Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and et...

A groundbreaking study of the connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in American literature and US slave culture.Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveho...

Cornucopia explores the health and economic implications of U.S. farm policy. Using a corn farm in rural South Dakota as his starting point, Johnson reviews the history of agricultural policies in America to understand how large-scale, industrial agriculture came to play such a large role in U.S. and world food production. He also discusses the role of agricultural policies in the on-going "food for fuel" debate, as well as the linkages between agricultural outputs and health outc...

THIRTY-NINE SIXTY - A ROMANTICCHRISTMAS THRILLEROn a frigid December day, sixty-six hours before Christmas, Aedan O'Beirne's wife, Ciara, and their five-year-old son, Colin, disappear. Aedan discovers that he has until the first second of Christmas Day to find them, or he will lose his family forever.Set in Chicagoland, this absorbing and suspenseful tale launches readers into Aedan's surprise-filled world, ...

A history with surprising new revelations about the depths of government surveillance and constitutional rights abusesIn the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anarchist and socialist political movements spurred the expansion of nascent United States federal surveillance capabilities. But it was the ensuing, decades-long persistent exaggerations of domestic political threats that drove an exponential increase in the size and scope of unlawful government surveillan...

Would you believe me if I told you that I found multiple proven ways for you to be able to leave your 9-5 job, earn a 6-figure income, and build generational wealth for your family? Would you believe you could be in this financial position with no college degree or years of extensive and expensive training? This sense of financial freedom is becoming a reality for many people in America, and it can also become a reality for you.In this book, I attempt to eliminate every excuse you ...

Bryce Quinlan never expected to see a world other than Midgard, but now that she has, all she wants is to get back. Everything she loves is in Midgard: her family, her friends, her mate. Stranded in a strange new world, she's going to need all her wits about her to get home again. And that's no easy feat when she has no idea who to trust.Hunt Athalar has found himself in some deep holes in his life, but this one might be the deepest of all. After a few brief months with everything ...

Why do representatives of different religious traditions find the transhumanist vision of the future not only theologically compatible but even inspiring? Transhumanism is a global movement seeking radical human enhancement. The trans in transhumanism marks the transition from the present stage in human evolution into the future, namely, post-human existence. Containing chapters written by adherents to a variety of religious traditions, Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics prov...

Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between ...

Reading Rape examines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations.Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and "realist" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels to Deliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine S...

From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture.

A testament to the power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme oppression, this landmark history of slavery in the South challenged conventional views by illuminating the many forms of resistance to dehumanization that developed in slave society.Displaying keen insight into the minds of both enslaved persons and slaveholders, historian Eugene Genovese investigates the ways that enslaved persons forced their owners to acknowledge their humanity through cul...