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The core of Larks is rural and mythic and true, existential and domestic, tender while full of sharp grief and documentation. Circling genealogies of silence and harm in a southern family, Larks centers on the relationship and memories of three sisters and Ovid's telling of Philomel. In a landscape inhabited as much by farm animals (cows, goats, chickens, and barn kittens) as by the family, the lyric poem parses and articulates the self's history—from the experience of a sister's home birth to the traumatic erasure (and recovery) of the speaker's memory. A work of poetic memoir, Larks asks if poetry can hold the heaviest truths we carry. The answer is a resounding yes.

In the years after independence, new art forms and practices flourished at the Casablanca École des beaux-arts, transforming the colonial relic into a wellspring of Moroccan modernism. Casablanca School artists, including Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi, defined the modernist movement in Morocco. Their visual arts activism was displayed at their iconic outdoor exhibition in the Djemaa al-Fna plaza in Marrakech, in their collaborations with the cultural and political journal Souffles, through their radical anticolonial pedagogy, and through their use of abstraction to expand the horizons of postcolonial national culture. In Moroccan Modernism, Holiday Powers argues that the pedagogy and transnational solidarities of this generation of artists were intrinsic to their broader artistic projects. She advances a novel reading of Moroccan modernism that is rooted in its cosmopolitan national context and in Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, the transnational anticolonial intellectual movements that defined the era.

A must for flower and art lovers, Born in the Spring is a unique collection of line drawings and magnificent watercolors of spring wildflowers with over 90 illustrations, 46 in full color. The text accompanying each plate enables the reader to easily locate the flower in its natural setting.

Shakespeare and baseball are monuments of high and popular culture: Shakespeare is the most widely read and staged playwright in the world, and baseball is America's game. Professor Samuel Crowl, a prize-winning teacher and international scholar of Shakespeare on film, explores his life as a champion of the Bard and a fan of the Detroit Tigers. He saw his first Tigers game in the summer of 1950 (Hal Newhouser beat the Chicago White Sox) and his first Shakespeare play in 1953 (Alec Guinness as Richard III at Ontario's Stratford Festival) and has spent almost seventy-five years enjoying and writing about the pleasures of play that each provides.Shakespeare and Baseball is an unusual hybrid combining Crowl's education as a Shakespeare and baseball fan, the resonances he perceives between the playwright and the game, the unexpected pleasures both forms of play have afforded his extended family of children and grandchildren, and a selection from the seventy letters he has written to them about Tigers games he has seen, from old Tiger Stadium, Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, and ballparks in Cleveland.Crowl finds unexpected connections between his twin subjects, including beer, which funded and fueled both the establishment of Major League baseball clubs, like the Yankees and Cardinals, and the creation of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, visited by Shakespeare enthusiasts from around the world. A deeper linkage is that Shakespeare's festive comedies kept the ideas, rituals, and customs of rural England alive in the dense urban world of Elizabethan London, just as baseball kept the image of the garden—the rural American past in which the game took shape­—alive in the twentieth-century American city. The book is written in a style that captures what one reader has called Crowl's “warm, rich midwestern voice” and will be of interest to fans of the game and of the Bard, from high schoolers on up.

The son of a coal miner from a small Illinois town, Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman lived the American dream until his untimely death at age twenty-nine. In his brief life, he reached the pinnacle of baseball success as the best shortstop in the American League. While many professional ballplayers struggled with meager salaries, the handsome Chapman had married heiress Kathleen Daly, one of Cleveland's wealthiest women. With a child on the way and an executive job in the offseason, Chapman was moving toward a privileged place in society until an errant fastball fractured his skull and ended his life the next day.Late in the 1920 pennant race, the Indians were in New York for a key series against the Yankees. New York pitcher Carl Mays threw a high hard one that Chapman could not evade. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where doctors tried in vain to save his life. The tragedy did not end there. His widow took her own life eight years later, and their daughter, Rae, subsequently died from meningitis. Today, people visit Chapman's impressive grave in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery, leaving baseballs and gloves in his memory. Though gone over a hundred years, he is well remembered as a Cleveland icon. This book goes far beyond the well-worn accounts of Chapman's untimely death to illustrate the fullness of his short life.

A little over two decades ago, Zimbabwe undertook its Fast Track Land Reform Programme. Critics saw it as nothing more than an assault on human and property rights for political expedience by a ruling elite that was fast losing its power. In contrast, those sympathetic to the land reform program saw it as fundamental to the righting of colonialism's historical wrongs. Yet, rural displacements at the hands of state actors, or of those closely connected to them, continue. As in the past, the continuing land conflicts are mostly understood as the result of the actions of an authoritarian state that exploits its control of land for the political and economic benefit of those who inhabit it. These explanations share one thing in common: each understands the country's perpetual land questions in terms of the actions or inactions of the colonial or the postcolonial state.This book refocuses attention on how regimes of power rooted in kinship, gender, generation, and status have, individually and in combination, informed access to land in precolonial northeastern Zimbabwe. It then examines how these regimes of power interacted with colonial policies to inform the African experience in colonial Zimbabwe. Further, the book places land and the ability to ensure its fecundity at the center of the making and moderation of precolonial political power and how this power was impacted by the imposition of colonial rule.Tracing the dynamics of land and power from precolonial times, together with their entanglement with colonial policies, is important, for this relationship is almost always neglected by both scholars and policymakers drawn to the high drama of colonial and postcolonial politics of land. This oversight has real consequences on our understandings of landed inequalities and how they are addressed. When Zimbabwe's postcolonial state focused on colonially induced racialized land inequalities, its land reform efforts left older forms of landed inequalities based on gender, generation, and ideas of belonging intact. The book, which details these inequalities, reminds Zimbabweans and others that if the quest for equity espoused in postcolonial land reforms is to be meaningful, it must be attentive to both colonially induced inequalities and those enduring disparities that predated, were deepened by, and outlived colonial rule. At the same time, Zimbabweans who now live with a postcolonial state that is increasingly centralizing power over land may well learn from past societies'creative efforts to limit the authority of their leaders.

The Morality of Revolution offers the first historical examination of urban cleanup campaigns and reeducation camps in socialist Mozambique. The book presents the camps as the template for independent Mozambique's punitive society under Frelimo. Individuals who transgressed the law and socialist normative codes of behavior were targeted by the revolutionary party, which obsessively pursued putative wrongdoers in an effort to build a new society from the ruins of Portuguese colonialism. Benedito Luís Machava argues that the socialist experiment, while ushering in an era of economic development and social progress, sought also to remake the moral fabric of Mozambican society. At play was the contradictory combination of high modernist, socialist aspirations and conservative anxieties rooted in a moralist reading of society.From its inception in 1974 to its demise in the late 1980s, the reeducation program was a do-it-yourself enterprise. The Frelimo government, unable to finance and support the carceral regime, expected its agents and the detainees to carry out the ambitious project on their own. Without material and human resources to run the program, state officials compelled detainees to build their own detention facilities; to grow their own food; to enforce their own political education; and in many ways, to oversee their own incarceration. The state's incapacity to translate the salvationist ideas of reeducation into planned action—a general feature of the socialist experiment in Mozambique—produced spaces of social neglect and castigation that negatively affected both the inmates and the personnel tasked with disciplining and reeducating them.

British literature of the Victorian period has always been celebrated for the quality, innovativeness, and sheer profusion of its love poetry. Every major Victorian poet produced notable poems about love. This includes not only canonical figures, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti, but also lesser-known poets whose works have only recently become widely recognized and studied, such as Augusta Webster and the many often anonymous working-class poets whose verses filled the pages of popular periodicals. Modern critics have claimed, convincingly, that love poetry is not just one strain of Victorian poetry among many; it is arguably its representative, even definitive, mode.This collection of essays reconsiders the Victorian poetry of love and, just as importantly, of intimacy—a more inclusive term that comprehends not only romance but love for family, for God, for animals, and for language itself. Together the essays seek to define a poetics of intimacy that arose during the Victorian period and that continues today, a set of poetic structures and strategies by which poets can represent and encode feelings of love.There exist many studies of intimate relations (especially marriage) in Victorian novels. But although poetry rivals the novel in the depth and diversity of its treatment of love, marriage, and intimacy, that aspect of Victorian verse has remained underexamined. Love among the Poets offers an expansive critical overview. With its slate of distinguished contributors, including scholars from the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia, the volume is a wide-ranging account of this vital era of poetry and of its importance for the way we continue to write, love, and live today.

Influenced by Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Rachel Zucker, and other poets of the New York school, the poems in Retribution Forthcoming blend a talky, quick, funny voice with candid examinations of gender norms, class pressures, and the existential. Their speaker explores her mortality anxiety through her experiences of gendered exploitation, reflecting on bodily autonomy and the nexus of violences that women face.Using oblique and direct strategies, these poems recount sexual coercion, the ways consumerist society reinforces and reifies gender conformity and performativity, and the psychological ramifications of these abuses of power. Retribution Forthcoming examines selfhood, consciousness, and mortality as they intertwine with our identities and the ways those identities are politicized. At its core, though, this book is an account of sexual assault and its aftermath, exploring how trauma interacts with belief and our ability to trust others and ourselves.

This case study of Botswana focuses on the state-building qualities of biodiversity conservation in southern Africa. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Annette A. LaRocco argues that discourses and practices related to biodiversity conservation are essential to state building in the postcolonial era. These discourses and practices invoke the ways the state exerts authority over people, places, and resources; enacts and remakes territorial control; crafts notions of ideal citizenship and identity; and structures economic relationships at the local, national, and global levels.The book's key innovation is its conceptualization of the “conservation estate,” a term most often used as an apolitical descriptor denoting land set aside for the purpose of conservation. LaRocco argues that this description is inadequate and proposes a novel and much-needed alternative definition that is tied to its political elements. The components of conservation—control over land, policing of human behavior, and structuring of the authority that allows or disallows certain subjectivities—render conservation a political phenomenon that can be analyzed separately from considerations of “nature” or “wildlife.” In doing so, it addresses a gap in the scholarship of rural African politics, which focuses overwhelmingly on productive agrarian dynamics and often fails to recognize that land nonuse can be as politically significant and wide reaching as land use.Botswana is an ideal empirical case study upon which to base these theoretical claims. With 39 percent of its land set aside for conservation, Botswana is home to large populations of wildlife, particularly charismatic megafauna, such as the largest herd of elephants on the continent. Utilizing more than two hundred interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this book examines a series of conservation policies and their reception by people living on the conservation estate. These phenomena include securitized antipoaching enforcement, a national hunting ban (2014–19), restrictions on using wildlife products, forced evictions from conservation areas, limitations on mobility and freedom of movement, the political economy of Botswana's wildlife tourism industry, and the conservation of globally important charismatic megafauna species.

Acholi Intellectuals draws on the writings of homespun historians, interviews with elderly men and women who remember the last days of colonial rule, and government and missionary archives to illuminate the intellectual and political history of the colonial transition in northern Uganda. The book focuses on Acholiland, a place that has been chronically understudied in comparison to Uganda's rich, fertile, and well-documented south. Southerners there—following the depictions of colonial officials and missionaries—have often regarded northerners as uncultured people lacking ideas. Acholi Intellectuals challenges this prejudice, bringing into view a whole category of men (and a few women) who mediated between indigenous and colonial knowledge systems and inaugurated a new kind of politics.Patrick William Otim studies a category of people—known as healers, messengers, war leaders, poet-musicians, and diplomats—who possessed prestige and power in an older Acholi political logic and who, in the dawning days of colonial government, came to occupy positions of power in the British administration. Otim argues that these Acholi intellectuals were not simply creatures of British colonial self-interest; neither was their power invented by the coercive logic of indirect rule. He asserts instead that people who held moral and social power in the older system were able to transform that strength, under colonial administration, into a new form of political legitimacy.

In the past few decades, Western studies of Afrofuturism have grown to encompass examples deriving from multiple sites across the diaspora, as well as from the African continent. However, an increasing number of Africans and Africanists have voiced their concerns about grouping African work under the larger umbrella of Afrofuturism without distinction and have emphasized the need to investigate the differences between African American and African production. This book offers an introduction to Africanfuturism—a body of African speculative works that is distinguishable from, albeit related to, US-based Afrofuturism.Kimberly Cleveland uses Africanfuturism as an intellectual lens to explore works that embody combinations of possibilities, challenges, and concerns related to what lies ahead for the continent and its peoples. This book highlights twenty-first-century film, video, painting, sculpture, photography, tapestry, novels, short stories, comic books, song lyrics, and architecture by African creatives of different nationalities, races, ethnicities, genders, and generations. Cleveland analyzes the ideas and opinions of African intellectuals and cultural producers, combining interviews with historical research. Each chapter features one of Africanfuturism's most common themes: space and time exploration, creation of worlds, technology and the digital divide, Sankofa and remix, and mythmaking.This investigation of Africanfuturism is geared toward students, academics, and Afrofuturism enthusiasts, and its included discussion questions facilitate classroom use. The book illuminates Africa's place in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy and how Africanfuturist work builds on the continent's own traditions of speculative expression. Because these creative works disrupt the history of Western domination in Africa, Cleveland also connects Africanfuturism with the process of decolonization and addresses specific ways in which African creatives (re)center indigenous beliefs, strategies, and approaches in their production. Africanfuturism encourages both imaginative possibilities and potential real-world outcomes, highlighting the rich contributions of Africans to the vision of future worlds.

A Gay man chronicles his relationship to his native Appalachian culture and society.Appalachians are known for their love of place, yet many LGBTQ+ people from the mountains flee to urban areas in search of community and broader acceptance. Jeff Mann tells his story as one who left and then returned, who insists on claiming and celebrating both regional and sexual identities.In memoir and poetry, Mann describes his life as an openly gay man who has remained true to his mountain roots. Mann recounts his upbringing in Hinton, a small town in southern West Virginia, as well as his realization of his homosexuality, his early encounters with homophobia, his coterie of supportive lesbian friends, and his initial attempts to escape his native region in hopes of finding a freer life in urban gay communities. Mann depicts his difficult search for a romantic relationship, the family members who have given him the strength to defy convention, his anger against religious intolerance and the violence of homophobia, and his love for the rich folk culture of the Highland South.His character and values shaped by the mountains, Mann has reconciled his sexuality with both traditional definitions of Appalachian manhood and his own attachment to home and kin. Loving Mountains, Loving Men is a compelling, universal story of making peace with oneself and the wider world.

A historiographical analysis of human geography and a social history of nationalist separatism and cultural identity in southern Senegal.This book is a spatial history of the conflict in Casamance, the portion of Senegal located south of The Gambia. Mark W. Deets traces the origins of the conflict back to the start of the colonial period in a select group of contested spaces and places where the seeds of nationalism and separatism took root. Each chapter examines the development of a different piece of the still unrealized Casamançais nation: river, rice field, forest, school, and stadium. Each of these locations forms a spatial discourse of grievance that transformed space into place, rendering a separatist nation from the pieces where a particular Casamançais identity emerged. However, not every Casamançais identified with these spaces and places in the same way. Many refused to tie their beloved culture and landscape to the project of separatism, revealing a layer of counter-mapping below that of the separatist leaders like Father Augustin Diamacoune Senghor and Mamadou “Nkrumah” Sané.The Casamance conflict began on December 26, 1982. After an oath-taking ceremony in a sacred forest on the edge of Ziguinchor, hundreds of separatists from the Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance (MFDC) marched into the town to remove the Senegalese flag in front of the regional governor's office and replace it with a white flag. The marchers were met by gendarmes who quickly found themselves outnumbered. Government surveillance, arrests, and interrogations followed into the next year, when gendarmes went to the sacred forest to stop another MFDC meeting. This time, the separatists greeted the gendarmes with a burst of violence that left four dead, their bodies mutilated. Senegalese security responded with force, driving the separatists—armed only with improvised rifles, bows and arrows, and machetes—into the forest. The Casamance conflict continues to the present day, so far having left more than five thousand dead, four hundred killed or maimed by land mines, and another eight hundred thousand living in a state of insecurity, with limited possibility for economic development. Ordinary Casamançais—on the Casamance River, in the rice fields, in the forests, in the schools, and in the sports stadiums—have demonstrated a diversity of opinions about the separatist project. Whether by the Senegalese state or by the separatists, these ordinary Casamançais have refused to be mapped. They have made the Casamance “a country of defiance.”

A collection of essays on nature, naturalists, and the natural history of fishes in central Appalachia.A nature lover's paradise, central Appalachia supports a diversity of life in an extensive network of waterways and is home to a dazzling array of fish species. This book focuses not only on the fishes of central Appalachia but also on the fascinating things these fishes do in their natural habitats. An ecological dance unfolds from a species and population perspective, although the influence of the community and the ecosystem also figures in the text. Stuart A. Welsh's essays link central Appalachian fishes with the complexities of competition and predation, species conservation, parasitic infections, climate change, public attitudes, reproductive and foraging ecology, unique morphology, habitat use, and nonnative species. The book addresses a selection of the families of central Appalachian fishes, including lampreys, gars, freshwater eels, pikes, minnows, suckers, catfishes, trouts, trout-perches, sculpins, sunfishes, and perches.These essays often refer to the works of naturalists who contributed to our knowledge of nature during previous centuries and who recorded their discoveries when science writing was less concise than it is today. Although many of these works are nearly forgotten, these early naturalists built a strong knowledge base that supports much of our current science and thus merits reexamination. Most people are not scientists, but many have an interest in nature and are, in their own way, naturalists. This book is for those people willing to peer beneath the water's surface.

This guide to moths, native plants, and their environmental roles is an indispensable resource for gardeners, conservationists, and nature enthusiasts across the midwestern United States.Gardening for Moths is the first book to show midwestern gardeners and naturalists why they should attract specific moth species to their properties and how to do it. The book's stunning color photographs and intriguing facts reveal the fascinating world of these insects, inspiring readers to incorporate moth-loving native plants into their landscapes. The authors emphasize the importance of moths and their caterpillars to ecological food webs, widening the book's appeal to birders and bat lovers as well.The book consists of three main sections, beginning with a thorough overview of moths, including theirpopulation decline and conservation,importance in ecosystems,relationship with native plants, andpredators and defensesIn addition, this first section features tips on how to attract and photograph moths at night.In the next section the authors profile about 140 plant species, providing brief background, natural history, habitat, and growing notes for each along with lists of potential moths the plants may attract. The third section highlights approximately 150 moth species, ordered taxonomically. These accounts include interesting facts about the life history of both the caterpillar and adult moth of each species. Each account also features a list of the species'common host plants. Throughout the volume, inset text boxes provide additional fascinating moth facts. Beautiful photographs (most by the authors) illustrate every included plant and moth species. Select references, online resources, and quick reference tables round out this valuable resource.

These lyrical poems about growing up and becoming a parent in Detroit reflect deeply felt connections to places and experiences that inevitably fall victim to irrevocable change.Sprawl is a reconstruction of the constantly shifting landscape of metropolitan Detroit, which extends over six counties and is home to over four million people, from the perspective of a single parent raising a young child amid financial precarity. Part memoir, part invention, the book is Andrew Collard's attempt to reconcile the tenderness and sense of purpose found in the parent-child relationship with ongoing societal crises in the empire of the automobile. Here, a mansion may contrast with a burned-out home just up the street. How does one construct a sense of place in such a landscape, where once-familiar neighborhoods turn to strip malls or empty lots and the relationships that root us dissolve? Sprawl suggests that there is solace in recognizing that when we ask this question, we are never alone in asking.Within the larger geographical space of the metropolis are the in-between places of personal significance: the gas stations, burger joints, malls, and parking lots where many of the defining moments of ordinary lives occur. These poems take deep inspiration from such places, insisting on the value of the people found there, along with their experiences. What might be considered high and low culture are as inextricably linked in the formal cues of the poems as they are in the Michigan landscape, influenced by pop music, midcentury modern aesthetics, comic books, and cars.While the sprawl of the title refers to the seemingly endless succession of businesses and neighborhoods extending north from Detroit (“a sprawl this extensive breeds / empty pockets”), it also invokes the sprawl of history through poems that move between the past and present. One sequence of poems built on old newspaper clippings draws attention to a Chrysler plant that once constructed Redstone missiles. Elsewhere, two poems refer to the Detroit newspaper strike of the 1990s, a local controversy with lasting implications for the community. Sprawl ultimately illuminates the relationship of one place to other places, contextualizing its characters and locales within a wider societal frame.

The firsthand pandemic experiences of rural health-care providers—who were already burdened when COVID-19 hit—raise questions about the future of public health and health-care delivery. This volume comprises the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of Appalachian health-care workers, including frontline providers, administrators, and educators. The combined narrative reveals how governmental and corporate policies exacerbated the region's injustices, stymied response efforts, and increased the death toll. Beginning with an overview of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its impact on the body, the essays in the book's first section provide background material and contextualize the subsequent explosion of telemedicine, the pandemic's impact on medical education, and its relationship to systemic racism and related disparities in mental health treatment. Next, first-person narratives from diverse perspectives recount the pandemic's layered stresses, including the scramble for ventilators, masks, and other personal protective equipment the neighbors, friends, and family members who flouted public-health mandates, convinced that COVID-19 was a hoax the added burden the virus leveled on patients whose health was already compromised by cancer, diabetes, or addiction the acute ways the pandemic's arrival exacerbated interpersonal and systemic racism that Black and other health-care workers of color bear not only the battle against the virus but also the growing suspicion and even physical abuse from patients convinced that doctors and nurses were trying to kill them These visceral, personal experiences of how Appalachian health-care workers responded to the pandemic amid the nation's deeply polarized political discourse will shape the historical record of this “unprecedented time” and provide a glimpse into the future of rural medicine. Contributors: Lucas Aidukaitis, Clay Anderson, Tammy Bannister, Alli Delp, Lynn Elliott, Monika Holbein, Laura Hungerford, Nikki King, Brittany Landore, Jeffrey J. LeBoeuf, Sojourner Nightingale, Beth O'Connor, Rakesh Patel, Mildred E. Perreault, Melanie B. Richards, Tara Smith, Kathy Osborne Still, Darla Timbo, Kathy Hsu Wibberly

The first major study of Cashmere and Paisley shawls in nineteenth-century British literature, this book shows how they came to represent both high fashion and the British Empire.During the late eighteenth century, Cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent began arriving in Britain. At first, these luxury goods were tokens of wealth and prestige. Subsequently, affordable copies known as “Paisley” shawls were mass-produced in British factories, most notably in the Scottish town of the same name. Textile Orientalisms is the first full-length study of these shawls in British literature of the extended nineteenth century. Attentive to the juxtaposition of objects and their descriptions, the book analyzes the British obsession with Indian shawls through a convergence of postcolonial, literary, and cultural theories. Surveying a wide range of materials—plays, poems, satires, novels, advertisements, and archival sources—Suchitra Choudhury argues that while Cashmere and Paisley shawls were popular accoutrements in Romantic and Victorian Britain, their significance was not limited to fashion. Instead, as visible symbols of British expansion, for many imaginative writers they emerged as metaphorical sites reflecting the pleasures and anxieties of the empire. Attentive to new theorizations of history, fashion, colonialism, and gender, the book offers innovative readings of works by Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Frederick Niven, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In determining a key status for shawls in nineteenth-century literature, Textile Orientalisms reformulates the place of fashion and textiles in imperial studies. The book's distinction rests primarily on three accounts. First, in presenting an original and extended discussion of Cashmere and Paisley shawls, Choudhury offers a new way of interpreting the British Empire. Second, by tracing how shawls represented the social and imperial experience, she argues for an associative link between popular consumption and the domestic experience of colonialism on the one hand and a broader evocation of texts and textiles on the other. Finally, discussions about global objects during the Victorian period tend to overlook that imperial Britain not only imported goods but also produced their copies and imitations on an industrial scale. By identifying the corporeal tropes of authenticity and imitation that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century imaginative production, Choudhury's work points to a new direction in critical studies.

One woman's national, political, ethnic, social, and personal identities impart an extraordinary perspective on the histories of Europe, Polish Jews, Communism, activism, and survival during the twentieth century. Tonia Lechtman was a Jew, a loving mother and wife, a Polish patriot, a committed Communist, and a Holocaust survivor. Throughout her life these identities brought her to multiple countries—Poland, Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel—during some of the most pivotal and cataclysmic decades of the twentieth century. In most of those places, she lived on the margins of society while working to promote Communism and trying to create a safe space for her small children. Born in Łódź in 1918, Lechtman became fascinated with Communism in her early youth. In 1935, to avoid the consequences of her political activism during an increasingly antisemitic and hostile political environment, the family moved to Palestine, where Tonia met her future husband, Sioma. In 1937, the couple traveled to Spain to participate in the Spanish Civil War. After discovering she was pregnant, Lechtman relocated to France while Sioma joined the International Brigades. She spent the Second World War in Europe, traveling with two small children between France, Germany, and Switzerland, at times only miraculously avoiding arrest and being transported east to Nazi camps. After the war, she returned to Poland, where she planned to (re)build Communist Poland. However, soon after her arrival she was imprisoned for six years. In 1971, under pressure from her children, Lechtman emigrated from Poland to Israel, where she died in 1996. In writing Lechtman's biography, Anna Müller has consulted a rich collection of primary source material, including archival documentation, private documents and photographs, interviews from different periods of Lechtman's life, and personal correspondence. Despite this intimacy, Müller also acknowledges key historiographical questions arising from the lacunae of lost materials, the selective preservation of others, and her own interpretive work translating a life into a life story.

Original oral and ethnographic sources inform this conceptual history of power in central Africa, imagined through the lens of Kitawala religious practices.Unruly Ideas: A History of Kitawala in Congo recounts the multifaceted history of the Congolese religious movement Kitawala from its colonial beginnings in the 1920s through its continued practice in some of the most conflict-riven parts of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo today. Drawing on a rich body of original oral, ethnographic, and archival research, Nicole Eggers uses Kitawala as a lens through which to address the complex relationship between politics, religion, healing, and violence in central African history.Kitawala, which has roots in the African Watchtower (Jehovah's Witness) movement, has long been viewed both by scholars and by popular historians as a form of male-dominated, anticolonial insurgency. But just as Kitawalists were never exclusively male, their teachings and activities were never directed solely at the Belgian colonial state, and their yearnings for self-rule were never entirely about the secular realms of authority. A more comprehensive look at the oral and archival evidence reveals they were and are concerned with the morality of power more broadly: on state, communal, and individual levels. Moreover, Kitawalist doctrine is itself unruly, and its preachers, prophets, and practitioners have articulated innumerable interpretations—most quite different from Watchtower Christianity—across space and time.More than a case study of a particular religious movement, Unruly Ideas is a conceptual history of power that investigates how communities and individuals in the region have historically imagined power, sought to access it, wielded it, and policed the morality of its uses. By focusing on power and its intellectual and social history in Congo, Unruly Ideas creates an analytical space in which readers can understand the differing manifestations of Kitawala—from its overtly political and sometimes violent moments to those more aptly characterized as individual quests for spiritual and physical therapy—as varying themes in the same story: the pursuit of wellness in the context of malady.On a more practical level, the book raises important questions about the project of writing histories of places like eastern Congo: a region where the repercussions of decades of political neglect, upheaval, and violence force us to reconsider how we can think about and use oral and archival sources. Finally, the book investigates the embodied and gendered nature of field research and interrogates the intersubjective and reciprocal nature of knowledge production.

A fascinating study that shows how the intersection of technology and politics has shaped South African history since the 1960s.This book details the development of an interconnected technological system of a coal mine and of the Matimba and Medupi power stations in the Waterberg, a rural region of South Africa near the country's border with Botswana. South Africa's state steel manufacturing corporation, Iscor, which has since been privatized, developed a coal mine in the region in the 1970s. This set the stage for the national electricity provider, Eskom, to build coal-fueled power stations in the Waterberg. Faeeza Ballim follows the development of these technological systems from the late 1960s, a period of heightened repression as the apartheid government attempted to realize its vision of racial segregation, to the deeply fraught construction of the Medupi power station in postapartheid South Africa. The Medupi power station was planned toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century as a measure to alleviate the country's electricity shortage, but the continued delay of its completion and the escalation of its costs meant that it failed to realize those ambitions while public frustration and electricity outages grew. By tracing this story, this book highlights the importance of technology to our understanding of South African history. This characterization challenges the idea that the technological state corporations were proxies for the apartheid government and highlights that their activities in the Waterberg did not necessarily accord with the government's strategic purposes. While a part of the broader national modernization project under apartheid, they also set the stage for worker solidarity and trade union organization in the Waterberg and elsewhere in the country. This book also argues that the state corporations, their technology, and their engineers enjoyed ambivalent relationships with the governments of their time, relationships that can be characterized as both autonomous and immersive. In the era of democracy, while Eskom has been caught up in government corruption—a major scourge to the fortunes of South Africa—it has also retained a degree of organizational autonomy and offered a degree of resistance to those who sought to further corruption. The examination of the workings of these technological systems, and the state corporations responsible for them, complicates conventional understandings of the transition from the authoritarian rule of apartheid to democratic South Africa, which coincided with the transition from state-led development to neoliberalism. This book is an indispensable case study on the workings of industrial and political power in Africa and beyond.

The life story of this World War II Navajo Code Talker introduces middle-grade readers to an unforgettable person and offers a close perspective on aspects of Navajo (or Diné) history and culture. Thomas H. Begay was one of the young Navajo men who, during World War II, invented and used a secret, unbreakable communications code based on their native Diné language to help win the war in the Pacific. Although the book includes anecdotes from other code talkers, its central narrative revolves around Begay. It tells his story, from his birth near the Navajo reservation, his childhood spent herding sheep, his adolescence in federally mandated boarding schools, and ultimately, his decision to enlist in the US Marine Corps. Alysa Landry relies heavily on interviews with Begay, who, as of this writing, is in his late nineties and one of only three surviving code talkers. Begay's own voice and sense of humor make this book particularly significant in that it is the only Code Talker biography for young readers told from a soldier's perspective. Begay was involved with the book every step of the way, granting Landry unlimited access to his military documents, personal photos, and oral history. Additionally, Begay's family contributed by reading and fact-checking the manuscript. This truly is a unique collaborative project.

An interdisciplinary environmental humanities volume that explores human-environment relationships on our permanently polluted planet. While toxicity and pollution are ever present in modern daily life, politicians, juridical systems, media outlets, scholars, and the public alike show great difficulty in detecting, defining, monitoring, or generally coming to terms with them. This volume's contributors argue that the source of this difficulty lies in the struggle to make sense of the intersecting temporal and spatial scales working on the human and more-than-human body, while continuing to acknowledge race, class, and gender in terms of global environmental justice and social inequality. The term toxic timescapes refers to this intricate intersectionality of time, space, and bodies in relation to toxic exposure. As a tool of analysis, it unpacks linear understandings of time and explores how harmful substances permeate temporal and physical space as both event and process. It equips scholars with new ways of creating data and conceptualizing the past, present, and future presence and possible effects of harmful substances and provides a theoretical framework for new environmental narratives. To think in terms of toxic timescapes is to radically shift our understanding of toxicants in the complex web of life. Toxicity, pollution, and modes of exposure are never static; therefore, dose, timing, velocity, mixture, frequency, and chronology matter as much as the geographic location and societal position of those exposed. Together, these factors create a specific toxic timescape that lies at the heart of each contributor's narrative. Contributors from the disciplines of history, human geography, science and technology studies, philosophy, and political ecology come together to demonstrate the complex reality of a toxic existence. Their case studies span the globe as they observe the intersection of multiple times and spaces at such diverse locations as former battlefields in Vietnam, aging nuclear-weapon storage facilities in Greenland, waste deposits in southern Italy, chemical facilities along the Gulf of Mexico, and coral-breeding laboratories across the world.

This volume offers practical, detailed guidance and case studies on how to avoid exacerbating inequalities while researching gender-based violence and other related issues in Africa. Wartime violence and its aftermath present numerous practical, ethical, and political challenges that are especially acute for researchers working on gender-based and sexual violence. Drawing upon applied examples from across the African continent, this volume features unique contributions from researchers and practitioners with decades of experience developing research partnerships, designing and undertaking fieldwork, asking sensitive questions, negotiating access, collecting and evaluating information, and validating results. These are all endeavors that also raise pressing ethical questions, especially in relation to retraumatization, social stigma, and even payment of participants. Ethical and methodological questions cannot be separated from political and institutional considerations. Systems of privilege and marginalization cannot be wished away, so they need to be both interrogated and contested. This is where precedents and power relations established under colonialism and imperialism take center stage. Europeans have been extracting valuable resources from the African continent for centuries. Research into gender-based violence risks being yet another extractive industry. There are times when committed individuals can make valuable contributions to a more equitable future, but funding streams, knowledge hierarchies, and institutional positions continue to have powerful effects.Accordingly, the contributors to this volume also concentrate upon the layered effects of power and position, relationships between researchers, organizations, and communities, and the political economy of knowledge production; this brings into focus questions about how and why information gets generated, for which kinds of audiences, and for whose benefit.

Based on the real life of Edith Warner, who ran a tearoom at Otowi Crossing, just below Los Alamos, The Woman at Otowi Crossing is the story of Helen Chalmer, a person in tune with her adopted environment and her neighbors in the nearby Indian pueblo and also a friend of the first atomic scientists. The secret evolution of atomic research is a counterpoint to her psychic development.In keeping with its tradition of allowing the best of its list to thrive, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press is particularly proud to reissue The Woman at Otowi Crossing by best-selling author Frank Waters. This new edition features an introduction by Professor Thomas J. Lyon and a foreword by the author's widow, Barbara Waters.The story is quintessential Waters: a parable for the potentially destructive materialism of the mid-twentieth century. The antidote is Helen Chalmer's ability to understand a deeper truth of her being; beyond the Western notion of selfhood, beyond the sense of a personality distinct from the rest, she experiences a new and wider awareness.The basis for an opera of the same name, The Woman at Otowi Crossing is the powerful story of the crossing of cultures and lives: a fable for our times.

Wilfrid Sellars tackled the difficult problems of reconciling Pittsburgh school–style analytic thought, Husserlian phenomenology, and the Myth of the Given. This collection of essays brings into dialogue the analytic philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars—founder of the Pittsburgh school of thought—and phenomenology, with a special focus on the work of Edmund Husserl. The book's wide-ranging discussions include the famous Myth of the Given but also more traditional problems in the philosophy of mind and phenomenology such as the status of perception and imagination nature of intentionality concept of motivation relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic experiences relationship between conceptual and preconceptual experiences Moreover, the volume addresses the conflicts between Sellars's manifest and scientific images of the world and Husserl's ontology of the life-world. The volume takes as a point of departure Sellars's criticism of the Myth of the Given, but only to show the many problems that label obscures. Contributors explain aspects of Sellars's philosophy vis-à-vis Husserl's phenomenology, articulating the central problems and solutions of each. The book is a must-read for scholars and students interested in learning more about Sellars and for those comparing Continental and analytic philosophical thought. Contributors Walter Hopp Wolfgang Huemer Roberta Lanfredini Danilo Manca Karl Mertens Antonio Nunziante Jacob Rump Daniele De Santis Michela Summa

An exploration of Francophone African literary imaginations and expressions through the lens of Afrofuturism Generally attributed to the Western imagination, science fiction is a literary genre that has expressed projected technological progress since the Industrial Revolution. However, certain fantastical elements in African literary expressions lend themselves to science fiction interpretations, both utopian and dystopian. When the concept of science is divorced from its Western, rationalist, materialist, positivist underpinnings, science fiction represents a broad imaginative space that supersedes the limits of this world. Whether it be on the moon, under the sea, or elsewhere within the imaginative universe, Afrofuturist readings of select films, novels, short stories, plays, and poems reveal a similarly emancipatory African future that is firmly rooted in its own cultural mythologies, cosmologies, and philosophies. Isaac Joslin identifies the contours and modalities of a speculative, futurist science fiction rooted in the sociocultural and geopolitical context of continental African imaginaries. Constructing an arc that begins with gender identity and cultural plurality as the bases for an inherently multicultural society, this project traces the essential role of language and narrativity in processing traumas that stem from the violence of colonial and neocolonial interventions in African societies. Joslin then outlines the influential role of discursive media that construct divisions and create illusions about societal success, belonging, and exclusion, while also identifying alternative critical existential mythologies that promote commonality and social solidarity. The trajectory proceeds with a critical analysis of the role of education in affirming collective identity in the era of globalization; the book also assesses the market-driven violence that undermines efforts to instill and promote cultural and social autonomy. Last, this work proposes an egalitarian and ecological ethos of communal engagement with and respect for the diversity of the human and natural worlds.

How have the waves of democracy and decentralization that swept the developing world in recent decades affected states—among the most important drivers of poverty and prosperity—at national and local levels in Ghana and beyond? State actors beneath the national level—what Barry Driscoll calls the local state—have considerable responsibility for carrying out state functions, but they are also forced to compete for these local state offices. How does a local state actually work in poor twentieth-century countries? This book offers a descriptive account, as well as a causal explanation, of how political competition affects the local state in Ghana. Driscoll shows how closely fought elections drive local state institutions to provide patronage. The source of these demands for patronage comes not from rent-seeking bureaucrats or landed elites but from the government's own party volunteers. Driscoll explains how electoral competition affects how local state actors are insulated from such patronage demands. Moreover, these highly competitive, patronage-providing local governments actually have relatively better-qualified senior civil servants at their disposal. Driscoll makes sense of this paradox by introducing the logic of building administrative capacity in order to provide patronage. He then abstracts from the case of Ghana to generalize about how the effect of political competition is shaped by the locally salient variety of clientelism, which in turn is conditioned by the strength of the party system. The book draws on fourteen months of fieldwork in six of Ghana's districts, far from the nation's capital city. Ethnographic and interview data come from time spent with market traders, tax collectors, politicians, and other figures in local state offices. Quantitative data come from a survey covering almost all local governments. The result is a detailed account of Ghana's local state power dynamics that has relevant implications for states across the developing world.

Scholars working in archaeology, education, history, geography, and politics tell a nuanced story about the people and dynamics that reshaped this region and determined who would control it. The Ohio Valley possesses some of the most resource-rich terrain in the world. Its settlement by humans was thus consequential not only for shaping the geographic and cultural landscape of the region but also for forming the United States and the future of world history. Settling Ohio begins with an overview of the first people who inhabited the region, who built civilizations that moved massive amounts of earth and left an archaeological record that drew the interest of subsequent settlers and continues to intrigue scholars. It highlights how, in the eighteenth century, Native Americans who migrated from the East and North interacted with Europeans to develop impressive trading networks and how they navigated complicated wars and sought to preserve national identities in the face of violent attempts to remove them from their lands. The book situates the traditional story of Ohio settlement, including the Northwest Ordinance, the dealings of the Ohio Company of Associates, and early road building, into a far richer story of contested spaces, competing visions of nationhood, and complicated relations with Indian peoples. By so doing, the contributors provide valuable new insights into how chaotic and contingent early national politics and frontier development truly were. Chapters highlighting the role of apple-growing culture, education, African American settlers, and the diverse migration flows into Ohio from the East and Europe further demonstrate the complex multiethnic composition of Ohio's early settlements and the tensions that resulted. A final theme of this volume is the desirability of working to recover the often-forgotten history of non-White peoples displaced by the processes of settler colonialism that has been, until recently, undervalued in the scholarship.