Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction


Book Description

Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction focuses on the resurgence of biological racism in 21st-century public discourse, the ontological and material turns in the academy that have occurred over the same time period, and how Afro-diasporic fiction has responded to both with alternative visions of bloodlines, kinship, and community. In thinking through conceptions of race, ethnicity, and materiality at work within both humanities research and popular culture, Nicole Simek asks how the figure of alchemy – that semi-scientific, semi-mystical search for gold and the elixir of long life – can help scholars address the epistemological and affective investments in blood, bloodlines, and genetics marking both academic and mainstream discourses. To answer this question, Simek examines neo-plantation and Afrofuturist narratives, Afropessimist interventions, museums and public memory projects, and direct-to-consumer genetic testing services in the French Caribbean and the United States. This comparative approach to cultural production helps pinpoint and better understand the intersections and divergences between scholarship trends and troubling features of a broader Zeitgeist.




Alchemy of Desire, Revolt & Violence


Book Description

It is essential to set a balanced context for literary analysis amidst international, national and regional conditions. In terms of Indian perspectives, it travels deep down to religion, caste and cultural levels. To understand any Indian phenomenon, one needs to understand the diversity and its historical implications. Mahesh Elkunchwar as a notable Indian dramatist, holds a key position in Indian literature due to his excellent presentation of Indian consciousness on stage. Desire, revolt and violence are perhaps few of the most important issues in human relationships. The performance of the emotions on the stage receives special significance. The poststructuralist perspectives on Elkunchwar's plays by Vishnu Patil, present a fresh insight into the study of Indian drama in particular and critical thinking about desire and violence in general. It becomes a fine interweaving of eastern and western thinking about sexuality and violence. He investigates and offers deconstructive analysis on incest relationships, extramarital affairs, rape, prostitution, homosexuality, love relationships as depicted in the plays like Desire in the Rocks, Garbo, etc. He examines acts of violence and revolt in a post structuralist way especially in the light of ideas of post Lacanian critic Slovej Zizek. Revolt however is treated on both the levels i.e. feminist and general level. The book continuously attempts to unveil the ideological forces functional under many regular social practices especially in the form of patriarchy, religion and so on. It succeeds in doing so by combining views on the issues desire and violence from ancient Indian contexts and its evolution through time. The textual references serve the purpose of setting a balanced review and investigation of relevance of certain ideas and sexual politics and it also helps to understand reasons and culminations of violent responses and politics responsible for its origin.




Nomadic Narratives


Book Description

The Thar Desert, which is today divided by an international boundary, has historically been a frontier region connecting Punjab, Multan, Sindh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. This book looks at the Desert as an historical region shaped through the mobility of its inhabitants - warriors, pastoralists, traders, ascetics and bards, often in overlapping capacities. It challenges the frames of Mughal-Rajput relationships generally employed to explore the histories of the Thar, arguing that Rajputana remains an inadequate category to explore polities located in this frontier region, where along with Rajputs, a range of groups, such as Charans, Bhils, Meenas, Soomras and Pathans controlled circulation, and with whom the Rajput states had to constantly negotiate. Sifting through a wide range of Rajasthani written and oral narratives, travelogues of British administrators, and vernacular as well as English records, the book explores long-term relationships between mobility, martiality, memory and identity in the desert expanses of the Thar.




Violence Workers


Book Description

Of the twenty-three Brazilian policemen interviewed in depth for this landmark study, fourteen were direct perpetrators of torture and murder during the three decades that included the 1964-1985 military regime. These "violence workers" and the other group of "atrocity facilitators" who had not, or claimed they had not, participated directly in the violence, help answer questions that haunt today's world: Why and how are ordinary men transformed into state torturers and murderers? How do atrocity perpetrators explain and justify their violence? What is the impact of their murderous deeds—on them, on their victims, and on society? What memories of their atrocities do they admit and which become public history?




Legal Alchemy


Book Description

Is scientific information misused by this country’s court system and lawmakers? Today more than ever before, lawyers, politicians, and government administrators are forced to wrestle with scientific research and to employ scientific thinking. The results are often less than enlightened. In Legal Alchemy, David Faigman explores the ways the American legal system incorporates scientific knowledge into its decision making. Praised by both legal and scientific communities when it first appeared in hardcover, Legal Alchemy shows how science has been used and misused in a variety of settings, including • The Courtroom—from the O. J. Simpson trial to the Dow Corning silicone breast implant lawsuit to landmark cases such as Roe v. Wade. • The Legislature—where Congress uses scientific information to help enact legislation about clean air, cloning, and government science projects like the space station and the superconducting super collider. • Government Agencies—who use science to determine policy on a variety of topics, from regulating sport utility vehicles to reintroducing gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park. As Faigman describes these and other important cases, he provides disturbing evidence that many judges, juries, and members of Congress simply don’t understand the science behind their decisions. Finally, he offers suggestions on how the science and legal professions can overcome their miscommunication and work together more effectively.




The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep: A Relational Approach to Internalized Perpetration in Complex Trauma Survivors


Book Description

The literature on psychological trauma and traumatic attachment has progressed over the past few decades, however issues of coerced and internalized perpetration have not been fully explored and deconstructed. This book presents a synthesis of relational and archetypal psychology, trauma and dissociation theory, and highly relevant child soldier literature, to offer new clinical perspectives to assist psychotherapists and trauma patients to achieve more successful therapy outcomes. The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep offers instructive, cautionary and innovative therapeutic approaches to help transform the lives of survivors of complex trauma. Providing an explanation of how the effects of coerced perpetration trauma are built, and the damage done to the psyches and lives of most trauma victims, the book extends our knowledge base in a thorough deconstruction of the nature of perpetration and its effects on the psyche. Chapters include: - trauma, dissociation, and coerced perpetration - the child soldier as a model of internalized perpetration - relational concepts in the treatment of trauma and dissociative disorders - treatment trajectory - archetypal constructs as a vehicle for integration. This book provides valuable new perspectives on the psychodynamic challenges and opportunities for mental health professionals treating internalized perpetration in survivors of complex trauma, and will prove essential reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and post-graduate students as well as researchers, legal scholars and policy makers.




American Alchemy


Book Description

California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture. In American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption. Roberts points to a long-neglected truth of the gold rush: many of the northeastern forty-niners who ventured westward were in fact middle-class in origin, status, and values. Tracing the experiences and adventures both of these men and of the "unseen" forty-niners--women who stayed back East while their husbands went out West--he shows that, whatever else the gold seekers abandoned on the road to California, they did not simply turn their backs on middle-class culture. Ultimately, Roberts argues, the story told here reveals an overlooked chapter in the history of the formation of the middle class. While the acquisition of respectability reflects one stage in this history, he says, the gold rush constitutes a second stage--a rebellion against standards of respectability.




Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers


Book Description

Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year This “witty, engaging analysis” of female monsters in pop culture offers “provocative and incisive” commentary on society’s fear of female rage and power (Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her) Women have always been seen as monsters. Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction. Maybe they are. And maybe that’s a good thing. Sady Doyle, hailed as “smart, funny and fearless” by the Boston Globe, takes readers on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula’s Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft. She illuminates the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein’s “domineering” mother Augusta; exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, who starved herself to death to quell her demons; author Mary Shelley, who dreamed her dead child back to life. These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive. “Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture; Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete.” —Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once




Authorship as Alchemy


Book Description

This book is an attempt to answer Michel Foucault's question, 'What is an author?' It examines the relationship between personal identity, the physical person of the writer, and the 'author' projected as a matter of public perception via the reception of written texts. It approaches this problem by analyzing the way Romantic writers play upon and subvert the 'author' position projected upon them in the public reception of their texts, and it sheds light on the use of anonyms and pseudonyms as strategies that subvert the emerging institution of authorship.




Tarot Alchemy


Book Description

Employing a practical, mathematical approach, author Kenneth Coombs presents a scientific and comprehensive analysis of the twenty-two Tarot cards in the Major Arcana. This detailed examination deciphers the reactions and interactions of the Tarot cards with each other, rather than simply the individual meanings of each card. He shares the results of the 231 possible combinations. In Tarot Alchemy, Coombs, a chemist with more than thirty years of Tarot card reading experience, discusses a novel approach to understanding Tarot. He details the process of alchemy, which involves looking at each Tarot card as an element. The interactions of the Tarot cards are like reactions that create molecules, and it is the interactions of the Tarot cards with each other that give depth and enlightenment in a Tarot reading. This process has given him the ability to determine specific timeframes and even names of people and places using the cards. His approach of deciphering the interactions in a scientific way leads to new insights about the meanings of the Tarot cards in a reading. Tarot Alchemy shows how learning to find patterns in the cards strengthens intuitive abilities and unlocks the doors to understanding the Tarot cards.