GROUPS OF JUDAEANS AND CHRISTIANS - (R.) Last, (P.A.) Harland Group Survival in the Ancient Mediterranean. Rethinking Material Conditions in the Landscape of Jews and Christians. Pp. x + 229, ills. London and New York: T&T Clark, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Cased, £85, US$115. ISBN: 978-0-5676-5748-0.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Rollens
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Group Survival ◽  
Material Conditions

Homeless shelters and the blues

2022 ◽  
pp. 026377582110675
Author(s):  
Christian D Siener
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Homeless Shelters ◽  
Homeless Shelter ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Emergent Structure ◽  
Material Conditions

In this article, I analyze the emergence of New York City’s infrastructure of homeless shelters dialectically, relationally, and historically. The members of Boogie Down Productions met in an incipient New York City homeless shelter in the mid-1980s. Their relationship and music is a window into a critical political consciousness of men living in homeless shelters because the artists gave expression to an emergent structure of feeling of resistance taking hold during intense changes to New York’s political economy and its institutions. The paper first analyzes homeless policy and infrastructural change through a reading of archival sources and government reports and documents. The second section understands oral histories conducted with men living in a New York City homeless shelter as blues geographies—insurgent, critical explanations of these institutional spaces. Shelter residents actively challenge the material conditions, relations, and values that produce homeless shelters as essential instruments of the carceral state. I argue that they activate this resistance to the naturalization of shelters, and themselves as homeless, by narrating carceral spaces as abolitionist spaces.

Rediasporization

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Richards-Greaves
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
Friday Evening ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Survival ◽  
Traditional Performance ◽  
Bride Price

This book examines how African-Guyanese in New York City participate in the Come to My Kwe-Kwe ritual to facilitate rediasporization, that is, the creation of a newer diaspora from an existing one. Since the fall of 2005, African-Guyanese in New York City have celebrated Come to My Kwe-Kwe (more recently called Kwe-Kwe Night) on the Friday evening before Labor Day. Come to My Kwe-Kwe is a reenactment of a uniquely African-Guyanese pre-wedding ritual called kweh-kweh, and sometimes referred to as karkalay, mayan, kweh-keh, and pele. A typical traditional (wedding-based) kweh-kweh has approximately ten ritual segments, which include the pouring of libation to welcome or appease the ancestors; a procession from the groom’s residence to the bride’s residence or central kweh-kweh venue; the hiding of the bride; and the negotiation of bride price. Each ritual segment is executed with music and dance, which allow for commentary on conjugal matters, such as sex, domestication, submissiveness, and hard work. Come to My Kwe-Kwe replicates the overarching segments of the traditional kweh-kweh, but a couple (male and female) from the audience acts as the bride and groom, and props simulate the boundaries of the traditional performance space, such as the gate and the bride’s home. This book draws on more than a decade of ethnographic research data and demonstrates how Come to My Kwe-Kwe allows African-Guyanese-Americans to negotiate complex, overlapping identities in their new homeland, by combining elements from the past and present and reinterpreting them to facilitate rediasporization and ensure group survival.

Consecration and Materiality

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-158
Author(s):  
Fiona R. Greenland
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Formation Mechanisms ◽  
Archival Data ◽  
Media Campaigns ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Ancient Monuments ◽  
Ancient Monument ◽  
The Town

This article focuses on a case of failed consecration: the Egyptian obelisk in New York’s Central Park, commonly known as Cleopatra’s Needle. The obelisk arrived in New York from Alexandria in 1880, with great fanfare. For a brief period, it was the talk of the town: a tourist curiosity and star of advertising campaigns for consumer goods. After an initial surge in public visibility, the monument’s prominence faded. Today, the obelisk is not on the list of New York’s top cultural attractions, and no longer features in media campaigns or political rallies. I ask why the obelisk’s initial popularity failed to crystallize into an enduring condition of consecration. To answer this question, I use archival data to chart the obelisk’s transfer of ownership and planned move, through its Central Park début and subsequent decline in cultural salience. The obelisk met key criteria associated with successful cases of retrospective consecration. What weakened the obelisk’s career were lack of consecrating institutions and inherently unstable material conditions. These mechanisms are symbiotically related: because no institution took responsibility for conserving and protecting the obelisk, its granite face rapidly deteriorated and frustrated attempts to attract potential consecrating institutions. The article makes a twofold contribution to the literature on retrospective consecration. First, by discussing a failed case, it highlights the linked efficacy of consecration formation mechanisms. Second, in focusing on an ancient monument, it demonstrates the role played by materials and the specific measures of consecration that obtain in the broader sphere of ancient monuments.

Talent on Strike: The Musicians’ Union and the Early Agonies of the Creative Class

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-36
Author(s):  
Rachel Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Internal Structure ◽  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
Creative Class ◽  
Creative Economy ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
The Face ◽  
Mutual Obligation ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Low Wages

Abstract In November 1865, the membership of New York City's Musical Mutual Protective Union went on strike. Spurred by low wages and professional disrespect, union men came together around an ensemble ethic emphasizing mutual obligation among players. This powerful code of conduct—enforced through the union's internal structure and the musicians’ employment model—sustained several weeks of strike action in the face of public indifference. It also pushed musicians to close their ranks and ensured the homogeneity of the orchestra pit. The strike invites us to historicize the “creative economy,” with equal attention to the material conditions of workers and the durable conceptual categories created by the culture industries.

scholarly journals Variation in the Duration of Survival of Patients with Acute Leukemia

Blood ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 683-693 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN MACMAHON ◽  
DONALD FORMAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Acute Leukemia ◽  
Average Duration ◽  
Cell Type ◽  
Blood Cell Count ◽  
Duration Of Symptoms ◽  
Group Survival ◽  
The Mean ◽  
One Year

Abstract Survey of records of 34 Brooklyn hospitals and of selected hospitals elsewhere in New York City revealed records of 623 white residents of Brooklyn diagnosed as having acute leukemia during the period 1943-52. Diagnosis was on the basis of marrow biopsy or autopsy in 79 per cent. Date of death was known for 96 per cent. Almost half of these patients died within one month of diagnosis, and three quarters before the end of the third month. Ten per cent survived for 6 months and 3 per cent for one year. The mean interval between diagnosis and death was 2.4 months. The duration of survival after diagnosis was longer for the group of patients in whom the cell type was diagnosed as lymphocytic, than in those diagnosed as granulocytic. Percentage of patients surviving three months was also significantly higher in the lymphocytic than in the granulocytic group. Average duration of survival was almost twice as long for patients in the first decade as for those in any subsequent age group. Survival was shorter for patients in whom the total white blood cell count taken at diagnosis was high. Duration of survival after diagnosis increased with increasing duration of symptoms prior to diagnosis. This suggests another limitation to the use for prognostic purposes of the interval between onset of symptoms and death. No association of survival with sex, religion or ABO blood group was detected.

scholarly journals In the “Fissures of Infrastructure”

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-158
Author(s):  
Kate Lewis Hood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
The United States ◽  
Protection Agency ◽  
Federal Intervention ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Indigenous Poetry ◽  
Poetic Work

Abstract This article offers an account of “toxic infrastructures” as mutually material and discursive arrangements operating in the postwar, postcrash, and settler colonial landscapes of the United States. It specifically responds to Jennifer Scappettone’s multimodal poetic work The Republic of Exit 43, developed after the author’s discovery that the industrial landfill site she grew up alongside in New York had been classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as requiring federal intervention. Tracing Scappettone’s poetic geographies from the “corporate dump” of Syosset Landfill to the more (in)famous waste site Fresh Kills, the article argues that Scappettone exposes the ways that certain bodies and ecologies are rendered physically and conceptually toxic and implicates readers in the uneven social, embodied, and ecological conditions of composition and response. It suggests that Scappettone’s practices of collage, salvage, and collaborative performance destabilize lyric subjectivity to address a “garbage arcadia” compounding the material accumulations of US consumerism and neoliberal financialization with longer processes of dispossession and displacement. Reading this text with feminist materialisms and Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s queer Indigenous poetry, the article considers how poetics might reckon with the material conditions and residues of uneven wasting and generate situated, critical, and relational approaches to toxic infrastructures.

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