Stumbling Blocks And Other Unfinished Work

Stumbling Blocks expands and contextualizes the unpublished works of the late African American writer Delores Phillips. Born in Cartersville, Georgia in 1950, Delores Faye Phillips spent much of her childhood in Georgia before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. Best known for her 2004 novel The Darkest Child, which follows the Quinn family as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia during the 1950s, Phillips wrote much more than that. While the novel was met with critical acclaim, little is known about Phillips herself or about her other writings. Indeed, in the 2018 reissue of The Darkest Child, Tayari Jones remarks in the introduction that when she heard Phillips had passed away in 2014, she was “weighted down with longing for the other books that she would never write.” This volume, then, corrects the misconception that The Darkest Child was Phillips’s only published work. Rather, it establishes her as an experienced and prolific writer who created multi-genre literature throughout her life. It paints a broader picture of Phillips, who was not just a novelist but also a poet and short story writer as well. Just as Alice Walker’s recovery work on Zora Neale Hurston in the 1970s was critical to a revival and appreciation of Hurston as “a genius of the South,” Stumbling Blocks illuminates and expands the legacy of an underrepresented writer who is uniquely situated at the intersections of multiple identities including race, gender, disability, and region. In addition to the sequel to The Darkest Child, this collection also includes an unfinished third novel (No Ordinary Rain), ten poems, seven short stories, contextualizing essays, and an in-depth biography of Phillips. It is also bookended by a foreword from Phillips’s sister, Linda Miller, and an afterword from renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris.

"Stumbling Blocks expands and contextualizes the unpublished works of the late African American writer Delores Phillips. Born in Cartersville, Georgia in 1950, Delores Faye Phillips spent much of her childhood in Georgia before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. Best known for her 2004 novel The Darkest Child, which follows the Quinn family as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia during the 1950s, Phillips wrote much more than that. While the novel was met with critical acclaim (won Black Caucus of the ALA Award and was a nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Phillips), little is known about Phillips herself or about her other writings. In fact, in the 2018 reissue of The Darkest Child, Tayari Jones remarks in the introduction that when she heard Phillips had passed away in 2014, she was "weighted down with longing for the other books that she would never write." This volume, then, corrects the misconception that The Darkest Child was Phillips's only published work. Rather, it establishes her as an experienced and prolific writer who created multi-genre literature throughout her life. It paints a broader picture of Phillips, who was not just a novelist, but also a poet and short story writer as well. Much like Alice Walker's recovery work on Zora Neale Hurston in the 1970s was critical to a revival and appreciation of Hurston as "a genius of the South," Stumbling Blocks expands the legacy and illuminates an under-represented writer who is uniquely situated at the intersections of multiple identities including race, gender, disability, and region. In addition to the sequel to The Darkest Child, this collection also includes an unfinished third novel (No Ordinary Rain), ten poems, seven short stories, contextualizing essays, and an in-depth biography of Phillips. It is also bookended by a foreword from Phillips sister, Linda Miller, and an afterword from Trudier Harris"--

Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve and sends them to earn their keep for the household, whether in domestic service, in the fields, or at “the farmhouse” on the edge of town, where Rozelle beds local men for money. But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle’s grasp without ruinous—even fatal—consequences?

While historical and political aspects of the Russo-German relationship over the past three to four centuries have received due attention from scholars, the range of the far more diverse, important, and peculiar cultural relations still awaits full assessment. This volume shows how enriching these cultural influences were for both countries, affecting many spheres of intellectual and daily life such as philosophy and religion, education and ideology, sciences and their application, arts and letters, custom and language. The German-Russian relationship has always been particularly intense. Oscillating as it has between infatuation and contempt, it has always been marked by a singular paradox: a German cultural presence in Russia resulting either in a more or less complete fusion, as in the case of Russifield German, or in a pronounced mutual repulsion, accompanied by the denigration of each other's culture as inferior. It is this curious paradox that determines the perspectives of the articles that were specially written for this volume, providing it with a unifying focus.

Significant German communities existed in Russia for three centuries until the Bolshevik revolution gradually extirpated their presence. These 18 papers explore a number of cultural influences that the German presence had on Russian letters, art, architecture, music, and other cultural pursuits. Spe.

The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution. Douthwaite explores how the works within this corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley.

How are social inequalities experienced, reproduced and challenged in local, global and transnational spaces? What role does the control of space play in distribution of crucial resources and forms of capital (housing, education, pleasure, leisure, social relationships)? The case studies in Geographies of Privilege demonstrate how power operates and is activated within local, national, and global networks. Twine and Gardener have put together a collection that analyzes how the centrality of spaces (domestic, institutional, leisure, educational) are central to the production, maintenance and transformation of inequalities. The collected readings show how power--in the form of economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital--is employed and experienced. The volume’s contributors take the reader to diverse sites, including brothels, blues clubs, dance clubs, elite schools, detention centers, advocacy organizations, and public sidewalks in Canada, Italy, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Mozambique, South Africa, and the United States. Geographies of Privilege is the perfect teaching tool for courses on social problems, race, class and gender in Geography, Sociology and Anthropology.