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Rhetorical Economies of Whiteness examines the interplay of rhetoric, whiteness, and economics-attending not only to how economic arrangements that sustain whiteness are rhetorically enacted and legitimated but also to how rhetoric itself operates as an economy to give identities exchange value. Case studies across the volume illustrate how economic and class structures incentivize adherence to whiteness as both an identity formation and a form of symbolic capital. Some contributors investigate issues of public policy-analyzing judicial appointments, housing, and education-while others explore intersections of politics, sports, news and entertainment media, and culture. Wide-ranging, complementary methods-textual and discourse analysis, archival approaches, ethnographic interviewing and focus groups, personal narratives and storytelling-exemplify the insights gleaned from different approaches to studying intersections of race and economics across and within societies. Taken together, these essays help to explain how whiteness so quickly adapts to evade antiracist challenges and why investments in whiteness are so difficult to dislodge.Contributors:Godfried Asante, Robert Asen, Charles Athanasopoulos, Paulami Banerjee, Anne Bonds, Linsay M. Cramer, Derek G. Handley, V. Jo Hsu, Kelly Jensen, Casey Ryan Kelly, Kyle R. Larson, George (Guy) F. McHendry Jr., Thomas K. Nakayama, Adedoyin Ogunfeyimi, Rico Self, Stacey K. Sowards, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino

Rhetorical Economies of Whiteness examines the interplay of rhetoric, whiteness, and economics-attending not only to how economic arrangements that sustain whiteness are rhetorically enacted and legitimated but also to how rhetoric itself operates as an economy to give identities exchange value. Case studies across the volume illustrate how economic and class structures incentivize adherence to whiteness as both an identity formation and a form of symbolic capital. Some contributors investigate issues of public policy-analyzing judicial appointments, housing, and education-while others explore intersections of politics, sports, news and entertainment media, and culture. Wide-ranging, complementary methods-textual and discourse analysis, archival approaches, ethnographic interviewing and focus groups, personal narratives and storytelling-exemplify the insights gleaned from different approaches to studying intersections of race and economics across and within societies. Taken together, these essays help to explain how whiteness so quickly adapts to evade antiracist challenges and why investments in whiteness are so difficult to dislodge.Contributors:Godfried Asante, Robert Asen, Charles Athanasopoulos, Paulami Banerjee, Anne Bonds, Linsay M. Cramer, Derek G. Handley, V. Jo Hsu, Kelly Jensen, Casey Ryan Kelly, Kyle R. Larson, George (Guy) F. McHendry Jr., Thomas K. Nakayama, Adedoyin Ogunfeyimi, Rico Self, Stacey K. Sowards, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino

In Women at Odds, Riya Das demonstrates the limitations of female solidarity for the New Woman in Victorian society. On the one hand, feminist antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways, and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, the urban professional New Woman's rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically-what Das terms "retro-progressively"-into the labor pool of the British empire. While foregrounding the figure of the New Woman as a white imperialist reformer, Das illustrates how the New Woman movement detaches itself from the domestic politics of female friendship. In works by George Eliot, George Gissing, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, and others, antagonism and indifference enable the fin de siècle New Woman to transcend traditionally defined roles and fashion social progress for herself at the expense of femininities she excludes as "other." By contesting the critical notion of solidarity as the only force that brings Victorian women's narratives to fruition, Women at Odds reveals the troubled but effective role of antagonistic and indifferent reformist politics in loosening rigid social structures for privileged populations.

In Refiguring Race and Risk, Roberta Wolfson turns to novels, memoirs, and other cultural works to debunk the false sense of national security rooted in positioning people of color as embodiments of risk. Considering output by Miné Okubo, Sanyika Shakur, Abraham Verghese, Khaled Hosseini, Helena María Viramontes, and others, Wolfson demonstrates how these authors disrupt racist security regimes and model alternative strategies for managing risk by crafting stories of collective care and community building. Chapters discuss, among other examples, how gang members defy the mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans by committing to self-education and self-advocacy; how an Asian immigrant doctor offers a corrective to the pandemic-era trend of allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions by providing human-centered medical services to HIV-positive patients; and how Latinx migrant farmworkers battle ongoing precarity amid the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by bartering life-sustaining resources. In revealing how these works cultivate love as a mode of political resistance, Wolfson relabels people of color not as a source of risk but as critical actors in the push to improve national security.

As old worlds become hostile and new spaces become hospitable, many species are shifting their ranges to live in locations where they have never previously existed. Biological and sociocultural realms collide and boundaries blur, making it increasingly difficult to mark definitively who belongs and who is a trespasser. In Trespassing Natures, Donnie Johnson Sackey troubles the idea of biological "invasion," turning our attention away from scientific considerations and toward the discursive and rhetorical dimensions of this term--offering a new paradigm that recasts this issue as a question of what it means to live in multi-species communities. Presenting case studies on bed bugs, bighead carp, feral cats, and mackerel, Sackey argues that the identification of a species as an invader is not merely a scientific act, but a cultural and political one. By questioning issues around space, identity, and the institutions that make human participation apparent, Sackey redirects focus away from the belief that a single species threatens space. Ultimately, Trespassing Natures asks us to expand our idea of community and question who has the right to space.

From the founding of the United States, enduringly consequential debates over Indigeneity and immigration have occurred on the battlefield and in Congress, in courtrooms, at territorial borders, and in mainstream culture. In Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire, Leah Perry traces the ways that the US created its empire through public pedagogies--which she defines as policy and media discourses--surrounding Indigenous dispossession, gendered state violence, and racialized immigration. These pedagogies have propelled the expansion of US empire, including the redrawing of the US as a neoliberal democracy. Perry argues that by changing the discourse around gender, race, immigration, and Indigeneity, the United States has continued its imperial project through different eras, always predicated on Indigenous dispossession. In exploring crucial components of empire, such as welfare, eugenics, disability, sexual violence, foodways, queerness, and policing, Perry interrogates violence against Indigenous peoples and against immigrants, examining these not independently--as is so often the case--but as co-constitutive. Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire thus intervenes in and fills a gap in immigration studies, Indigenous studies, race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and US history.

The player is a womanizer, a trickster, a gambler-but can Asian American men fully participate in this kind of masculinity? In Asian American Players, Audrey Wu Clark showcases how the literary figure of the Asian American player unsettles the hegemony of white American masculinity through mimicry, even as that masculinity socially and politically alienates him. She examines gendered and racialized US militarism through works written during major postmodern American wars, investigating how books by John Okada, David Henry Hwang, Chang-rae Lee, Frances Khirallah Noble, and Viet Thanh Nguyen (re)fashion Asian American masculinity in ways that ultimately mimic masculinist American foreign policy and military strategies during corresponding wars. She unearths a dual picture of Asian American players: as traces of the anxiety of America's quest for empowerment and continued military and industrial dominance in the international arena and as those tarred as inferior and disloyal outsiders within this mirrored global dominance. She thus finds new inroads into understanding US imperialism and militarism and identifies ways that key literary figures have written against insidious tropes.

In nineteenth-century Britain, the word queer was associated not only with same-sex desire but also with irregular forms of financial association and trust. Queer Economic Dissonance and Victorian Literature centers this forgotten facet of queer by recovering an alternative economic narrative of the Victorian period: one of economic excess, waste, debt, and downward mobility. Drawing on insights from intersectional queer theory and economic literary criticism, as well as astute readings of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Seacole, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, Meg Dobbins argues that eccentric economic figures like Black entrepreneurs, childless widows, and working-class benefactors represent sites of queerness--forms of economic desire, identity, strategy, or relation that become sites of friction within the developing social and institutional norms of nineteenth-century capitalism. Dobbins argues that Victorian authors document the everyday economic struggles of those cast aside, left behind, and fundamentally transfigured by modern capitalism. Rather than rejecting capitalist ideology, these authors queer socioeconomic norms, shedding light on the provocative ways Victorians made capitalism livable, and even pleasurable. In this way, Queer Economic Dissonance rearticulates the link between erotic and economic forms of dissonance in capitalist society.

Until recently, the embodied hand has paradoxically escaped the notice of nineteenth-century cultural and literary historians precisely because of its centrality. The essays in Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka's new collection, Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies, join an emerging body of work that seeks to remedy this. Casting new light on an array of well-known authors-Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde-the volume explores the role of the hand as a nexus between culture and physical embodiment. The contributors to this volume address a wide range of manual topics and concerns, including those related to religion, medicine, science, industry, paranormal states, language, digital humanities, law, photography, disability, and art history. Examining hands, language, materiality, and agency, these contributors employ their expertise as Victorianists in order to understand what hands have to tell us about the cultural preoccupations of the nineteenth century and how the unique conditions of Britain at the time shaped the modern emergence of our cultural relationship with our hands. Contributors James Eli Adams, Karen Bourrier, Aviva Briefel, Peter J. Capuano, Jonathan Cheng, Kate Flint, Pamela K. Gilbert, Tamara Ketabgian, J. Hillis Miller, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Daniel A. Novak, Julianne Smith, Herbert F. Tucker, and Sue Zemka

A marginalized but persistent figure of Greek tragedy, Niobe, whose many children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, embodies yet problematizes the philosophically charged dialectics between life and death, mourning and melancholy, animation and inanimation, silence and logos. The essays in Niobes present her as a set of complex figurations, an elusive mythical character but also an overdetermined figure who has long exerted a profound influence on various modes of modern thought, especially in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics. As a symbol of both exclusion and resistance, Niobe calls for critical attention at a time of global crisis. Reconstructing the dialogues of Phillis Wheatley, G. W. F. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and others with Niobe as she appears in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ovid, and the visual arts, a collective of major thinkers-classicists, art historians, and critical theorists-reflect on the space that she can occupy in the humanities today. Inspiring new ways of connecting the classical tradition and ancient tragic discourse with crises and political questions relating to gender, race, and social justice, Niobe insists on living on. Contributors: Barbara Baert, Andrew Benjamin, drea brown, Adriana Cavarero, Rebecca Comay, Mildred Galland-Szymkowiak, John T. Hamilton, Paul A. Kottman, Jacques Lezra, Andres Matlock, Ben Radcliffe, Victoria Rimell, Mario Telò, Mathura Umachandran, Daniel Villegas Vélez

Mako Yoshikawa's father, Shoichi, was a man of contradictions. He grew up fabulously wealthy in prewar Japan but spent his final years living in squalor; he was a proper Japanese man who craved society's approval yet cross-dressed; he was a brilliant Princeton University physicist and renowned nuclear fusion researcher, yet his career withered as his severe bipolar disorder tightened its grip. And despite his generosity and charisma, he was often violent and cruel toward those closest to him. Yoshikawa adored him, feared him, and eventually cut him out of her life, but after he died, she was driven to try to understand this extraordinarily complex man. In Secrets of the Sun, her search takes her through everything from the Asian American experience of racism to her father's dedication to fusion energy research, from mental illness to the treatment of women in Japan, and more. Yoshikawa gradually discovers a life filled with secrets, searching until someone from her father's past at last provides the missing piece in her knowledge: the story of his childhood. Secrets of the Sun is about a daughter's mission to uncover her father's secrets and to find closure in the shadow of genius, mental illness, and violence.

Slowness is frequently seen as a response to modernity's cult of speed and efficiency, and its influence in contemporary culture can be felt in artistic trends such as "slow cinema" or "slow TV." Despite the popularity of these labels, however, slowness remains undertheorized in contemporary narrative scholarship. What makes a narrative slow, and what conceptual and analytical tools are best suited to account for this slowness? Is slowness a feature of certain narratives, an experiential response to these narratives, or both? How is narrative slowness related to the pace and rhythm of plot, and how does it carry cultural significance?Slow Narrative across Media illuminates the concept of slow narrative and demonstrates how it manifests across media forms: from short stories to novel cycles, to comics, to music, to experimental film. Led by editors Marco Caracciolo and Ella Mingazova, contributors draw on cognitive and rhetorical approaches to narrative as well as on econarratology to bring into focus both the media-specific ways in which narrative evokes slowness and the usefulness of a transmedial approach to this phenomenon.Contributors:Jan Baetens, Raphaël Baroni, Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Karin Kukkonen, Ella Mingazova, Peggy Phelan, Greice Schneider, Roy Sommer, Carolien Van Nerom, Gary Weissman

Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance is the first major study to explore the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) in Victorian literature and art. As the Bible's only erotic poem, the Song of Songs is the canonical Judeo-Christian book about love, furnishing the Victorians with an authoritative and literary language for love, marriage, sex, mourning, and religious celibacy. Duc Dau adopts a queer and feminist lens to consider how Victorians employed and interpreted the Song of Songs in their work. How did writers and artists fashion and, most importantly, challenge the norms of gender, romantic love, and marriage? Spanning the early Victorian era through the first two decades of the twentieth century, Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance considers the works of Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Gray, Michael Field, Edward Burne-Jones, and Simeon Solomon alongside two lesser-known figures: Irish-born Scottish artist Phoebe Anna Traquair and the Catholic religious leader Augusta Theodosia Drane. By addressing the relevance of the Song of Songs in light of shifting and conflicting religious and social contexts, Dau provides a fresh perspective on Victorian literature, religion, and culture.

Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an accidental immigrant. The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents-including a father who worked as a translator-meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator's Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.

Margaret Charles Smith, a ninety-one-year-old Alabama midwife, has thousands of birthing stories to tell. Sifting through nearly five decades of providing care for women in rural Greene County, she relates the tales that capture the life-and-death struggle of the birthing experience and the traditions, pharmacopeia, and spiritual attitudes that influenced her practice. She debunks images of the complacent southern "granny" midwife and honors the determination, talent, and complexity of midwifery.Fascinating to read, this book is part of the new genre of writing that recognizes the credibility of midwives who have emerged from their own communities and were educated through apprenticeship and personal experience. Past descriptions of southern black midwives have tended to denigrate their work in comparison with professional established medicine. Believed to be the oldest living (though retired) traditional African American midwife in Alabama, Smith is one of the few who can recount old-time birthing ways. Despite claims that midwives contributed to high infant mortality rates, Smith's story emphasizes midwives' successes in facing medical challenges and emergencies.