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In the early years of the twenty-first century, a number of Muslim women have achieved positions of influence. Women who care about the society in which they live and bring up their children are increasingly finding a voice and working together to make things happen. There is some way to go in harnessing the potential that lies at the heart of this change, but there is plenty of evidence that Muslim women are paving the way forward in new dynamic, challenging, and creative ways. This book is all about women who have shown courage, dignity, and strength; pioneers who have recognized their potential in the public and private realms of society, who have struggled, made sacrifices, taken pride in their multiple identities, and who are committed to positive and peaceful change in the UK. It presents the stories of twenty women from Bradford between the ages of fourteen and eighty, from their own perspectives. Based on a broader project called Our Lives, which was designed to explore the insights and experiences of over one hundred women in Bradford, it belongs to a long tradition of oral history, whereby practical knowledge is passed from generation to generation. The book offers an intricate mosaic of the experiences, views, and hopes of these women and in so doing, emphasises the power of people's lives to aid deeper debate and understanding and gives voice to an important and often marginalized group.

One of science fiction's undisputed grandmasters, Frederik Pohl built an astonishing career that spanned more than seven decades. In publishing novels, short stories, and essays, Pohl won millions of readers and seemingly as many awards while leaving a lasting mark on the genre. This book traces Pohl's extraordinary journey from discovering books as a boy at the Brooklyn Public Library to publishing the novel All the Lives He Led at age 91. A first-of-its-kind study, the book delves into the iconic works of fiction like The Space Merchants, Jem, and the tales of the Gateway universe, as well as Pohl's creative alliances with the likes of C. M. Kornbluth, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. But the book also examines Pohl's as-essential contributions in other areas. He represented many of the major science fiction writers as a literary agent in the 1940s and 1950s. He helped professionalize the field by midwifing science fiction publishing at Ballantine and Ace Books. Finally, while working at Galaxy and If, he aided countless careers as, in Gardner Dozois' words, “quite probably the best SF magazine editor who ever lived.”

This book argues that Walton's practice, in his Lives, was crucial in shaping modern expectations of biography: how it should be organised, how it should treat evidence, how seriously it should regard narrative coherence, and most particularly in the modern expectation of an intimate relationship between author, reader, and subject. This book considers Walton's biographical ethics in relation to the tributary genres influencing him as they emerged from post-Reformation commendatory practice after 1546, most particularly classical funeral oratory and the emergent Protestant funeral sermon, the Plutarchan parallel, the didactic Character, martyrological narrative, and finally Walton's direct model, the exemplary biographical commemoration of the conformist minister. The book considers how Walton develops his literary inheritance, arguing that his lay status required him to initiate a different kind of mediation between reader and subject from the straightforwardly imitative. Walton presents himself as a channel for the words and acts of an authoritative subject, a preference implicitly followed both in his stress on personal connections with his subjects (which spectacularly particularizes his portraits) and in his very extensive use of their own writings. His Lives attempt posthumous autobiography. They are also considered as prominent and accomplished examples of the many politically intended narratives which exploit a consensual interpretation of private virtue to support, without having to argue for, a sectarian interpretation of public rectitude.

In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.

Recent years have brought public mourning to the heart of American politics, as exemplified by the spread and power of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has gained force through its identification of pervasive social injustices with individual losses. The deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and so many others have brought private grief into the public sphere. The rhetoric and iconography of mourning has been noteworthy in Black Lives Matter protests, but this text argues that we have paid too little attention to the nature of social mourning—its relationship to private grief, its practices, and its pathologies and democratic possibilities. The book addresses significant and urgent questions about how citizens can mourn traumatic events and enduring injustices in their communities. The book offers a framework for analyzing the politics of mourning, drawing from psychoanalysis, Greek tragedy, and scholarly discourses on truth and reconciliation. This book connects these literatures to ongoing activism surrounding racial injustice, and it contextualizes Black Lives Matter in the broader politics of grief and recognition. The text also examines recent, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes such as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2004–006), which provided a public examination of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979—a deadly incident involving local members of the Communist Workers Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

Few literary figures are as commonly referenced in contemporary culture as James Baldwin. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the election of Donald Trump, and daily debates about walls, borders, and bans, Baldwin’s righteous indignation and prophetic warnings speak to the urgent mood of the present. His words appear on signs at rallies, in speeches, and on social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook; he has been the subject of countless features in major magazines, as well as the inspiration for a new academic journal (the James Baldwin Review) and an Oscar-nominated documentary (I Am Not Your Negro). This Baldwin renaissance, however, follows decades of dismissals and neglect, particularly of his late career. James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era zeroes in on his final decade, revealing a still-razor-sharp, provocative writer who, with the benefit of hindsight, holds up as one of the most prescient observers of the post-civil rights landscape. Indeed, contrary to the conventional narrative of his decline, Baldwin’s work in the 1980s proves remarkably engaged with the cultural milieu of a new generation, commenting on everything from the culture wars to the deterioration of inner cities, from the Reagan Revolution to the religious Right, from gender-bending in pop culture to the AIDS crisis. A groundbreaking new assessment of Baldwin in the context of the media-saturated Reagan era, James Baldwin and the 1980s offers the first in-depth study of the author’s final decade -- and shows why his work from this period is so relevant to the world we live in today.