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Townies
by William O'ShaughnessyIn his six previous books, William O’Shaughnessy, one of the nation’s best known and most beloved community broadcasters, has told the tales of the power brokers and visionaries of politics, government, business and industry, the arts, fine living—world famous figures like Joe DiMaggio, Fred Astaire, Nelson Rockefeller, the Bushes, Kennedys, and so many others.He elevated each encounter with his wisdom, wit, insight … and compassion, and what emerged through words that carried the weight of authority as they danced with the delight of Nijinsky was nothing less than transformative for both subject and reader. In O’Shaughnessy, we have our modern day Plutarch, whose prose has run across the decades like a power strip illuminating the lives of the nation’s most incandescent leaders from every arena. Henry Kissinger, Rush Limbaugh, Mario Cuomo, Jacob K. Javits, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John V. Lindsay, Dan Rather, President Richard Nixon, President Donald J. Trump, Jimmy Breslin, Pope Francis—his list of on-air guests and from-the-notebook subjects is the broadcasting world’s premier who’s who list. A “vivid man about town” known for his blazers, Belgian loafers, and the Yankees World Series ring given to him in appreciation by George M. Steinbrenner, O’Shaughnessy shared the gift of vividness not only with the great and powerful but also with the local characters who made their mark “about town,” the “Townies” of Westchester, a/k/a the “Golden Apple,” and beyond.Folks who may have been touched by fame, they were devoutly invested in the fortunes of their home heath, and O’Shaughnessy amplified their passions, priorities, quests, hurdles, and triumphs as a friend and champion who wielded the most respected and influential “megaphone” in the Eastern Establishment … and far beyond. He shared the counsel and companionship of political influencers, and leading lights from the media, the arts, the sporting world, and the constellation of fine living … who all were blessed with the heart and soul of a Townie.The Townies derives its power to inform and captivate from the radiance of these good people, their good will, and their good deeds, which shine brighter than the lights of Broadway on a Saturday night. Enjoy!
Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State
by Gareth WilliamsThis book makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. Infrapolitical Passages proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. In doing so, Gareth Williams makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. The book offers a theory of globalization as a gigantic, directionless crisis in humanity’s symbolic organization, as well as a theory of global economic warfare as the very positing of directionlessness and, at the same time, facticity. Williams’s infrapolitics stands at a distance from the biopolitical, which it understands as domination presenting itself as the production of specific forms of subjectivity in the face of the commodity. The subsequent obscuring of being signals the need to circumvent the instrumentalization of life as subordination to the metaphysics of subjectivity, representation, and politics. Infrapolitical Passages works to confront that which is unavailable in subjectivity and representation, opening a way for facticity in the age of globalization in order to make room for the infrapolitical question for existence.
The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany
by Banu KaracaBased on long-term ethnographic research in the art worlds of Istanbul and Berlin, The National Frame rethinks the politics of art by focusing on the role of art in state governance. It argues that artistic practices, arts patronage and sponsorship, collecting and curating art, and the modalities of censorship continue to be refracted through the conceptual lens of the nation-state, despite the globalization of the arts. By examining discussions of the civilizing function of art in Turkey and Germany and particularly moments in which art is seen to cede this function, The National Frame reveals the histories of violence on which the production, circulation, and, very understanding of art are predicated. Karaca examines this darker side of art in two cities in which art and its institutions have been intertwined with symbolic and material dispossession. The particularities of German and Turkish contexts, both marked by attempts to claim modern nationhood through the arts; illuminate how art is staked to memory and erasure, resistance and restoration; and why art has been at once vital and unwieldy for national projects. As art continues to be called upon to engage the past and imagine different futures, The National Frame explores how to reclaim art’s emancipatory potential.
The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition
by Jennifer YusinThe Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a groundbreaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourse. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as presented in the Freudian metapsychology, it thinks anew the relation between temporality and traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the character of the structure of repetition.By examining the role of borders in the history of the 1947 partition of British India and the politics of memorialization in postgenocide Rwanda, The Future Life of Trauma brings to light the implications of trauma as a material event in contemporary nation-formation, sovereignty, and geopolitical violence. In showing how the form of the psyche changes in the encounter, it presents a challenge to the category of difference in the condition of identity, resulting in the formation of a concept of life that elaborates a new relation to destruction and finitude by asserting its power to transform itself.
Welcoming the Stranger: Abrahamic Hospitality and Its Contemporary Implications
by Ori Z Soltes and Rachel SternEmbracing hospitality and inclusion in Abrahamic traditionsOne of the signal moments in the narrative of the biblical Abraham is his insistent and enthusiastic reception of three strangers, a starting point of inspiration for all three Abrahamic traditions as they evolve and develop the details of their respective teachings. On the one hand, welcoming the stranger by remembering “that you were strangers in the land of Egypt” is enjoined upon the ancient Israelites, and on the other, oppressing the stranger is condemned by their prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible.These sentiments are repeated in the New Testament and the Qur’an and elaborated in the interpretive literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Such notions resonate obliquely within the history of India and its Dharmic traditions. On the other hand, they have been seriously challenged throughout history. In the 1830s, America’s “Nativists” sought to emphatically reduce immigration to these shores. A century later, the Holocaust began by the decision of the Nazi German government to turn specific groups of German citizens into strangers. Deliberate marginalization leading to genocide flourished in the next half century from Bosnia and Cambodia to Rwanda. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the United States renewed a decisive twist toward closing the door on those seeking refuge, ushering in an era where marginalized religious and ethnic groups around the globe are deemed unwelcome and unwanted.The essays in Welcoming the Stranger explore these issues from historical, theoretical, theological, and practical perspectives, offering an enlightening and compelling discussion of what the Abrahamic traditions teach us regarding welcoming people we don’t know.Welcoming the Stranger: Abrahamic Hospitality and Its Contemporary Implications is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.Published by The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art and the Fordham University Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work
Deep Time, Dark Times: On Being Geologically Human (Thinking Out Loud)
by David WoodThe new geological epoch we call the Anthropocene is not just a scientific classification. It marks a radical transformation in the background conditions of life on Earth, one taken for granted by much of who we are and what we hope for. Never before has a species possessed both a geological-scale grasp of the history of the Earth and a sober understanding of its own likely fate. Our situation forces us to confront questions both philosophical and of real practical urgency. We need to rethink who “we” are, what agency means today, how to deal with the passions stirred by our circumstances, whether our manner of dwelling on Earth is open to change, and, ultimately, “What is to be done?” Our future, that of our species, and of all the fellow travelers on the planet depend on it.The real-world consequences of climate change bring new significance to some very traditional philosophical questions about reason, agency, responsibility, community, and man’s place in nature. The focus is shifting from imagining and promoting the “good life” to the survival of the species. Deep Time, Dark Times challenges us to reimagine ourselves as a species, taking on a geological consciousness. Drawing promiscuously on the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and other contemporary French thinkers, as well as the science of climate change, David Wood reflects on the historical series of displacements and de-centerings of both the privilege of the Earth, and of the human, from Copernicus through Darwin and Freud to the declaration of the age of the Anthropocene. He argues for the need to develop a new temporal phronesis and to radically rethink who “we” are in respect to solidarity with other humans, and responsibility for the nonhuman stakeholders with which we share the planet. In these brief, lively chapters, Wood poses a range of questions centered on our individual and collective political agency. Might not human exceptionalism be reborn as a sort of hyperbolic responsibility rather than privilege?
Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility
by Corey McEleneyHonorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First BookAgainst the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own.During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.
Aeffect: The Affect and Effect of Artistic Activism
by Stephen DuncombeThe first book to seriously identify how artistic activism works and how to make it work betterThe past decade has seen an explosion in the hybrid practice of “artistic activism,” as artists have turned toward activism to make their work more socially impactful and activists have adopted techniques and perspectives from the arts to make their interventions more creative. Yet questions haunt the practice: Does artistic activism work aesthetically? Does it work politically? And what does “working” even mean when one combines art and activism? In Æffect, author Stephen Duncombe sets out to address these questions at the heart of the field of artistic activism.Written by the co-founder and current Research Director of the internationally recognized Center for Artistic Activism, Æffect draws on Duncombe’s more than twenty-five years of experience in the field and one hundred in-depth interviews with artistic activists worldwide. More than a mere academic exercise, the theory, research, and tools in this book lay the groundwork for artistic activists to evaluate and strengthen their practice and to create better projects. The exploration of good artistic activism is grounded in three sets of concerns. 1) Change: Upon what theories of change is artistic activism based? 2) Intention: What do we hope and expect artistic activism to do, and how does it do this? 3) Evaluation: What actually happens as the result of an artistic activist intervention? Can it be measured?Æffect is rich with examples that demonstrate successful artistic activism, including Undocubus, an old bus painted “No Fear” across its side that was driven cross-country by a group of undocumented immigrant activists; Journal Rappé, a video show created by Senegalese rappers who created long-form investigative reports by rapping the current news in French and Wolof; and War on Smog, a staged a public performance piece by artistic activists in the city of Chongqing in Southwest China. Scannable QR codes are included to provide tools that help readers assess the æffect of their artistic activism.
Agents without Empire: Mobility and Race-Making in Sixteenth-Century France
by Antónia SzabariIt is well known that Renaissance culture gave an empowering role to the individual and thereby to agency. But how does race factor into this culture of empowerment? Canonical French authors like Rabelais and Montaigne have been celebrated for their flexible worldviews and interest in the difference of non-French cultures both inside and outside of Europe. As a result, this period in French cultural history has come to be valued as an exceptional era of cultural opening toward others. Agents without Empire shows that such a celebration is, at the very least, problematic. Szabari argues that before the rise of the French colonial empire, medieval categories of race based on the redemption story were recast through accounts of the Ottoman Empire that were made accessible, in a sudden and unprecedented manner, to agents of the French crown. Spying performed by Frenchmen in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century permeated French culture in large part because those who spied also worked as knowledge producers, propagandists, and artists. The practice changed what it meant to be cultured and elite by creating new avenues of race- and gender-specific consumption for French and European men that affected all areas of sophisticated culture including literature, politics, prints, dressing, personal hygiene, and leisure.Agents without Empire explores race making in this period of European history in the context of diplomatic reposts, travel accounts, natural history, propaganda, religious literature, poetry, theater, fiction, and cheap print. It intervenes in conversations in whiteness studies, race theory, theories of agency and matter, and the history of diplomacy and spying to offer a new account of race making in early modern Europe.
The Roads to Hillbrow: Making Life in South Africa's Community of Migrants (Polis: Fordham Series in Urban Studies)
by Jean Halley Ron NerioThis highly accessible portrayal of a post-apartheid neighborhood in transition analyzes the relationship between identity, migration, and place.Since it was founded in 1894, amidst Johannesburg’s transformation from a mining town into the largest city in southern Africa, Hillbrow has been a community of migrants. As the “city of gold” accumulated wealth on the backs of migrant laborers from southern Africa, Jewish Eastern Europeans who had fled pogroms joined other Europeans and white South Africans in this emerging suburb. After World War II, Hillbrow became a landscape of high-rises that lured western and southern Europeans seeking prosperity in South Africa’s booming economy. By the 1980s, Hillbrow housed some of the most vibrant and visible queer spaces on the continent while also attracting thousands of Indian and Black South Africans who defied apartheid laws to live near the city center. Filling the void for a book about migration within the Global South, The Roads to Hillbrow explores how one South African neighborhood transformed from a white suburb under apartheid into a “grey zone” during the 1970s and 1980s to become a “port of entry” for people from at least twenty-five African countries. The Roads to Hillbrow explores the diverse experiences of domestic and transnational migrants who have made their way to this South African community following war, economic dislocation, and the social trauma of apartheid. Authors Ron Nerio and Jean Halley weave sociology, history, memoir, and queer studies with stories drawn from more than 100 interviews. Topics cover the search for employment, options for housing, support for unaccompanied minors, possibilities for queer expression, the creation of safe parks for children, and the challenges of living without documents. Current residents of Hillbrow also discuss how they cope with inequality, xenophobia, high levels of crime, and the harsh economic impacts of COVID-19.Many of the book’s interviewees arrived in Hillbrow seeking not only to gain better futures for themselves but also to support family members in rural parts of South Africa or in their countries of origin. Some immerse themselves in justice work, while others develop LGBTQ+ support networks, join religious and community groups, or engage in artistic expression. By emphasizing the disparate voices of migrants and people who work with migrants, this book shows how the people of Hillbrow form connections and adapt to adversity.
Indifference and Repetition; or, Modern Freedom and Its Discontents
by Frank RudaIn capitalism human beings act as if they are mere animals. So we hear repeatedly in the history of modern philosophy. Indifference and Repetition examines how modern philosophy, largely coextensive with a particular boost in capitalism’s development, registers the reductive and regressive tendencies produced by capitalism’s effect on individuals and society.Ruda examines a problem that has invisibly been shaping the history of modern, especially rationalist philosophical thought, a problem of misunderstanding freedom. Thinkers like Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx claim that there are conceptions and interpretations of freedom that lead the subjects of these interpretations to no longer act and think freely. They are often unwillingly led into unfreedom. It is thus possible that even “freedom” enslaves. Modern philosophical rationalism, whose conceptual genealogy the books traces and unfolds, assigns a name to this peculiar form of domination by means of freedom: indifference. Indifference is a name for the assumption that freedom is something that human beings have: a given, a natural possession. When we think freedom is natural or a possession we lose freedom. Modern philosophy, Ruda shows, takes its shape through repeated attacks on freedom as indifference; it is the owl that begins its flight, so that the days of unfreedom will turn to dusk.
Humanitarian Fictions: Africa, Altruism, and the Narrative Imagination
by Megan Cole PaustianHumanitarianism has a narrative problem. Far too often, aid to Africa is envisioned through a tale of Western heroes saving African sufferers. While labeling white savior narratives has become a familiar gesture, it doesn’t tell us much about the story as story. Humanitarian Fictions aims to understand the workings of humanitarian literature, as they engage with and critique narratives of Africa.Overlapping with but distinct from human rights, humanitarianism centers on a relationship of assistance, focusing less on rights than on needs, less on legal frameworks than moral ones, less on the problem than on the nonstate solution. Tracing the white savior narrative back to religious missionaries of the nineteenth century, Humanitarian Fictions reveals the influence of religious thought on seemingly secular institutions and uncovers a spiritual, collectivist streak in the discourse of humanity. Because the humanitarian model of care transcends the boundaries of the state, and its networks touch much of the globe, Humanitarian Fictions redraws the boundaries of literary classification based on a shared problem space rather than a shared national space. The book maps a transnational vein of Anglophone literature about Africa that features missionaries, humanitarians, and their so-called beneficiaries. Putting humanitarian thought in conversation with postcolonial critique, this book brings together African, British, and U.S. writers typically read within separate traditions. Paustian shows how the novel—with its profound sensitivity to narrative—can enrich the critique of white saviorism while also imagining alternatives that give African agency its due.
The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil? (Commonalities)
by Roberto EspositoIn this book Roberto Esposito explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century’s most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer’s Iliad—that “great prism through which every gesture has the possibility of becoming public, precisely by being observed by others”— as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, Esposito examines the foundational relation between war and the political.Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt’s and Weil’s voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, The Origin of the Political traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of Esposito’s notion and practice of “the impolitical.”In Esposito’s account Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other’s thought, in the shadow of the other’s light,” to “think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, Esposito unravels the West’s illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.
Radio Active
by William O'ShaughnessyRadio Active is William O’Shaughnessy’s fifth collection of essays, on-air interviews, tributes and eulogies, endorsements, recollections of an evening, and more from “perhaps the finest broadcaster in America” whose commentaries are akin to “potato chips” per former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger because “You can’t stop with only one.”The book opens with a ringing signature defense of the First Amendment and collected O’Shaughnessy correspondence with heroes and “villains,” and insightful sections honoring former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who said, “When O’Shaughnessy is on his game . . . he’s better than anyone on the air or in print.” There is also a section on the estimable Bush family.In eliciting “provocative and candid revelations” from his wide circle, this new compendium pulses with brilliant, insightful prose and a life-affirming reverence for luminous people, places, and events, past and present.
Caged: A Teacher's Journey Through Rikers, or How I Beheaded the Minotaur
by Brandon Dean LamsonAn honest and gripping memoir of one man’s life-altering experience teaching at Rikers Island.When Brandon Dean Lamson first accepted the teaching position at Horizon Academy, a court-mandated academic program for eighteen- to twenty-year-old prisoners at Rikers Island, even he had to question his own motivation. Why was he risking his life every day at a prison notorious for being one of the most dangerous places to work? Was it his small way of making amends for the blatant and pervasive racism he witnessed every day growing up in his small Southern town? Or was it to prove he wasn’t afraid to go where his own father, a prominent District Court judge, had sent both the innocent and guilty alike? In Caged, Lamson provides an intimate view of his transformative experience teaching inmate students on Rikers Island.Rikers Island resonates as a place of horrific violence and inescapable punishment, one of the last places in America that truly invoke overwhelming, universal fear. Set in the late 1990s—a time when the city was rapidly changing into an increasingly corporatized and policed space—Caged exposes a criminal justice system designed to thwart efforts to rehabilitate and educate the incarcerated. Lamson’s first-hand account illustrates how penitentiaries too often use prison education as another means of control.Written in a gripping, confessional narrative, Caged explores the consequential impact of Lamson’s move to New York City, his childhood experiences with racial justice, and his journey working in four prisons over the course of three years. Lamson provides glimpses into his own self-destructive behavior as parallels emerge between his life on Rikers and his personal life, his white privilege, and how his behavior progressively entraps him in ways that resonate with the challenges faced by his students. The book intimately captures how incarceration changes both prisoner and educator alike as Lamson struggles to integrate into life outside prison after his departure from Horizon Academy.
War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945 (World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension)
by Kent PuckettIn this original and engaging work, author Kent Puckett looks at how British filmmakers imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during wartime through film. The Second World War posed unique representational challenges to Britain’s filmmakers. Because of its logistical enormity, the unprecedented scope of its destruction, its conceptual status as total, and the way it affected everyday life through aerial bombing, blackouts, rationing, and the demands of total mobilization, World War II created new, critical opportunities for cinematic representation.Beginning with a close and critical analysis of Britain’s cultural scene, War Pictures examines where the historiography of war, the philosophy of violence, and aesthetics come together. Focusing on three films made in Britain during the second half of the Second World War—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), and David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945)—Puckett treats these movies as objects of considerable historical interest but also as works that exploit the full resources of cinematic technique to engage with the idea, experience, and political complexity of war. By examining how cinema functioned as propaganda, criticism, and a form of self-analysis, War Pictures reveals how British filmmakers, writers, critics, and politicians understood the nature and consequence of total war as it related to ideas about freedom and security, national character, and the daunting persistence of human violence. While Powell and Pressburger, Olivier, and Lean developed deeply self-conscious wartime films, their specific and strategic use of cinematic eccentricity was an aesthetic response to broader contradictions that characterized the homefront in Britain between 1939 and 1945. This stylistic eccentricity shaped British thinking about war, violence, and commitment as well as both an answer to and an expression of a more general violence.Although War Pictures focuses on a particularly intense moment in time, Puckett uses that particularity to make a larger argument about the pressure that war puts on aesthetic representation, past and present. Through cinema, Britain grappled with the paradoxical notion that, in order to preserve its character, it had not only to fight and to win but also to abandon exactly those old decencies, those “sporting-club rules,” that it sought also to protect.
The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger’s Magical Materialism (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
by Dimitris VardoulakisThe Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger’s entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinking—in short, the ineffectual—are critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work.By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger’s response to an old problem, namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality.Heidegger’s conception of an action without ends or effect forgets the role of instrumentality in the tradition that posits a single, unified being. And yet, the ineffectual has had a profound influence in how continental philosophy determines the ethical and the political since World War II. The critique of the ineffectual in Heidegger is thus effectively a critique of the conception of praxis in continental philosophy. Vardoulakis proposes that it is urgent to undo the forgetting of instrumentality if we are to conceive of a democratic politics and an ethics fit to respond to the challenges of high capitalism.
Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism
by Myka Tucker-AbramsonThroughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space.Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the midcentury novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new urban spaces as traumatic “shocks” that required new aesthetic forms. Rejecting older shock-based modernisms, these novelists forged a new modernism, which reimagined shock as a therapeutic force that would create a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish neoliberalism’s roots. In offering a cultural prehistory of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks resituates the Cold War novel as a key archive for understanding neoliberalism’s emergence and offers a more materialist and historically grounded account of neoliberalism’s subjective, affective, and ideological structures.
Recovering Their Stories: US Catholic Women in the Twentieth Century (Catholic Practice in the Americas)
by Sandra Yocum and Nicholas K. RademacherCelebrating the diverse contributions of Catholic lay women in 20th century AmericaRecovering Their Stories focuses on the many contributions made by Catholic lay women in the 20th century in their faith communities across different regions of the United States. Each essay explores the lives and contributions of Catholic lay women across diverse racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds, addressing themes related to these women’s creative agency in their spirituality and devotional practices, their commitment to racial and economic justice, and their leadership and authority in sacred and public spaces Taken together, this volume brings together scholars working in what otherwise may be discreet areas of academic study to look for patterns, areas of convergence and areas of divergence, in order to present in one place the depth and breadth of Catholic lay women’s experience and contributions to church, culture, and society in the United States. Telling these stories together provides a valuable resource for scholars in a number of disciplines, including American Catholic Studies, American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Feminist Studies, and US History. Additionally, scholars in the areas of Latinx studies, Black Studies, Liturgical Studies, and application of Catholic social teaching will find the book to be a valuable resource with respect to articles on specific topics.
The Tradition of Natural Law: A Philosopher's Reflections
by Yves R. Simon Vukan KuicAvailable in a new digital edition with reflowable text suitable for e-readersThe tradition of natural law is one of the foundations of Western civilization. At its heart is the conviction that there is an objective and universal justice which transcends humanity’s particular expressions of justice. It asserts that there are certain ways of behaving which are appropriate to humanity simply by virtue of the fact that we are all human beings. Recent political debates indicate that it is not a tradition that has gone unchallenged: in fact, the opposition is as old as the tradition itself. By distinguishing between philosophy and ideology, by recalling the historical adventures of natural law, and by reviewing the theoretical problems involved in the doctrine, Simon clarifies much of the confusion surrounding this perennial debate. He tackles the questions raised by the application of natural law with skill and honesty as he faces the difficulties of the subject. Simon warns against undue optimism in a revival of interest in natural law and insists that the study of natural law beings with the analysis of “the law of the land.” He writes not as a polemicist but as a philosopher, and he writes of natural law with the same force, conciseness, lucidity and simplicity which have distinguished all his other works.
Living in Death: Genocide and Its Functionaries (Thinking from Elsewhere)
by Richard RechtmanWinner, Prix Littéraire Paris-Liège 2021 Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and TranslationWhen we speak of mass killers, we may speak of radicalized ideologues, mediocrities who only obey orders, or bloodthirsty monsters. Who are these men who kill on a mass scale? What is their consciousness? Do they not feel horror or compassion?Richard Rechtman’s Living in Death offers new answers to a question that has haunted us at least since the Holocaust. For Rechtman, it is not ideologies that kill, but people. This book descends into the ordinary life of people who execute hundreds every day, the same way others go to the office. Bringing philosophical sophistication to the ordinary, the book constitutes an anthropology of mass killers.Turning away from existing psychological and philosophical accounts of genocide’s perpetrators, Rechtman instead explores the conditions under which administering death becomes a job like any other. Considering Cambodia, Rwanda, and other mass killings, Living in Death draws on a vast array of archival research, psychological theory, and anecdotes from the author’s clinical work with refugees and former participants in genocide. Rechtman mounts a compelling case for reframing and refocusing our attempts to explain—and preempt—acts of mass torture, rape, killing, and extermination.What we must see, Rechtman argues, is that for genocidaires (those who carry out acts that are or approach genocide), there is nothing extraordinary, unusual, or world-historical about their actions. On the contrary, they are preoccupied with the same mundane things that characterize any other job: interactions with colleagues, living conditions, a drink and a laugh at the end of the day. To understand this is to understand how things came to be the way they are—and how they might be different.
A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture
by Saul Noam ZarittA Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures. Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means “Jewish” and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In contrast, this book calls attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means “German.” By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. In time, when the word shifted to a verb, taytshn, it came to mean the act of translation. To write or speak in Yiddish is thus to render into taytsh and inhabit the gap between languages.A Taytsh Manifesto highlights the cultural porousness that inheres in taytsh and deploys the term as a paradigm that can be applied to a host of modern Jewish cultural formations. The book reads three corpora in modern Yiddish culture through the lens of translation: Yiddish pulp fiction, also known as shund (trash); the genre of the Yiddish monologue as authored by Sholem Aleichem and other prominent Yiddish writers; and the persistence of Yiddish as a language of vulgarity in contemporary U.S. culture. Together these examples help revise current histories of Yiddish while demonstrating the need for new vocabularies to account for the multidirectionality of Jewish culture. A Taytsh Manifesto develops a model for identifying, in Yiddish and beyond, how cultures intertwine, how they become implicated in world systems and empire, and how they might escape such limiting and oppressive structures.
NBC Goes to War: The Diary of Radio Correspondent James Cassidy from London to the Bulge (World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension)
by James CassidyThe diary of radio correspondent James Cassidy presents a unique view of World War II as this reporter followed the Allied armies into Nazi Germany.James Joseph Cassidy was one of 362 American journalists accredited to cover the European Theater of Operations between June 7, 1944, and the war’s end. Radio was relatively new, and World War II was its first war. Among the difficulties facing historians examining radio reporters during that period is that many potential primary documents—their live broadcasts—were not recorded. In NBC Goes to War, Cassidy’s censored scripts alongside his personal diary capture a front-line view during some of the nastiest fighting in World War II as told by a seasoned NBC reporter.James Cassidy was ambitious and young, and his coverage of World War II for the NBC radio network notched some notable firsts, including being the first to broadcast live from German soil and arranging the broadcast of a live Jewish religious service from inside Nazi Germany while incoming mortar and artillery shells fell 200 yards away. His diary describes how he gathered news, how it was censored, and how it was sent from the battle zone to the United States. As radio had no pictures, reporters quickly developed a descriptive visual style to augment dry facts. All of Cassidy’s stories, from the panic he felt while being targeted by German planes to his shock at the deaths of colleagues, he told with grace and a reporter’s lean and engaging prose.Providing valuable eyewitness material not previously available to historians, NBC Goes to War tells a “bottom-up” narrative that provides insight into war as fought and chronicled by ordinary men and women. Cassidy skillfully placed listeners alongside him in the ruins of Aachen, on icy back roads crawling with spies, and in a Belgian bar where a little girl wailed “Les Américains partent!” when Allied troops retreated to safety, leaving the town open to German re-occupation. With a journalistic eye for detail, NBC Goes to War unforgettably portrays life in the press corps. This newly uncovered perspective also helps balance the CBS-heavy radio scholarship about the war, which has always focused heavily on Edward R. Murrow and his “Murrow’s Boys.”
The Survival of Dulles: Reflections on a Second Century of Influence
by Michael M. CanarisThis collection, marking the centenary of Avery Dulles’s birth, makes an entirely distinctive contribution to contemporary theological discourse as we approach the second century of the cardinal’s influence, and the twenty-first of Christian witness in the world. Moving beyond a festschrift, the volume offers both historical analyses of Dulles’s contributions and applications of his insights and methodologies to current issues like immigration, exclusion, and digital culture. It includes essays by Dulles’s students, colleagues, and peers, as well as by emerging scholars who have been and continue to be indebted to his theological vision and encyclopedic fluency in the ecclesiological developments of the post-conciliar Church. Though focused more on Catholic and ecumenical affairs than interreligious ones, the volume is intentionally outward-facing and strives to make clear the diverse and pluralistic contours of the cardinal’s nearly unrivaled impact on the North American Church, which truly crossed ideological, denominational, and generational boundaries. While critically recognizing the limits and lacunae of his historical moment, it serves as one among a multitude of testaments to the notion that the ripples of Avery Dulles’s influence continue to widen toward intellectually distant shores.
Carbonate of Copper
by Roberto TejadaBringing together lyric poetry, documentary photographs, and lives lived along the U.S.-Mexico borderlandWritten during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, in Carbonate of Copper Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement. The poems stage scenes adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the realities of migration warped by jarring political vitriol, bearing witness to past and present-day hazards and sorrows wagered by those in search of asylum. So enabled, these poems make visible not only the infrastructure of militarized surveillance and its detention complex but also the aspiration to justice and mercy and the resilient self-organized order of time for migrants seeking human dignity while awaiting passage to the other side of the dividing line.The book’s title refers also to a mineral found in azurite and malachite, a color medium that had an impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise, and its systems of extraction. Carbonate of copper was less desirable than the deeper ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli, but Renaissance artists and patrons nonetheless coveted it and prompted a market for the blue derivative used in tempera and oil pigment. The blue powder pigment serves, too, as a form of sorcery: one that would ward off those who deal in injury of the already dispossessed.Turning his attention to the forced relocation of peoples, the COVID-19 death toll, the encroaching dangers of illiberal rule, the meanings of home and eviction, the power of cultural memory, as well as his artistic forebears, Tejada accounts for the uncounted and those excluded from belonging in voices that tell the cruel fortunes and joyful vitality of human and non-human life forms.