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Articles 72821 à 72840 sur 94871
Par Lomarsh Roopnarine. 2018
Winner of the 2018 Gordon K. and Sybil Farrell Lewis Award for the best book in Caribbean studies from the…
Caribbean Studies Association This book tells a distinct story of Indians in the Caribbean--one concentrated not only on archival records and institutions, but also on the voices of the people and the ways in which they define themselves and the world around them. Through oral history and ethnography, Lomarsh Roopnarine explores previously marginalized Indians in the Caribbean and their distinct social dynamics and histories, including the French Caribbean and other islands with smaller South Asian populations. He pursues a comparative approach with inclusive themes that cut across the Caribbean. In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean. Today India bears little relevance to most of these Caribbean Indians. Yet, Caribbean Indians have developed an in-between status, shaped by South Asian customs such as religion, music, folklore, migration, new identities, and Bollywood films. They do not seem akin to Indians in India, nor are they like Caribbean Creoles, or mixed-race Caribbeans. Instead, they have merged India and the Caribbean to produce a distinct, dynamic local entity. The book does not neglect the arrival of nonindentured Indians in the Caribbean since the early 1900s. These people came to the Caribbean without an indentured contract or after indentured emancipation but have formed significant communities in Barbados, the US Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. Drawing upon over twenty-five years of research in the Caribbean and North America, Roopnarine contributes a thorough analysis of the Indo-Caribbean, among the first to look at the entire Indian diaspora across the Caribbean.Par Margaret Barton-Fumo. 2017
After a robust career in the Netherlands as the country's most successful director, Paul Verhoeven (b. 1938) built an impressive…
career in the United States with such controversial blockbusters as RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls before returning home to direct 2006's Black Book. After a recent stint as a reality television judge in the Netherlands, Verhoeven returned to the big screen with his first feature film in a decade, a highly anticipated French-language production, Elle, starring Isabelle Huppert.Verhoeven, who holds an advanced degree in mathematics and physics, boasts a fascinating background. Traversing Hollywood, the Dutch film industry, and now French filmmaking, the interviews in this volume reveal a complex, often ambiguous figure, as well as a director of immense talent.Paul Verhoeven: Interviews covers every phase of the director's career, beginning with six newly translated Dutch newspaper interviews dating back to 1968 and ending with a set of previously unpublished interviews dedicated to his most recent work. He experimented with crowd-sourced filmmaking for the television show The Entertainment Experience, which resulted in the film Tricked, as well as his latest feature Elle. Editor Margaret Barton-Fumo includes "Sex, Cinema and Showgirls," a long out-of-print essay by Verhoeven on his most controversial film, accompanied by pages of original storyboards from this and some of Verhoeven's other films. Finally, Barton-Fumo allots due attention to the director's little-known lifelong fascination with the historical Jesus Christ. Verhoeven is the only non-theologian member of the exclusive Westar Institute and author of the book Jesus of Nazareth.Par Janice Hume. 2000
“Within the short period of a year, she was a bride, a beloved wife and companion, a mother, a corpse,”…
reported The National Intelligencer on the death of Elizabeth Buchanan in 1838. Such obituaries fascinate us. Few of us realize that, when examined historically, they can reveal not only information about the departed but also much about American culture and about who and what we value. They also offer hints about the way Americans view death. This book also will fascinate, for it surveys more than 8,000 newspaper obituaries from 1818 to 1930 to show what they reveal about our culture. It shows how, in memorializing individual citizens, obituaries make a public expression of our values. Far from being staid or morbid, these death notices offer a lively look at a changing America. Indeed, obits are little windows through which to view America's cultural history. In the nineteenth century, they spoke of a person's character, in the twentieth of a person's work and wealth. In the days when women were valued mainly in their relationships with men, their obituaries were about the men in their lives. Then, as now, important friendships make a difference, for sometimes a death has been deemed newsworthy only because of whom the deceased knew. In 1838 when a fifty-year-old Virginian named William P. Custis died “after a long and wasting illness,” readers of The Daily National Intelligencer learned about his generous hospitality, his sterling business principles, and his kindness as a neighbor and husband. Custis's obituary not only recorded the fact of his death but also celebrated his virtues. The newspaper obituary has a commemorative role. It distills the essence of a citizen's life, and it reflects what society values and wants to remember about the deceased. Throughout our history, these published accounts have revealed changing values. They provide a link between public remembrances of individuals and the collective memory of a great American past. In obits of yesteryear, men were brave, gallant, vigilant, bold, honest, and dutiful. Women were patient, resigned, obedient, affectionate, amiable, pious, gentle, virtuous, tender, and useful. Mining newspapers of New York City, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco, along with two early national papers, Niles' Weekly Register and The National Intelligencer, Janice Hume has produced a portrait of America, an entertaining history, and a revealing look at the things Americans have valued.Women from all over the country came to New Orleans in 1884 for the Woman's Department of the Cotton Centennial…
Exposition, that portion of the World's Fair exhibition devoted to the celebration of women's affairs and industry. Their conversations and interactions played out as a drama of personalities and sectionalism at a transitional moment in the history of the nation. These women planted seeds at the Exposition that would have otherwise taken decades to drift southward. This book chronicles the successes and setbacks of a lively cast of postbellum women in the first Woman's Department at a world's fair in the Deep South. From a wide range of primary documents, Miki Pfeffer recreates the sounds and sights of 1884 New Orleans after Civil War and Reconstruction. She focuses on how difficult unity was to achieve, even when diverse women professed a common goal. Such celebrities as Julia Ward Howe and Susan B. Anthony brought national debates on women's issues to the South for the first time, and journalists and ordinary women reacted. At the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, the Woman's Department became a petri dish where cultures clashed but where women from across the country exchanged views on propriety, jobs, education, and suffrage. Pfeffer memorializes women's exhibits of handwork, literary and scientific endeavors, inventions, and professions, but she proposes that the real impact of the six-month-long event was a shift in women's self-conceptions of their public and political lives. For those New Orleans ladies who were ready to seize the opportunity of this uncommon forum, the Woman's Department offered a future that they had barely imagined.Par Tunde Adeleke. 2009
Postcolonial discourses on African Diaspora history and relations have traditionally focused intensely on highlighting the common experiences and links between…
black Africans and African Americans. This is especially true of Afrocentric scholars and supporters who use Africa to construct and validate a monolithic, racial, and culturally essentialist worldview. Publications by Afrocentric scholars such as Molefi Asante, Marimba Ani, Maulana Karenga, and the late John Henrik Clarke have emphasized the centrality of Africa to the construction of Afrocentric essentialism. In the last fifteen years, however, countervailing critical scholarship has challenged essentialist interpretations of Diaspora history. Critics such as Stephen Howe, Yaacov Shavit, and Clarence Walker have questioned and refuted the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of Afrocentric essentialist ideology. Tunde Adeleke deconstructs Afrocentric essentialism by illuminating and interrogating the problematic situation of Africa as the foundation of a racialized worldwide African Diaspora. He attempts to fill an intellectual gap by analyzing the contradictions in Afrocentric representations of the continent. These include multiple, conflicting, and ambivalent portraits of Africa; the use of the continent as a global, unifying identity for all blacks; the de-emphasizing and nullification of New World acculturation; and the ahistoristic construction of a monolithic African Diaspora worldwide.Par Vanessa Joosen. 2018
Contributions by Gökçe Elif Baykal, Lincoln Geraghty, Verónica Gottau, Vanessa Joosen, Sung-Ae Lee, Cecilia Lindgren, Mayako Murai, Emily Murphy, Mariano…
Narodowski, Johanna Sjöberg, Anna Sparrman, Ingrid Tomkowiak, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, Ilgim Veryeri Alaca, and Elisabeth Wesseling Media narratives in popular culture often assign interchangeable characteristics to childhood and old age, presuming a resemblance between children and the elderly. These designations in media can have far-reaching repercussions in shaping not only language, but also cognitive activity and behavior. The meaning attached to biological, numerical age—even the mere fact that we calculate a numerical age at all—is culturally determined, as is the way people “act their age.” With populations aging all around the world, awareness of intergenerational relationships and associations surrounding old age is becoming urgent. Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media caters to this urgency and contributes to age literacy by supplying insights into the connection between childhood and senescence to show that people are aged by culture. Treating classic stories like the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and Heidi; pop culture hits like The Simpsons and Mad Men; and international productions, such as Turkish television cartoons and South Korean films, contributors explore the recurrent idea that “children are like old people,” as well as other relationships between children and elderly characters as constructed in literature and media from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This volume deals with fiction and analyzes language as well as verbally sparse, visual productions, including children's literature, film, television, animation, and advertising.In 1966, a year after the Voting Rights Act began liberating millions of southern blacks, New Yorkers challenged a political…
system that weakened their voting power. Andrew W. Cooper (1927–2002), a beer company employee, sued state officials in a case called Cooper vs. Power. In 1968, the courts agreed that black citizens were denied the right to elect an authentic representative of their community. The 12th Congressional District was redrawn. Shirley Chisholm, a member of Cooper's political club, ran for the new seat and made history as the first black woman elected to Congress. Cooper became a journalist, a political columnist, then founder of Trans Urban News Service and the City Sun, a feisty Brooklyn-based weekly that published from 1984 to 1996. Whether the stories were about Mayor Koch or Rev. Al Sharpton, Howard Beach or Crown Heights, Tawana Brawley's dubious rape allegations, the Daily News Four trial, or Spike Lee's filmmaking career, Cooper's City Sun commanded attention and moved officials and readers to action. Cooper's leadership also gave Brooklyn—particularly predominantly black central Brooklyn—an identity. It is no accident that in the twenty-first century the borough crackles with energy. Cooper fought tirelessly for the community's vitality when it was virtually abandoned by the civic and business establishments in the mid-to-late twentieth century. In addition, scores of journalists trained by Cooper are keeping his spirit alive.Par David G. Sansing. 1990
The troubled history of higher education in Mississippi is a mirror image of the cultural and political dynamics that have…
shaped the state's history over the last two centuries. The interaction between race and place, the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, illiteracy and literary genius, the conflict and change and continuity that mark the contours of its history, have influenced the development of higher education in Mississippi.In this study of the origin and evolution of the state's collegiate system, David Sansing examines higher education in its broad cultural context and its elaborate involvement with the rest of society. Although he focuses on one southern state, he links the growth of higher education in Mississippi to both regional and national developments.Sansing also contrasts the strong popular support for higher education with the general neglect of public schools, a longstanding tradition in Mississippi that dates from the pre-Civil War period. From the antebellum artisans and the sharecroppers of the Gilded Age, to the redneck farmers of the debt-ridden twenties and post-World War II blacks with their rising expectations, Mississippians have struggled and sacrificed to send their children to college as a way up and out of poverty.Sansing's history of higher education in Mississippi is the first such study since 1899 and is the most recent of the five modern state histories of higher education. This path-breaking study traces the gradual and often controversial expansion of Mississippi's institutions of higher learning from the founding of Jefferson College in 1802, through the sectional crisis and Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the Bilbo Purge, World War II, the Meredith Crisis, and Civil Rights Revolution.Par Elisabeth El Refaie. 2012
A troubled childhood in Iran. Living with a disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the…
comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields—including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology—El Refaie shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one's self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.A significant body of scholarship examines the production of children's literature by women and minorities, as well as the representation…
of gender, race, and sexuality. But few scholars have previously analyzed class in children's literature. This definitive collection remedies that by defining and exemplifying historical materialist approaches to children's literature. The introduction of Little Red Readings lucidly discusses characteristics of historical materialism, the methodological approach to the study of literature and culture first outlined by Karl Marx, defining key concepts and analyzing factors that have marginalized this tradition, particularly in the United States. The thirteen essays here analyze a wide range of texts—from children's bibles to Mary Poppins to The Hunger Games—using concepts in historical materialism from class struggle to the commodity. Essayists apply the work of Marxist theorists such as Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson to children's literature and film. Others examine the work of leftist writers in India, Germany, England, and the United States. The authors argue that historical materialist methodology is critical to the study of children's literature, as children often suffer most from inequality. Some of the critics in this collection reveal the ways that literature for children often functions to naturalize capitalist economic and social relations. Other critics champion literature that reveals to readers the construction of social reality and point to texts that enable an understanding of the role ordinary people might play in creating a more just future. The collection adds substantially to our understanding of the political and class character of children's literature worldwide and contributes to the development of a radical history of children's literature.Par Marius M. Carriere Jr.. 2018
In the 1850s, a startling new political party appeared on the American scene. Both its members and its critics called…
the new party by various names, but to most it was known as the Know Nothing Party. It reignited political fires over nativism and anti-immigration sentiments. At a time of political uncertainty, with the Whig party on the verge of collapse, the Know Nothings seemed destined to replace them and perhaps become a political fixture.Historian Marius M. Carriere Jr. tracks the rise and fall of the Know Nothing movement in Louisiana, outlining not only the history of the party as it is usually known, but also explaining how the party's unique permeation in Louisiana contrasted with the Know Nothings' expansion nationally and elsewhere in the South. For example, many Roman Catholics in the state joined the Know Nothings, even though the party was nationally known as anti-Catholic.While historians have largely concentrated on the Know Nothings' success in the North, Carriere furnishes a new context for the evolution of a national political movement at odds with its Louisiana constituents. Through statistics on various elections and demographics of Louisiana politicians, Carriere forms a detailed account of Louisiana's Know Nothing Party. The national and rapidly changing Louisiana political landscape yielded surprising, credible leverage for the Know Nothing movement. Slavery, Carriere argues, also played a crucial difference between southern and northern Know Nothing ideals. Carriere delineates the eventual downfall of the Know Nothing Party, while offering new perspectives on a nativist movement, which has appeared once again in a changing, divided country.Par Patricia Galloway, Evan Peacock. 2015
Contributions by Keith A. Baca, Jeffrey P. Brain, Samuel O. Brookes, Ian W. Brown, Philip J. Carr, Jessica Crawford, Patricia…
Galloway, Alison M. Hadley, Christopher T. Hays, Edward R. Henry, Cliff Jenkins, Jay K. Johnson, Evan Peacock, Janet Rafferty, Maria Schleidt, Mary Evelyn Starr, James B. Stoltman, Andrew M. Triplett, Melissa H. Twaroski, and Richard A. Weinstein This volume includes original scholarship on a wide array of archaeological research across the South. One essay explores the effects of climate on early cultures in Mississippi. Contributors reveal the production and distribution of stone effigy beads, which were centered in southwest Mississippi some 5,000 years ago, and trace contact between different parts of the prehistoric Southeast as seen in the distribution of clay cooking balls. Researchers explore small, enigmatic sites in the hill country of northern Mississippi now marked by scatters of broken pottery and a large, seemingly isolated "platform" mound in Calhoun County. Pieces describe a mound group in Chickasaw County built by early agriculturalists who subsequently abandoned the area and a similar prehistoric abandonment event in Winston and Choctaw Counties. A large pottery collection from the famous Anna Mounds site in Adams County, excavations at a Chickasaw Indian site in Lee County, camps and works of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the pine hill country of southern Mississippi, and the history of logging in the Mississippi Delta all yield abundant, new understandings of the past. Overview papers include a retrospective on archaeology in the National Forests of north Mississippi, a look at a number of mound sites in the lower Mississippi Delta, and a study of how communities of learning in field archaeology are built, with prominent archaeologist Samuel O. Brookes's achievements as a focal point. History buffs, artifact enthusiasts, students, and professionals all will find something of interest in this book, which opens doors on the prehistory and history of Mississippi.Par Michael Streissguth. 1997
Illustrated with fifty-four photographs and featuring a comprehensive discography and sessionography, this book traces Eddy Arnold's origins from a cotton…
farm in western Tennessee to his legendary status in the world of country music. Michael Streissguth covers Arnold's success as a top-selling artist in the 1940s and 1950s and his temporary wane as listeners gravitated toward the rock & roll sound, embodied by newcomer Elvis Presley. Arnold (1918-2008) kept recording, however, and working on his craft. By the mid-60s, he reemerged as a pop crooner with his hit song "Make the World Go Away." His blend of country sentiments and pop stylings created the template for Nashville's modern country music sound. Throughout his career he was a major concert attraction and a radio and television star. Few other figures can claim to have had as great an influence on contemporary country and popular arranging.Par Ted Olson. 1998
In the years immediately preceding the founding of the American nation the Blue Ridge region, which stretches through large sections…
of Virginia and North Carolina and parts of surrounding states along the Appalachian chain, was the American frontier. In colonial times, it was settled by hardy, independent people from several cultural backgrounds that did not fit with the English-dominated society. The landless, the restless, and the rootless followed Daniel Boone, the most famous of the settlers, and pushed the frontier westward. The settlers who did not migrate to new lands became geographically isolated and politically and economically marginalized. Yet they created fulfilling lives for themselves by forging effective and oftentimes sophisticated folklife traditions, many of which endure in the region today. In 1772 the Blue Ridge was the site of the Watauga Association, often cited as the first free and democratic non-native government on the American continent. In 1780 Blue Ridge pioneers helped win the Revolutionary War for the patriots by defeating Patrick Ferguson's army of British loyalists at the Battle of Kings Mountain. When gold was discovered in the southernmost section of the Blue Ridge, America experienced its first gold rush and the subsequent tragic displacement of the region's aboriginal people. Having been spared by the coincidence of geology and topography from the more environmentally damaging manifestations of industrialization, coal mining, and dam building, the Blue Ridge region still harbors scenic natural beauty as well as vestiges of the earliest cultures of southern Appalachia. As it describes the most characteristic and significant verbal, customary, and material traditions, this fascinating, fact-filled book traces the historical development of the region's distinct folklife.Par John McCusker. 2012
Edward "Kid" Ory (1886-1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells…
his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city's hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans's top "hot" band. Ory's career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 he moved to Chicago where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton that captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, "Muskrat Ramble," is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, he returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career.Drawing on oral history and Ory's unpublished autobiography, Creole Trombone is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory's personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of his most significant recordings.This Woman's Work presents a social history and critical biography based on the life of award-winning writer Bebe Moore Campbell…
(1950-2006). It offers the personal story of a popular novelist, journalist, and mental health advocate. This book examines Campbell's life and activism in two periods: first, as a student at the University of Pittsburgh during the 1960s black student movement and, second, as a mental health advocate near the end of her life in 2006. It describes Campbell's activism within the Black Action Society from 1967 to 1971 and her negotiation of the Black Nationalist ideologies espoused during the 1960s. The book also explores Campbell's later involvement in the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), her role as a national spokesperson, and the local activism that sparked the birth of the NAMI Urban-Los Angeles chapter, which served black and Latino communities (1999-2006).Adjacent to her activist work, Campbell's first novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, connects to her emerging political consciousness (related to race and gender) and the concern for racial violence during the US black liberation period from 1950 to 1970. Similarly Campbell's final novel, 72 Hour Hold, is examined closely for its connection to her activism as well as the sociopolitical commentary, emphasis on mental health disparities, coping with mental illness, and advocacy in black communities. As a writer and activist, Campbell immersed her readers in immediately relevant historical and sociopolitical matters. This Woman's Work is the first full-length biography of Bebe Moore Campbell and details the seamless marriage of her fiction writing and community activism.Par Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, Jerome Klinkowitz. 2006
Bestselling authors, sensational lecturers, documentary filmmakers, amateur archaeologists, spies for FDR—Dana and Ginger Lamb led the life of Indiana Jones…
long before the movie icon was ever scripted. “We blaze the trail,” Ginger said, “and the scientists follow.” The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb is the first biography of this captivating, entrepreneurial couple. In southern California, they started married life in 1933 by building a canoe. With only $4.10 in their pockets, they paddled to Central America and through the Panama Canal. Three years later they returned triumphant, bearing a photographic record of the amazing trek that made them famous. After releasing their bestselling book, Enchanted Vagabonds, the two became exactly that. They relentlessly lectured for the public and mooned for the media until they were able to fund more exotic voyages to remote jungles and rivers. So convincing were they on the circuit that their most powerful fan, President Franklin Roosevelt, coerced J. Edgar Hoover into hiring the Lambs as spies in Mexico. After World War II, they launched their Quest for the Lost City, which yielded another book and documentary. Drawing on historical records, the Lambs' books and letters, and recently declassified espionage documents, biographers Julie Huffman-klinkowitz and Jerome Klinkowitz show how the Lambs succeeded in marketing their conquests and films to armchair explorers around the world and how they became, in popular imagination, the quintessential American adventurers.Par Marc C. Conner. 2000
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively been examined as sagas illuminating history, race, culture, and gender politics. This…
gathering of eight essays by top scholars probes Morrison's novels and her growing body of nonfiction and critical work for the complex and potent aesthetic elements that have made her a major American novelist of the twentieth century. Through traditional aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, the beautiful, and the grotesque, through issues of form, narrative, and language, and through questions of affect and reader response, the nine essays in this volume bring into relief the dynamic and often overlooked range within Morrison's writing. Employing aesthetic ideas that range from the ancient Greeks to contemporary research in the black English oral tradition, The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison shows the potency of these ideas for interpreting Morrison's writing. This is a force Morrison herself has often suggested in her claims that Greek tragedy bears a striking similarity to “Afro-American communal structures.” At the same time each essay attends to the ways in which Morrison also challenges traditional aesthetic concepts, establishing the African American and female voices that are essential to her sensibility. The result is a series of readings that simultaneously expands our understanding of Morrison's work and also provokes new thinking about an aesthetic tradition that is nearly 2,500 years old. These essays offer a rich complement to the dominant approaches in Morrison scholarship by revealing aspects of her work that purely ideological approaches have obscured or about which they have remained oddly silent. Each essay focuses particularly on the relations between the aesthetic and the ethical in Morrison's writing and between the artistic production and its role in the world at large. These relations show the rich political implications that aesthetic analysis engenders. By treating both Morrison's fiction and her nonfiction, the essays reveal a mind and imagination that have long been intimately engaged with the questions and traditions of the aesthetic domain. The result is a provocative and original contribution to Morrison scholarship, and to scholarship in American letters generally.In The Gaithers and Southern Gospel, Ryan P. Harper examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaither's Homecoming video and concert series--a…
gospel music franchise that, since its beginning in 1991, has outperformed all Christian and much secular popular music on the American music market.The Homecomings represent "southern gospel." Typically that means a musical style popular among white evangelical Christians in the American South and Midwest, and it sometimes overlaps in style, theme, and audience with country music. The Homecomings' nostalgic orientation--their celebration of "traditional" kinds of American Christian life--harmonize well with southern gospel music, past and present. But amidst the backward gazes, the Homecomings also portend and manifest change. The Gaithers' deliberate racial integration of their stages, their careful articulation of a relatively inclusive evangelical theology, and their experiments with an array of musical forms demonstrate that the Homecoming is neither simplistically nostalgic, nor solely "southern."Harper reveals how the Gaithers negotiate a tension between traditional and changing community norms as they seek simultaneously to maintain and expand their audience as well as to initiate and respond to shifts within their fan base. Pulling from his field work at Homecoming concerts, behind the scenes with the Gaithers, and with numerous Homecoming fans, Harper reveals the Homecoming world to be a dynamic, complicated constellation in the formation of American religious identity.Par Terrence R. Wandtke. 2016
Ed Brubaker (b. 1966) has emerged as one of the most popular, significant figures in art comics since the 1990s.…
Most famous as the man who killed Captain America in 2007, Brubaker's work on company-owned properties such as Batman and Captain America and creator-owned series like Criminal and Fatale live up to the usual expectations for the superhero and crime genres. And yet, Brubaker layers his stories with a keen self-awareness, applying his expansive knowledge of American comic book history to invigorate his work and challenge the dividing line between popular entertainment and high art. This collection of interviews explores the sophisticated artist's work, drawing upon the entire length of the award-winning Brubaker's career. With his stints writing Catwoman, Gotham Central, and Daredevil, Brubaker advanced the work of crime comic book writers through superhero stories informed by hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir. During his time on Captain America and his series Sleeper and Incognito, Brubaker revisited the conventions of the espionage thriller. With double agents who lose themselves in their jobs, the stories expose the arbitrary superhero standards of good and evil. In his series Criminal, Brubaker offered complex crime stories and, with a clear sense of the complicated lost world before the Comics Code, rejected crusading critic Fredric Wertham's myth of the innocence of early comics. Overall, Brubaker demonstrates his self-conscious methodology in these often little-known and hard-to-find interviews, worthwhile conversations in their own right as well as objects of study for both scholars and researchers.