Appealing Because He Is Appalling

This collection invites us to think about how African-descended men are seen as both appealing and appalling, and exposed to eroticized hatred and violence and how some resist, accommodate, and capitalize on their eroticization. Drawing on James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon, the contributors examine the contradictions, paradoxes, and politico-psychosexual implications of Black men as objects of sexual desire, fear, and loathing. Kitossa and the contributing authors use Baldwin's and Fanon's cultural and psychoanalytic interpretations of Black masculinities to demonstrate their neglected contributions to thinking about and beyond colonialist and Western gender and masculinity studies. This innovative and sophisticated work will be of interest to scholars and students of cultural and media studies, gender and masculinities studies, sociology, political science, history, and critical race and racialization. Foreword by Tommy J. Curry. Contributors: Katerina Deliovsky, Delroy Hall, Dennis O. Howard, Elishma Khokhar, Tamari Kitossa, Kemar McIntosh, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Watufani M. Poe, Satwinder Rehal, John G. Russell, Mohan Siddi

The Humanity of Private Law presents a new way of thinking about English private law. Making a decisive break from earlier views of private law, which saw private law as concerned with wealth-maximisation or preserving relationships of mutual independence between its subjects, the author argues that English private law's core concern is the flourishing of its subjects. THIS VOLUME - presents a critique of alternative explanations of private law; - defines and sets out the key building blocks of private law; - sets out the vision of human flourishing (the RP) that English private law has in mind in seeking to promote its subjects' flourishing; - shows how various features of English private law are fine-tuned to ensure that its subjects enjoy a flourishing existence, according to the vision of human flourishing provided by the RP; - explains how other features of English private law are designed to preserve private law's legitimacy while it pursues its core concern of promoting human flourishing; - defends the view of English private law presented here against arguments that it does not adequately fit the rules and doctrines of private law, or that it is implausible to think that English private law is concerned with promoting human flourishing. A follow-up volume will question whether the RP is correct as an account of what human flourishing involves, and consider what private law would look like if it sought to give effect to a more authentic vision of human flourishing. The Humanity of Private Law is essential reading for students, academics and judges who are interested in understanding private law in common law jurisdictions, and for anyone interested in the nature and significance of human flourishing.

A radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons. Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls. Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons--not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.

This dictionary of American English is designed to help learners write and speak accurate and up-to-date English. • Ideal for upper-intermediate and advanced learners of English • Based on the Collins 4.5-billion-word database, the Collins Corpus • Up-to-date coverage of today’s English, with all words and phrases explained in full sentences • Authentic examples from the Collins Corpus show how English is really used • Extensive help with grammar, including plural forms and verb infl ections • Fully illustrated Word Web and Picture Dictionary boxes provide additional information on vocabulary and key concepts • Vocabulary-building features encourage students to improve their accuracy and fl uency: †- Word Partnership notes highlight important collocations †- Thesaurus entries offer synonyms and antonyms for common words †- Usage notes explain different meanings and uses of the word • Supplements on Grammar, Writing, Speaking, Words That Frequently Appear on TOEFL® and TOEIC®, Text Messaging and Emoticons

Spanning four and a half centuries, James A. Michener’s monumental saga chronicles the epic history of Texas, from its Spanish roots in the age of the conquistadors to its current reputation as one of America’s most affluent, diverse, and provocative states. Among his finely drawn cast of characters, emotional and political alliances are made and broken, as the loyalties established over the course of each turbulent age inevitably collapse under the weight of wealth and industry. With Michener as our guide, Texas is a tale of patriotism and statesmanship, growth and development, violence and betrayal—a stunning achievement by a literary master. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii. Praise for Texas “Fascinating.”—Time “A book about oil and water, rangers and outlaws, frontier and settlement, money and power . . . [James A. Michener] manages to make history vivid.”—The Boston Globe “A sweeping panorama . . . [Michener] grapples earnestly with the Texas character in a way that Texas’s own writers often don’t.”—The Washington Post Book World “Vast, sprawling, and eclectic in population and geography, the state has just the sort of larger-than-life history that lends itself to Mr. Michener’s taste for multigenerational epics.”—The New York Times

We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation. Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.