Corporeal Legacies In The Us South

This book examines the ways in which the histories of racial violence, from slavery onwards, are manifest in representations of the body in twenty-first-century culture set in the US South. Christopher Lloyd focuses on corporeality in literature and film to detail the workings of cultural memory in the present. Drawing on the fields of Southern Studies, Memory Studies and Black Studies, the book also engages psychoanalysis, Animal Studies and posthumanism to revitalize questions of the racialized body. Lloyd traces corporeal legacies in the US South through novels by Jesmyn Ward, Kathryn Stockett and others, alongside film and television such as Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Walking Dead. In all, the book explores the ways in which bodies in contemporary southern culture bear the traces of racial regulation and injury.

This book presents an intellectual history and theoretical exploration of black humanism since the civil rights era. Humanism is a human-centered approach to life that considers human beings to be responsible for the world and its course of history. Both the heavily theistic climate in the United States as well as the dominance of the Black Church are responsible for black humanism’s existence in virtual oblivion. For those who believe the world to be one without supernatural interventions, human action matters greatly and is the only possible mode for change. Humanists are thus committed to promoting the public good through human effort rather than through faith. Black humanism originates from the lived experiences of African Americans in a white hegemonic society. Viewed from this perspective, black humanist cultural expressions are a continuous push to imagine and make room for alternative life options in a racist society. Alexandra Hartmann counters religion’s hegemonic grasp and uncovers black humanism as a small yet significant tradition in recent African American culture and cultural politics by studying its impact on African American literature and the ensuing anti-racist potentials. The book demonstrates that black humanism regards subjectivity as embodied and is thus a worldview that is characterized by a fragile hope regarding the possibility of progress – racial and otherwise – in the country.

This book analyzes six key narratives of Hurricane Katrina across literature, film and television from the literary fiction of Jesmyn Ward to the cinema of Spike Lee. It argues that these texts engage with the human tragedy and political fallout of the Katrina crisis while simultaneously responding to issues that have characterized the wider, George W. Bush era of American history; notably the aftermath of 9/11 and ensuing War on Terror. In doing so it recognizes important challenges to trauma studies as an interpretive framework, opening up a discussion of the overlaps between traumatic rupture and systemic or, “slow violence.”

Modern literature has always been obsessed by music. It cannot seem to think about itself without obsessing about music. And music has returned the favour. The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature addresses this relationship as a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of word and music studies. The 37 chapters within consider the partnership through four lenses—the universal, opera and literature, musical and literary forms, and popular music and literature—and touch upon diverse and pertinent themes for our modern times, ranging from misogyny to queerness, racial inequality to the claimed universality of whiteness. This Companion therefore offers an essential resource for all who try to decode the musico-literary exchange.

The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies considers the ways in which teachers and students are affected by our encounters with literature and other cultural texts in the higher education classroom. The essays consider the range of emotions and affects elicited by teaching settings and practices: those moments when we in the university are caught off-guard and made uncomfortable, or experience joy, anger, boredom, and surprise. Featuring writing by teachers at different stages in their career, institutions, and national or cultural settings, the book is an innovative and necessary addition to both the study of affect, theories of learning and teaching, and the fields of literary and cultural studies.

Horror films have traditionally sunk their teeth into straitened times, reflecting, expressing and validating the spirit of the epoch, and capitalising on the political and cultural climate in which they are made. This book shows how the horror genre has adapted itself to the transformation of contemporary American politics and the mutating role of traditional and new media in the era of Donald Trump’s Presidency of the United States. Exploring horror’s renewed potential for political engagement in a socio-political climate characterised by the angst of civil conflict, the deception of ‘alternative facts’ and the threat of nuclear or biological conflict and global warming, Make America Hate Again examines the intersection of film, politics, and American culture and society through a bold critical analysis of popular horror (films, television shows, podcasts and online parodies), such as 10 Cloverfield Lane, American Horror Story, Don’t Breathe, Get Out, Hotel Transylvania 2, Hush, It, It Comes at Night, South Park, The Babadook, The Walking Dead, The Woman, The Witch and Twin Peaks: The Return. The first major exploration of the horror genre through the lens of the Trump era, it investigates the correlations between recent, culturally meaningful horror texts, and the broader culture within which they have become gravely significant. Offering a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on popular culture as a site of cultural politics, Make America Hate Again will appeal to scholars and students of American studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies.

An intimate portrait of the postwar lives of Korean children and women Korean children and women are the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Yet during and after the Korean War, they were central to the projection of US military, cultural, and political dominance. Framed by War examines how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride emerged at the heart of empire. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America in ways that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. What unfolded in Korea set the stage for US postwar power in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. American destruction and humanitarianism, violence and care played out upon the bodies of Korean children and women. Framed by War traces the arc of intimate relations that served as these foundations. To suture a fragmented past, Susie Woo looks to US and South Korean government documents and military correspondence; US aid organization records; Korean orphanage registers; US and South Korean newspapers and magazines; and photographs, interviews, films, and performances. Integrating history with visual and cultural analysis, Woo chronicles how Americans went from knowing very little about Koreans to making them family, and how Korean children and women who did not choose war found ways to navigate its aftermath in South Korea, the United States, and spaces in between.

Adaptation in Young Adult Novels argues that adapting classic and canonical literature and historical places engages young adult readers with their cultural past and encourages them to see how that past can be rewritten. The textual afterlives of classic texts raise questions for new readers: What can be changed? What benefits from change? How can you, too, be agents of change? The contributors to this volume draw on a wide range of contemporary novels – from Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series and Megan Shepherd's Madman's Daughter trilogy to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones – adapted from mythology, fairy tales, historical places, and the literary classics of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Unpacking the new perspectives and critiques of gender, sexuality, and the cultural values of adolescents inherent to each adaptation, the essays in this volume make the case that literary adaptations are just as valuable as original works and demonstrate how the texts studied empower young readers to become more culturally, historically, and socially aware through the lens of literary diversity.