American Literatures Initiative imprint: 27 books
Hating Empire Properly
The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2013
In Hating Empire Properly, Sunil Agnani produces a novel attempt to think the eighteenth-century imagination of
the West and East Indies together, arguing that this is how contemporary thinkers Edmund Burke and Denis
Diderot actually viewed them. This concern with multiple geographical spaces is revealed...
The Naked Communist
Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture
Language: English
Release Date: December 10, 2012
The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the “world” names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three...
Quiet Testimony
A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Language: English
Release Date: September 2, 2013
The nineteenth century was a time of extraordinary attunement to the unspoken, the elusively present, and the subtly haunting. Quiet Testimony finds in such attunement a valuable rethinking of what it means to encounter the truth. It argues that four key writers—Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and...
Thresholds of Illiteracy
Theory, Latin America, and the Crisis of Resistance
Language: English
Release Date: April 3, 2014
Thresholds of Illiteracy reevaluates Latin American theories and narratives of cultural resistance by advancing the concept of “illiteracy” as a new critical approach to understanding scenes or moments of social antagonism. “Illiteracy,” Acosta claims, can offer us a way of talking about what...
by Nahum Dimitri Chandler
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2013
X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought offers an original account of matters African American, and by implication the African diaspora in general, as an object of discourse and knowledge. It likewise challenges the conception of analogous objects of study across dominant ethnological...
by Adam Frank
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2014
Transferential Poetics presents a method for bringing theories of affect to the study of poetics. Informed by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, it offers new interpretations of the poetics of four major American artists: Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Gertrude Stein,...
Experiments in Exile
C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness
Language: English
Release Date: August 7, 2018
Explores political possibilities for defining the common outside the bounds of citizenship and conventional liberal identity categories.
Reconstructing Individualism
A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2012
America has a love–hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American...
Blackpentecostal Breath
The Aesthetics of Possibility
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2016
In this profoundly innovative book, Ashon T. Crawley engages a wide range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or “otherwise” modes of existence can serve...
The Underside of Politics
Global Fictions in the Fog of the Cold War
Language: English
Release Date: June 21, 2013
This book argues that during the Cold War modern political imagination was held captive by the split between two visions of universality—freedom in the West versus social justice in the East—and by a culture of secrecy that tied national identity to national security. Examining post- 1945 American...
Asylum Speakers
Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2010
Offering the first interdisciplinary study of refugees in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States, Asylum Speakers relates current theoretical debates about hospitality and cosmopolitanism to the actual conditions of refugees. In doing so, the author weighs the questions of "truth...
Common Things
Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity
Language: English
Release Date: November 11, 2013
What are the relationships between the books we read and the communities we share? Common Things explores how transatlantic romance revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century influenced—and were influenced by—emerging modern systems of community.
Drawing on the work of Washington...
Scandalize My Name
Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2016
From sapphire, mammy, and jezebel, to the angry black woman, baby mama, and nappy-headed ho, black female iconography has had a long and tortured history in public culture. The telling of this history has long occupied the work of black female theorists—much of which has been foundational in situating...
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