Three Lessons from the History of a Book

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 759-764
Author(s):  
Eric Slauter
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unintended Consequence ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Latino Identity ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Printed Materials

How Do Printed Objects Help Political Subjects Make and Remake Worlds? This is One of the Central Questions Animating Raúl Coronado's brilliant book A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. I believe Coronado is one of the most gifted and imaginative literary scholars working today. What is more rare, his writing is both provocative and a pleasure to read. Casting himself as a genealogist, he deploys previously little-known printed materials to tell a dramatic story, and he tells it with a narrative confidence seldom seen in studies that rely, as his ultimately does, so heavily on the close reading of texts.In a series of discontinuous but deeply contextualized studies situated on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States, advancing from the 1810s to the 1850s and taking readers at times much further back (into, say, the diffusion of scholastic thought), Coronado traces a history of foreclosed revolutionary possibilities, of discursive dead ends and epistemological ruptures, and of the failure of communities to become anything but imagined. He probes understudied people, texts, and episodes for what they can tell us about the complex processes of the experience of modernization—and by modernization he means the major movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for republicanism, capitalism, individualism, secularism, and nationalism. He uses this discontinuous narrative also to arrest what he takes to be a misguided quest among some in his field for a different kind of genealogy: an unbroken lineage of Latino identity and subjectivity that centers on resistance. Instead, he narrates the making of a people as the unintended consequence of individuals who had hoped and failed to make a nation.

The Black Legend of Texas

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 735-742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Brickhouse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Foundational Work

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).

Immigration, Jesuit Higher Education, and the Undocumented

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt Schlichting
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Jesuit Education ◽  
Jesuit Higher Education ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
History Of Migration

This chapter traces the history of migration to the United States starting in the 1500s, and discusses the role of religious institutions, including Jesuit colleges starting in the early 1800s, in providing for the needs of recent immigrants. Throughout American history, immigrants have arrived in “waves,” leaving their homelands and undertaking the arduous journey to the promised land. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the journey involved a long voyage across the oceans in frail wooden ships, navigated by the sun and stars. Today the voyage may be by foot through the Americas or on a crowded jet airplane, but the challenge remains: to venture and then adjust to a new life in a new world. At Jesuit campuses, the undocumented immigrants follow in the footsteps of generations of immigrants and their children from various European countries. These new immigrants believe that a Jesuit education is the key to achieving their American dream and the dreams of their parents.

What Price Sugar? Land, Labor, and Revolution

2008 ◽  
Vol 81 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-84
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Littlefield
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

[First paragraph]Sugar, Slavery, and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United States. Bernard Moitt (ed.). Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. vii + 203 pp. (Cloth US $ 65.00)Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 347 pp. (Paper US $ 22.50)These two books illustrate the fascination that sugar, slavery, and the plantation still exercise over the minds of scholars. One of them also reflects an interest in the influence these have had on the modern world. For students of the history of these things the Schwartz collection is in many ways the more useful. It seeks to fill a lacuna left by the concentration of monographs on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that we know less about the history of sugar than we thought we did. Perhaps in no other single place is such a range of information on so wide an area presented in such detail for so early a period. Ranging from Iberia to the Caribbean and including consumption as well as production of sugar, with a nod to the slave trade and a very useful note on weights and currencies, this volume is a gold mine of information. It considers (briefly) the theoretical meaning as well as the growing of this important crop, contrasting its production in Iberia with that on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, colonized by Iberian powers, and continuing the contrast with São Tomé, off the coast of Africa, and on to Brazil and the Spanish American empire before ending with the British in Barbados. In the transit, it of necessity considers and complicates the meaning of “sugar revolution” and shows how scholars using that term do not always mean the same thing. John McCusker and Russell Menard, for example, tackling a cornerstone of the traditional interpretation of the development of sugar, argue that there was no “sugar revolution” in Barbados; economic change had already begun before sugar’s advent, though sugar may have accelerated it, and yet sugar production was transformed on the island. They also undercut, without quite denying, the significance of the Dutch role in the process. Schwartz, while questioning, lings to the traditional expression if not the traditional outlook, seeing in Barbados “the beginning of the sugar revolution” (p. 10).

Health and Health Systems in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Parin Dossa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Beliefs ◽  
Clinical Care ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Muslims ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
American Society ◽  
Health Beliefs And Practices

The long history of Islam in the United States is not well understood. The first Muslims to come to this country were African slaves followed by Muslims from the Ottoman Empire. As time went by, other Muslims from different parts of the world followed suit. Today, Muslims form part of the sociocultural and religious diversity of US society. A unique feature of this community is its diversity, a function of different schools of thought as well as different migration trajectories in terms of ethnicity, gender, age, class, and countries of origin. Its diversity has generated a rich body of knowledge on health care that can enrich the American biomedical model. Yet, this knowledge has been subjugated and remains unrecognized owing to structural exclusion of Muslims exacerbated by 9/11. The aim of this article is to highlight health beliefs and practices of American Muslims with the view to recognizing their contribution to American society, leading to greater acceptance of this community. In sum, beyond addressing systemic exclusion, it is important to recognize that American Muslims have a long history and richness in understanding health in diverse sociocultural milieus in Islam that can and should be recognized in clinical care.

Teaching Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and the Diamond Sutra

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-172
Author(s):  
Darin Pradittatsanee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Buddhist Text ◽  
History Of

The essay discusses Jack Kerouac’s use of the Diamond Sutra, a major Buddhist text grounding his composition of The Dharma Bums. In addition to a close reading of how the sutra is incorporated in the novel, the essay also presents a brief history of Buddhism in the United States.

Edward W. Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the ‘Color Complex’

1992 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 669-684 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. C. Echeruo
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Experience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Color Complex ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind

This article is an attempt to present (and thereby to come to terms with) an important aspect of the meaning of race as it relates to the experience of black people, especially in America. It commences with Edward W. Blyden because his ‘color complex’ is of a kind that brings us back, not without much embarrassment, to the realisation that while colour may be a state of the mind, it is also and even primarily a matter of the body. Blyden is particularly appropriate as a starting point, for he is an epitome, in many ways, of the African experience in the later nineteenth century, linking (as he does) the multiple experiences of the Caribbean, the United States, and mainland Africa. He wrote at a time when the intellectual and other currents in ‘Negro’ America flowed easily to the new centres of influence in Liberia and colonial West Africa. He was thus the product of the history of Africanity in his period, and for a long time after.

scholarly journals “The Girl Had a Shadow”

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia R. Mager
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

In this research paper, I examine how Jordan Peele’s film Us (2019) fits into the genre of a modern “Black Gothic.” I analyze how Peele uses imagery, character construction, and social references to construct a modern Black Gothic film that considers the intense history of oppression and silencing of groups on the basis of their race and class in the United States. I use the foundational definitions and examples provided by Maisha Wester and Sheri-Marie Harrison to argue how Us fits into and further modernizes the Black Gothic genre, as well as examining how Peele’s imagery contributes to the horror and the social commentary of the film. Ultimately, this paper provides a close reading of the whole film as a part of a larger conversation around how the historical and modern oppression of Black individuals and communities is embedded into the very foundation of the United States as a nation.

Introduction to Student Voice in American Education Policy

2015 ◽  
Vol 117 (13) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerusha O. Conner ◽  
Rachel Ebby-Rosin ◽  
Amanda S. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Education Policy ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Student Voice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come

This introduction sets up the volume by defining student voice, reviewing the philosophical and theoretical warrants for it, briefly summarizing the history of the movement in the United States, and synthesizing extant research on the topic. It also explains the tripartite structure of the book (Discovering, Developing, and Demonstrating the Power of Student Voice) and previews the chapters to come. The student voice initiatives analyzed in this volume represent a powerful new model of education reform—one in which students assume an active, integral role. No longer can students be cast simply as the targets of educational policies and the passive beneficiaries of educational processes. As students across the country add their voices to policy debates and assume critical roles as educational innovators, analysts, researchers, and agents of change—not just in their schools, but on local, state, and national stages—they are shaping education policy in powerful ways. Though student voice may be a trendy term in some educational circles, these students’ efforts to make their schools and the school system more responsive to their needs show student voice to be both a serious and a significant reform strategy.

"Consider that it is a Raid on the Path of God": The Spiritual Manual of the Attackers of 9/11

Numen ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Kippenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Political Center ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Early Islamic

AbstractThe document found with three of the four cells responsible for the crimes of 9/11 is unique in providing specific information about how the Muslim suicide terrorists conceived of their action. The document shows that they found justification for violence by emulating the moment in early Islamic history when Muhammad cancelled contracts with non-Muslims and organized raids (ghazwa) against the Meccans in order to establish Islam as a political order. No statement in the Manual explicitly identifies the United States as the financial, military, and political center of today's paganism; rather, such identification is tacitly assumed, as was shown by the action itself. Instead, the Manual prescribes recitations, prayers and rituals by which each member of the four cells should prepare for the ghazwa, purify his intention and anticipate in his mind the successive stages of the struggle to come. Not the objective aim but the subjective intention is at the center of the Manual. The article places this type of justification of violence in the history of Islamic activism since the 1980s.

The Voyage Home

2018 ◽  
pp. 237-260
Author(s):  
Alasdair Pettinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Shipping Company ◽  
William Lloyd Garrison ◽  
To Come ◽  
New Phase ◽  
Distinctive Role

Through a close reading of Douglass’s farewell speech in London, the newspaper coverage of the racist discrimination he faced once again from the Cunard shipping company, and his subsequent account of the episode, this chapter shows how Douglass returned to the United States, equipped with the skills and confidence to embark on a new phase of his career, breaking away with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison with a strong sense of his own, distinctive, role in the antislavery struggle to come.

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