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This book analyzes the filmmaking careers of Lana and Lilly Wachowski as the world’s most influential transgender media producers. Situated at the intersection of trans* studies and black feminist film studies, it argues that the Wachowskis’ cinema has been co-constitutive with the historical appearance of transgender, tracing how their work invents a trans* aesthetics of sensation that has disrupted conventional schemas of race, gender, space, and time. Offering new readings of the Wachowskis’ films and television, it illustrates the previously unsensed presence of transgender in the subtext of queer cinema, in the design of digital video, and in the emergence of a twenty-first-century global cinematic imaginary. It is in the Wachowskis’ art, the author argues, that transgender cultural production most centrally confronts cinema’s construction of reality, and in which white, Western transgender subjectivity most directly impacts global visual culture. Thus, the Wachowskis’ cinema is an inescapable archive for sensing the politics of race and gender in the present moment.

Through careful examination of religious beliefs and practices in the German-speaking world from approximately 1400 to 1600, this book challenges the centuries-old narrative of the transition from late medieval Christianity to Protestantism as a process of “de-sensualizing” religion. The common assumption that Protestant Christianity is somehow more intellectual and less sensual than its late medieval and Catholic counterparts has its origins in the culture of the German evangelical movements of the early sixteenth century, and continues to influence how we think and talk about religious difference generally to this day. This study develops a critique of this narrative in two parts, integrating periods of late medieval and early modern history, often treated as distinct fields of study. In part 1 of the study, critical scrutiny of the practical provisioning for sensuous worship and discussions about its meaning in the church of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries reveals that late medieval religion was a far more complex, locally variegated, and dynamic thing than scholarly and popular narratives of the “sensuous” Middle Ages often assume. Part 2 turns to the early Protestant Reformation’s relationship to the late medieval paradigm. It shows that popular discourse framed the early Reformation as inaugurating a fundamental break with the world that came before it. Despite this, considerable continuities in belief and practice persisted, particularly in the Lutheran tradition, but also, significantly, among reformed traditions often perceived as representing a more definitively modern, and correspondingly less sensuous, form of Christianity.

In the 1840s, Nauvoo, Illinois, was a religious boomtown, the headquarters for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism), a controversial religion whose theology, social practices, and solidarity led to cultural conflict. By the mid-1840s, Joseph Smith, the religion’s prophet-leader, was killed, and thousands of Mormons relocated west to Utah. During the twentieth century, the Latter-day Saints returned to their former headquarters in Nauvoo, Illinois, in a dramatic way. Acquiring nearly half of the property in the city, the faith transformed the sleepy Mississippi River town into a historical re-creation of its earlier splendor. However, as it did in the nineteenth century, Mormonism’s presence in western Illinois in the twentieth century created conflict. Competing groups, including the religion’s sister faith, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ, offered a rival interpretation of Nauvoo’s past. Additionally, community members without a connection to either branch of Mormonism sought to preserve their own rich history in the city. Return to the City of Joseph: Modern Mormonism’s Contest for the Soul of Nauvoo examines the conflicts over historical memory that have developed as Mormonism returned to western Illinois. It focuses on the social history of the community, examining interactions between groups impacted by Mormonism’s touristic takeover. In a broader way, it also intersects with studies of historical tourism and pilgrimage.

This book offers theoretical perspectives and case studies for teaching American literature of the long nineteenth century using the tools and methods of the digital humanities (DH). The essays highlight best methods for integrating the building of digital tools and projects in the nineteenth-century American literature classroom and strategies for incorporating into the curriculum already established digital materials. By emphasizing a discipline-specific approach, the collection invites conversations among scholars of other disciplines about how digital pedagogies can deepen their objectives for student learning. The collection is organized into five keywords, or tags: Make, Read, Recover, Archive, and Act. The essays in Make illustrate the pedagogical value of project-based, collaborative learning. The essays in Read describe assignments in which students engage in multiple reading practices, from close to collaborative and computational. In Recover, contributors show how DH approaches aid in the scholarly consideration of marginalized texts. The essays in Archive encourage students to select and organize artifacts with an ethics of care, often in communities beyond the classroom. The final section, Act, advocates for an activist approach, demonstrating how DH can bring new insights to debates central to the study of the long nineteenth century, particularly concerning difference. As they engage digital humanities practices and pedagogies, the essays in the collection model inventive strategies and rethink what is possible in the American literature classroom.

This volume brings together emerging and leading scholars in the field of anthropology to reflect on the intellectual trajectories of fifteen African American anthropologists who earned their doctorates in anthropology between 1960 and 1969. Following in the footsteps of African American Pioneers in Anthropology (Harrison and Harrison 1999), this volume documents the quest for knowledge, respect, truth and value in the inspiring work of the next generation of black anthropologists. This volume features the intellectual biographies of James Lowell Gibbs Jr., Charles Warren II, William Alfred Shack, Diane K. Lewis, Delmos Jones, Niara Sudarkasa, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, John Langston Gwaltney, Ira E. Harrison, Audrey Smedley, George Clement Bond, Oliver Osborne, Anselme Remy, Vera Mae Green, and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan. This book reflects on the trajectories, challenges, and accomplishments of this second generation of black anthropologists.

This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but also transformative, and preoccupied with gender, sexuality, race, and time. Pornographic films enthusiastically expose the perceived hypocrisy of this Victorianness, rhetorically equating it with mainstream, legitimate culture, as a way of staging pornography’s alleged sexual authenticity and transgressive nature. Through an analysis of porn set during the nineteenth century and porn adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this book shows how these adaptations expose the implicit pornographic aspects of “legitimate” culture while also revealing the extent to which “high” and “low” genres rely on each other for self-definition. In the process, neo-Victorian pornographies draw on Gothic spaces and icons in order to situate itself as this Gothic other, utilizing the Gothic and the monstrous to craft a transformative, pornographic space. These neo-Victorian Gothic pornographies expose the way the genre as a whole emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates gender, sexuality, and race through the lens of history and legacy.

This book maps the interplay of conservative and feminist women in Indiana during the second half of the twentieth century and proposes an alternative framework for understanding the second wave feminist movement. The central theme is that rightwing women’s understanding of one-worldism--a conspiracy theory refined by grassroots anticommunists during the height of the Cold War--shaped conservative women’s response to the second wave feminist movement and circumscribed feminist activism. Over the course of the postwar era, anticommunist organizations like the Minute Women of the U.S.A., Pro America, and the John Birch Society provided a forum for rightwing women to develop their understanding of related forces pushing for a “one-world,” totalitarian supra-government, forces they described as treasonous. While communists often were lumped under the “one-worlder” category, the two were not synonymous. In literature rightwing women described a spectrum of subversion that included a fifth column but also those advocating domestic cooperation through federal regionalism, gender equality as opposed to gender difference, and internationalists advocating stronger authority for the United Nations. The book documents the work of Hoosier feminists to accomplish their goals, especially the Equal Rights Amendment, in a hostile political environment and the work of rightwing women to counter the threat of internationalism or one-worldism, culminating in a showdown at the 1977 International Women’s Year celebration.

The book provides a short but thorough introduction to twelfth-century composer and visionary St. Hildegard of Bingen, creator of seventy-seven plainchant melodies (her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum) as well as a complete play set to music, the Ordo virtutum. Six chapters chronicle her eventful life, incorporating information about her compositions in the Dendermonde and Riesencodex manuscripts as appropriate: enclosure at the monastery of Disibodenberg; the catalytic vision that spurred her multifaceted creativity; her founding of the convent at Rupertsberg; preaching tours and exorcisms; clashes with priests, prelates, popes, and the Holy Roman Emperor; punishment by interdict; and final vindication. These chapters also explore her many nonmusical creations (three major theological treatises, Gospel homilies and smaller religious writings, scientific and medical works, two hagiographies, an invented language and accompanying alphabet, and her extensive correspondence). A seventh chapter traces continued awareness of her achievement after her death, her canonization and recognition as Doctor of the Church, and the belated rebirth of her music. The final three chapters are devoted to her music, beginning with a general overview and followed by a chapter each on shorter and longer genres, with the former providing basic liturgical information. Ancillary material includes a dozen illustrations (including several iconic images), a works list, and a selected bibliography and discography.

Voices of Drought is an ethnomusicological study of relationships between popular music, the environmental and social costs of drought, and the politics of culture and climate vulnerability in the northeast region of Brazil, primarily the state of Ceará. The book traces the articulations of music and sound with drought as a discourse, a matter of politics, and a material reality. It encompasses multiple entwined issues, including ecological exile, poverty, and unequal access to vital resources such as water, along with corruption, prejudice, unbridled capitalism, and rapidly expanding neoliberalism. Each chapter is a case study: the use of carnauba wax, formed by palm trees as a protective climate adaptation, in the production of wax cylinder sound recordings in the late nineteenth century; the political significance of regionalist popular music, especially baião and forró, in the mid-twentieth century; forró music and practices of weather forecasting that involve listening to bird calls; the production and meaning of the soundscape of a small city as it involves musician Raimundo Fagner; social and musical change at the turn of the twenty-first century; and the cancellation of state-sponsored Carnival celebrations due to a costly multi-year drought in the 2010s. Demonstrating how ecological crisis affects musical culture by way of and proportionate to social difference and stratification, the book advocates a focus on environmental justice in ecomusicological scholarship.

Reshaping Women’s History: Voices of Nontraditional Women Historians is a collection of eighteen essays written by “nontraditional” women historians, all of whom have won the prestigious Catherine Prelinger Award. The contributors reflect on connections among their lived experiences, their scholarship, the field of women’s and gender history, and women’s professional lives. Key themes include the significance of mentorship; the fragility of financial stability; the persistence of gendered family demands, biases, and expectations; the anxiety of having to explain gaps in CVs as women endeavor to advance from one career stage to the next. Contributors offer vital lessons into challenges as well as rewards that women encounter as they pursue a life of the mind. They also have much to say about the commitment not only to writing histories of women but also preserving their voices in archives and the importance of financial support that the Prelinger Award provided. Motivated by life experiences and their personal philosophies to be change agents in their families, their workplaces, and in society, all of the contributors have written about and engaged in feminist and social justice activism. Finally, these diverse essays point to instructive and essential realities about women’s lives, the field of women.