Block Reference
(2017)
Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life

Christopher Freeburg’s  Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life offers a crucial new reading of a neglected aspect of African American literature and art across the long twentieth century. Rejecting the idea that the most dehumanizing of black experiences, such as lynching or other racial violence, have completely robbed victims of their personhood, Freeburg rethinks what it means to be a person in the works of black artists. This book advances the idea that individual persons always retain the ability to withhold, express, or change their ideas, and this concept has profound implications for long-held assumptions about the relationship between black interior life and black collective political interests.

Examining an array of seminal black texts—from Ida B. Wells’s antilynching pamphlets to works by Richard Wright, Nina Simone, and Toni Morrison—Freeburg demonstrates that the personhood represented by these writers unsettles rather than automatically strengthens black subjects’ relationships to political movements such as racial uplift, civil rights, and black nationalism. He shows how black artists illuminate the challenges of racial collectivity while stressing the vital stakes of individual personhood. In his challenge to current African Americanist criticism, Freeburg makes a striking contribution to our understanding of African American literature and culture.

 

(2017)
The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Waïl S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world.

The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.

 

(2017)
The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest and Counterculture

The Global 1960s presents compelling narratives from around the world in order to de-center the roles played by the United States and Europe in both scholarship on, and popular memories of, the sixties.Geographically and chronologically broad, this volume scrutinizes the concept of "the sixties" as defined in both Western and non-Western contexts. It provides scope for a set of analyses that together span the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Written by a diverse and international group of contributors, chapters address topics ranging from the socialist scramble for Africa, to the Naxalite movement in West Bengal, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, global media coverage of Israel, Cold War politics in Hong Kong cinema, sexual revolution in France, and cultural imperialism in Latin America.The Global 1960s explores the contest between convention and counter-culture that shaped this iconic decade, emphasizing that while the sixties are well-known for liberation, activism, and protest against the establishment, traditional hierarchies and social norms remained remarkably entrenched. Multi-faceted and transnational in approach, this book is valuable reading for all students and scholars of twentieth-century global history.

 

(2017)
The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy: After Kant, Volume I: The Interpretive Tradition

The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy: After Kant provides a comprehensive introduction to the predominantly European (“Continental”) interpretive tradition of philosophy after Kant in one volume, and to the now predominantly Anglo-American analytic tradition in the other. It features the extensive editorial apparatus for which Norton Anthologies have been known and trusted by professors and students alike for more than 50 years. Ideal for courses at all levels in the history of philosophy after Kant, these volumes belong on every philosopher’s (and philosophy student’s) bookshelf.

 

(2017)
The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921

The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 is a new history of Russia's revolutionary era as a story of experience-of people making sense of history as it unfolded in their own lives and as they took part in making history themselves. The major events, trends, and explanations, reaching from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to the final shots of the civil war in 1921, are viewed through the doubled perspective of the professional historian looking backward and the contemporary journalist reporting and interpreting history as it happened. The volume then turns toward particular places and people: city streets, peasant villages, the margins of empire (Central Asia, Ukraine, the Jewish Pale), women and men, workers and intellectuals, artists and activists, utopian visionaries, and discontents of all kinds. We spend time with the famous (Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel) and with those whose names we don't even know. Key themes include difference and inequality (social, economic, gendered, ethnic), power and resistance, violence, and ideas about justice and freedom. Written especially for students and general readers, this history relies extensively on contemporary texts and voices in order to bring the past and its meanings to life. This is a history about dramatic and uncertain times and especially about the interpretations, values, emotions, desires, and disappointments that made history matter to those who lived it

 

(2017)
Poems Against the Empire

Poetry stands against any empire! The pen is always mightier than the sword! The author has spent the past five decades learning, lecturing, writing, and lawyering against the American Empire as well as against foreign empires. Set forth in this book are his poetic reflections on these experiences fighting for peace, justice, human rights and international law. The author’s hope is that these poems might inspire the reader to do the same. You can do it too!