In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity, Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence. Rudolph examines the perception by media and fans of Latino baseball players and the consumption of these athletes as both social and political stand-ins for an entire culture, showing how these participants in the nationalist game of baseball exemplify tensions over race, nation, and language for some while simultaneously revealing baseball as a practice of latinidad, or pan-Latina/o/x identity, for others. By simultaneously exploring the ways in which Latino baseball players can appear both as threats to American values and the embodiment of the American Dream, and engaging with both archival research and new media representations of MLB players, Rudolph sheds new light on the current ambivalence of mainstream American media and fans towards Latin/o culture.

In this compelling interdisciplinary study of what has been called the "century of illegitimacy," Lisa Zunshine seeks to uncover the multiplicity of cultural meanings of illegitimacy in the English Enlightenment. Bastards and Foundlings pits the official legal views on illegitimacy against the actual everyday practices that frequently circumvented the law; it reconstructs the history of social institutions called upon to regulate illegitimacy, such as the London Foundling Hospital; and it examines a wide array of novels and plays written in response to the same concerns that informed the emergence and functioning of such institutions. By recreating the context of the national preoccupation with bastardy, with a special emphasis on the gender of the fictional bastard/foundling, Zunshine offers new readings of "canonical" texts, such as Steele's The Conscious Lovers, Defoe's Moll Flanders, Fielding's Tom Jones, Moore's The Foundling, Colman's The English Merchant, Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Evelina, Smith's Emmeline, Edgewort's Belinda, and Austen's Emma, as well as of less well-known works, such as Haywood's The Fortunate Foundlings, Shebbeare's The Marriage Act, Bennett's The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors, and Robinson's The Natural Daughter.

The 1963 publication of Thomas Pynchon’s V. changed the landscape of American fiction. Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. offers a detailed examination of the dramatic transformations that took place as Pynchon’s foundational novel went from typescript to published work. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft develop and deploy a rich theory of genetic narratology to examine the performance of genre in the novel. Pushing back against the current dominance of cognitive narratology, they discuss focalization, character construction, and evocation of consciousness as clues to Pynchon’s developing narratology of historical fiction. Their theoretical interventions offer an important and timely corrective to the field of narratology with a method that brings the author back into the analytical frame. 

Herman and Krafft use as their guide the typescript of V. that surfaced in 2001, when it was acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, as well as Pynchon’s editorial correspondence with Corlies Smith, his first editor at J. B. Lippincott. Becoming Pynchon assembles a comprehensive and unequaled picture of Pynchon’s writing process that will appeal both to Pynchonians and to postmodernism scholars more broadly. 

Winner, 2023 Comics Studies Society Edited Book Prize

While most US-based comics studies anthologies tend to neglect race, Beyond the Icon brings it to the foreground through an analysis of the vibrant and growing body of graphic narratives by Asian North American creators in the twenty-first century. By demonstrating how the forms and styles of the comics genre help depict Asian Americans as nuanced individuals in ways that words alone may not, Beyond the Icon makes the case for comics as a crucial artistic form in Asian American cultural production––one used to counter misrepresentations and myths, rewrite official history, and de-exoticize the Asian American experience.

An interdisciplinary team of contributors offers exciting new readings of key texts, including Ms. Marvel, George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s The Shadow Hero, works by Adrian Tomine and Jillian Tamaki, and more, to uncover the ways in which Asian American comics authors employ graphic narratives to provide full and complex depictions of Asian diasporic subjects and intervene in the wider North American consciousness. Beyond the Icon initiates vital conversations between Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and comics.

Contributors:
Monica Chiu, Shilpa Davé, Melinda Luisa de Jesús, Lan Dong, Jin Lee, erin Khuê Ninh, Stella Oh, Jeanette Roan, Eleanor Ty

“A fascinating search for personal and cultural identity.” —Kirkus

Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.

Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, the environment, the aftershocks of history, and human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.

 

In Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination, Zachary F. Price illuminates martial arts as a site of knowledge exchange between Black, Asian, and Asian American people and cultures to offer new insights into the relationships among these historically marginalized groups. Drawing on case studies that include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s appearance in Bruce Lee’s film Game of Death, Ron van Clief and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Chinese American saxophonist Fred Ho, Price argues that the regular blending and borrowing between their distinct cultural heritages is healing rather than appropriative. His analyses of performance, power, and identity within this cultural fusion demonstrate how, historically, urban working-class Black men have developed community and practiced self-care through the contested adoption of Asian martial arts practice. By directing his analysis to this rich but heretofore understudied vein of American cultural exchange, Price not only broadens the scholarship around sites of empowerment via such exchanges but also offers a compelling example of nonessentialist emancipation for the twenty-first century.

Howard E. Good was born on a farm in an area of the Maumee Valley in northwestern Ohio known as the Black Swamp, a remnant of the violence of the Ice Age and its glaciers, from which farmland had to be wrested by long and arduous labor and where only the stouthearted had any hope of success. In Black Swamp Farm, a stirring memoir of his early days, Good recounts a now vanished way of life.

Good remembers playing shinny with clamp-on skates and a tin can that had been stomped until it could whiz across the ice given just the right combination of speed and accuracy. He tells of the boom of the steam engine as it pulled the threshing machine to a neighboring farm on a hot summer day, and of the excitement of riding high on a wagonload of hay, gazing down on the horses’ broad, shining backs. He describes the springtime task of making soap, the ritual of the shivaree, and the pleasure of the church ice-cream social. He remembers well—and chronicles for the reader—the unproclaimed achievements of men and women whose courage and grueling toil brought them rich rewards.

First published in 1967, this reprint makes available once again a faithful portrayal of Black Swamp—a place that no longer exists—and provides a treasure trove of history for Ohioans.
 

Sister Mary Appassionata has been talking herself into David Citino's poetry collections for many years. Charming when she wants to be, pushy by nature and by vocation, determined to say what she has to say, Sister Mary has evolved into a recognized literary personality, very popular with readers of Citino's poetry. She has now persuaded both poet and press that she is ready for her own breakthrough book, arguing that everything she has said in the past is still true and that she also has important new observations to make. The Book of Appassionata presents Sister Mary's new poems and brings together in one volume all her poems from Citino's previous collections.

Columbus, Ohio, and its ample cloud cover may be on the eastern edge of the Midwest, but the city’s unfettered suburbanization and rapid postwar expansion recall its Sunbelt peers. To understand why—and the social and economic stakes of this all-too-common model of urban growth—pioneering geographer Kevin R. Cox takes us through the postwar history of development in Columbus, a city that has often welcomed corporate influence at the expense of livability and equal opportunity for its residents.
How have development interests become entwined with government? How has a policy of annexation reformed the city’s map? Why have airline service and major league prestige lagged behind its status as a regional center? And what, if anything, makes this city with a reputation for being average stand apart? In Boomtown Columbus, Cox applies both scholarly expertise and his personal experience as a long-time resident of the city to look at the real-life costs of policy. The resulting narrative will fascinate not only locals but anyone with a stake in understanding American cities and a path toward urban livability for all.
 

In the late nineteenth century, a new era began in American urban history, characterized by an explosion of both the populations and the proportions of cities, obliterating their traditional social and physical characteristics. Commercial businesses relocated, slums emerged around the core, and new residential areas were established along the periphery. The period was one of extreme disorder—labor and ethnic unrest, election violence, rising crime rates—but it was also a time of political innovation and civic achievement.

In documenting the changes Cincinnati experienced during  the Progressive Era, Zane L. Miller provides a clear perspective on the processes of urbanization that transformed the American city. His focus is political because politics provided continuity amid the diversity of city life. The most important aspect of political continuity in Cincinnati and in other cities was "bossism," often depicted as an example of corruption, but which was in many cities part of the quest for a new urban order. In Cincinnati, Boss George B. Cox's machine was a response to the disorder of the times; interestingly, the machine actually helped to control disorder, paving the way for later reforms. Miller carefully explores both the nature and the significance of bossism, showing how it and municipal reform were both essential components of the modern urban political system.

Originally published in 1968, Boss Cox's Cincinnati is considered a classic in the field of urban studies.

In this, David Citino's eighth full-length collection, a poet approaching the end of the twentieth century takes stock of a single life: of its family and culture, history, and beliefs; of the contemporary forces of nature, science politics, gender, and myth that shape and misshape it; of the land--and even the body--it calls home. These are poems that take a hard look at the experience of one individual, but always in terms of place and context, and other lives. Employing "broken symmetry"--a term from high energy physics for a state in which traces of an earlier symmetry can be found--as a description of the contemporary fractured world and his own fitfully declining health, Citino seeks to know whether an unbroken symmetry ever existed, or whether it is human nature to believe fervently in some lost golden age. Readers familiar with the work of David Citino will recognize the territories and obsessions this fine poet has explored over the past twenty years. Here are poems that investigate the credentials of saints, secular and religious; poems that seek to know how the ghosts of history come to haunt the future through the present; poems spoken by the redoubtable Sister Mary Appassionata, a character driven to believe ardently everything she is told, everything she imagines; poems that evoke the urban and rural and even moral landscapes of Ohio. And there are poems that take up new concerns and cover new territory--dire, contemporary warnings, public and personal news that disturbs, myths just now coming into being. These are passionate, accessible poems in which, singing of joy and sorrow, certitude and doubt, a poet wonders what a life is worth. David Citino is Poet Laureate and professor of English and creative writing at The Ohio State University

Dalia Magaña’s Building Confianza demonstrates that effective doctor-patient communication in Spanish requires that practitioners not only have knowledge of Spanish but also have transcultural knowledge of Latino/a values and language use. Using linguistic analysis to study real-time doctor-patient interactions, Magaña probes the role of interpersonal language and transcultural competency in improving patient-centered health care with Spanish-speaking Latino/as, highlighting successful examples of how Latino/a cultural constructs of confianza (trust), familismo (family-orientation), personalismo (friendliness), respeto (respect), and simpatía (kindness) can be deployed in medical interactions. She proposes that transcultural interactions entail knowing patients’ cultural values and being mindful about creating an interpersonal connection with patients through small talk, humor, self-disclosure, politeness, and informal language, including language switching and culturally appropriate use of colloquialisms. By explicitly articulating discourse strategies doctors can use in communicating with Spanish-speaking patients, Building Confianza will aid both students and providers in connecting to communities of Spanish speakers in health care contexts and advancing transcultural competence.