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BOOM! SPLAT!: Comics and Violence
By Jim Coby and Joanna Davis-McElligatt. 2024
Contributions by Lawrence Abrams, Diana Álvarez Amell, Partha Bhattacharjee, Natalja Chestopalova, Jim Coby, Rita Costello, Sam Cowling, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Elisabetta…
Di Minico, Kiera M. Gaswint, Vincent Haddad, Kaleb Knoblauch, Christina M. Knopf, Leah Milne, Jacob Murel, Priyanka Tripathi, and Steven S. Vrooman In 1954, the culture, distribution, and content of comics forever changed. Long a mainstay of America’s reading diet, comic books began to fall under the scrutiny of parent groups, church leaders, and politicians. The bright colors and cheaply printed pulp pages of comic books that had once provided an escape were suddenly presumed to house something lascivious, insidious, and morally corrosive. While anxieties about representations of violence in comics have largely fallen to the wayside since the moral panic of the 1950s, thematic and symbolic visual depictions of violence remain central to the comics form. BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence examines violence in every iteration—physical violence enacted between people and their environments, formal and structural violence embedded in the comics language itself, representations of historical violence, and ways of reading and seeing violence.BOOM! SPLAT! is composed of fifteen essays from renowned comics scholars and is organized thematically into four sections, including an examination of histories of violence, forms of violence, modes and systems of violence, and political and social violence. Chapters focus on well-known comics and comics creators, such as Steve Ditko, Hulk, X-Men, and the Marvel universe, to newspaper cartoon strips, postwar graphic novels, revolution, civil rights, trauma, #blacklivesmatter, and more. BOOM! SPLAT! serves as a resource to scholars and comics enthusiasts who wish to contemplate and confront the permutations, forms, structures, and discourses of violence that have always animated cartoons. Through this interrogation, our understanding of violence moves beyond the immediately physical and interpersonal into modes of ephemeral, psychological, and ideological violence. Contributors fill critical gaps by offering sustained explorations of the function of manifold violences in the comics language—those seen, felt, and imagined. The essays in this collection are critically necessary for understanding the current and historical role that violence has played in comics and will help recognize how cartooning imbricates, resists, and expands our thinking about and experiences of violence.Rewatching on the Point of the Cinematic Index
By Allen H. Redmon. 2022
Rewatching on the Point of the Cinematic Index offers a reassessment of the cinematic index as it sits at the…
intersection of film studies, trauma studies, and adaptation studies. Author Allen H. Redmon argues that far too often scholars imagine the cinematic index to be nothing more than an acknowledgment that the lens-based camera captures and brings to the screen a reality that existed before the camera. When cinema’s indexicality is so narrowly defined, the entire nature of film is called into question the moment film no longer relies on a lens-based camera. The presence of digital technologies seemingly strips cinema of its indexical standing. This volume pushes for a broader understanding of the cinematic index by returning to the early discussions of the index in film studies and the more recent discussions of the index in other digital arts. Bolstered by the insights these discussions can offer, the volume looks to replace what might be best deemed a diminished concept of the cinematic index with a series of more complex cinematic indices, the impoverished index, the indefinite index, the intertextual index, and the imaginative index. The central argument of this book is that these more complex indices encourage spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation of the reality they see on the screen, and that it is on the point of these indices that the most significant instances of rewatching movies occur. Examining such films as John Lee Hancock’s Saving Mr. Banks (2013); Richard Linklater’s oeuvre; Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006); Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006); Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011); and Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), Inception (2010), and Memento (2000), Redmon demonstrates that the cinematic index invites spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation.The War on Poverty in Mississippi: From Massive Resistance to New Conservatism
By Emma J. Folwell. 2020
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty instigated a ferocious backlash in Mississippi. Federally funded programs—the embodiment of 1960s liberalism—directly…
clashed with Mississippi’s closed society. From 1965 to 1973, opposing forces transformed the state. In this state-level history of the war on poverty, Emma J. Folwell traces the attempts of white and black Mississippians to address the state’s dire economic circumstances through antipoverty programs. At times, the war on poverty became a powerful tool for black empowerment. But more often, antipoverty programs served as a potent catalyst of white resistance to black advancement. After the momentous events of 1964, both black activism and white opposition to black empowerment evolved due to these federal efforts. White Mississippians deployed massive resistance in part to stifle any black economic empowerment, twisting antipoverty programs into tools to marginalize black political power. Folwell uncovers how the grassroots war against the war on poverty laid the foundation for the fight against 1960s liberalism, as Mississippi became a national model for stonewalling social change. As Folwell indicates, many white Mississippians hardwired elements of massive resistance into the political, economic, and social structure. Meanwhile, they abandoned the Democratic Party and honed the state’s Republican Party, spurred by a new conservatism.Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity…
following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns—author Glen Donnar examines the impact of “terror-Others,” from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil. Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood’s attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they are supposed to be fighting. Donnar concludes that interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nationhood continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, the volume offers an important counternarrative to this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War
By Harriet E. Earle. 2017
Conflict and trauma remain among the most prevalent themes in film and literature. Comics has never avoided such narratives, and…
comics artists are writing them in ways that are both different from and complementary to literature and film. In Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War, Harriet E. H. Earle brings together two distinct areas of research--trauma studies and comics studies--to provide a new interpretation of a long-standing theme. Focusing on representations of conflict in American comics after the Vietnam War, Earle claims that the comics form is uniquely able to show traumatic experience by representing events as viscerally as possible.Using texts from across the form and placing mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics, Earle suggests that comics are the ideal artistic representation of trauma. Because comics bridge the gap between the visual and the written, they represent such complicated narratives as loss and trauma in unique ways, particularly through the manipulation of time and experience. Comics can fold time and confront traumatic events, be they personal or shared, through a myriad of both literary and visual devices. As a result, comics can represent trauma in ways that are unavailable to other narrative and artistic forms.With themes such as dreams and mourning, Earle concentrates on trauma in American comics after the Vietnam War. Examples include Alissa Torres's American Widow, Doug Murray's The 'Nam, and Art Spiegelman's much-lauded Maus. These works pair with ideas from a wide range of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Fredric Jameson, as well as contemporary trauma theory and clinical psychology. Through these examples and others, Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War proves that comics open up new avenues to explore personal and public trauma in extraordinary, necessary ways.Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta
By Michael Copperman. 2016
When Michael Copperman left Stanford University for the Mississippi Delta in 2002, he imagined he would lift underprivileged children from…
the narrow horizons of rural poverty. Well-meaning but naïve, the Asian American from the West Coast soon lost his bearings in a world divided between black and white. He had no idea how to manage a classroom or help children navigate the considerable challenges they faced. In trying to help students, he often found he couldn't afford to give what they required--sometimes with heartbreaking consequences. His desperate efforts to save child after child were misguided but sincere. He offered children the best invitations to success he could manage. But he still felt like an outsider who was failing the children and himself.Teach For America has for a decade been the nation's largest employer of recent college graduates but has come under increasing criticism in recent years even as it has grown exponentially. This memoir considers the distance between the idealism of the organization's creed that "One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education and reach their full potential" and what it actually means to teach in America's poorest and most troubled public schools.Copperman's memoir vividly captures his disorientation in the divided world of the Delta, even as the author marvels at the wit and resilience of the children in his classroom. To them, he is at once an authority figure and a stranger minority than even they are--a lone Asian, an outsider among outsiders. His journey is of great relevance to teachers, administrators, and parents longing for quality education in America. His frank story shows that the solutions for impoverished schools are far from simple.Intimate Partner Violence in New Orleans: Gender, Race, and Reform, 1840-1900
By Ashley Baggett. 2017
Ashley Baggett uncovers the voices of abused women who utilized the legal system in New Orleans to address their grievances…
from the antebellum era to the end of the nineteenth century. Poring over 26,000 records, Baggett analyzes 421 criminal cases involving intimate partner violence—physical or emotional abuse of a partner in a romantic relationship—revealing a significant demand among women, the community, and the courts for reform in the postbellum decades. Before the Civil War, some challenges and limits to the male privilege of chastisement existed, but the gendered power structure and the veil of privacy for families in the courts largely shielded abusers from criminal prosecution. However, the war upended gender expectations and increased female autonomy, leading to the demand for and brief recognition of women's right to be free from violence. Baggett demonstrates how postbellum decades offered a fleeting opportunity for change before the gender and racial expectations hardened with the rise of Jim Crow. Her findings reveal previously unseen dimensions of women's lives both inside and outside legal marriage and women's attempts to renegotiate power in relationships. Highlighting the lived experiences of these women, Baggett tracks how gender, race, and location worked together to define and redefine gender expectations and legal rights. Moreover, she demonstrates recognition of women's legal personhood as well as differences between northern and southern states' trajectories in response to intimate partner violence during the nineteenth century.Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation
By Charles C. Camosy. 2015
Cuts through the mass confusion surrounding abortion and lays out solid common ground The abortion debate in the United States…
is confused. Ratings-driven media coverage highlights extreme views and creates the illusion that we are stuck in a hopeless stalemate. In this book Charles Camosy argues that our polarized public discourse hides the fact that most Americans actually agree on the major issues at stake in abortion morality and law. Unpacking the complexity of the abortion issue, Camosy shows that placing oneself on either side of the typical polarizations -- pro-life vs. pro-choice, liberal vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican -- only serves to further confuse the debate and limits our ability to have fruitful dialogue. Camosy then proposes a new public policy that he believes is consistent with the beliefs of the broad majority of Americans and supported by the best ideas and arguments about abortion from both secular and religious sources.Blessings of the Burden: Reflections and Lessons in Helping the Homeless
By Alan R. Burt. 2013
In Blessings of the Burden Alan R. Burt shares his heart for people who are homeless. Full of personal stories…
drawn from almost two decades of firsthand experience working with the homeless, this book is a passionate plea for greater community involvement in confronting the pressing social problem of homelessness.Unfolding in five parts, Blessings of the Burden includes Burt's own journey from apathy to advocacy, a moving interview with a formerly homeless man who is now the director of an organization that fights homelessness in Cape Cod, Burt's analysis of the fourteen main reasons why homelessness is such a massive problem in America, and an example of how one community developed an innovative and cost-effective approach to helping the homeless among them. Powerful and compelling, Blessings of the Burden will inspire readers to get involved with the homeless and to become advocates for their needs, believing that they can make a difference in their communities.The Empowerment Wheel: Helping Clients Heal from Relationship Abuse
By Rachel Brandoff, Astra Czerny. 2024
Intimate partner violence leaves long-term effects. Survivors often struggle with issues of safety, self-esteem, and trusting their own ability to…
make healthy decisions and enter future relationships. This revolutionary treatment method uses art therapy to guide individuals through a journey of self-exploration, helping them to re-discover their confidence and grow beyond their experiences. Each sector of the Empowerment Wheel is supported by a creative project designed to help individuals examine their experience of red flags, boundaries, locus of control, relationship authenticity, self-talk, and integrated self. With this method, clients will learn to recognise the echoes of relationship abuse and begin to rebuild their self-esteem and individual sense of empowerment.Grounded in the authors' extensive experience in the field of trauma and recovery, the Empowerment Wheel provides a measured, client-directed way to guide survivors of intimate partner violence through the healing process to build a healthy, empowered future.Bluegrass: A True Story of Murder in Kentucky
By William Van Meter. 2009
By the lights of absolutely everyone who ever knew her, Katie Autry never harmed a hair on a dog's head.…
She came from a tiny village in Kentucky. The State moved her as a child into a foster home in a town so small it had one stoplight. New to her own beauty and a little awkward, Katie had the biggest smile on her high school cheerleading squad. In September 2002, she matriculated as a freshman at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. She majored in the dental program, but as it was for many college students her age, partying was of equal priority. She worked days at the smoothie shop, nights at the local strip club, and fell in love with a football player who wouldn't date her. Five feet two in heels and without a bad word to say about anyone, Katie Autry was sweet, kind, and utterly naïve. She was making the clumsy strides of a newborn colt, discovering what the world was like and learning to be her own person. And on the morning of May 4, 2003, Katie Autry was raped, stabbed, sprayed with hairspray, and set on fire in her own dormitory room. In telling the true story of this shocking crime, Bluegrass describes the devastation of not one but three families. Two young men, whose lives seem preordained to intertwine, are jailed for the crime: DNA evidence places Stephen Soules, an unemployed, mixed-race high school dropout, atthe scene, and Lucas Goodrum, a twenty-one-year-old pot dealer with an ex-wife, a girlfriend still in high school, and an inauspicious history of domestic abuse, is held by an ever-changing confession. The friends of the suspects and the foster and birth families of the victim form complex and warring social nets that are cast across town. And a small southern community, populated by eccentrics of every socioeconomic class, from dirt-poor to millionaire, responds to the horror. Like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this tale is redolent with atmosphere, dark tension, and lush landscapes. With the keen eye of a talented young journalist returning to his southern roots, Van Meter paints a vivid portrait of the town, the characters who fill it, and the simmering class conflicts that made an injustice like this not only possible, but inevitable.Sexual Harassment and the Law in Africa: Country and Regional Perspectives
By Furaha-Joy Sekai Saungweme, Carol Chi Ngang, Graham Towl. 2024
Written by a team of experts from legal, forensic, and policy backgrounds, this book presents new research into sexual violence…
and harassment across Africa.This first of it's kind book foregrounds the work of African scholars and presents careful research analysis and case studies that consider sexual harassment from legal, socio-economic, and cultural realities. It highlights the importance of laws around sexual harassment in Africa, the intersectional challenges it poses to women in the workplace, and the role of the feminist movement in Africa to hold perpetrators accountable and give voice to survivors of sexual harassment. The book forms part of a broader African-driven research initiative on sexual harassment and the law and is written in partnership with the Africa End Sexual Harassment Initiative (AESHI). It also explores the need to focus on best-practice benchmarks for Africa and also learning from developments in Africa.Timely and relevant, the book will be of great interest to legal and policy academic scholars, professionals, and activists working in the fields of gender policy, forensic psychology, and NGOs. It will also be useful reading for postgraduate students of law, gender studies, political science, and African studies.Accidental Sisters: Refugee Women Struggling Together for a New American Dream
By Kimberly Meyer. 2024
With a foreword by Ilhan Omar, this breathtaking work of literary nonfiction reveals the power of solidarity for women facing…
the inadequacies of the US immigration system. Accidental Sisters follows five refugee women in Houston, Texas, as they navigate a program for single mothers overseen by Alia Altikrity, a former refugee from Iraq. Grounded in the words of these women—Mina from Iraq, Mendy from Sudan, Sara and Zara from Syria, and Elikya from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—this book recounts their lives in their mother countries, how they were forced to flee, and their struggles to find belonging in an epicenter of refugee resettlement. Readers join author Kimberly Meyer on a journey with each woman as they experience Alia's guiding philosophy: that small, direct, meaningful acts of mutual care are the foundation for a flourishing community. While celebrating the sanctuary the women eventually find, the book critiques the US refugee resettlement program for its insistence on rapid self-sufficiency and offers an alternative American Dream rooted in sisterhood and solidarity. Immersive and intimate, Accidental Sisters inspires hope for a way forward in the face of pandemics, political inaction, and climate change.Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade (Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century #8)
By Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger. 2024
A fierce and galvanizing reminder that resistance is everywhere in the fight for abortion and reproductive justice in the United…
States. Fighting Mad is a book about what "reproductive justice" means and what it looks like to fight for it. Editors Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger bring together many of the strongest, most resistant voices in the country to describe the impacts of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision on abortion access and care. The essayists and change agents gathered in Fighting Mad represent a remarkable breadth of expertise: activists and artists, academics and abortion storytellers, health care professionals and legislators, clinic directors and lawyers, and so many more. They discuss abortion restrictions and strategies to provide care, the impacts of criminalization, efforts to protect the targeted, shortcomings of the past, and visions for the next generation. Fighting Mad captures for the social and historical record the vigorous resistance happening in the early post-Roe moment to show that there are millions on the ground fighting to secure a better future.Modern Fables
By Mikka Jacobsen. 2022
In this darkly funny book about love in the digital age, Mikka Jacobsen challenges the notion that a single woman…
in her thirties writing about love is simply desperate. Instead, in an unflinching collage of coming-of-age narratives, she both elevates singledom and upholds the value of finding profound love. A work of feminist thinking, these interlinked essays blend memoir with cultural and literary criticism, exploring first loves and teenage drug-slingers, sports culture and blowjobs, catfishing and the problematic advice of self-help gurus. At the same time, Modern Fables considers how we are shaped as much by the places we are from as by the times in which we live. Growing up and living in the deeply conservative Canadian prairies, what does it mean when you're not at home at home? Whether she's writing about a settler mother's forays into shamanism in "The Indian Act" or considering the favourite writer of every Calgary man's online-dating profile in "Kurt Vonnegut Lives on Tinder," Mikka Jacobsen pulls no punches, delivering a fiery manifesto on love and place for our times.When My Ghost Sings: A Memoir of Stroke, Recovery, and Transformation
By Tara Sidhoo Fraser. 2023
A lucid exploration of amnesia, selfhood, and who is left behind when the past is obliterated Tara Sidhoo Fraser is…
thirty-two years old when a rare mutation in her brain causes a stroke. Awakening after surgery with no memory of her previous life, she attempts to piece it all back together through a haze of amnesia. Yet, as memories do begin to surface, they are seen through someone else's eyes - the person whose body she stole, whom she calls Ghost. Fighting to stabilize her existence, Tara struggles with the gulf between who she was and who she is now, while constantly battling and paying penance to Ghost. She meets Jude, who is also contending with their identity, the gap between who they are and who they present to the world. As Jude's transition progresses and they begin testosterone injections, Tara's conflict with Ghost heightens. Ghost's voice becomes stronger, and memories buried in the body they now share of hospital visits, old desires, and her ex threaten Tara's new relationship. She burrows deeper into the mystery of who she once was, recognizing the need to fuse herself and Ghost into one. When My Ghost Sings is a lyrical memoir of healing, a farewell letter, and a reclamation of selfhood.Nowhere, Exactly: On Identity and Belonging
By M. G. Vassanji. 2024
From one of Canada's most celebrated writers, two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji, comes a thoughtful meditation on what it…
means to belong in the world.Home is never a single place, entirely and unequivocally. It is contingent. The abstract "nowhere," then, is the true home.M.G. Vassanji has been exploring the immigrant experience for over three decades, drawing deeply on his own transnational upbringing and intimate understanding of the unique challenges and perspectives born from leaving one's home to resettle in a new land. The question of identity, of how to configure and see oneself within this new land, is one such challenge faced. But Vassanji suggests that a more fundamental and slippery endeavour than establishing one's identity is how, if ever, we can establish a sense of belonging. Can we ever truly belong in this new home? Did we ever truly belong in the home we left? Where exactly do we belong? For many, the answer is nowhere exactly. Combining brilliant prose, thoughtful, candid observation, and a lifetime of exploring how we as individuals are shaped by the places and communities in which we live and the history that haunts them, Nowhere, Exactly examines with exquisite sensitivity the space between identity and belonging, the immigrant experience of both loss and gain, and the weight of memory and nostalgia, guilt and hope felt by so many of those who leave their homes in search of new ones.Regional Equity (Community Development – Current Issues Series)
By Victor Rubin. 2016
Regional equity as a field of scholarship, as an arena of policy change, and as a social movement has grown,…
diversified, and matured in important ways over the past decade. The fruits of that growth and development can be seen in recent federal and state policies, in the practices of many regional planning organizations, and in the agendas and approaches of countless community-based organizations and issue advocacy groups.As the field has expanded, a growing number of researchers have been tracking these phenomena: explaining how and why concepts of metropolitan development are being reframed; documenting the efforts to shape policies and diversify leadership; assessing where and how equity and social justice concerns have been brought into regional planning for transportation, land use, housing, public finances, environmental quality, smart growth, sustainable development, public health and other issue areas. This volume brings together analyses and commentary by some of the leading scholarly observers these timely developments.This book was published as a special issue of Community Development.Narcos Over the Border: Gangs, Cartels and Mercenaries
By Robert J. Bunker. 2011
The book takes a hard hitting look at the drug wars taking place in Mexico between competing gangs, cartels, and…
mercenary factions; their insurgency against the Mexican state; the narco-violence and terrorism that is increasingly coming over the border into the United States, and its interrelationship with domestic prison and street gangs. Analysis and response strategies are provided by leading writers on 3GEN gang theory, counterterrorism, transnational organized crime, and homeland security.Narcos Over the Border is divided into three sections: narco-opposing force (NARCO OPFOR) organization and technology use; patterns of violence and corruption and the illicit economy; and United States response strategies. The work also includes short introductory essays, a strategic threat overview, an afterword and selected references. Specific topics covered include: advanced weaponry, internet use, kidnappings and assassinations, torture, beheadings, and occultism, cartel and gang evolutionary patterns, drug trafficking, street taxation, corruption, and border firefights. This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.The Disability Experience: Working Toward Belonging (Orca Issues #5)
By Hannalora Leavitt. 2021
People with disabilities (PWDs) have the same aspirations for their lives as you do for yours. The difference is that…
PWDs don’t have the same access to education, employment, housing, transportation and healthcare in order to achieve their goals. In The Disability Experience you’ll meet people with different kinds of disabilities, and you'll begin to understand the ways PWDs have been ignored, reviled and marginalized throughout history. The book also celebrates the triumphs and achievements of PWDs and shares the powerful stories of those who have fought for change.