Search Results

This chapter looks at the increasingly public divisions between the clergy and the laity, conservatives and reformers in the early years of the English Reformation. It charts the role of literary production in both fuelling the hostilities through polemical publications and in attempting to resolve them through a growing literature advocating moderation and tolerance in many aspects of public life. The drama and lyrics of John Heywood are examined as a key example of the latter.

During Pratt’s imprisonment, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles prepared to launch a joint British mission. Days after arriving in Illinois, Pratt participated in the mass healing occasion known as the “Day of God’s Power.” Weeks later, he departed with his family for New York, port of departure. In the city, he revised several of his works and published his theologically groundbreaking Treatise on Regeneration and Eternal Duration of Matter. After preaching with Joseph Smith in Philadelphia, he sailed to England, where he wrote many pamphlets, dozens of hymns, and edited the church’s periodical Millennial Star. He retrieved his family from the U.S. and labored in the midst of financial hardship. After departure of other apostles, he administered the British mission until he sailed for the “United States in fall 1842.

The final chapter briefly touches on Richardson’s second divorce but focuses on her difficulties finding and keeping employment. After holding a series of jobs in various corporate and not-for-profit agencies, Richardson eventually earned a permanent civil service position with the City of New York, where she worked until the twenty-first century. In one way or another, all her jobs involved some kind of social justice. Over the last five decades, Richardson has paid close attention to social change movements, including Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, and this chapter discusses her thoughts about them, particularly her view that young people have the capability and vision to lead the nation to greater freedom, just as young people did in the 1960s. She advises them to replicate the group-centered and member-driven model student activists employed in the early 1960s and to avoid becoming ideological.

This coda briefly addresses the election of Donald Trump and the implications of an increasingly visible white nationalist movement on the arguments of the book. The coda also analyzes elements of the Black Lives Matter movement to argue that while much of the optimism of the post era has been mitigated, several of its major theoretical strains—the emphasis on individual agency over racial identity, the turn towards racial identity as performance—remain critical to understanding current activism. It also explains the influence of theoretical frameworks such as intersectionality and Afropessimism on current movements. The coda also looks briefly towards growing and ongoing trends in African American literature, like Afrofuturism.

Ed Whitley’s chapter describes a project in which students study the curatorial work of Harriet Beecher Stowe in The Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” alongside current examples of digital activism to understand how groups mobilize and share information to effect change. Students “reverse engineer” the composition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by searching through digital archives of abolitionist texts and images to discover how Stowe’s inclusion of some materials and exclusion of others shaped her novel. Students then consider how social activists similarly sort, organize, select, and reject the documentary record of social injustice appearing online in real-time. As students compare historical periods and media forms, they reflect on the processes through which texts are created, disseminated, structured, stored, and used to change the world.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Legman completed and published two volumes of his studies of sexual humor, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke and No Laughing Matter. In these books he presented thousands of jokes on sexual and bodily topics, framed by his own version of a Freudian approach to humor. This chapter lays out Legman’s organization of the materials dredged up in his decades of joke collecting, outlines his theories of humor, and places his books in the expansion of scholarly interest in humor in the 1960s and 1970s. Legman was almost alone in emphasizing aggression as a largely unconscious motive in joke telling and in emphasizing that jokes expressed unresolved psychic conflicts. The Rationale of the Dirty Joke was more warmly received than Legman’s second volume of jokes, in large part because No Laughing Matter dealt with the nastiest jokes in Legman’s collection. The chapter also examines the academic and popular reactions to both books and details Legman’s difficulties with publishers, especially around the issue of royalties for his work.

In this chapter, P. J. Blount and David Molina trace NASA’s attempted counternarrative of social value and a policy of liberal equality rooted in the concept of “all mankind.” They consider whether this argument for NASA’s value remains a salient one at present as the continued inequalities in American life are increasingly highlighted in the media, and as we face a historical moment in which activists and astronauts alike will be challenged to bridge the distance between Black Lives Matter and Mars.

Chapter Four explores the competing demands made upon young Nigerian civil servants in the colonial administration, through an examination of Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease. The chapter contextualizes the social and sexual pressures under which the novel’s protagonist, Obi, buckles through discussion of contemporary popular culture and the experiences of real-life Nigerian colonial administrators. The novel is also discussed in relation to the British colonial texts to which it responds, notably Joyce Cary’s Mr Johnson and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. Achebe’s own reflections on the social uses of fiction are also considered. The chapter argues that as readers we are invited by Achebe into judgement of Obi, and in doing so we are brought into larger debates about the nation state and the law.

In this chapter Pia Ednie Brown takes a vitally materialist approach to discussing the nonhuman creativity that comes from the house which, like any creative project, is like a living creature whose personality changes in time and whose vitality of matter is wild. Architecture as assemblages of forces, humans as a force that becomes part of a tangled ecology and the house, acting like any personality, perpetually evolving and being discovered, while in relation to us humans, it is yet another responsibility for which we are never utterly in control of. The chapter attempts to approach anthropomorphising without falling into its indisputable dangers. As the author suggests, new forms of value can be generated if things can be thought of as persons. That way we may manage to usher their activity to attention.

Vera Bühlmann in this chapter inhabits Serres’s position on philosophy for architecture, suggesting that chance and necessity are not in conflict as necessity originates in chance and chance comprehends necessity. Matter in its quantum physical character is controlled by computational and chance bound calculation, but how can knowledge be new if it is rule-based. Serres’s exodic knowledge is capitalised in the case of this chapter as a way of looking at elements as coded, discretised and distributed while unaccountable and inaccessible, allowing building as an autonomous entity to be a function of rarity that is compatibility with the totality of economic and political power without dominating or being harnessed by them. Paris Hermitage project by Pa.La.Ce studio is the vehicle to discuss materiality, as this is initiated in the field of recent architectural theory, that incorporates code and a formality that is computational.

The epilogue considers the enduring challenges in public education and racial politics and the dynamic new cohort of organizers proposing alternative visions of educational, economic, and racial equity and justice. Both contemporary proponents and opponents of “school choice” policies have used language and practices that echo Black education reformers of the past to frame their arguments. Social justice-oriented ideas of self-determination and localism generated within a different political context have been repurposed in service of the corporate reorganization of the public sphere. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, followed in the 2010s by mayor Rahm Emanuel, ushered in corporate education reforms and “school choice” plans that expanded charter schools and “turned around” or closed more than 150 public schools. The embrace of neoliberal education reform policies locally and nationally has been a bipartisan affair, with Democratic administrations, including the Obama administration, also proposing policies based on market principles. These policies have disproportionately impacted Black, students, teachers, and communities. While Chicago has produced many of these policies, the city also produced strident resistance movements against austerity policies, led by Karen Lewis and the Chicago Teachers Union, young organizers, the Black Lives Matter movement, and older community organizations.

The book concludes with a discussion of the importance of broad-based coalitional organizing that moves beyond over-simplified identity politics. As society evolves away from binary understandings of sexuality and gender, identities that essentialize those binaries will become less and less useful. Further, by acknowledging that as LGBTQ becomes more normal the boundaries between normal and queer get redrawn, adults who are concerned about the well-being of young people would be wise to pay close attention to how bodies are queered beyond simply sexuality and gender. The conclusion points to the Black Lives Matter and transgender movements as examples of twenty-first-century social justice movements that are responding to the ways the identity-based movements of the late twentieth century often failed to protect their most marginalized members.

The introduction lays out the book’s key parameters. It offers a framework by which Black communities are shown to be simultaneously prone to being “overpoliced” (subject to undue surveillance, harassment, and violence from police) and “underprotected” (lacking the safety from personal and property crime that the police are nominally supposed to provide). It critically argues that studies that date America’s policing crisis to the War on Crime or War on Drugs are insufficient and that better attention must be paid to local histories of policing. In so doing, it also argues that if scholars and citizens are to understand why mass incarceration has been such a deeply racialized project from its inception, they must better understand how police departments themselves constructed regimes that punished blackness over the course of the twentieth century.

The book’s epilogue discusses how the history told in the book’s core chapters can inform our understanding of the present. It explains how the modern, massive racial disparities evident in the system of mass incarceration and the systems of policing that drive it built directly from those disparities and systems that local police department’s like Chicago’s implemented decades and generations ago. It explains how exploding police budgets like Chicago’s do and have done little to keep people safe and have, indeed, done significant harm to certain communities. And it shows how modern movements to demand reparations for police torture, to challenge police surveillance, harassment, violence, and racism, and make, as the demand goes, Black Lives Matter, are part of a long tradition of Black resistance to abusive and anti-Black police power.

This section contains chapters written in the early twenty-first century. In one chapter Willis confronts the “mantra” that desiring peace is an amulet against a predatory world—a powerful rejection of the post-9/11 fetish for first principles; another provokes the left to examine its rage at Israel. In the wake of 9/11, the text observes that psychopathology drives Islamic fundamentalism, and that anyone motivated to kill for a promise of penetrating virgins in heaven has taken sexual repression to its logical conclusion. In addition, the text embraces the “political stand” that critic Susan Sontag demanded from intellectuals while remaining cognizant of its limits; offers a reading of Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas?; considers the utopian dimension of politics and Russell Jacoby’s views on utopianism; and criticizes the cosmopolitan writers who hoped something beneficial might come out of 9/11.