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We play a game
\"Duy Doan's striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection's unassuming title, in poems that explore--now with abundant humor, now with a deeply felt reserve--the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan's experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for--and masterfully playing with--the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Nothing is alien to these poems: the Saigon of a mother's dirge, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, an owl that \"talks to his other self in the well\"--all have a place in Doan's far-reaching and intimately human art.\"--Dust jacket.
Book
The Sovereignty of Quiet
African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. InThe Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person's desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture.The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos's protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander's reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks'sMaud Martha, James Baldwin'sThe Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison'sSulato move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.
eBook
Incidents of travel in poetry : new and selected poems
\"Incidents of Travel in Poetry is the first collection by Latino New York School poet Frank Lima in almost 20 years. In addition to a generous selection of his published books, Incidents contains a wealth of previously unpublished new material, tracing his development from his early gritty portrayals of Spanish Harlem street life to his later abstractly lyrical mode\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Fit to Be Citizens?
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
eBook
The weary blues
\"Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening \"Proem\" (prologue poem)--\"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa\"--Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, \"His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race. Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal,\" and, he concludes, they are the expression of \"an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature.\" That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, with precocious confidence and clarity. In a new introduction to the work, the poet and editor Kevin Young suggests that Hughes from this very first moment is \"celebrating, critiquing, and completing the American dream,\" and that he manages to take Walt Whitman's American \"I\" and write himself into it. We find here not only such classics as \"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\" and the great twentieth-century anthem that begins \"I, too, sing America,\" but also the poet's shorter lyrics and fancies, which dream just as deeply. \"Bring me all of your / Heart melodies,\" the young Hughes offers, \"That I may wrap them / In a blue cloud-cloth / Away from the too-rough fingers / Of the world.\"\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Aphrodite's Daughters
The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed moment for racial uplift, poetic innovation, sexual liberation, and female empowerment.Aphrodite's Daughtersintroduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression.
Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women-Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery-who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape. She examines the varied ways these poets articulated female sexual desire, ranging from Grimké's invocation of a Sapphic goddess figure to Cowdery's frank depiction of bisexual erotics to Bennett's risky exploration of the borders between sexual pleasure and pain. Yet Honey also considers how they were united in their commitment to the female body as a primary source of meaning, strength, and transcendence.
The product of extensive archival research,Aphrodite's Daughtersdraws from Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery's published and unpublished poetry, along with rare periodicals and biographical materials, to immerse us in the lives of these remarkable women and the world in which they lived. It thus not only shows us how their artistic contributions and cultural interventions were vital to their own era, but also demonstrates how the poetic heart of their work keeps on beating.
eBook
Fighting Invisibility
In Fighting Invisibility , Monica Mong Trieu argues that we
must consider the role of physical and symbolic space to fully
understand the nuances of Asian American racialization. By doing
this, we face questions such as, historically, who has represented
Asian America? Who gets to represent Asian America? This book
shifts the primary focus to Midwest Asian America to disrupt-and
expand beyond-the existing privileged narratives in United States
and Asian American history. Drawing from in-depth interviews,
census data, and cultural productions from Asian Americans in Ohio,
Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and
Michigan, this interdisciplinary research examines how post-1950s
Midwest Asian Americans navigate identity and belonging, racism,
educational settings, resources within co-ethnic communities, and
pan-ethnic cultural community. Their experiences and life
narratives are heavily framed by three pervasive themes of
spatially defined isolation, invisibility, and racialized
visibility. Fighting Invisibility makes an important
contribution to racialization literature, while also highlighting
the necessity to further expand the scope of Asian American
history-telling and knowledge production.
eBook
Sightseer in this killing city
\"Eugene Gloria's fourth collection of poetry captures the surreal and unreal feelings of the present. Through the voice of Nacirema, the central persona of the collection, who is a Filipina American woman with an ambiguous sexual identity, we are introduced to a character who chooses mystery and inhabits landscapes fraught with brutality and beauty. Flawed like America, Nacirema embodies ideas of wanderlust and self-discovery. In poems that recount her journey, Gloria invokes the spirit of 1970s soul music and of jazz, blending the urban lament of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane with the idiom of Stevie Wonder and Fela Kuti. Sightseer in This Killing City argues for grace and perseverance in these strange times\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Ghost-Watching American Modernity:Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination
In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Maria del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development. The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Jose Marti, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernandez, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
eBook