Reckless Eyeballing

Masochism is out and feminism is in, Jews are out and Germans are in, race is out and gender is in, and everyone's fighting (and rewriting) for a piece of the pie. Jewish director Jim Minsk disappears during a trip to the South. Black playwright Ian Ball writes the all-female play Reckless Eyeballing in hopes of getting off the "sex-list." Preeminent playwright Jack Brashford, claiming the Jews stole all his black material, decides to write about Armenians. In the background, an unknown assailant dubbed the "Flower Phantom" runs loose through the city shaving heads of prominent black feminists (to the secret delight of black men). In this hilarious, devastating, but also deeply sympathetic novel, Ishmael Reed turns characters on the backs, sides, tops and bottoms to expose the multiple hypocrisies at the heart of American culture.

1656: A Boston court sentences a ship's captain to sit in the stocks for two hours for 'lewd and unseemly behaviour' on the Sabbath. His offence? Arriving home that Sunday after three years at sea, he had kissed his wife. 1889: The chief justice of England debates with fellow judges whether a man can have 'sexual connection with a duck.' 1968: J. Edgar Hoover tries to ban the recording 'Two Virgins' because the cover depicts John Lennon and Yoko Ono stark naked from both directions. 2000: A stripper sues her plastic surgeon because her bottom looks like her top after he stitches breast implants into her buttocks. Spanning all legal history, from the Bible onward, these and other sex-charged legal cases are covered when sex meets the law in "Ardor in the Court."

The Encyclopedia of Tennessee contains detailed information on States: Symbols and Designations, Geography, Archaeology, State History, Local History on individual cities, towns and counties, Chronology of Historic Events in the State, Profiles of Governors, Political Directory, State Constitution, Bibliography of books about the state and an Index.

This Companion presents new essays covering the one hundred and fifty year history of the African American novel.

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

Is feminism dead, as has been claimed by notable members of the media and the academy? Has feminist knowledge, with its proliferation of methodologies and fields, been purchased at the price of power? Are the conflicts among feminists evidence of self-destructive infighting or do they herald the emergence of innovative modes of inquiry? Given a feminism now ensconced within higher education as specialized or fractious scholarship, Susan Gubar's Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century demonstrates that an invigorated concentration on activism and artistry can accentuate not the clinical or disparaging meaning of "critical" but its sense of compelling urgency and irreverent vitality. As a pioneer of feminist studies—and the object of some of the more rancorous criticism lodged against early feminist scholars—Gubar stands in a unique position to comment on current dilemmas. Moving beyond defensiveness produced by generational rivalry, the impasse propagated by smug deployments of identity politics, and the obscurity of poststructuralist theory, she claims that the very controversies that undermine feminism's unity also prove its resilience. Gubar begins by considering the volatile impact of gender on recent redefinitions of race, sexuality, religion, and class proposed by four important groups in contemporary feminism: African-American performance and visual artists, lesbian creative writers, Jewish-American women, and newly institutionalized female academics. She then addresses major divisions—including the rifts between various area studies and women's studies, as well as strains between generations—that both threaten and invigorate feminist inquiry. Gubar's forays into art and activism, politics, and the profession provide a sometimes distressing, sometimes comical, sometimes optimistic view of feminism emerging from a time of contention into a lively period of pluralized perspectives and disciplines.

If the police sniff at your door without a warrant, is it an illegal search? If the mortuary loses your cremated remains, can your family get compensation? Is it a crime to try to pick an empty pocket? Is Yiddish displacing Latin as the second language of our law? And exactly why is it that Robin Hood's merry men "could not have frequently been merry?" Our experiences with the law show how we cope with the most dramatic, poignant, and ridiculous moments of our lives. Judgments in lawsuits can make vivid, even inspirational literature, shining their high beam on whether we have demonstrated grace under pressure. "Where There's Life, There's Lawsuits" collects Jeffrey Miller's 20 years of research and bemusement as a legal historian and columnist for "The Lawyers Weekly", chronicling this intersection of law and the human tragicomedy.

Tato kniha se zaměřuje na tvorbu afroamerického spisovatele Ishmaela Reeda a sleduje, jak se napříč jeho padesátiletou románovou tvorbou proměňuje způsob, jímž autor uplatňuje satiru. Přestože je každý Reedův román originálním knižním počinem, v uplatnění satiry lze najít jisté pravidelnosti a vývojové tendence. Zatímco v Reedově rané satiře převládá společenská kritika založená na zobrazení nestandardní sexuality, v jeho současnější satiře (čímž je označována autorova románová tvorba od roku 1993 dále) dominuje společenská kritika založená na argumentaci. Uvedené mody satiry jsou v knize dále propojeny se dvěma druhy amerického rasismu, s rasismem zjevným a skrytým. Kniha dokládá, že spolu s tím, jak se zjevný rasismus stal v americkém společenském diskurzu nepřípustným a byl nahrazen rasismem skrytým, aktualizoval Ishmael Reed svoji satiru, aby i nadále zůstala efektivním modem společenské kritiky. Kniha je určena pro čtenáře z řad odborné i širší veřejnosti, kteří mají zájem o tvorbu Ishmaela Reeda i afroamerickou literaturu obecně. Inspirativní může být i pro ty, jež se zajímají o žánr satiry a její vývoj.