Troubling Vision


Book Description

Nicole R. Fleetwood explores how blackness is seen as a troubling presence in the field of vision and the black body is persistently seen as a problem. She examines a wide range of materials from visual and media art, documentary photography theatre, performance and more.




Troubled Vision


Book Description

Troubled Vision is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the interface between gender, sexuality and vision in medieval culture. The volume represents an exciting array of scholarship dealing with visual and textual cultures from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth centuries. Bringing together a range of theoretical approaches that address the troubling effects of vision on medieval texts and images, the book mediates between medieval and modern constructions of gender and sexuality. Troubled Vision focuses thematically on four central themes: Desire, looking, representation and reading. Topics include the gender of the gaze, the visibility of queer desires, troubled representations of gender and sexuality, spectacle and reader response, and the visual troubling of modern critical categories.




Troubling Transparency


Book Description

Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.




Mediated Misogynoir


Book Description

To be considered innocent is to be viewed as vulnerable to harm and worthy of protection from harm. An innocent person’s pain is recognized, acknowledged, and addressed. Mediated Misogynoir: Erasing Black Women’s and Girls’ Innocence in the Public Imagination interrogates contemporary media culture to illuminate the ways the intersections of anti-blackness and misogyny, i.e., misogynoir, converge to obscure public perceptions of Black women and girls as people with any claim to innocence. When pained images of Black female bodies appear on media devices, the socio-political responses are telling, not only in their lack of urgency, but also in their inability to be read empathetically. By examining viral videos, memes, and recent film and television, Kalima Young makes a striking case for the need to create a new Black feminist media studies framework broad enough to hold the complexity and agency of Black women and girls in a digital age invested in framing them as inherently adulterated and impure.







Troubling a Star


Book Description

In book five of the award-winning Austin Family Chronicles young adult series from Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, Vicky Austin experiences the difficulties and joys of growing up. After a year in New York City and a summer with her grandfather, Vicky Austin returns to the rural connecticut village she grew up in-- and feels totally out of place. Then she meets Adam Eddington's Great Aunt Serena, who reminds her of her beloved grandfather, and she begins to find a comfortable, if not exciting, routine to her days. At Christmas, Serena gives Vicky a trip to Antarctica, to visit Adam. Vicky can't believe her luck. But the trip is not what Vicky imagined it would be. First of all, she doesnt know where she stands with Adam. He's pulled back, saying they are just friends. But weren't they more than that, Vicky thinks. And Vicky's fellow passengers are not what they seem or they are more than she knows. Finally, even Aunt Serena's motives are suspect, as Vicky discovers a journal that belonged to Adam's famous uncle who disappeared many years earlier. As Vicky becomes more and more caught up in a mystery involving drugs, nuclear waste, and international espionage, she discovers that her assumptions about the world are hopelessly naive and that life, hers included, is as fragile as the ecosystem of Antarctica, the world's most remote continent. Books by Madeleine L'Engle A Wrinkle in Time Quintet A Wrinkle in Time A Wind in the Door A Swiftly Tilting Planet Many Waters An Acceptable Time A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel by Madeleine L'Engle; adapted & illustrated by Hope Larson Intergalactic P.S. 3 by Madeleine L'Engle; illustrated by Hope Larson: A standalone story set in the world of A Wrinkle in Time. The Austin Family Chronicles Meet the Austins (Volume 1) The Moon by Night (Volume 2) The Young Unicorns (Volume 3) A Ring of Endless Light (Volume 4) A Newbery Honor book! Troubling a Star (Volume 5) The Polly O'Keefe books The Arm of the Starfish Dragons in the Waters A House Like a Lotus And Both Were Young Camilla The Joys of Love




Black Lives and Spatial Matters


Book Description

Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. Jodi Rios argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. She also considers how an ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, Black Lives and Spatial Matters studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and to global histories of race and race-making. As such, the book adds important insight into the racialization of metropolitan space and people in the United States. The arguments presented in this book draw from fifteen years of engaged research in North St. Louis County and rely on multiple disciplinary perspectives and local knowledge in order to study relationships between interconnected practices and phenomena.







Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects


Book Description

The decades following the civil rights and decolonization movements of the sixties and seventies—termed the post-soul era—created new ways to understand the aesthetics of global racial representation. Daphne Lamothe shows that beginning around 1980 and continuing to the present day, Black literature, art, and music resisted the pull of singular and universal notions of racial identity. Developing the idea of "Black aesthetic time"—a multipronged theoretical concept that analyzes the ways race and time collide in the process of cultural production—she assesses Black fiction, poetry, and visual and musical texts by Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Dionne Brand, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Stromae, among others. Lamothe asks how our understanding of Blackness might expand upon viewing racial representation without borders—or, to use her concept, from the permeable, supple place of Black aesthetic time. Lamothe purposefully focuses on texts told from the vantage point of immigrants, migrants, and city dwellers to conceptualize Blackness as a global phenomenon without assuming the universality or homogeneity of racialized experience. In this new way to analyze Black global art, Lamothe foregrounds migratory subjects poised on thresholds between not only old and new worlds, but old and new selves.




She Is Weeping


Book Description

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history, scientific theories have played a vital role in the accumulation of power over colonized and racialized people. Scientific intellectual discourses on race, gender, and sexuality characterized Blackness as emotionally distinct in both deficiency and excess, a contrast with the emotional benevolence accorded to Whiteness. Ideas on racialized emotions have simultaneously driven the development of devastating body politics by enslaving structures of power. Bold and thought provoking, She Is Weeping provides a new understanding of racialized emotions in the Atlantic World, and how these discourses proved instrumental to the rise of slavery and racial capitalism, racialized sexual violence, and the expansion of the carceral state.