Book News: Uniting art, writing, and protest in the 1960s Black Arts Movement

Start a Riot!

Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement 

Drama, Fiction, and Poetry

BY CASARAE LAVADA ABDUL-GHANI

30% off during February

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496840455

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Start-a-Riot

While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent 1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses, scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic writings.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Start a Riot! Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement Drama, Fiction, and Poetry analyzes riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ben Caldwell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Henry Dumas challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings. Representations of riots became more pronounced in the 1960s as pivotal leaders shaping Black consciousness, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. , were assassinated. BAM artist-writers sought to override the public's interpretation in their literary exposés that a riot’s disjointed and disorderly methods led to more chaos than reparative justice.

Start a Riot! uncovers how BAM artist-writers expose anti-Black racism and, by extension, the United States' inability to compromise with Black America on matters related to citizenship rights, housing (in)security, economic inequality, and education—tenets emphasized during the Black Power Movement. Abdul-Ghani argues that BAM artist-writers did not merely write literature that reflected a spirit of protest; in many cases, they understood their texts, themselves, as acts of protest.

"Start a Riot! will forge new directions in the study of art, political activism, and contemporary African American culture. Analyzing neglected or overlooked texts, Abdul-Ghani unveils the recurrent attention to the idea of the riot and sheds light on the complexity of thought during the Black Arts era, proving we might not know the Black Arts Movement and its key texts as well as we thought. "

-- GerShun Avilez, author of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani is a scholar of African American literary cultural studies and owner of Africana Instructional Design.

Book News: The narrowed politics of form in contemporary literature

 Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature

BY MITCHUM HUEHLS

Ohio State UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1524-1

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215241.html

Can form be political? Do specific aesthetic and literary forms necessarily point us toward a progressive or reactionary politics? Artists, authors, and critics like to imagine so, but what happens when they lose control of the politics of their forms? In Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature, Mitchum Huehls argues that art’s interest in revolution did not end with the twentieth century, as some critics would have it, but rather that the relationship between literary forms and politics has been severed, resulting in a twenty-first century investment in forms of generality such as genre, gesture, constructivism, and abstraction. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Focusing on three particular domains (art, theory, and revolution) in which the relationship between form and politics has collapsed, Huehls shows how twenty-first-century US fiction writers such as Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rachel Kushner, Salvador Plascencia, and Sheila Heti are turning to forms of generality that lead us toward a more modest, ad hoc, context-dependent way to think about the politics of form. The result is the first major study of generality in literature.

“With theoretical capaciousness, thematic timeliness, and rhetorical clarity, Art, Theory, Revolution makes a much-needed intervention into ongoing discussions about fictional realism, historical fiction, and political forms. In this way, Huehls promises to enliven debates about how novels possess their own political agency and contribute aesthetically to the making of theory.” —Alexandra Kingston-Reese, author of Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

“Huehls captures what’s exciting and unique about recent American fiction and remains clear-sighted despite dealing with difficult concepts in aesthetic theory, deconstructive thinking, and the politics of revolution. Art, Theory, Revolution breaks new ground in how we understand cultural production after postmodernism.” —Daniel Grausam, author of On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

Mitchum Huehls is associate professor in the Department of English at UCLA. He is the author of After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age and Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time and co-editor (with Rachel Greenwald Smith) of Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture.

Book News: British Fiction in the Turbulent 1970s

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

By J. RUSSELL PERKIN

McGill-Queen's UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780228006244

https://www.mqup.ca/politics-and-the-british-novel-in-the-1970s-products-9780228006244.php?page_id=73&

The 1970s in Britain saw a series of industrial disputes, a referendum on membership in the European Economic Community, conflict about issues of immigration and citizenship, and emergent environmental and feminist movements. It was also a decade of innovation in the novel, and novelists often addressed the state of the nation directly in their works.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

In Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s Russell Perkin looks at social novels by John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, the Cold War thrillers of John le Carré, Richard Adams's best-selling fable Watership Down, the popular campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Doris Lessing's dystopian visions, and V.S. Naipaul's explorations of post-colonial displacement. Many of these highly regarded works sold in large numbers and have enjoyed enduring success - a testament to the power of the political novel to explain a nation to itself. Perkin explores the connections between the novel and politics, situating the works it discusses in the rich context of the history and culture of the decade, from party politics to popular television shows.

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s elucidates a period of literary history now fifty years in the past and offers a balanced perspective on the age, revealing that these works not only represented the politics of the time but played a meaningful role in them.

"Russell Perkin's emphasis on the ways in which fiction reflects political currents and discussions in the 1970s offers an original and much-needed contribution to our understanding of this tumultuous and neglected period." Caroline Zoe Krzakowski, Northern Michigan University

J. Russell Perkin is professor of English at Saint Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Book News: Exploring Flann O'Brien's dark comedy

 Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour

EDITED BY RUBEN BORG AND PAUL FAGAN

Cork University Press, 2020

ISBN: 9781782054214

https://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Flann-O-Brien-p/9781782054214.htm

The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O’Brien’s art. The organizing theme of Gallows Humour focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death and the comic spirit in the author’s canon. These innovative analyses explore the place of biopolitics in O’Brien’s modernist experimentation and popular writing through reflections on his handling of the thematics of violence, justice, capital punishment, eugenics, prosthetics, skin, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, auto-immune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games, and masculinist nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Ruben Borg is associate professor and chair of the department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to Gallows Humour, he co-edited two volumes on Flann O’Brien for Cork University Press: Contesting Legacies (with Paul Fagan and Werner Huber: 2014), and Problems with Authority (with Paul Fagan and John McCourt: 2017).

Paul Fagan is senior scientist at Salzburg University, as well as a lecturer at the University of Vienna and co-founder of the Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theories Summer School. As well as co-editing the Cork University Press collections Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014) and Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017), Fagan is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society and is presently completing a monograph on the Irish Literary Hoax Tradition.

Book News: Examining "the crowd" in modern literature

Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd

BY JUDITH PALTIN  

Cambridge UP, December 2020

Hardback ISBN: 9781108842235

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/modernism-and-idea-crowd?format=HB

This book argues that modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities. Judith Paltin compares patterns of crowds in modernist Anglophone literature to historical arrangements and theories of democratic assembly to argue that an abstract construction of the crowd engages with the transformation of popular subjectivity from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with intersectional conditions of oppression and precarity. Modernist works, many of which were composed during the ascendancy of fascism and other populist politics claiming to be based on the action of the crowd, frequently stage the crowd as a primal scene for violence; at the same time, they posit a counterforce in more agile collective gatherings which clarify the changing relations in literary modernity between subjects and power.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Examines and analyzes crowds, political agency, and group performativity across a set of canonical and lesser known modernist works
• Offers a comprehensive anatomy of the social mind as theorized from within modernist studies, democracy studies, and literary studies
• Engages with a variety of period archives including fiction, drama, poetry, music, painting, newspapers, police and government records, published correspondence, manifestos, private writings, and exhibitions

Judith Paltin is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. She has published articles in the James Joyce Quarterly, The Conradian, Conradiana, The Wildean, and ISLE, and a chapter in Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (2019).

Book News: Restoring the radical potential of dialogue

Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent

By JUAN MENESES

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0676-4 

Cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-0675-7 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/resisting-dialogue

Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address.

Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works expose the pitfalls of other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene.  

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics. 

Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity.

— Grant Farred, Cornell University

Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quo—these immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political.

— Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic

Juan Meneses is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Linguistic Politics: JML 43.3 (Spring 2020) is now live

JML 43.3 (Spring 2020) on the theme “Linguistic Politics” is now live on JSTOR and on Project Muse.

Content includes the following:

Isabelle Parkinson
Democrat or “imbecile”? Gertrude Stein’s Useful Knowledge and Discourses of Intellectual Disability in the To-day and To-morrow Pamphlet Series
READ FOR FREE

Grant Scott
The Duplicity of the Word in Lynd Ward’s Vertigo (1937) 

Florian Gargaillo
Wistful Lies and Civil Virtues: Randall Jarrell on World War II Propaganda 

Jiang Yunqin
Dialectic of Desire and the Populist Subject in All the King’s Men

Rebecca Couch Steffy
Steve Benson’s “Views of Communist China”: Experimental Form and the Orientalist Trace 

Raymond Blake Stricklin
“I Have Nothing to Say” — John Cage, Biopower, and the Demilitarization of Language

Seth McKelvey
Unstate: Disarticulating State Knowledge and Joan Didion’s Democracy
READ FOR FREE

Alexander Hartley
Beckett’s Legal Scuffles and the Interpretation of the Plays

Tracy A. Stephens
Disrupting the Homoerotic Appeal of State Power in Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? 

Kirsten Sandrock
Border Temporalities, Climate Mobility, and Shakespeare in John Lanchester’s The Wall 

Elizabeth Scheer
When Artists Respond: Charles Andrews’s Writing Against War 

Daniel Rosenberg Nutters
Aesthetics and Politics Again?

Sean Weidman
Encountering Anew the Ghosts of Modernism