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Black and Brown Planets, edited by Isiah Lavender, III, signifies a timely exploration of the Western obsession with color in its analysis of the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore some of the possible worlds of science fiction (literature, television, and film) to lift blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre. In two sections, this collection considers the role that race and ethnicity plays in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from Black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. Analysis of Indigenous science fiction in the second section addresses the effects of colonization, assists in discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, the second section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being and moving between two cultures, effectively alienated as a response to political repression. Black and Brown Planets considers how alternate racial futurisms reconfigure our sense of viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny and, therefore, adds more color to this otherwise monochrome genre.

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac’s life they were—in Holmes’s words—“Brother-Souls.” Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in a postwar American society that for them had lost its direction. Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term “Beat Generation” to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. This book is the chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and Holmes’s life. From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac’s wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife, to read the pages of Holmes’s manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes’s final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951 he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road, the author of which was close to Holmes for more than a decade.

The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliche. This book seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer’s “The White Negro” to Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” to Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment, even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy. By examining these works closely, the author posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring, but in ways that—intentionally or not—often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally naive. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought.

The anthology asks: What social and political impact is created by the Steampunk dimension of film, television, fashion, and decoration? How does Steampunk both reflect and shape social attitudes and predispositions? To what extent does Steampunk provide the grounding for subcultures? How is Steampunk used in political appeals? Its essays address the way that Steampunk culture generates its own rhetorical norms, its own communicative patterns and structures, at the same time that it generates a lexicon that becomes part of the larger rhetoric of popular and political culture.

Media narratives in popular culture often ascribe interchangeable characteristics to childhood and old age. In the manner of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, the authors in this volume envision the presumed semblance between children and the elderly as a root metaphor that finds succinct articulation in the idea that “children are like old people” and vice versa. The volume explores the recurrent use of this root metaphor in literature and media from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The authors demonstrate how it shapes and is reinforced by a spectrum of media products from Western and East-Asian countries. Most the media products addressed were developed for children as their primary audience, and range from children’s classics such as Heidi to recent Dutch children’s books about euthanasia. Various authors also consider narratives produced either for adults (for instance, the TV series Mad Men, and the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) or for a dual audience (for example, the family film Paddington or The Simpsons). The diversity of these products in terms of geography, production date, and audience buttresses a broad comparative exploration of the connection between childhood and old age, allowing the authors to bring out culturally specific aspects and biases. Finally, since this book also unites scholars from a variety of disciplines (media studies, children’s literature studies, film studies, pedagogy, sociology), the individual chapters provide a range of methods for studying the connection between childhood and old age.

This book traces the development of a Left feminist consciousness as women became more actively involved in the American Left during and immediately following World War II. It argues that women writers on the Left drew on the rhetoric of antifascism to critique the cultural and ideological aspects of women’s oppression. In Left journals during World War II, women writers outlined the dangers of fascist control for women and argued that the fight against fascism must also be about ending women’s oppression. After World War II, they continued to use this antifascist framework to call attention to the ways in which the emerging domestic ideology in the United States bore a frightening resemblance to the fascist repression of women in Nazi Germany. This critique of American domestic ideology emphasized the ways in which black and working-class women were particularly affected, and extended to an examination of women’s roles in personal and romantic relationships. Underlying this critique was the belief that representations of women in American culture were part of the problem. To counter these dominant cultural images, women writers on the Left depicted female activists in contemporary antifascist and anticolonial struggles, or turned to the past for historical role models in the labor, abolitionist, and antisuffrage movements. This depiction of women as models of agency and liberation challenged some of the conventions about femininity in the postwar era.

Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focuses on moving beyond stereotypes to examine how Asian American children and adolescents define their unique identities. For these kids, being or considered to be American becomes a challenge in itself as they assert their Asian and American identities; claim their own ethnic identity, be they an immigrant or American-born; and negotiate their ethnic communities. Chapters focus on primary texts from many ethnicities, such as Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Hawaiian. Individual chapters crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries revise the traditional white male bildungsroman to negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American children’s and teenagers’ identities. Chapters cover such topics as internalized racism and self-loathing; hyper-sexualization of Asian American females in graphic novels; the fluidity and ambiguity of the biracial or mestizo Filipino male and female’s ethnic and racial identities; interracial friendships between Japanese Americans and Americans of other ethnicities during the Japanese internment; transnational adoptions and birth searches by Korean Americans; food as a means of assimilation and resistance for first generation immigrant Vietnamese American girls; the hostile and alienating environment generated by the War on Terror for South Asian American teenagers; and commodity racism and the tourist gaze as well as self-authorship, interstitial identity, and the ambiguity of motherland in Hawaiian American literature.

Larry Brown was unique among writers who started their careers in the late twentieth century. Unlike most of them—his friends Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Rick Bass, Kaye Gibbons, among others—he was neither a product of a writing program, nor did he teach at one. In fact, he did not even attend college. His innate talent, his immersion in the life of north Mississippi, and his determination led him to national success. Drawing on excerpts from numerous letters and material from interviews with family members and friends, this book is a biography of a landmark southern writer. It explores the cultural milieu of Oxford, Mississippi, and the writers who influenced Brown, including William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews, and Cormac McCarthy. The book covers Brown’s history in Mississippi, the troubled family in which he grew up, and his boyhood in Tula and Yocona, Mississippi, and in Memphis, Tennessee. It relates stories from Brown’s time in the Marines, his early married life—which included sixteen years as an Oxford fireman—and what he called his “apprenticeship” period, the eight years during which he was teaching himself to write publishable fiction. The book examines Brown’s years as a writer: the stories and novels he wrote, his struggles to acclimate himself to the fame his writing brought him, and his many trips outside Yocona, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. It concludes with a discussion of A Miracle of Catfish.

Larry Brown (1951–2004) is noted for his subjects—rural life, poverty, war, and the working class—and his spare, gritty style. His oeuvre spans several genres and includes acclaimed novels (Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son, The Rabbit Factory, and A Miracle of Catfish), short story collections (Facing the Music, Big Bad Love), memoir (On Fire), and essay collections (Billy Ray’s Farm). At the time of his death, Brown was considered to be one of the finest exemplars of minimalist, raw writing of the contemporary South. This book considers the writer’s full body of work, placing it in the contexts of southern literature, Mississippi writing, and literary work about the working class. Collectively, the chapters explore such subjects as Brown’s treatment of class politics, race and racism, the aftereffects of the Vietnam War on American culture, the evolution of the South from a plantation-based economy to a postindustrial one, and male–female relations. The book discusses the role of Brown’s mentors—Ellen Douglas and Barry Hannah—in shaping his work, as well as Brown’s connection to such writers as Harry Crews and Dorothy Allison. It is one of the first critical studies of a writer whose depth and influence mark him as one of the most well-regarded Mississippi authors.

Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture is a collection of essays that seeks to consider gothic horror texts for children with the respect such texts deserve, weighing the multitude of benefits they can provide for young readers and viewers. It refuses to write off the horror genre as campy, trite, or deforming, instead recognizing that many of the children’s books and films categorized as “scary” are among those most widely read/viewed by children and young adults. It also considers how adult horror has been domesticated by children’s literature and culture, with authors and screenwriters turning that which was once utterly horrifying into safe, funny, and delightful books and films, along with the impetus behind such re-envisioning of the adult horror novel or film as something appropriate for the young. Especially today, when dark novels, shows, and films targeted toward children and young adults are proliferating with wild abandon, understanding the methods by which such texts have traditionally operated, as well as how those methods have been challenged, abandoned, and appropriated in recent years, becomes all the more crucial.

The Cold War was unique in the way films, books, television shows, colleges and universities, and practices of everyday life were enlisted to create American political consensus. This coercion fostered a seemingly hegemonic, nationally unified perspective devoted to spreading a capitalist, socially conservative notion of freedom throughout the world to fight Communism. This book traces the historical contours of this manufactured consent by considering the ways in which authors, playwrights, and directors participated in, responded to, and resisted the construction of Cold War discourses. It argues that a fugitive resistance to the status quo emerged as writers and activists variously fled into exile, went underground, or grudgingly accommodated themselves to the new spirit of the times. To this end, the author examines work by a wide swath of creators, including essayists W. E. B. Du Bois and F. O. Matthiessen; novelists Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, and Paul Bowles; playwright Arthur Miller; poet Sylvia Plath; and filmmakers Elia Kazan and John Ford. The book explores how writers and artists created works that went against mainstream notions of liberty, and which offered alternatives to the false dichotomy between capitalist freedom and totalitarian tyranny. These complex responses and the era they reflect had, and continue to have, profound effects on American and international cultural and intellectual life, as can be seen in the connections the author makes between past and present.

Twenty-First Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature employs methodologies from material feminism to demonstrate how feminist thinking has influenced literature for the young in the last two decades. Material feminism provides people with ways of thinking about the interactions among discourse, embodiment, technology, the environment, cognition, and the ethics of caring. This book thus applies the principles behind material feminism and interrelated manifestations of feminism (such as Critical Race Theory and ecofeminism) to texts written for the young to demonstrate how shifting cultural perceptions of feminism affect what is happening both in publishing for the young and in the academic study of children’s and adolescent literature. The work begins with a specific focus on how language and the material interact before moving to an examination of race as an intersectionally-lived material phenomenon and a social construction. How embodied individuals interact with the environment is explored through ecofeminism and the dystopic; how people interact with each other involves romance, sexuality, and feminist ethics. In other words, the structure of the book moves from examinations of the individual to examinations of the individual in social groups, the individual and the environment, and the individual within relationships. Overall, the goal of this work is to interrogate how material feminism can expand our understanding of materiality, maturation, and gender—especially girlhood—as represented in narratives for preadolescents and adolescents.