Keeping It Real


Book Description

The Quantum Bomb of 2015 changed everything. The fabric that kept the universe's different dimensions apart was torn and now, six years later, the people of earth exist in uneasy company with the inhabitants of, amongst others, the elven, elemental and demonic realms. Magic is real and can be even more dangerous than technology. Elves are exotic, erotic, dangerous and really bored with the constant Lord of the Rings references. Elementals are a law unto themselves and demons are best left well to themselves. Special agent Lila Black used to be pretty but now she's not so sure. Her body is now more than half restless carbon and metal alloy machinery. A machine she's barely in control of. It goes into combat mode, enough weapons for a small army springing from within itself, at the merest provocation. As for her heart . . . well ever since being drawn into a Game by the elven rockstar she's been assigned to protect, she's not even sure she can trust that anymore either.




Keeping It Real


Book Description

“Fun and juicy.”—New York Times “A solid story of summer growth and exploration.”—Kirkus Reviews Marigold Johnson is looking forward to a future full of family, friends, and fashion—but what will she do when it all explodes in her face? When she discovers that her entire life is a lie? Paula Chase, the author of So Done, Dough Boys, and Turning Point, explores betrayal, conformity, and forgiveness—and what it means to be family—in this stand-alone novel perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds, Rebecca Stead, and Renée Watson. Marigold Johnson can’t wait to attend a special program at her family’s business, Flexx Unlimited, for teens who love fashion. But Mari quickly realizes that she’s out of place compared to the three other trainees—and one girl, Kara, seems to hate her on sight. As tension builds and the stakes at the program get higher, Mari uncovers exactly why Kara’s been so spiteful. She also discovers some hard truths about herself and her family. Paula Chase explores complex themes centering on friendships, family, and what it means to conform to fit in. Keeping It Real is also a powerful exploration of what happens when parents pick and choose what they shield their children from. Timely and memorable, Paula Chase’s character-driven story touches on creativity, art, fashion, and music. A great choice for the upper middle grade audience.




Under a Bad Sign


Book Description

What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the overlooked history of art that has often seemed at odds with the politics of civil rights and racial advancement, Under a Bad Sign explores the rationale behind this tradition of criminal self-representation from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary gangsta culture. In this lively exploration, Jonathan Munby takes a uniquely broad view, laying bare the way the criminal appears within and moves among literary, musical, and visual arts. Munby traces the legacy of badness in Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes’s detective fiction and in Claude McKay, Julian Mayfield, and Donald Goines’s urban experience writing. Ranging from Peetie Wheatstraw’s gangster blues to gangsta rap, he also examines criminals in popular songs. Turning to the screen, the underworld films of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper, the 1970s blaxploitation cycle, and the 1990s hood movie come under his microscope as well. Ultimately, Munby concludes that this tradition has been a misunderstood aspect of African American civic life and that, rather than undermining black culture, it forms a rich and enduring response to being outcast in America.




In Case You Missed It


Book Description

Sometimes the only way to find yourself is to lose your privacy. Sammy Wallach has epic plans for the end of junior year over: Sneak out to the city to see her favorite band. Get crush-worthy Jamie Moss to ask her to prom. Rock all exams (APs and driver's).With a few white lies, some killer flirting, and tons of practice, Sammy's got things covered. That is, until the bank her dad works for is attacked by hacktivists who manage to steal everything in the Wallach family's private cloud, including Sammy's entire digital life. Literally the whole world has access to her emails, texts, photos, and, worst of all, journal.Life. Is. Over.Now Sammy's best friends are furious about things she wrote, Jamie thinks she's desperate, and she can barely show her face at school. Plus, her parents know all the rules she broke. But Sammy's not the only one with secrets -- her family has a few of its own that could change everything. And while the truth might set you free, no one said it was going to be painless. Or in Sammy's case, private.




Youth-Led Community Organizing


Book Description

Youth-led organizing is increasingly receiving attention from scholars, activists, and the media. Delgado and Staples have produced the first comprehensive study of this dynamic field. Their well-organized book takes an important step toward bridging the gap between academic knowledge and community practice in this growing area.




What Rough Beasts? Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium


Book Description

What Rough Beasts presents an innovative and diverse collection of new research papers which investigate key literary and historical issues in Irish and Scottish Studies, providing a view onto the range of current research interests both within and across the two disciplines. From a selection of papers presented at an AHRC-sponsored conference held at the University of Aberdeen, the volume showcases original material by both emergent and established scholars. Opening up illuminating conversations between often diverse areas of study, this book covers issues including: poetry and violence; film and drama; history and historiography; ethnography and literature; the politics of representation.




American Shame


Book Description

Essays examining the role of shame as an American cultural practice and how public shaming enforces conformity and group coherence. On any given day in America’s news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America’s discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors. “An eclectic anthology, it offers the readers more than one argument and perspective, which makes the volume itself lively and rich.” —Ron Scapp, coeditor of Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality




Street Players


Book Description

The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narratives featuring black protagonists in crime stories, conspiracy thrillers, prison novels, and Westerns. From Iceberg Slim’s Pimp to Donald Goines’s Never Die Alone, the thread that tied all of these books together—and made them distinct from the majority of American pulp—was an unfailing veneration of black masculinity. Zeroing in on Holloway House, Street Players explores how this world of black pulp fiction was produced, received, and recreated over time and across different communities of readers. Kinohi Nishikawa contends that black pulp fiction was built on white readers’ fears of the feminization of society—and the appeal of black masculinity as a way to counter it. In essence, it was the original form of blaxploitation: a strategy of mass-marketing race to suit the reactionary fantasies of a white audience. But while chauvinism and misogyny remained troubling yet constitutive aspects of this literature, from 1973 onward, Holloway House moved away from publishing sleaze for a white audience to publishing solely for black readers. The standard account of this literary phenomenon is based almost entirely on where this literature ended up: in the hands of black, male, working-class readers. When it closed, Holloway House was synonymous with genre fiction written by black authors for black readers—a field of cultural production that Nishikawa terms the black literary underground. But as Street Players demonstrates, this cultural authenticity had to be created, promoted, and in some cases made up, and there is a story of exploitation at the heart of black pulp fiction’s origins that cannot be ignored.




Surreal Meets Madam Fake


Book Description




Diasporic Ruptures


Book Description

Diasporic Ruptures: Globality, Migrancy, and Expressions of Identity lies at the intersections of various processes emerging from globalization: border-crossings, transnationalism, identity formations. Carefully selected and placed in two volumes, the essays here represent works of both well-seasoned scholars as well as emerging writers, academics and intellectuals. The volumes critically examine various manifestations of the trend now commonly known as globalization—manifestations that many diasporic communities, immigrants, and people from all walks of life experience. They also illuminate recent political, social, economic and technological developments that are taking place in a rapidly changing world. Volume One offers sophisticated insights into the nature of contemporary formations of diasporic life, internationalism, and hybrid identities. The volume asks bold questions around what it means to live in constantly shifting boundaries of nationality, identity, and citizenship. The type of methodological, discursive and experiential awareness promoted by this work helps us understand how millions of people face the challenge of living in a globalizing world; it also fosters a consciousness of how globalization itself functions differently in different environments. Volume Two (see Volume 7 in Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education) addresses additional and more nuanced questions around culture, race, sexuality, migration, displacement and resistance. It also explores certain epistemological and methodological fallacies regarding conventional articulations of nation-state, nationalism, and the local/global nexus. The volume seeks to answer questions such as: What are the meanings and connotations of ‘displacement’ in a rapidly globalizing world? What are some dilemmas and challenges around notions of cultural hybridity, linguistic diversity, and a sense of belonging? What is the meaning of home in diaspora and the meaning of diaspora at home? Together, the volumes raise many topics that will be of immense interest to scholars across disciplines and general readers. While celebrating the increasing acknowledgment of difference and diversity in recent times, this work reminds us of the ongoing ramifications of dominant structures of inequality, relations of power, and issues of inclusion and exclusion. This work offers different ways of thinking, writing and talking about globalization and the processes that emerge from it.