Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most “legible” black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies—those bodies that are all too real for us—as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies—those versions of black masculinity that we can’t believe are real—as legible. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men. Looking for Leroy features close readings of contemporary black masculinity and popular culture, highlighting both the complexity and accessibility of black men and boys through visual and sonic cues within American culture, media, and public policy. By rendering legible the illegible, Neal maps the range of identifications and anxieties that have marked the performance and reception of post-Civil Rights era African American masculinity.
Black Ephemera explores the crisis and the challenge of the Black Musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global import, yet the cultural DNA of that culture is becoming obscured in the transformation from analog to digital"--
In The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven Mark W. Driscoll examines nineteenth-century Western imperialism in Asia and the devastating effects of "climate caucasianism"—the white West's pursuit of rapacious extraction at the expense of natural environments and people of color conflated with them. Drawing on an array of primary sources in Chinese, Japanese, and French, Driscoll reframes the Opium Wars as "wars for drugs" and demonstrates that these wars to unleash narco- and human traffickers kickstarted the most important event of the Anthropocene: the military substitution of Qing China's world-leading carbon-neutral economy for an unsustainable Anglo-American capitalism powered by coal. Driscoll also reveals how subaltern actors, including outlaw societies and dispossessed samurai groups, became ecological protectors, defending their locales while driving decolonization in Japan and overthrowing a millennia of dynastic rule in China. Driscoll contends that the methods of these protectors resonate with contemporary Indigenous-led movements for environmental justice.
In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems that organize our modern world. Modernity's predicament, Seltzer writes, is a society so hungry for reality that it cannot stop describing itself, and that makes for a world that continuously establishes itself by staging its own conditions. Employing the social theories of Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Peter Sloterdijk, Seltzer shows how suspense novels, films, and performance art by Patricia Highsmith, Tom McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy, J. G. Ballard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and others outline how we currently live and reveal the stress-points and mood-systems of the modern epoch. In its focus on social games, depictions of violent and explosive persons, along with its cast of artists, reporters, detectives, and others who observe and report and reenact, the suspense mode creates and recreates modern systems of action and autonomy, and defines the self-turned world's practices and aesthetics. By epitomizing a reflexive, self-legislating, and autonomous world, a suspense art with humans in the systems epoch provides the models and sets the rules for our modern, official world.
With more than 1,100 impeccably sourced quotes from throughout John Wayne's 172-film career, John Wayne Speaks: The Ultimate John Wayne Quote Book provides what has often been missing from other Duke Wayne reference books: accuracy, context, and comprehensiveness. These quotations offer a deep dive into Wayne’s films and acting persona—the iconic American man of action whose sense of values and decency are a veneer covering a boiling pot of determination, courage, outrage, and even violence. The quotes in John Wayne Speaks are at once inspirational, humorous, touching, and revealing. Author and veteran journalist Mark Orwoll has created an overlay of categories into which each quote fits, making the manuscript easy for readers to find the type of quote—or even the exact quote, footnoted to identify its film—they may be searching for. But John Wayne Speaks is more than just a collection of the actor's movie lines. Orwoll has researched and written an in-depth introduction to Wayne's film career to put the quotes in a broader context. Movie-lovers will also appreciate the author's opinionated capsule reviews and production notes from Wayne's complete filmography. John Wayne Speaks is the quote book that every fan of the Duke needs and a delightful addition to any cinephile’s library.
Individual carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have exceptional mechanical and electrical properties. However, the transfer of these extraordinary qualities into CNT products, without compromising performance, remains a challenge. This chapter presents an overview of the manufacturing of CNT sheets and buckypaper and also describes research performed at the University of Cincinnati in this field. CNT arrays were grown using the chemical vapor deposition method. Sheets were drawn from the spinnable CNT arrays and characterized using scanning electron microscopy to show the highly unidirectional alignment of the nanotubes in the sheet. The anisotropic morphology of the sheet provides superior properties along one material axis as observed by measuring the tensile strength, electrical resistivity, optical transmittance, and electromagnetic interference shielding properties of the material. Surface modification of aligned multiwall nanotube sheets was carried out via incorporation of an atmospheric pressure plasma jet in the sheet posttreatment process. Helium/oxygen plasma was utilized to produce carboxyl (–COO−) functionality on the surface of the nanotubes. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy confirmed the presence of the functional groups on the nanotube surface. The sheet was further characterized using Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and contact angle testing. Composite laminates made from functionalized CNT sheets showed higher strength than those made with pristine sheets. The effects of plasma power and oxygen concentration were studied in order to determine the best possible parameters for functionalization. Plasma treatment is a useful tool for fast, clean and dry functionalization of CNTs. This study demonstrates the ease of incorporating the plasma tool in the manufacturing process of sheets leading to the production of CNT/polymer composites. Macroscopic structures of nanotubes such as threads and sheets are leading to novel applications.
In Fictions of Land and Flesh Mark Rifkin explores the impasses that arise in seeking to connect Black and Indigenous movements, turning to speculative fiction to understand those difficulties and envision productive ways of addressing them. Against efforts to subsume varied forms of resistance into a single framework in the name of solidarity, Rifkin argues that Black and Indigenous political struggles are oriented in distinct ways, following their own lines of development and contestation. Rifkin suggests how movement between the two can be approached as something of a speculative leap in which the terms and dynamics of one are disoriented in the encounter with the other. Futurist fiction provides a compelling site for exploring such disjunctions. Through analyses of works by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, and others, the book illustrates how ideas about fungibility, fugitivity, carcerality, marronage, sovereignty, placemaking, and governance shape the ways Black and Indigenous intellectuals narrate the past, present, and future. In turning to speculative fiction, Rifkin illustrates how speculation as a process provides conceptual and ethical resources for recognizing difference while engaging across it.
For nearly fifty years, Edward Kennedy 'Duke' Ellington was one of America's most famous musicians. Tucker traces Ellington's childhood and young adult years in Washington, D. C. where he got his start as a ragtime pianist, and also draws on accounts from newspapers, periodicals, and trade publications.
Mark Poster considers how new media&—from TiVO to digital file sharing&—affects society, and he traces its implications for cultural theory and progressive political change.
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Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I would write an autobiography they would read it, when they got leisure, I yield at last to this frenzied public demand, and herewith tender my history: Ours is a noble old house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity. The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of the family by the name of Higgins. This was in the eleventh century, when our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England. Why it is that our long line has ever since borne the maternal name (except when one of them now and then took a playful refuge in an alias to avert foolishness), instead of Higgins, is a mystery which none of us has ever felt much desire to stir. It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we leave it alone. All the old families do that way. Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note—a solicitor on the highway in William Rufus' time. At about the age of thirty he went to one of those fine old English places of resort called Newgate, to see about something, and never returned again. While there he died suddenly. Augustus Twain, seems to have made something of a stir about the year 1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old sabre and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night, and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump. He was a born humorist. But he got to going too far with it; and the first time he was found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one end of him, and put it up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the people and have a good time. He never liked any situation so much or stuck to it so long.
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