A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Carly Inghram’s poems explore the day-to-day experiences of a Black queer woman who is ceaselessly bombarded with images of mass-consumerism, white supremacy, and sexism, and who is forced, often reluctantly, back indoors and away from this outside chaos. The poems in The Animal Indoors seek to understand and define the boundaries between our inside and outside lives, critiquing the homogenization and increasing insincerity of American culture and considering what safe spaces exist for Black women. The speaker in these poems seeks refuge, working to keep the interior safe until we can reckon with the world outside, until the speaker is able to “unleash the indoor news onto the unclean water elsewhere.”
The Animal Indoors won the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Terrance Hayes.
During the last third of the twentieth century, white supremacists moved, both literally and in the collective imagination, from midnight rides through Mississippi to broadband-wired cabins in Montana. But while rural Montana may be on the geographical fringe of the country, white supremacist groups were not pushed there, and they are far from "fringe elements" of society, as many Americans would like to believe. Evelyn Schlatter's startling analysis describes how many of the new white supremacist groups in the West have co-opted the region's mythology and environment based on longstanding beliefs about American character and Manifest Destiny to shape an organic, home-grown movement.
Dissatisfied with the urbanized, culturally progressive coasts, disenfranchised by affirmative action and immigration, white supremacists have found new hope in the old ideal of the West as a land of opportunity waiting to be settled by self-reliant traditional families. Some even envision the region as a potential white homeland. Groups such as Aryan Nations, The Order, and Posse Comitatus use controversial issues such as affirmative action, anti-Semitism, immigration, and religion to create sympathy for their extremist views among mainstream whites—while offering a "solution" in the popular conception of the West as a place of freedom, opportunity, and escape from modern society. Aryan Cowboys exposes the exclusionist message of this "American" ideal, while documenting its dangerous appeal.
Details the ferment in civil rights that took place across the South before the momentous Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954
This collection refutes the notion that the movement began with the Supreme Court decision, and suggests, rather, that the movement originated in the 1930s and earlier, spurred by the Great Depression and, later, World War II—events that would radically shape the course of politics in the South and the nation into the next century.
This work explores the growth of the movement through its various manifestations—the activities of politicians, civil rights leaders, religious figures, labor unionists, and grass-roots activists—throughout the 1940s and 1950s. It discusses the critical leadership roles played by women and offers a new perspective on the relationship between the NAACP and the Communist Party.
Before Brown shows clearly that, as the drive toward racial equality advanced and national political attitudes shifted, the validity of white supremacy came increasingly into question. Institutionalized racism in the South had always offered white citizens material advantages by preserving their economic superiority and making them feel part of a privileged class. When these rewards were threatened by the civil rights movement, a white backlash occurred.
A Guardian Best Book of the Year
“A gripping study of white power…Explosive.”
—New York Times
“Helps explain how we got to today’s alt-right.”
—Terry Gross, Fresh Air
The white power movement in America wants a revolution.
Returning to a country ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of Vietnam veterans and disgruntled civilians who shared their virulent anti-communism and potent sense of betrayal concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. The command structure of their covert movement gave women a prominent place. They operated with discipline, made tragic headlines in Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, and are resurgent under President Trump. Based on a decade of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.
“A much-needed and troubling revelation… The power of Belew’s book comes, in part, from the fact that it reveals a story about white-racist violence that we should all already know.”
—The Nation
“Fascinating… Shows how hatred of the federal government, fears of communism, and racism all combined in white-power ideology and explains why our responses to the movement have long been woefully inadequate.”
—Slate
“Superbly comprehensive…supplants all journalistic accounts of America’s resurgent white supremacism.”
—Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian
The Color of Sex reveals what happens when race and sexuality meet, when white desire encounters its own ambivalence. As Stokes argues, whiteness and heterosexuality exist in anxious relation to one another. Mutually invested in “the normal,” they support each other in their desperate insistence on the cultural logic of exclusion. At the same time, however, they threaten one another in their attempt to create and sustain a white future, since reproducing whiteness necessarily involves the risk of contamination
Charting the curious movements of this “white heterosexuality,” The Color of Sex inaugurates a new moment in our ongoing attempt to understand the frenzied interplay of race and sexuality in America. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in race theory, sexuality studies, and American history, culture, and literature.
Born in early 1812 in Crawfordville, Georgia, Alexander Stephens grew up in an antebellum South that would one day inform the themes of his famous Cornerstone Speech. While Stephens made many speeches throughout his lifetime, the Cornerstone Speech is the discourse for which he is best remembered. Stephens delivered it on March 21, 1861—one month after his appointment as vice president of the Confederacy—asserting that slavery and white supremacy comprised the cornerstone of the Confederate States of America. Within a few short weeks, more than two hundred newspapers worldwide had reprinted Stephens’s words.
Following the war and the defeat of the Confederacy, Stephens claimed that his assertions in the Cornerstone Speech had been misrepresented, his meaning misunderstood, as he sought to breathe new and different life into an oration that may have otherwise been forgotten. His intentionally ambiguous rhetoric throughout the postwar years obscured his true antebellum position on slavery and its centrality to the Confederate Nation and lent itself to early constructions of Lost Cause mythology.
In Cornerstone of the Confederacy, Keith Hébert examines how Alexander Stephens originally constructed, and then reinterpreted, his well-known Cornerstone Speech. Hébert illustrates the complexity of Stephens’s legacy across eight chronological chapters, meticulously tracing how this speech, still widely cited in the age of Black Lives Matter, reverberated in the nation’s consciousness during Reconstruction, through the early twentieth century, and in debates about commemoration of the Civil War that live on in the headlines today.
Audiences both inside and outside of academia will quickly discover that the book’s implications span far beyond the memorialization of Confederate symbols, grappling with the animating ideas of the past and discovering how these ideas continue to inform the present.
Gods of the Blood details the trends that have converged to fuel militant paganism in the United States: anti-government sentiments inflamed by such events as Ruby Ridge and Waco, the rise of the white power music industry (including whitenoise, dark ambient, and hatecore), the extraordinary reach of modern communications technologies, and feelings of economic and cultural marginalization in the face of globalization and increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the American population. Gardell elucidates how racist pagan beliefs are formed out of various combinations of conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, warrior ideology, populism, beliefs in racial separatism, Klandom, skinhead culture, and tenets of national socialism. He shows how these convictions are further animated by an array of thought selectively derived from thinkers including Nietzche, historian Oswald Spengler, Carl Jung, and racist mystics. Scrupulously attentive to the complexities of racist paganism as it is lived and practiced, Gods of the Blood is a fascinating, disturbing, and important portrait of the virulent undercurrents of certain kinds of violence in America today.
Inside the Klavern is an annotated collection of the minutes of a thriving Ku Klux Klan in La Grande, Oregon, between 1922 and 1924. The most complete set of Klan minutes ever uncovered, these documents illustrate the inner workings of a Klan chapter of more than three hundred members at a time when the national membership reached into the millions and the Invisible Empire was at the peak of its power. Through an extensive introduction and conclusion as well as brief notes previewing each installment of the minutes, David A. Horowitz places these unique documents in historical perspective.
The La Grande minutes demonstrate Klan hostility to Roman Catholics, Jews, blacks, and "hyphenated" Americans. But they also explain how the chapter exercised requirements for admission, how officers were selected, and how Klansmen encountered difficulties enforcing the moral standards of their order. Because the Klan kligrapp (recording secretary) Harold R. Fosner recorded not only the official proceedings but also volunteered extemporaneous comments and gossip, readers get a genuine feeling for what it was like to attend the meetings. Through his own obvious excitement and commitment to the cause, Fosner re-creates the flavor, tone, and atmosphere of these meetings: "Tis beyond my power of expression to relate the harmony and fellowship which reigned supreme. . . . Suffice to say that these were the golden moments of our lives."
His evaluation of Klan propaganda, too, is telling: "The weekly newsletter from Atlanta, Georgia, contained a little book, the official message of our emperor, one Col. William Joseph Simmons, read before the most noble band of men ever assembled and for the noblest cause in the world. To my firm belief this book is the leading masterpiece of our day and age."
Horowitz concludes that "although it is tempting to judge Jazz Age Klansmen by the standards of later generations, the story provided by the minutes is a complex one—a chronicle of both compassion and complicity in cruelty, of positive social accomplishment and arbitrary and dysfunctional divisiveness."
Arguing that today’s right engenders its popularity not by overt bigotry or hatred but by focusing on people’s hopes for their children, Burlein finds a politics of grief at the heart of such rhetoric. While demonstrating how religious symbols, rituals, texts, and practices shape people’s memories and their investment in society, she shows how Peters and Dobson each construct countermemories for their followers that reframe their histories and identities—as well as their worlds—by reversing mainstream perspectives in ways that counter existing power relations. By employing the techniques of niche marketing, the politics of scandal, and the transformation of political issues into “gut issues” and by remasculinizing the body politic, Burlein shows, such groups are able to move people into their realm of influence without requiring them to agree with all their philosophical, doctrinal, or political positions.
Lift High the Cross will appeal to students and scholars of religion, American cultural studies, women’s studies, sociology, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as to non-specialists interested in American politics and, specifically, the right.
In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.
How Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim in the post-9/11 world
While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of law’s protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim.
Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim women’s clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West.
Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force.
In November 2001, the state of Alabama opened a referendum on its long-standing constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage. A bill on the state ballot offered the opportunity to relegate the state's antimiscegenation law to the dustbin of history. The measure passed, but the margin was alarmingly slim: more than half a million voters, 40 percent of those who went to the polls, voted to retain a racist and constitutionally untenable law.
Julie Novkov's Racial Union explains how and why, nearly forty years after the height of the civil rights movement, Alabama struggled to repeal its prohibition against interracial marriage---the last state in the Union to do so. Novkov's compelling history of Alabama's battle over miscegenation shows how the fight shaped the meanings of race and state over ninety years. Novkov's work tells us much about the sometimes parallel, sometimes convergent evolution of our concepts of race and state in the nation as a whole.
"A remarkably nuanced account of interlocked struggles over race, gender, class and state power. Novkov's site is Alabama, but her insights are for all America."
---Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
"Hannah Arendt shocked Americans in the 1950s by suggesting that interracial intimacy was the true measure of a society's racial order. Julie Novkov's careful, illuminating, powerful book confirms Arendt's judgment. By ruling on who may be sexually linked with whom, Alabama's courts and legislators created a racial order and even a broad political order; Novkov shows us just how it worked in all of its painful, humiliating power."
---Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Harvard College Professor
Tracing how the “Great Replacement” narrative has shaped far-right extremism and propelled its dangerous political projects and acts of violence
The “Great Replacement” narrative, which imagines that historic white majorities are being intentionally replaced through immigration policies crafted by global elites, has effectively mobilized racist, nationalist, and nativist movements in the United States and Europe. The Rage of Replacement tracks how this narrative has shaped the politics and worldview of the far right, binding its various camps into a community of rage obsessed with nostalgia for a white-supremacist past.
Showing how the replacement narrative has found significant purchase in recent mainstream discourse through the rise of Trumpism, right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson, and events such as 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Michael Feola diagnoses the dangers this racist theory poses as it shapes the far-right imagination, expands through civil society, and deforms political culture. In particular, he tracks how the replacement narrative has given rise to malignant political strategies designed to “take back” the nation from its perceived enemies—by force if deemed necessary.
Identifying the Great Replacement narrative as a central force behind the rise and expansion of far-right extremism, Feola shows how it has motivated a variety of dangerous political projects in pursuit of illiberal, antidemocratic futures. From calls for the creation of segregated white ethnostates to extremist violence such as the mass shootings in Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo, The Rage of Replacement makes clear that replacement theory poses a dire threat to democracy and safety.
This book describes who American skinheads are, how they have developed within larger youth group scenes, their ideas and activities, the role of music in their formation and development, how they have been perceived by the media in America, and what damage they have done in American society. Jack B. Moore focuses on the cultural history of this group in America during the 1980s and suggests that while they were originally a minor distraction on the punk scene, they have grown into a dangerous and far more politically engaged source of hate thought and crime.
This comparison of narrative response with written public reaction to the actual revolts allows Sale to investigate the precise manner in which public opinion regarding definitions of liberty evolved over this crucial period of time between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Mapping the ways in which unequally empowered groups claimed and transformed statements associated with the discourse of national identity, Sale succeeds in recovering a historically informed sense of the discursive and activist options available to people of another era.
In its demonstration of how the United States has been uniquely shaped by its dual status as both an imperial and a postcolonial power, this study on the discourse of natural rights and national identity in the pre-Civil War United States will interest students and scholars of American studies, African American studies, gender studies, and American history and literature.
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