BiblioVault

Queen in Blue

Ambalila Hemsell

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

This gorgeous and wry debut firmly claims physical strength, toughness, and authority for femininity. Ambalila Hemsell’s poems speak from a place of empowerment as well as wonder. They address the insatiable fear of motherhood and the violence embedded in natural processes of creation, birth, and survival. Her words flicker and glow with magical realism, just as they reveal profound truths shared by the miraculous and the mundane. This lush and lyric collection artfully tackles what it means to reconcile one’s own needs and desires with those of others, and to find abundance and strength in the midst of catastrophe.

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Queer Frontiers

Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations

Edited by Joseph A. Boone, et.al.

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

In the first collection of its kind, twenty-three scholars, artists, and critics forecast the impact of queer theory on the future of sexuality. Arguing that queer theory is poised to transform society’s perception of gender itself, this thoroughly interdisciplinary anthology locates itself at the forefront of various debates both inside and outside the academy.
From the history of gay and lesbian studies to the emergence of video bars, from an interview with playwright Cherrie Moraga to a photo record of 1950s gay Los Angeles, these original essays tackle the past, present, and future of queer sexuality from all directions. Queer Frontiers brings together the most vital and energetic voices around; whether promising young scholar or veteran of gay activism, each contributor is helping to move the debate into uncharted territory.

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Quertext

An Anthology of Queer Voices from German-Speaking Europe

Edited by Gary Schmidt and Merrill Cole

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

Knowing that queer voices have been making themselves heard in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria decades before Stonewall, editors Gary Schmidt and Merrill Cole curated thrilling snapshots of prose fiction from more than twenty contemporary writers whose work defies stereotypes, disciplines, and expectations. These authors produce fiction for adults and young people that celebrates the multiplicity of the present, casts a queer eye on the past, and interrogates LGBTQ+ futures.

These outstanding texts exemplify the glittering variety of styles, themes, settings, and subjects addressed by openly queer authors who write in German today. They explore identity, sexuality, history, fantasy, loss, and discovery. Their authors, narrators, and characters explore gender nonconformity and living queer everywhere from city centers to rural communities. They are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and nonbinary. They are exiles, immigrants, and travelers through time and space.

Witty, titillating, and a delight to read, Quertext opens up new worlds of experience for readers interested in queer life beyond the Anglophone world.

Featuring work by Jürgen Bauer • Ella Blix • Claudia Breitsprecher • Lovis Cassaris • Gunther Geltinger • Joachim Helfer • Odile Kennel • Friedrich Kröhnke • Anja Kümmel • Marko Martin • Hans Pleschinski • Christoph Poschenrieder • Peter Rehberg • Michael Roes • Sasha Marianna Salzmann • Angela Steidele • Antje Rávik Strubel • Alain Claude Sulzer • Antje Wagner • J. Walther • Tania Witte • Yusuf Yeşilöz

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A Question of Class

The Redneck Stereotype in Southern Fiction

Duane Carr

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

“Rednecks” have long been subjects of scorn and ridicule, especially in the South. Carr probes the historical and sociological reasons for the descent of this social class into poverty, their inability to rise above it, and their continuing subjugation to a stereotype developed by others—and all too often accepted by themselves. Carr also records the progress in Southern fiction of this negative stereotype, from antebellum writers who saw rednecks as threats to the social order, to post-Civil War writers who lamented the lost potential of these people and urged sympathy and understanding, to contemporary writers who favor acceptance. Ultimately, this work is an evaluation of individual Southern fiction writers in their capacity to rise above stereotyping.

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A Question of Quality

Popularity and Value in Modern Creative Writing

Edited by Louis Filler

University of Wisconsin Press, 1976

The subjects treated in this symposium have one major characteristic in common, that they have recently, or relatively recently, enjoyed high popularity among readers. Also, they have received from substantial to torrents of comment.

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A Quiet Corner of the War

The Civil War Letters of Gilbert and Esther Claflin, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, 1862–1863

Gilbert Claflin and Esther Claflin; Edited by Judy Cook; Foreword by Keith S. Bohannon

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

In 2002, Judy Cook discovered a packet of letters written by her great-great-grandparents, Gilbert and Esther Claflin, during the American Civil War. An unexpected bounty, these letters from 1862–63 offer visceral witness to the war, recounting the trials of a family separated. Gilbert, an articulate and cheerful forty-year-old farmer, was drafted into the Union Army and served in the Thirty-Fourth Wisconsin Infantry garrisoned in western Kentucky along the Mississippi. Esther had married Gilbert when she was fifteen; now a woman with two teenage sons, she ran the family farm near Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in Gilbert’s absence.

In his letters, Gilbert writes about food, hygiene, rampant desertions by drafted men, rebel guerrilla raids, and pastimes in the daily life of a soldier. His comments on interactions with Confederate prisoners and ex-slaves before and after the Emancipation Proclamation reveal his personal views on monumental events. Esther shares in her letters the challenges and joys of maintaining the farm, accounts of their boys Elton and Price, concerns about finances and health, and news of their local community and extended family. Esther’s experiences provide insight into family, farm, and village life in the wartime North, an often overlooked aspect of Civil War history.

Judy Cook has made the letters accessible to a wider audience by providing historical context with notes and appendixes. The volume includes a foreword by Civil War historian Keith S. Bohannon.

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The Quills of the Porcupine

Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana

Jean Marie Allman

University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

Bearing the historic symbol of the Asante nation, the porcupine, the National Liberation Movement (NLM) stormed onto the Gold Coast’s political stage in 1954, mounting one of the first and most significant campaigns to decentralize political power in decolonizing Africa.
    Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) was the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to secure political independence from Britain. The struggle for full self-government was led by Kwame Nkrumah, the leading advocate of African nationalism and Pan-African unity in the post-World War II era. The NLM threatened the stability of Nkrumah’s preindependence government and destroyed prospects for a smooth transition to full self-rule. Though NLM demands for Asante autonomy mobilized thousands of members, marchers, and voters, the NLM was unable to forestall plans for a unitary government in a new nation. Under Nkrumah, Ghana became independent in 1957.
    Marginalized politically by 1958, the NLM has at times been marginalized by scholars as well. Cast into the shadows of academic inquiry where history’s losers often dwell, the NLM came to be characterized as a tribalist ghost of the past whose foreordained defeat was worthy of some attention, but whose spectacular rise was not.
    Today, when it is far harder to dismiss decentralizing movements and alternative nationalisms as things of the past, Jean Marie Allman’s brilliant The Quills of the Porcupine recovers the history of the NLM as a popular movement whose achievements and defeats were rooted in Asante’s history and in the social conflicts of the period. Allman draws skillfully on her extensive interviews with NLM activists, on a variety of published and archival sources in Ghana, and on British colonial records—many of them recently declassified—to provide rich narrative detail.
    Sophisticated in its analysis of the NLM’s ideology and of the appeals of the movement to various strata within Asante society, The Quills of the Porcupine is a pioneering case study in the social history of African politics. An exciting story firmly situated within the context of the large theoretical and historical literature on class, ethnicity, and nationalism, its significance reaches far past the borders of Asante, and of Ghana.

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