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The volume also contains late essays on growing up in Houston, writing from life, and illness and recovery."--Jacket.
In No One's Witness Syd Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“No one / bears witness for the / witness”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness demonstrates the necessity of confronting the Nazi holocaust in relation to transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. Thinking along with black feminist theory's ...
In The Brink of Freedom David Kazanjian revises nineteenth-century conceptions of freedom by examining the ways black settler colonists in Liberia and Mayan rebels in Yucatán imagined how to live freely. Focusing on colonial and early national Liberia and the Caste War of Yucatán, Kazanjian interprets letters from black settlers in apposition to letters and literature from Mayan rebels and their Creole antagonists. He reads these overlooked, multilingual archives not for their descriptive content, but for how they unsettle and recast liberal forms of freedom within global systems of racial capitalism. By juxtaposing two unheralded and seemingly unrelated Atlantic histories, Kazanjian finds remarkably fresh, nuanced, and worldly conceptions of freedom thriving amidst the archived everyday. The Brink of Freedom’s speculative, quotidian globalities ultimately ask us to improvise radical ways of living in the world.
How natural history made sex scientific in the eighteenth century. If sexology—the science of sex—came into being sometime in the nineteenth century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Greta LaFleur demonstrates that eighteenth-century natural history—the study of organic life in its environment—actually provided the intellectual foundations for the later development of the scientific study of sex. Natural historians understood the human body to be a "porous envelope," eminently vulnerable to its environment. Yet historians of sexuality have tended to rely on archival...
Michael Gamer explodes the myth of the unworldly Romantic poet, showing writers' interest in public presence, and profit and loss.
Over the course of two years, Jennifer Doyle filed multiple harassment complaints with her campus’s Title IX office and one with the Department of Labor. Her experiences with these complaints and how they subsequently impacted her life have led to this book, Shadow of My Shadow. Doyle tells her personal story, sharing how she lost her sense of voice, felt exposed at work, became distrustful of students and colleagues, and was consumed by grief. Working across autobiography, literary criticism, an analysis of the Larry Nassar Title IX case, and a larger institutional critique of harassment administration, Doyle shows that harassment is at once intimate, dynamic, and intensely social, flourishing in neglected social spaces. In her own case, it profoundly reshaped her relationship to her work, her writing, and ultimately to herself. As Doyle explains, the experience drew out the distance between herself in the world and herself on the page. This book is her effort to understand and repair that breach and to consider how loss and grief can be sources of insight and compassion.
How modernist women writers used biographical writing to resist their exclusion from literary history It’s impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. The Passion Projects examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figur...
Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation shows the importance of textual, religious, and bureaucratic ties to struggles over colonial governance and identities. Goldmark analyzes these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardized education, or the regulation of doctrine. Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how nonprocreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime.
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