Life in a Shatter Zone: Debra Granik's Film Winter's Bone
...and film versions of Winter’s Bone. In the earlier novel various members of the Dolly family also appear as characters, but there they conform fairly closely to comic stereotype, as...
Ecologies of the Sacred: A Review of Valérie Loichot's Water Graves
...so-called "rationality" and "civilization" implicitly accompany its evocation. Explicitly deconstructing the history and usage of "humanity" while signaling a plurality of humanities would not only eliminate the tension created by...
Jim Crow Journeys: An Excerpt from Traveling Black
...it among the colored passengers." The food they sent, Pickens noted bitterly, only added "indigestion to insult." For seventy-five cents, you could get "a quarter of an impenetrable dried hen...
Nowhere [yet Everywhere] in the World: Cuban History and Sexuality in the Dramas of Abel González Melo
...Cuban history: the mentally ill were directly considered scum, unwanted by society, alongside homosexuals and convicts), although the truth of the matter was that the family wanted to get rid...
Still Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease
...critical attention to occupational safety and health. Originally and essentially, however, the black lung movement was a struggle over the recognition and, more implicitly, causation of an occupational disease. What...
Living with the Ghosts of Queer Pasts
Blog Post I recently bought a crumbling old house in a historically gay neighborhood in Roanoke, Virginia. I met my ex-lover in this house five years ago. At the time...
Along the Ulcofauhatche: Of Sorrow Songs and "Dried Indian Creek"
...told, this early spectacle lynching was staged as a warning to Native and enslaved Black people that any challenge to white rule would be swiftly and violently put down. We...
New Adventures in Tandem Ethnography
...century. He began with a family tree project that quickly became a collection of family photos, which began to amass heirlooms, furniture, machinery, and local publications dating back to the...
Spectacles of American Nationalism: The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama Painting and The Birth of a Nation
...until their commercial appeal declined precipitously.85Fruitema and Zoetmulder, The Panorama Phenomenon, 28. The mammoth canvases were particularly vulnerable to rapidly increasing competition from motion pictures. Movies were more easily distributed...
Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations
...of Cuba—the region which this book focuses on—many were only partially free. They had paid a portion of the price for their manumission while continuing to do some work for...