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Paperback. Condizione: New. Perhaps no other function of a free press is as important as the watchdog role-its ability to monitor the work of the government. It is easier for politicians to get away with abusing power-wasting public funds and making poor decisions-if the press is not shining its light with what is termed "accountability reporting." This need has become especially clear in recent months, as the American press has come under virulent direct attack for carrying out its watchdog duties. Upending the traditional media narrative that watchdog accountability journalism is in a long, dismaying decline, The Watchdog Still Barks presents a study of how this most important form of journalism came of age in the digital era at American newspapers. Although the American newspaper industry contracted significantly during the 1990s and 2000s, Fordham professor and former CBS News producer Beth Knobel illustrates through empirical data how the amount of deep watchdog reporting on the newspapers' studied front pages generally increased over time despite shrinking circulations, low advertising revenue, and pressure to produce the kind of soft news that plays well on social media. Based on the first content analysis to focus specifically on accountability journalism nationally, The Watchdog Still Barks examines the front pages of nine newspapers located across the United States to paint a broad portrait of how public service journalism has changed since 1991 as the advent of the Internet transformed journalism. This portrait of the modern newspaper industry shows how papers of varying sizes and ownership structures around the country marshaled resources for accountability reporting despite significant financial and technological challenges. The Watchdog Still Barks includes original interviews with editors who explain why they are staking their papers' futures on the one thing that American newspapers still do better than any other segment of the media: watchdog and investigative reporting.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 1st. Two developments that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century had a strong impact on Christian theology. The first was a deepening of the implications of historical consciousness, and the second was the impact of science on Christian self-understanding. Marx's sociology of knowledge symbolizes the first; Darwin's analysis of evolution symbolizes the second. These intellectual developments gave rise to various forms of process philosophy and theology. Within this context, a dialogue between Christian theology and evolution has yielded dramatically new convictions and practices in Christian spirituality, especially relative to ecology. For more than three decades Catherine Keller has been reflecting on the intellectual and practical effects that an internalization of the dynamic character of reality should have upon the practice of Christian life. Her text illustrates the basic framework of dynamic becoming that science demands, whether or not one is formally a process thinker. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was an earlier figure who was more zeroed in on the phenomenon of evolution, which he encountered in a distinct way as a Christian scientist trained in geology and paleontology, as distinct from biology or genetics. Evolution explicitly informs his spirituality. These two different Christian writers, the one representing the imaginative framework of being as process and becoming, the other focused on how evolution affects intentional spiritual life, open new perspectives on the spiritual character of people's active lives of work and creativity in the world that science presents to us.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This volume presents the spirituality of John Calvin in three short texts drawn from his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Many consider Calvin the most influential thinker of the sixteenth century. His ideas flowed from Geneva into northern Europe, to the English-speaking lands of Britain, and through the Puritans to North America. The prolific writings of Calvin across several genres open up many aspects of Christian living, and each one offers an entrée to his spirituality. On the supposition that "spirituality" refers to the way people or groups lead their lives in relation to ultimacy, three texts have been chosen to form the axis for this interpretation of Calvin's contribution. These texts deal with his theological view of law, a definition of sanctification, and a short treatise on the Christian life. The portrait of Calvin's spirituality that emerges from these texts and the larger framework of his theology, his ecclesiology, and his career as church leader and civic organizer can be summarized in the following phrase: a practical spirituality of sanctification by participation in society. One cannot find all of that in these texts, but they establish a platform on which the pieces fall into place. The story of his early life and formation, along with several key ideas that characterize the man and his vision, will help to draw a sharper, more distinctive picture of at least this influential aspect of Calvin's spirituality. It is one that bears direct relevance, with appropriate adjustments, to life today.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This volume presents reflections on the nature of Christian spirituality in the light of Immanuel Kant's work Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. It also contains two short comments on Kant's work: Paul Tillich directly engages Kant's moral philosophy, and Reinhold Niebuhr indirectly addresses him with his reflections on the role of conscience in religious experience. The whole volume rests on the constituent role that morality, and hence ethics, plays in a comprehensive understanding of Christian spirituality. Kant adds to that discussion by introducing the voice of the Enlightenment into the conversation. His work serves as a bridge between the spirituality displayed in the Medieval and Reformation periods and what may be called modern Western culture. Christians who are socialized into twenty-first century Western intellectual culture may be relatively unfamiliar with the cultures that spawned the characteristic accents of the spiritual languages that are learned in the churches today. When they move into the world of higher education, they will learn a whole series of ideas from science and critical modern thought that directly challenge the ordinary spiritual conceptions of church traditions. The critical discussion between intellectual culture and Christianity during the period of the Enlightenment was deep and serious, and it helps to explain how the churches in the West relate to present-day intellectual culture. Kant's text on the metaphysics of morals presents in an exemplary way the deep questions that Christian spirituality faces today with almost laboratory precision. The two commentators neatly draw the conversation into contexts that are closer to life in the world of our time.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This volume considers two authors who represent different but complementary responses to social injustice and human degradation. The writings of Walter Rauschenbusch and Dorothy Day respond to an American situation that arose out of the Industrial Revolution and reflect especially-but not exclusively-urban life on the East Coast of the United States during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Although these two authors differ greatly, they both reacted to the extreme social inequality and strife that occurred between 1890 and the beginning of World War II. They shared a total commitment to the cause of social justice, their Christian faith, and an active engagement in the quest for a just social order. But the different ways they reacted to the situation generated different spiritualities. Rauschenbusch was a pastor, writer, historian, and seminary professor. Day was a journalist who became an organizer. The strategic differences between them, however, grew out of a common sustained reaction against the massive deprivation that surrounded them. There is no spiritual rivalry here. They complement each other and reinforce the Christian humanitarian motivation that drives them. Their work brings the social dimension of Christian spirituality to the surface in a way that had not been emphasized in the same focused way before them. They are part of an awakening to the degree to which the social order lies in the hands of the people who support it. Both Rauschenbusch and Day are examples of an explicit recognition of the social dimension of Christian spirituality and a radical acting-out of that response in two distinctly different ways.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Clement of Alexandria represents Christianity at the end of the second and early in the third century. He reminds us of the pervasiveness of Greek culture at the time of Jesus that accompanied Roman imperium in the East. The New Testament was written in Greek even though its content was Jewish and appealed back to Jewish history. As Christianity spread north and westward it was received by Jews and Gentiles who were familiar with Greek culture which strongly affected Latin culture and Roman law and order. As one would expect, corporate Christian faith slowly took on the cultural forms of the places where it was accepted and internalized. Theologians can argue whether or in what respects Hellenization saved or distorted evangelical Christianity, but the early appropriation of Christian beliefs into a form of Greek wisdom that made sense in a critical and speculative culture ultimately provided the medium for central and still authoritative doctrines. Greek Christian wisdom in turn assigned values and influenced practices of Christian spirituality that spanned both the Eastern and the Western churches. Clement of Alexandria was one of the earliest and most thorough interpreters of Christian faith in the terms of Greek reflective thought. We still live by suppositions that were formulated in a way that made Christian faith in God something that Greeks and Romans and Mediterranean culture could understand, spiritually appropriate, and live out. We have to consider whether and in what measure these ancient spiritual ideas still communicate to us, for they have left their mark on Christian language and life in our own day.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University's Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return. A young European intellectual's first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same. Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous's fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the "omnipotence-other" seductions of literature; a family's flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius.

Paperback. Condizione: New. If Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225, as is commonly thought, then he died before reaching the age of fifty after producing the single most influential systematic theology of the Western Christian tradition. He did this with a formula: He internalized the thought of Aristotle as it was being introduced into western Europe and translated into Latin, and he in turn "translated" Christianity into this Aristotelian language. One can use the principles of hermeneutics outlined in Retrieving the Spiritual Teaching of Jesus of this series to analyze what was going on as Aquinas went through some of the basic doctrines of the Church in his Summa Theologiae. He laid out their contents by answering an exhaustive series of questions and responding to each of them in intricate detail. The model for each question and answer was drawn directly from the pattern of learning at the University of Paris. Although systematic and abstract, it also enabled an extensive conversation with the tradition of classical theologians and his own contemporaries. This may seem quite distant from spiritual life on the ground, but the method produced a clear understanding of the structure of spiritual life in terms of its goal and the means of attaining it. Aquinas's analysis of grace-how it enabled genuine Christian spirituality, empowered the virtues, and led to eternal life-constitutes a classic substructure of Western Christian spirituality that became all the more distinctive when Reformation spiritualities offered alternatives to it.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 1st. Two developments that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century had a strong impact on Christian theology. The first was a deepening of the implications of historical consciousness, and the second was the impact of science on Christian self-understanding. Marx's sociology of knowledge symbolizes the first; Darwin's analysis of evolution symbolizes the second. These intellectual developments gave rise to various forms of process philosophy and theology. Within this context, a dialogue between Christian theology and evolution has yielded dramatically new convictions and practices in Christian spirituality, especially relative to ecology. For more than three decades Catherine Keller has been reflecting on the intellectual and practical effects that an internalization of the dynamic character of reality should have upon the practice of Christian life. Her text illustrates the basic framework of dynamic becoming that science demands, whether or not one is formally a process thinker. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was an earlier figure who was more zeroed in on the phenomenon of evolution, which he encountered in a distinct way as a Christian scientist trained in geology and paleontology, as distinct from biology or genetics. Evolution explicitly informs his spirituality. These two different Christian writers, the one representing the imaginative framework of being as process and becoming, the other focused on how evolution affects intentional spiritual life, open new perspectives on the spiritual character of people's active lives of work and creativity in the world that science presents to us.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This volume considers two authors who represent different but complementary responses to social injustice and human degradation. The writings of Walter Rauschenbusch and Dorothy Day respond to an American situation that arose out of the Industrial Revolution and reflect especially-but not exclusively-urban life on the East Coast of the United States during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Although these two authors differ greatly, they both reacted to the extreme social inequality and strife that occurred between 1890 and the beginning of World War II. They shared a total commitment to the cause of social justice, their Christian faith, and an active engagement in the quest for a just social order. But the different ways they reacted to the situation generated different spiritualities. Rauschenbusch was a pastor, writer, historian, and seminary professor. Day was a journalist who became an organizer. The strategic differences between them, however, grew out of a common sustained reaction against the massive deprivation that surrounded them. There is no spiritual rivalry here. They complement each other and reinforce the Christian humanitarian motivation that drives them. Their work brings the social dimension of Christian spirituality to the surface in a way that had not been emphasized in the same focused way before them. They are part of an awakening to the degree to which the social order lies in the hands of the people who support it. Both Rauschenbusch and Day are examples of an explicit recognition of the social dimension of Christian spirituality and a radical acting-out of that response in two distinctly different ways.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Western Monastic Spirituality presents three authors as individuals, certainly, but also as textual informants who, like road markers, represent a line of the development of a Western monastic spiritual tradition. John Cassian (ca. 360-435) helped bring the wisdom of northern Egyptian ascetical life of the late fourth century to southern France in the early fifth century. Caesarius of Arles (468/470-542), drawing on his own monastic experience and Augustine's monastic rule, composed a rule for a women's monastery in the city of Arles. Not many years later, Benedict wrote the most influential rule in Western monasticism, one that still regulates the lives of monks today all over the world. These three texts, when looked at serially and together, offer a theology of monastic spirituality, an example of a relatively short but comprehensive early monastic rule, and a present day Benedictine interpretation of how Benedict's monastic spirituality can be summed up in a short present day digest of his rule. Reflection on early Western monasticism retrieves some basic Christian spiritual values that should inform life today outside the monastery in a busy, secular culture.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Martin Luther (1483-1546) is a classic Christian author who spearheaded the Reformation and whose witness has relevance for life in the present-day world. Grace and Gratitude presents two texts that represent his spirituality. Because Luther wrote so much in so many different genres, the choice of only two texts provides a limited taste of his spirituality. But they open up a specific, central, and distinctive mark of his conception of the structure of Christian life. The name of the theme, justification by grace through faith, often spontaneously correlates with Luther's name and his theology. The phrase points to a key theological doctrine that centered his thinking; it lay so deeply ingrained in his outlook that it sometimes explicitly but always tacitly shaped all his early theological views and bestowed a distinctive character to his ethics and spirituality. The two texts are chosen to illustrate how the conviction represented by the phrase draws its authority from scripture, especially Paul, and was discursively analyzed in an early foundational work on Christian life, The Freedom of a Christian. These texts do not represent all there is to say about spirituality in Luther's thought by any means, and this part should not be taken for the whole. But the coupling of these texts penetrates deeply into what may be called Luther's Christian spirituality of gratitude.

Paperback. Condizione: New. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST SPIRITUAL BOOKS OF 2021 BY SPIRITUALITY and PRACTICE Winner, 2023 AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show, Trade Typographic Bearing witness to the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic When New York City went into lockdown in March 2020, spiritual leader Micah Bucey found the world and himself in desperate need of prayer. While social distancing created disconnect, Bucey began a daily practice of writing a "Tiny Prayer" each morning and posting it on social media, each offering a reflection on what was going on in his own heart and in the wider world. Soon, a solitary practice became a communal one, with others engaging and sharing the prayers that touched them most, suggesting issues and topics for future prayers, and creating connection across a digital divide. Over the course of a year filled with fear and faith, protest and possibility, Bucey composed prayers for frontline workers and activists, those lost to illness and wins for democracy, for civic leaders, celebrities, and everyday emotions. While overwhelm threatened to engulf us all, these short meditations invited a combination of attention and intention in bite-sized form that aided the reader in focusing on one issue at a time, from the rise of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, to police violence, social justice uprisings, immigrant detentions, catastrophic climate events, mass shootings, and violent right-wing insurrections. Now, all 366 "Tiny Prayers" are collected here, together forming a chronicle of a specific moment in time and modeling a form for everyone to compose their own tiny prayers to engage the everyday around them. The Book of Tiny Prayer recalls a very particular year, but its spirit is universal, inviting all to quiet themselves, name the pain and the joy around them, and recommit to the change required for collective liberation, during the worst times and far beyond.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Bringing together lyric poetry, documentary photographs, and lives lived along the U.S.-Mexico borderland Written during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, in Carbonate of Copper Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement. The poems stage scenes adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the realities of migration warped by jarring political vitriol, bearing witness to past and present-day hazards and sorrows wagered by those in search of asylum. So enabled, these poems make visible not only the infrastructure of militarized surveillance and its detention complex but also the aspiration to justice and mercy and the resilient self-organized order of time for migrants seeking human dignity while awaiting passage to the other side of the dividing line. The book's title refers also to a mineral found in azurite and malachite, a color medium that had an impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise, and its systems of extraction. Carbonate of copper was less desirable than the deeper ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli, but Renaissance artists and patrons nonetheless coveted it and prompted a market for the blue derivative used in tempera and oil pigment. The blue powder pigment serves, too, as a form of sorcery: one that would ward off those who deal in injury of the already dispossessed. Turning his attention to the forced relocation of peoples, the COVID-19 death toll, the encroaching dangers of illiberal rule, the meanings of home and eviction, the power of cultural memory, as well as his artistic forebears, Tejada accounts for the uncounted and those excluded from belonging in voices that tell the cruel fortunes and joyful vitality of human and non-human life forms.

Paperback. Condizione: New. An incendiary literary work more relevant now than ever. "if anger were an ax/it would split me open/and if this is a sermon/let it be my granddaddy's sermon/my grandmother's foottapping/steady rocking/choir singing" -from "It Is Not a New Age" First published in 1998, Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery is the debut collection by acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed. Provocative and potent, it tackles the political and personal issues of enslavement, sexuality, emotional trauma, and abuse. These poems chart the journey of an artist trying to escape cycles of dependency and reclaim lost self and identity. Drawing parallels to Harriet Tubman's journey on the Underground Railroad, Sneed's explorations of the woods are a metaphor and emotional path one must explore to attain self-ownership. Sneed's poems are bound by the search for love, freedom, and justice-from images of lesbian love to Emmet Till's bloated body, they offer a raging cry and a roadmap for those interested in transforming the personal into social justice and abolitionist practices.

Paperback. Condizione: New. One of Book Riot's Must-Have New Poetry for Fall 2023 The remarkable debut collection by a young Nigerian queer poet. "here / i am not his image / and i envy it / i shut my eyes against what is left / the crackling softness of life / like communion / desire is a marathon / a baton waiting for your grip / here / i am not running / neither is he / i sit with a man for the first time / and we talk about war . . ." -FROM "BEAUTIFUL BOY WITH GARLANDS AROUND HIS WAIST" In Gorgeous Display, by Nigerian poet Ugochukwu Damian Okpara, is a volume dedicated to the memory of those lost to anti-queer violence in Nigeria and elsewhere. In this first full-length collection of his work, Okpara examines queer male identity, effeminacy, and exile, offering meditations on desire and sanctuary, freedom and estrangement. Forty-three poems pierce familial relationships, safety, fear, and anxiety portrayed through the outward sign of hand tremors, queer lynching, survival, hope, the emptiness of exile, and reclamation of the self. Embracing the ephemeral and spiritual nature of physical beauty, Okpara also reveals the scars of queer displacement, illuminating the ways that leaving home is never quite the utopia one hopes for and how often the ache of abandonment can haunt a life lived in the present.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Set in a rapidly gentrifying New York City determined to move beyond the decimation of a generation a decade earlier, What I Did Wrong is a day in the life of Tom, a forty-two-year-old English professor, haunted by the death of his best friend, Zack, who died theatrically and calamitously of AIDS. Tom himself slouches gingerly and precariously into middle age questioning every certainty he had about himself as a gay man while negotiating the field of his college classes, populated as they are with guys whose cocky bravado can't quite compensate for their own confused masculinity. Tom tries to balance his awkwardly developing friendships with them. In the process, he begins to find common ground with these proud young men and, surprisingly, a way to claim his own place in the world, and in history. A powerfully moving-and often disarmingly funny-book about loss, character, and sexuality in the wake of AIDS, What I Did Wrong is a survivor's tale in an age when all certainties have lost their logic and focus. It is a romance that embraces its objects from the traumas of toxic masculinity to the aftermath of catastrophic loss amidst the enduring allure of New York City in all its manic and heartbreaking grandeur.

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Before the onset of his irreversible decline, Eddie Socket always suspected he was on the verge of something. Now that "something" has arrived in the form of Merrit Mather, an attractive older gentleman of impeccable taste in everything from sweaters to his numerous sexual conquests. That Merrit happens to be the lover of Eddie's agitated boss, Saul, hardly fazes the smitten Eddie; that the elusive Merrit loses interest in Eddie with dizzying speed hardly dims his ardor. While Eddie continues his futile chase, he finds solace in his roommate, Polly, involved in her own implausible affair with a self-involved banker. Both Eddie and Polly eventually conclude that solitude is their best option. But even that is not possible as Eddie finds his life taking an unexpected turn-a turn that that serves as the catalyst for Eddie, love-ravaged Polly, and the indomitable Saul to reclaim their lives. First published in 1989 and winner of the 1990 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Debut Novel, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket is one of the first novels to respond to the global AIDS crisis. A comedy of absurdist horror, it weaponizes the comic as a way of intensifying the tragic aspects of AIDS, which were especially acute in the early 1980s, and the scars of which are still visible today.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Zonas Peligrosas: The Challenge of Creating Safe Neighborhoods in Central America examines indicators of orderliness and security in El Salvador, shows how policies and programs based on disorganization theory have been used, and why they might not make Salvadoran urban dwellers safer. In Latin America, these prescriptions form the basis for what has become known as "citizen security" policy. Just as in disorganization theory, citizen security emphasizes strong social cohesion and expectations for action on the part of neighbors and civil society. Mimicking the methodology of disorganization theorists from the Chicago School, Tom Hare conducted four neighborhood studies in the San Salvador metropolitan area. Mixed methods, including two hundred original survey-interviews, were used to create a rich description of each case. The cases were selected in order to compare and contrast the social order in neighborhoods with varying levels of security and physical and demographic makeup.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Thames Town-an English-like village built in Shanghai-is many places at once: a successful tourist destination, an affluent residential cluster, a city of migrant workers, and a ghost town. The Real Fake explores how the users of Thames Town transform a themed space into something more than a "fake place." Piazzoni understands authenticity as a dynamic relationship between people, places, and meanings that enables urban transformations. She argues that authenticity underlies the social and physical production of space through both top-down and bottom-up dynamics. The systems of moral and aesthetic judgments that people associate with "the authentic" materialize in Thames Town. Authenticity excludes some users as it inhibits access and usage especially to the migrant poor. And yet, ideas of the authentic also encourage everyday spontaneous appropriations of space that break the village's staged atmosphere. Most scholars criticize theming by arguing that it produces a "fake," controlling city. Piazzoni complicates this view by demonstrating that although the exclusionary character of theming remains unquestionable, it is precisely the experience of "fakeness" that allows Thames Town's users to develop a sense of place. Authenticity, the ways people construct and spatialize its meanings, intervenes holistically in the making and remaking of space.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 74th ed.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In cinema, blurriness is usually intended to go unnoticed. When it appears it is either considered an error - a mistake of focus or a technological failure - or a background effect of shallow focus intended to offset a defined image. As Martine Beugnet argues, however, blur is an essential feature of the cinema, possessing its own properties and affordances, and capable of powerful effects. Examining an array of notable examples of blurriness from horror to art cinema and experimental film, and including the works of the Lumière brothers, Josef von Sternberg, Agnès Varda and many others, she develops a taxonomy of blurs, from speed and motion blur to the hand-held, "shaky camera" blur common in contemporary digital cinema. These wide-ranging instances all return the viewer to the sensorial and material qualities of the moving image. In the face of technological developments that valorize sharpness as an indicator of progress, blur stands as a provocative reminder of the value of uncertainty-a sign of the irreducible mystery at the heart of the filmic image.

Paperback. Condizione: New. New. Winner of the 2023-24 Poetic Justice Institute Editors Prize for a BIPOC WriterISELE MAGAZINE EDITOR'S CHOICE: 25 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025 THE MODACULTURE 10 ANTICIPATED AFRICAN BOOKS OF 2025 OPEN COUNTRY MAGAZINE ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025In this unflinching debut collection, Adedayo Agarau confronts the harrowing reality of ritual killings and child abductions that have terrorized Nigeria from the turbulent pre-democratic era to the present day. Set against the backdrop of rural Ibadan, The Years of Blood plunges readers into the depths of collective trauma where "memory forsakes the body at the point where fear fills the body like air."These poems bear witness to unspeakable atrocities through dreamlike landscapes and surreal imagery that resist rational explanation. Memory is as vital as it is ungraspable. As the painful poem "the abduction" puts it, "memory forsakes the body at the point where fear fills the body like air." Or, in "Lilac," where "the debris of memory / becomes the fog before you." Agarau's lyrical language - at once rich and broken - captures both the violence witnessed and the guilt of survival through repetitions of words, phrases, and motifs.As both survivor and émigré to the U.S., Agarau explores "the weight of disappearance [that] hangs heavy over memory," the ongoing trauma that cannot be shed, and the search for healing across continents. His poems attempt to wrest language out of terror's domain, asking: "How many ways can the poet craft an elegy?"Above and beyond its art, The Years of Blood is essential reading for those interested in African literature, postcolonial studies, and the intersection of personal and political history and global literature. In its unyielding approach to its subject matter, this volume is a crucial interlocutor to conversations on trauma, grief, loss, absence, migration, loneliness, and African spiritualism.For readers of Ilya Kaminsky, Safia Elhillo, Ocean Vuong, and Claudia Rankine, this collection speaks to both specific cultural realities and universal human experiences through poetry that refuses easy consolation.

Paperback. Condizione: New. What are film props? What do they do? This book answers these questions by a close attention to those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds. The term "prop" is short for property. This truncated term's etymology belies the expansiveness of the concept and indicates the micro and macro scales at which the prop operates. Props are the material-often literal-furniture of cinema's diegetic reality. Props are also narrative agents: think of the animacy of objects in Jean Epstein's account of photogénie, the crystal egg in Risky Business, or the domestic bric-à-brac of Sirk's melodramas. The prop is central to production design and the construction of mise-en-scène. And yet, the prop has rarely-almost never-been taken as an object of analysis and theorization in its own right. This book begins by tracing the prop's curious but unacknowledged role in film theory, before proceeding to a series of theoretical speculations and close readings that bring the prop into focus. Analyses of scenes of "prop mastery" demonstrate the labor that props perform and enable, as well as the interpretive work they make possible. Across a variety of genres, modes, and historical contexts-studio filmmaking, art cinema, adult and avant-garde films-The Prop introduces readers to the notion of "prop value," a quality that puts the prop in proximity to the capitalist commodity, but also provides an ironic distance from the commodity's subjection to exchange value. Gorfinkel and Rhodes argue that the prop is nothing less than a condensation of how labor, subjection, value, and instrumentality underwrite the very conditions of cinema.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy's heart gave out. In one of the first such procedures in France, a stranger's heart was grafted into his body. Numerous complications followed, including more surgeries and lymphatic cancer. The procedure and illnesses he endured revealed to him, in a more visceral way than most of us ever experience, the strangeness of bodily existence itself and surviving the stranger within him. During this same period, Europe began closing its borders to those seeking refuge from war and poverty. Alarmed at this trend and drawn to a highly intimate form of strangeness with which he had been living for years, Nancy set out in The Intruder to articulate how intrusion-whether of a body or a border-is not antithetical to one's identity but constitutive of it. In 2004, Claire Denis adapted The Intruder into a film already hailed among the most important of our century. This edition includes Nancy's and Denis's accounts of turning philosophy into film and the text of a shorter collaboration between the two of them. Throughout, Nancy and Denis push us to recognize that to truly welcome strangers means a constant struggle against exoticism, enforced assimilation, and confidence in our own self-identity.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A graphic novel that confronts our habits, narratives, and fantasies head-on to help break our petroleum dependency What if the biggest barriers to responding to climate change are not technological or governmental but, rather, cultural? In other words, what if we ourselves could help to enact change through a deeper understanding of our petroleum dependency? In a provocative graphic format that draws widely from history, critical theory, and popular culture, Gasoline Dreams explores and challenges the ways fossil fuels have shaped our identities, relationships, and our ability to imagine sustainable, equitable futures. As our rapidly warming planet is pushed toward ecological collapse, we might often feel helpless or paralyzed by the enormity of the challenges confronting us. However, reflecting upon the cultural dimensions of our predicament helps reveal the great potential for social transformation inherent in the multiplying crises. Author and artist Simon Orpana engages with contemporary scholarship in the emergent field of Energy Humanities to confront the habits, narratives, and fantasies that support our attachment to fossil fuels. By revealing the many ways petroculture repeatedly fails to deliver on its promises of "the good life," Gasoline Dreams calls us to the difficult work of waking up from the fantasies that inhibit us from working toward a global transition to renewable energy. Written in an engaging graphic format that makes relevant historical, cultural, and political analyses of global warming and petrol dependency important to a wide audience, Gasoline Dreams refutes the progress narratives that depict contemporary, energy-intensive societies as the inevitable product of human history. By revealing the contingencies, coercions, and compulsions this myth disguises, the book allows us to imagine truly progressive alternatives. Rather than casting climate change as a problem for technological elites to solve, the book confronts the everyday realities that reinforce our dependence on fossil fuels, offering a space of hope and engagement from which concerned people can work to build a more sustainable future. On the threshold of the single greatest transformation the human species has yet faced, Gasoline Dreams challenges us to start living, working, and dreaming differently to become less culturally dependent on petroleum.

Paperback. Condizione: New. An exiled professor's journey from inside and beyond academeIn the summer of 2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois for his unwavering stance on Palestinian human rights and other political controversies. A year later, he landed a job in Lebanon, but that, too, ended badly. With no other recourse, Salaita found himself trading his successful academic career for an hourly salaried job. Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus - a vantage point from which Salaita explores social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, pro­fessional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school - An Honest Living describes the author's decade of turbulent post-professorial life and his recent return to the lectern.Steven Salaita was practically born to a life in academia. His father taught physics at an HBCU in southern West Virginia and his earliest memories are of life on campus and the cinder walls of the classroom. It was no surprise that he ended up in the classroom straight after graduate school. Yet three of his university jobs - Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois, and the American University of Beirut [AUB] - ended in public controversy. Shaken by his sudden notoriety and false claims of antisemitism, Salaita found himself driving a school bus to make ends meet. While some considered this just punishment for his anti-Zionist beliefs, Steven found that driving a bus provided him with not just a means to pay the bills but a path toward freedom of thought.Now ten years later, with a job at American University at Cairo, Salaita reconciles his past with his future. His restlessness has found a home, yet his return to academe is met with the same condition of fugitivity from whence he was expelled: an occasion for defiance, not conciliation. An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of the author's decade of professional joys and travails.

Paperback. Condizione: New. With humor and grace, the memoir of a first-generation Chinese American in New York City. Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng's upbringing in Flushing, Queens, in the 1970s. Back then, his family was one of the few immigrant Chinese families in a far-flung neighborhood in New York City. His parents had an arranged marriage and ran a Chinese hand laundry. From behind the counter of his parents' laundry and within the confines of a household that was rooted in a different century and culture, he sought to reconcile this insular home life with the turbulent yet inspiring street life that was all around them--from the faux martial arts of TV's Kung Fu to the burgeoning underworld of the punk rock scene. In the 1970s, NYC, like most of the world, was in the throes of regenerating itself in the wake of major social and cultural changes resulting from the counterculture and civil rights movements. And by the 1980s, Flushing had become NYC's second Chinatown. But Eng remained one of the neighborhood's few Chinese citizens who did not speak fluent Chinese. Finding his way in the downtown theater and performance world of Manhattan, he discovered the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder's foundational Americana drama, Our Town. This discovery became the unlikely catalyst for a psyche-healing pilgrimage to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China-his ancestral home in southern China-that led to writing and performing his successful autobiographical monologue, The Last Emperor of Flushing. Learning to tell his own story on stages around the world was what proudly made him whole. As cities, classrooms, cultures, and communities the world over continue to re-examine the parameters of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Our Laundry, Our Town will reverberate with a broad readership.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A collection of poems that contemplate the bureaucracy of the mind through interior political cabinets Taking its name from the banal, purgatorial space outside (but inside) a doctor's office, Well Waiting Room imagines the conversations we have with ourselves at this liminal site as an exchange between interior bureaucrats, each of whom governs a particular aspect of the psyche. The poems explore the dynamics of this political ministry, which includes the Cabinets of Desire, Indulgences, Self-Preservation, Ordinary Affairs, Ambivalence, Confrontations, and many others-there's even a press secretary, a curator, and a general counsel. Like a cabinet of curiosity wrapped in red tape, the poems examine the compartmentalization of the mind and the confounding news of the day. Formally, the poems range from dramatic monologues to combative sonnets, quippy memos to voice-y prose blocks, incantatory interludes to dreamlike visual landscapes. Sometimes, the poems address a purely internal conflict: Why do we lie to ourselves, indulge in schadenfreude, repeat the same mistakes? Other times, the poetic lens points outward like a spear, confronting the external universe: social injustice, polar ice melt, the Trump administration, and other man-made disasters. But in both universes, the poems find joy: the first observation of gravitational waves, the otherworldly beauty of rare marine species, the discovery that you are your own best way out. For Schlaifer, the underlying question is an epistemological one, an ontological one, a theological one. Why are we here, how do we know things, and why does God-so often-seem to be working against us? In Schlaifer's bureaucratic vision of the mind, readers will see their own internal voices affectingly (and often humorously) reflected. The book traverses unknowable terrain in sturdy boots. It unearths not answers but better questions for our time.