All Electric Narratives

Winner of the 2023 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies “All-Electric” Narratives is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the “all-electric” home came to be associated with the nation's hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century. The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances' capacity to “give back” time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or “return” them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances' role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated.

Beth Piatote's luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world Told with humor, subtlety, and spareness, the mixed–genre works of Beth Piatote’s first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return. A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven–year–old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s as her family is propelled to its front lines. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college—one French and the other Lakota—each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce–Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone. Formally inventive and filled with vibrant characters, The Beadworkers draws on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life.

Many twentieth-century literary writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This book explores literature's direct relationship to politics, offering new ways of thinking about the troubled relationship between literature and politics.

Storied Lives: Emancipatory Educational Inquiry—Experience, Narrative, & Pedagogy in the International Landscape of Diversity contains exemplary research practices, strategies, and findings gleaned from the contributions to the 15 issues of the Journal of Critical Inquiry Into Curriculum and Instruction (JCI~>CI). Founding Editor Tonya Huber initiated the JCI~>CI in 1997, as a refereed journal committed to publishing educational scholarship and research of professionals in graduate study. The journal was distinguished by its requirement that the scholarship be the result of the first author’s graduate research—according to Cabell’s Directory, the first journal to do so. Equally important, the third issue of each volume targeted wide representation of cultures and world regions. “Current thinking on ...” written by members of the JCI~>CI Editorial Advisory Board explores state-of-the-art topics related to curriculum inquiry. Illustrations, photography (e.g., Sebastião Salgado’s Workers in vol. 2), collage, student-generated art/artifacts, and full-color art enhance cutting-edge methodologies extending educational research through Aboriginal and Native oral traditions, arts-based analysis, found poetry, data poetry, narrative, and case study foci on liberatory pedagogy and social justice action research.

Subjectivity, the Unconscious and Consumerism is a unique and imaginative psycho-sociological exploration of how postmodern, contemporary consumerism invades and colonises human subjectivity. Investigating especially consumerism’s unconscious aspects such as desires, imagination, and fantasy, it engages with an extensive analysis of dreams. The author frames these using a synthesis of Jungian psychology and the social imaginaries of Baudrillard and Bauman, in a dialogue with the theories of McDonaldization and Disneyization. The aim is to broaden our understanding of consumerism to include the perennial consumption of symbols and signs of identity - a process which is the basis for the fabrication of the commodified self. The book offers a profound, innovative critique of our consumption societies, challenging readers to rethink how we live, and how our identities are impacted by consumerism. As such it will be of interest to students and scholars of critical psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, but is also accessible to anyone interested in the complex psychology of contemporary subjectivity.

Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * Winner of the Whiting Award * Longlisted for the National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize * Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize * Finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Refinery29, NPR, The Root, HuffPost, Vanity Fair, Bustle, Chicago Tribune, PopSugar, and The Undefeated In one of the season’s most acclaimed works of fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires offers “a firecracker of a book...a triumph of storytelling: intelligent, acerbic, and ingenious” (Financial Times). Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with race, identity politics, and the contemporary middle class in this “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo) collection. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous—two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids’ backpacks—while others are devastatingly poignant. In the title story, when a cosplayer, dressed as his favorite anime character, is mistaken for a violent threat the consequences are dire; in another story, a teen struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with so-called black culture. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires “has taken the best of what Toni Cade Bambara, Morgan Parker, and Junot Díaz do plus a whole lot of something we’ve never seen in American literature, blended it all together...giving us one of the finest short-story collections” (Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division).