Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence is a pathbreaking examination of the contact encounter in Hawaii from the perspective of Hawaiian women. Jocelyn Linnekin offers a reconstruction of Hawaiian women's authority and status before contact with the West and examines changes in their cultural valuation and social position during the first century of Western contact. Through a detailed analysis of women's roles in exchange, production, kinship, and politics during the political and economic transformations of the nineteenth century, Linnekin challenges the view that Polynesian women were doomed to a peripheral status by the ritual logic of pollution. She demonstrates how Hawaiian women maintained their position as points of access to land and power, while frequently resisting the constraints of the tabu system as well as later Western-influenced attempts to abridge their authority.
This book is a unique and important contribution to the scholarship on Hawaiian history as well as to the growing literature on women and colonialism and women and social stratification. It will appeal to scholars and students who work in the areas of gender studies, social stratification, cultural change, Oceania, and historical anthropology.
In Sacred Violence, the distinguished political and legal theorist Paul W. Kahn investigates the reasons for the resort to violence characteristic of premodern states. In a startling argument, he contends that law will never offer an adequate account of political violence. Instead, we must turn to political theology, which reveals that torture and terror are, essentially, forms of sacrifice. Kahn forces us to acknowledge what we don't want to see: that we remain deeply committed to a violent politics beyond law.
Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights.
Cover Illustration: "Abu Ghraib 67, 2005" by Fernando Botero. Courtesy of the artist and the American University Museum.
Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy Salomé has had a rich afterlife in literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture. Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression is the first comprehensive scholarly exploration of that extraordinary resonance that persists to the present. Petra Dierkes-Thrun positions Wilde as a founding figure of modernism and Salomé as a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde's Salomé marks a major turning point from a dominant traditional cultural, moral, and religious outlook to a utopian aesthetic of erotic and artistic transgression. Wilde and Salomé are seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarmé, Pater, and Nietzsche to modernist and postmodernist literature and philosophy and our contemporary culture. Dierkes-Thrun addresses subsequent representations of Salome in a wide range of artistic productions of both high and popular culture through the works of Richard Strauss, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, Ken Russell, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Altman, Tom Robbins, and Nick Cave, among others.
Sampling and Remixing Blackness is a timely and accessible book that examines the social ramifications of cultural borrowing and personal adaptation of Hip-hop culture by non-Black and non-African American Black artists in theater and performance. In a cultural moment where Hip-hop theater hits such as Hamilton offer glimpses of Black popular culture to non-Black people through musical soundtracks, GIFs, popular Hip-hop music, language, clothing, singing styles and embodied performance, people around the world are adopting a Blackness that is at once connected to African American culture--and assumed and shed by artists and consumers as they please. As Black people around the world live a racial identity that is not shed, in a cultural moment of social unrest against anti-blackness, this book asks how such engagements with Hip-hop in performance can be both dangerous and a space for finding cultural allies. Featuring the work of some of the visionaries of Hip-hop theater including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sarah Jones and Danny Hoch, this book explores the work of groundbreaking Hip-hop theater and performance artists who have engaged Hip-hop's Blackness through popular performance. The book challenges how we understand the performance of race, Hip-hop and Blackness in the age of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. In a cultural moment where racial identity is performed through Hip-hop culture's resistance to the status quo and complicity in maintaining it, Hodges Persley asks us to consider who has the right to claim Hip-hop's blackness when blackness itself is a complicated mixtape that offers both consent and resistance to transgressive and inspiring acts of performance.
“The theatre scholar’s daunting but irresistible quest to recover some echoes of performance of the past has never been more engagingly presented than in Pascoe’s account of tracing the long-silenced voice of Sarah Siddons. Her report is a warm, witty, and highly informative exploration of the methodology and the pleasures of historical research.”
—Marvin Carlson, author of The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine
During her lifetime (1755–1831), English actress Sarah Siddons was an international celebrity acclaimed for her performances of tragic heroines. We know what she looked like—an endless number of artists asked her to sit for portraits and sculptures—but what of her famous voice, reported to cause audiences to hyperventilate or faint? In The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, Judith Pascoe takes readers on a journey to discover how the actor’s voice actually sounded. In lively and engaging prose, Pascoe retraces her quixotic search, which leads her to enroll in a “Voice for Actors” class, to collect Lady Macbeth voice prints, and to listen more carefully to the soundscape of her life.
Bringing together archival discoveries, sound recording history, and media theory, Pascoe shows how romantic poets’ preoccupation with voices is linked to a larger cultural anxiety about the voice’s ephemerality. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files contributes to a growing body of work on the fascinating history of sound and will engage a broad audience interested in how recording technology has altered human experience.
Advice on sex and marriage in the literature of antiquity and the middle ages typically stressed the negative: from stereotypes of nagging wives and cheating husbands to nightmarish visions of women empowered through marriage. Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage brings together the leading scholars of this fascinating body of literature. Their essays examine a variety of ancient and early medieval writers' cautionary and often eccentric marital satire beginning with Plautus in the third century B.C.E. through Chaucer (the only non-Latin author studied). The volume demonstrates the continuity in the Latin tradition which taps into the fear of marriage and intimacy shared by ancient ascetics (Lucretius), satirists (Juvenal), comic novelists (Apuleius), and by subsequent Christian writers starting with Tertullian and Jerome, who freely used these ancient sources for their own purposes, including propaganda for recruiting a celibate clergy and the promotion of detachment and asceticism as Christian ideals.
Warren S. Smith is Professor of Classical Languages at the University of New Mexico.
Over seventy-five million Americans listen to podcasts every month, and the average weekly listener spends over six hours tuning into podcasts from the more than thirty million podcast episodes currently available. Yet despite the excitement over podcasting, the sounds of podcasting’s nascent history are vulnerable and they remain mystifyingly difficult to research and preserve. Podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or become housed in proprietary databases, which are difficult to search with any rigor. Podcasts might seem to be highly available everywhere, but it’s necessary to preserve and analyze these resources now, or scholars will find themselves writing, researching, and thinking about a past they can’t fully see or hear.
This collection gathers the expertise of leading and emerging scholars in podcasting and digital audio in order to take stock of podcasting’s recent history and imagine future directions for the format. Essays trace some of the less amplified histories of the format and offer discussions of some of the hurdles podcasting faces nearly twenty years into its existence. Using their experiences building and using the PodcastRE database—one of the largest publicly accessible databases for searching and researching podcasts—the volume editors and contributors reflect on how they, as media historians and cultural researchers, can best preserve podcasting’s booming audio cultures and the countless voices and perspectives podcasting adds to our collective soundscape.
The phenomenon known as Hip Hop encompasses a global, multiethnic, grassroots culture committed to social justice and self-expression through performance. Hip Hop Theater emerged from that culture, mixing spoken-word performance with music and dance and marked by Hip Hop's strong sense of activism and resistance. Hip Hop Theater is engaged with questions of identity – culture, heritage, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and difference—narrating the experiences of historically marginalized peoples and putting them in dialogue with other oppressed communities.
Say Word! Voices from Hip Hop Theater collects eight works by contemporary artists who confront today's compelling issues, ranging from racial profiling and police brutality to women's empowerment and from the commercial exploitation of Hip Hop to identity politics. Editor Daniel Banks has assembled work by Abiola Abrams, Zakiyyah Alexander, Chadwick Boseman, Kristoffer Diaz, Rha Goddess, Antoy Grant, Joe Hernandez-Kolski, Rickerby Hinds, and Ben Snyder, augmented with an extensive introduction and other informative commentary. The book also includes a roundtable moderated by Holly Bass and featuring Hip Hop pioneers Eisa Davis, Danny Hoch, Sarah Jones, and Will Power, a conversation that traces the roots of Hip Hop Theater and imagines its future directions.
The effect of religious factors on politics has been a key issue since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent rise of religious terrorism. However, the systematic investigations of these topics have focused primarily on the effects of religion on domestic and international conflict. Scriptures, Shrines, Scapegoats, and World Politics offers a comprehensive evaluation of the role of religion in international relations, broadening the scope of investigation to such topics as the relationship between religion and cooperation, religion and conflict, and the relationship between religion and the quality of life. Religion is often manipulated by political elites to advance their principal goal of political survival. Zeev Maoz and Errol A. Henderson find that no specific religion is either consistently more bellicose or consistently more cooperative than other religions. However, religious similarity between states tends to reduce the propensity of conflict and increase the opportunity for security cooperation. The authors find a significant relationship between secularism and human security.
While people of previous ages relied on public performance as their chief means of experiencing poetry, the Hellenistic age developed what one may term a culture of reading. This was the first era in which poets consciously shaped their works with an eye toward publication and reception not just on the civic stage but in several media---in performance, on inscribed monuments, in scrolls. The essays in Peter Bing's collection explore how poetry accommodated various audiences and how these audiences in turn experienced the text in diverse ways. Over the years, Bing's essays have focused on certain Hellenistic authors and genres---particularly on Callimachus and Posidippus and on epigram. His themes, too, have been broadly consistent. Thus, although the essays in The Scroll and the Marble span some twenty years, they offer a coherent vision of Hellenistic poetics as a whole.
Peter Bing is Professor of Classics at Emory University and editor, most recently, of the Companion to Hellenistic Epigram: Down to Philip (coedited with Jon Steffen Bruss).
Jacket illustration: Film still from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra, Columbia Pictures 1939. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.
Sculpting the Self addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of self and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic philosophical and mystical thought. Alongside detailed analyses of three major Islamic thinkers (Mullā Ṣadrā, Shāh Walī Allāh, and Muhammad Iqbal), this study also situates their writings on selfhood within the wider constellation of related discussions in late modern and contemporary thought, engaging the seminal theoretical insights on the self by William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. This allows the book to develop its inquiry within a spectrum theory of selfhood, incorporating bio-physiological, socio-cultural, and ethico-spiritual modes of discourse and meaning-construction. Weaving together insights from several disciplines such as religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, critical theory, and neuroscience, and arguing against views that narrowly restrict the self to a set of cognitive functions and abilities, this study proposes a multidimensional account of the self that offers new options for addressing central issues in the contemporary world, including spirituality, human flourishing, and meaning in life.
This is the first book-length treatment of selfhood in Islamic thought that draws on a wealth of primary source texts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Greek, and others. Muhammad U. Faruque’s interdisciplinary approach makes a significant contribution in the growing field of cross-cultural dialogue, as it opens up the way for engaging premodern and modern Islamic sources from a contemporary perspective by going beyond the exegesis of historical materials. He initiates a critical conversation between new insights into human nature as developed in neuroscience and modern philosophical literature and millennia-old Islamic perspectives on the self, consciousness, and human flourishing as developed in Islamic philosophical, mystical, and literary traditions.
This volume was conceived as a first book in SLA for advanced undergraduate or introductory master’s courses that include education majors, foreign language education majors, and English majors. It’s also an excellent resource for practicing teachers.
Both the research and pedagogy in this book are based on the newest research in the field of second language acquisition. It is not the goal of this book to address every SLA theory or teach research methodology. It does however address the myths and questions that non-specialist teacher candidates have about language learning.
Steven Brown is the co-author of the introductory applied linguistics textbook Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation textbook (and workbook).
The myths challenged in this book are:
§ Children learn languages quickly and easily while adults are ineffective in comparison.
§ A true bilingual is someone who speaks two languages perfectly.
§ You can acquire a language simply through listening or reading.
§ Practice makes perfect.
§ Language students learn (and retain) what they are taught.
§ Language learners always benefit from correction.
§ Individual differences are a major, perhaps the major, factor in SLA.
§ Language acquisition is the individual acquisition of grammar.
Every small town has a moment when the real world abruptly intrudes, shattering the town's notions of itself and its people. For citizens of Marshall, Michigan, that moment came August 18, 1967. Nola Puyear was working downtown at the Tasty Cafe that morning when she received a package. She opened it and was instantly killed in a fiery explosion.
In the months that followed, law enforcement and prosecutors wrestled with a crime that to all appearances was senseless. Evidence recovered from the blown-up restaurant, including a bottle of pills that had been tainted with lye, suggested a concerted plot to murder Mrs. Puyear. But why had someone wanted to kill the well-liked woman, by all accounts a pillar of her close-knit community? For that matter, was Marshall really the quaint paradise it seemed to be?
Secret Witness brings to light startling new evidence and freshly uncovered facts to address these and other questions that, to this day, surround one of Michigan's most brutal murders. Based on extensive interviews with surviving prosecutors, police, and witnesses, Blaine Pardoe re-creates the investigation that pried into Marshall's dark underbelly and uncovered the seamy private lives led by some of the town's citizenry but led to only tenuous theories about the bombing. The book also examines the pivotal role played by the Secret Witness program, an initiative by the Detroit News that offered rewards for anonymous tips related to violent crimes. What's ultimately revealed is the true depth of evil that occurred in Marshall that day. Every small town has dirty little secrets. This time, they were deadly.
“[Fanis] demonstrates an impressive ability to travel nimbly between abstract theoretical concepts and a messy reality. In each one of the case study chapters, her analysis is rich, thoughtful, and imaginative.”
—Ido Oren, University of Florida
Secular Power Europe and Islam argues that secularism is not the central principle of international relations but should be considered as one belief system that influences international politics. Through an exploration of Europe’s secular identity, an identity that is seen erroneously as normative, author Sarah Wolff shows how Islam confronts the EU’s existential anxieties about its security and its secular identity. Islam disrupts Eurocentric assumptions about democracy and revolution and human rights. Through three case studies, Wolff encourages the reader to unpack secularism as a bedrock principle of IR and diplomacy. This book argues that the EU’s interest and diplomacy activities in relation to religion, and to Islam specifically, is shaped by the insistence on a European secular identity, which should be reconsidered in areas of religion and foreign policy.
The European Union has made remarkable, unprecedented advances in both external and internal security integration. "Epistemic communities" of ambassadors, military generals, scientists, and other experts who supersede national governments in the diplomacy of security decision making are taking advantage of their shared expertise, common culture, professional norms, and frequent meetings to forge new levels of collaboration. Mai'a K. Davis Cross brings together numerous personal interviews and recent government documents across five separate case studies to construct a microsociological account of how EU governance really works and what future role the EU is likely to play internationally.
"A timely and significant supplement to C. P. Cavafy's poetic canon, the Selected Prose Works, eloquently translated and meticulously annotated by Peter Jeffreys, allows readers yet another creative engagement with the greatest Greek writer since antiquity. Marked by a wide and intriguing range of interests, these writings offer a rich trove for general readers and scholars alike, who from now on will find it difficult to discuss Cavafy's poetry without reference to his prose."
---Vassilis Lambropoulos, C. P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek, University of Michigan
"Peter Jeffreys gives us a rare gift---access to Constantine Cavafy's prose work. Through his intelligent translation, these texts, which range from literary criticism to personal notes, from essays on the Greek language to the Parthenon marbles, offer unexpected entry into the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest literary figures. They suggest new ways to think about not only Cavafy's remarkable poetry but also the man himself. An indispensable companion for all who love Cavafy's work."
---Gregory Jusdanis, The Ohio State University
"Once you've felt his influence, you won't need telling that Cavafy is unique in his distinctive voice, his quiet humor, and his unassertive culture."
---Frank Kermode, Formerly Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London, and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge
Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) is arguably the most important modern poet of Greece and Greek culture. Long a resident of Egypt and then Constantinople, Cavafy in his poems and prose works tended to focus on Greco-Roman antiquity, on Greece's national identity, and on personal and mythological images and themes including his ethnicity and sexual identity. He wrote some 150 poems, plus a few works in collaboration with his brother John.
His poetical works have been much translated and discussed, but until now, very little consideration has been given to his prose works, in part because many remained untranslated from the original Greek. This book collects Cavafy's more interesting prose pieces and translates those that originally appeared in Greek.
Of the forty pieces included, only thirteen have previously appeared in print, and of those thirteen only a few were in English. The pieces include essays, "prose poems," short stories, self-assessments, and considerations of other poets, including John Keats. This significant new collection offers a different perspective on the well-known Cavafy.
Peter Jeffreys, Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, received a Doctorate in English Literature from the University of Toronto. He is the author of Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E.M. Forster and C.P. Cavafy and the editor of The Forster-Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle. He is currently working on a bio-critical study of C. P. Cavafy and the decadent tradition.
Cover image copyright © David Levine
Are our elections for sale? Americans have long asked this question in the face of skyrocketing campaign spending by candidates and parties. Then, in the 1990s, came a wave of wealthy individuals whose deep pockets seemed to be buying political offices across the country. Our worst suspicions were confirmed. Or were they? What effect do self-financers really have on electoral outcomes? Jennifer Steen's authoritative empirical study of self-financed candidates is a landmark in American politics. Steen thoroughly dispels the notion that self-funded candidates can buy legislative seats, proving that the vast majority of self-financers do not win their elections. Her book gives us a truer understanding of self-financers' actual influence on campaign competition and rhetoric.
Jennifer A. Steen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College and a former political consultant. She is one of the nation's leading authorities on self-financed candidates.
Theatermakers in the United States have long been drawn to madness as a source of dramatic spectacle. During the Broadway musical’s golden age in the mid-twentieth century, creative teams used the currently in-vogue psychoanalytic ideas about mental life to construct troubled characters at odds with themselves and their worlds. As the clinical and cultural profile of madness transformed over the twentieth century, musicals continued to delve into the experience of those living with mental pain, trauma, and unhappiness.
Seriously Mad offers a dynamic account of stage musicals’ engagement with historically significant theories about mental distress, illness, disability, and human variance in the United States. By exploring who is considered mad and what constitutes madness at different moments in U.S. history, Aleksei Grinenko shows how, in attempts to bring the musicals closer to highbrow sophistication, theater dramatized serious medical conditions and social problems. Among the many Broadway productions discussed are Next to Normal, A Strange Loop, Sweeney Todd, Man of La Mancha, Gypsy, Oklahoma!, and Lady in the Dark.
Piranesi was an architect, engraver, antiquities restorer and dealer, draftsman, archaeologist, furniture and fireplace designer, author, and bookseller. His creations in paper and in stone garnered considerable renown in his own lifetime, allowing him to transform himself from a penniless son of a stonemason to a wealthy entrepreneur. However, despite attempts to catalogue and analyze his work, little is known about Piranesi. Since Henri Focillon published his monograph on the artist in 1918, scholars have sought to expand his interpretive strategies used to examine Piranesi and his work. This volume is a representative sampling of the contemporary scholarship on Piranesi, with each essay scrutinizing a particular aspect of his oeuvre. By engaging with material found in eighteenth-century manuscripts and printed materials, as well as the texts and images Piranesi produced, the nine essays by esteemed contributors add to the rapidly growing and diversifying field of eighteenth-century studies. The outcome is a volume that will add to the expanding, glittering mosaic of Piranesi’s life and his work.
Front Flap
Heather Hyde Minor is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Fabio Barry is Assistant Professor at the American University of Rome, Italy.
By tracing the development of the Michigan campus from its early days to the present, within the context of the evolution of higher education in America, Mayer provides a strong argument for the importance of rigorous and enlightened campus planning as a critical element of the learning environment of the university. His comprehensive history of campus planning, illustrated with photos, maps, and diagrams from Michigan’s history, is an outstanding contribution to the university’s history as it approaches its bicentennial in 2017. Perhaps more important, Mayer’s book provides a valuable treatise on the evolution of campus planning as an architectural discipline.
This book thus represents a radical methodological initiative not just for scholars of history and language but for specialists in law, political theory, political science, gender studies, semiotics, and science and technology studies. It takes posthumanist scholarship to an exciting and essential, if sometimes troubling, conclusion.
“It is an erudite work by a scholar of enormous talent, who advances a thesis that is richly insightful and deeply provocative.”"Few books blend the critical and creative approaches to drag performance this provocatively and engagingly, and none provides both the historical and the personal perspectives so effectively. Torr and Bottoms fundamentally challenge many long-standing ideas about drag kings and the performance of masculinity."
---Sarah Bay-Cheng, University at Buffalo
"This book brings the reader inside an artist's creative imagination and intellect, showing us Diane Torr's work in a detailed, thoughtful, and engaging way. We discover how Torr uses different physical disciplines to explore how gender is constructed, interpreted, and expressed. Along the way---by taking us into various venues in which she performed---she evokes the lively, dynamic scene in New York in the '80s and '90s."
---Alisa Solomon, Columbia University
Why would women want to perform as men? Why is gender crossing so compelling, whether it happens onstage or in everyday life? What can drag performance teach, and what aesthetic, political, and personal questions does it raise?
Performance artist Diane Torr has been experimenting with the performance of gender for thirty years---exploring everything from feminist go-go dancing to masculine power play. One of the key pioneers of "drag king" performance, Torr has been celebrated internationally for her gender transformation workshops, in which she has taught hundreds of ordinary women how to pass as men on city streets around the world. This cultural subterfuge appeals to participants for many different reasons: personal confidence-building, sexual frisson, gender subversion, trans-curiosity, or simply the appeal of disguise and role play.
Sex, Drag, and Male Roles documents the evolution of Torr's work by blending first-person memoir and commentary from Torr with critical reflections and contextualization from leading performance critic Stephen J. Bottoms. The book includes a consideration of the long cultural history of female-to-male cross-dressing and concludes with Torr's "Do-It-Yourself" guide to becoming a "Man for a Day."
Diane Torr developed her cross-disciplinary art in the downtown New York art scene from 1976 to 2002. Now living in Scotland, Torr has earned an international reputation for her performances and gender transformation workshops (featured on HBO, BBC, and This American Life on NPR, among others). Her work is the focus of a feature film, Man for a Day.
Stephen J. Bottoms is Wole Soyinka Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds. His books include Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement and Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island.
Cover: Diane Torr walks the streets of London, 1995. Photo by Debbie Humphreys.
How do we recapture, or hold on to, the live performances we most love, and the talented artists and performers we most revere? Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss tells the story of how 18th-century actors, novelists, and artists, key among them David Garrick, struggled with these questions through their reenactments of Shakespearean plays. For these artists, the resurgence of Shakespeare, a playwright whose works just decades earlier had nearly been erased, represented their own chance for eternal life. Despite the ephemeral nature of performance, Garrick and company would find a way to make Shakespeare, and through him the actor, rise again.
In chapters featuring Othello, Richard III, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, and The Merchant of Venice, Emily Hodgson Anderson illuminates how Garrick’s performances of Shakespeare came to offer his contemporaries an alternative and even an antidote to the commemoration associated with the monument, the portrait, and the printed text. The first account to read 18th-century visual and textual references to Shakespeare alongside the performance history of his plays, this innovative study sheds new light on how we experience performance, and why we gravitate toward an art, and artists, we know will disappear.
Given the explosion in recent years of scholarship exploring the ways in which disability is manifested and performed in numerous cultural spaces, it’s surprising that until now there has never been a single monograph study covering the important intersection of popular music and disability. George McKay’s Shakin’ All Over is a cross-disciplinary examination of the ways in which popular music performers have addressed disability: in their songs, in their live performances, and in various media presentations.
By looking closely into the work of artists such as Johnny Rotten, Neil Young, Johnnie Ray, Ian Dury, Teddy Pendergrass, Curtis Mayfield, and Joni Mitchell, McKay investigates such questions as how popular music works to obscure and accommodate the presence of people with disabilities in its cultural practice. He also examines how popular musicians have articulated the experiences of disability (or sought to pass), or have used their cultural arena for disability advocacy purposes.
Like national politicians, state legislators all too often focus on partisanship instead of policy making, engaging themselves in rancorous debate that achieves little beyond gridlock. However, during one short period in Michigan's history, legislators stopped bickering and focused on forging compromise. Daniel Loepp's Sharing the Balance of Power chronicles the 87th Michigan Legislature (1993-1994), in which Republicans and Democrats successfully shared power.
In 1992, Michigan voters elected exactly fifty-five Republicans and fifty-five Democrats to the state house. As a result, the two parties each elected a co-speaker, and a shared power agreement was forged. Given the history of intense partisanship in the state house, political pundits predicted that any plan for shared power would disintegrate within months. What resulted instead was one of the most productive legislatures in Michigan history.
Author Daniel Loepp, chief of staff to Democratic Co-Speaker Curtis Hertel at the time, skillfully takes the reader "inside" the State Capitol, examining the key policy debates (including school finance reform), important personalities, and difficult negotiations. Loepp's balanced presentation is testimony to the two years of bi-partisan cooperation in which he took part.
In an age of public cynicism about the legislative process, Daniel Loepp offers the reader a refreshing story about two co-speakers and their 108 colleagues who came together in the spirit of bi-partisan representation to successfully serve their constituents, the people of Michigan.
Daniel Loepp is a partner in the firm of Karoub Associates, Michigan's oldest multi-client lobbying firm.
The recurrent treatment of shipwrecks in the creative arts demonstrates an enduring fascination with this archetypal scene: a shipwreck survivor confronting the elements. It is remarkable, for example, that the characters in the 2004 television show Lost share so many features with those from Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
For survivors who are stranded on an island for some period of time, shipwrecks often present the possibility of a change in political and social status—as well as romance and even paradise. In each of the major shipwreck narratives examined, the poet or novelist links the castaways’ arrival on a new shore with the possibility of a new sort of life. Readers will come to appreciate the shift in attitude toward the opportunities offered by shipwreck: older texts such as the Odyssey reveals a trajectory of returning to the previous order. In spite of enticing new temptations, Odysseus—and some of the survivors in The Tempest—revert to their previous lives, rejecting what many might consider paradise. Odysseus is reestablished as king; Prospero travels back to Milan. In such situations, we may more properly speak of potential transformations. In contrast, many recent shipwreck narratives instead embrace the possibility of a new sort of existence. That even now the shipwreck theme continues to be treated, in multiple media, testifies to its long-lasting appeal to a very wide audience.
In Show Me Your Environment, a penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved—and is still evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form. The opening essays offer contemplations on the “environment” of poetry from thoughts on physical places and regions as well as the inner aesthetic environment. Next, Baker looks at the highly distinctive achievements and styles of poets ranging from George Herbert and Emily Dickinson through poets writing today. Finally, he takes joy in reading individual poems—from the canonical to the contemporary; simply and closely.
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