the fan auteur. A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy examines the contemporary ascendance of the fan auteur through a series of case studies. We consider both thoroughly mainstream fan auteur figures like Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon and more offbeat ones like Kevin Smith. We examine those who explicitly identify as fans of the source material they engage, like Steven Moffat, E L James, and Patty Jenkins, and those who don’t but engage in fannish ways nonetheless, like Taika Waititi and J. K. Rowling.

Flannery O’Connor’s work can be unsettling to read, inviting a wide range of responses because of her peculiar mixture of violence, grace, and humor. However, a few persistent readerly habits have shaped popular and critical understandings of Flannery O’Connor, overly narrowing interpretations of her work. This collection seeks to disrupt those habits, reconsidering a giant of southern literature in a range of ways. The essays featured here begin with new methodologies, including object-oriented ontology and "crip-queer" theory, among others. Some essays in this collection introduce new contexts, like gothic science fiction, by way of approaching O’Connor. Others draw out unlikely comparisons with writers not normally considered alongside O’Connor, including Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath. And in the final section, two essays reevaluate familiar arguments regarding O’Connor’s legacy, both in terms of her legal estate and as a formative figure in the rise of the creative writing workshop. Thus, this volume pursues questions that productively complicate the commonplace assumptions of O’Connor scholarship while also circling back to some old questions that are due for new attention.

This book examines how African-Guyanese in New York City participate in the Come to My Kwe-Kwe ritual to facilitate rediasporization, that is, the creation of a newer diaspora from an existing one. Since the fall of 2005, African-Guyanese in New York City have celebrated Come to My Kwe-Kwe (more recently called Kwe-Kwe Night) on the Friday evening before Labor Day. Come to My Kwe-Kwe is a reenactment of a uniquely African-Guyanese pre-wedding ritual called kweh-kweh, and sometimes referred to as karkalay, mayan, kweh-keh, and pele. A typical traditional (wedding-based) kweh-kweh has approximately ten ritual segments, which include the pouring of libation to welcome or appease the ancestors; a procession from the groom’s residence to the bride’s residence or central kweh-kweh venue; the hiding of the bride; and the negotiation of bride price. Each ritual segment is executed with music and dance, which allow for commentary on conjugal matters, such as sex, domestication, submissiveness, and hard work. Come to My Kwe-Kwe replicates the overarching segments of the traditional kweh-kweh, but a couple (male and female) from the audience acts as the bride and groom, and props simulate the boundaries of the traditional performance space, such as the gate and the bride’s home. This book draws on more than a decade of ethnographic research data and demonstrates how Come to My Kwe-Kwe allows African-Guyanese-Americans to negotiate complex, overlapping identities in their new homeland, by combining elements from the past and present and reinterpreting them to facilitate rediasporization and ensure group survival.

SEE! HEAR! CUT! KILL!: Experiencing Friday the 13^th, is the first book entirely devoted to the analysis of the Friday the 13^th franchise. The story a film tells is usually filtered through a particular perspective, or point of view. This book argues that slasher films, and the Friday the 13^th movies particularly, use all the stylistic tools at their disposal to create a complex and emotionally intense approach to perspective, which develops and shifts across the decades. Chapter one discusses the history of perspective in horror, and the different critical conversations around this. Chapter two looks at the use of camerawork, specifically point-of-view camerawork in the way these films visually communicate perspective. The fourth chapter talks about the way sound and editing work together to communicate perspective and experience in the death sequences these movies capitalize upon. The fourth chapter considers the perspective of viewers, and how each movie speaks to viewers who are either familiar or unfamiliar with the ongoing story in the series. The final chapter first explains how these trends look across a chronological timeline, and what this tells us about the historical development of perspective before looking at the influence these stylistic approaches have had on ‘serious’ film, particularly those recognized by the Hollywood critical establishment.

Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop examines how K-pop cites musical and performative elements of Black popular music culture as well as the ways that fans outside of Korea understand these citations. K-pop represents a hybridized mode of Korean popular music that emerged in the 1990s with global aspirations. Its hybridity combines musical elements from Korean and foreign cultures, particularly rhythm and blues-based genres (R&B) of African American popular music. Korean pop, R&B and hip-hop solo artists and groups engage in citational practices by simultaneously emulating R&B’s instrumentation and vocals and enhancing R&B by employing Korean musical strategies to such an extent that K-pop becomes part of a global R&B tradition. Korean pop groups use dynamic images and quality musical production to engage in cultural work that culminates the kind of global form of crossover pioneered by Black American music producers. Korean R&B artists, with a focus on vocals, take the R&B tradition beyond the Black-white binary, and Korean hip-hop practitioners use sampling and live instrumentation to promote R&B’s innovative music aesthetics. K-pop artists also cite elements of African American performance in Korean music videos that disrupt limiting representations. K-pop’s citational practices reveal diverse musical aesthetics driven by the interplay of African American popular music and Korean music strategies. As a transcultural fandom, global fans function as part of K-pop’s music press and deem these citational practices authentic. Citational practices also challenge homogenizing modes of globalization by revealing the multiple cultural forces that inform K-pop.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary perspective when positioning the impact of hypermasculinity on toxic masculinity and the vilification of identities outside of hypermasculinity through several mediums and genres, including film, TV and print comic book literature. The focus lies on heroes within popular culture, and the book argues for a reconsideration of the hero in popular media through an analysis of representation of masculinity, the demonization of femininity, and LGBTQIA+ identities, providing examples of progress and new ways to conceptualise superheroism. By unpicking toxic masculinity and its effect on others, and comparing it to more positive forms of masculinity, the volume will help develop a broader understanding of how the sociological phenomenon of toxic masculinity and its participation in hegemonic masculinity presents itself in our culture, providing a platform on which calls for a more diverse presentation of creators, characters, and actors can be ideologically supported. This volume contributes to wider discourses concerning popular media’s advances and shortcomings in accommodating diversity.