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34 books about Line
Below the Line
Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy
Vicki Mayer
Duke University Press, 2011
Below the Line illuminates the hidden labor of people who not only produce things that the television industry needs, such as a bit of content or a policy sound bite, but also produce themselves in the service of capital expansion. Vicki Mayer considers the work of television set assemblers, soft-core cameramen, reality-program casters, and public-access and cable commissioners in relation to the globalized economy of the television industry. She shows that these workers are increasingly engaged in professional and creative work, unsettling the industry’s mythological account of itself as a business driven by auteurs, manned by an executive class, and created by the talented few. As Mayer demonstrates, the new television economy casts a wide net to exploit those excluded from these hierarchies. Meanwhile, television set assemblers in Brazil devise creative solutions to the problems of material production. Soft-core videographers, who sell televised content, develop their own modes of professionalism. Everyday people become casters, who commodify suitable participants for reality programs, or volunteers, who administer local cable television policies. These sponsors and regulators boost media industries’ profits when they commodify and discipline their colleagues, their neighbors, and themselves. Mayer proposes that studies of production acknowledge the changing dynamics of labor to include production workers who identify themselves and their labor with the industry, even as their work remains undervalued or invisible.
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Bodies on the Line
Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading
Raphael Allison
University of Iowa Press, 2014
Bodies on the Line offers the first sustained study of the poetry reading in its most formative period: the 1960s. Raphael Allison closely examines a vast archive of audio recordings of several key postwar American poets to explore the social and literary context of the sixties poetry reading, which is characterized by contrasting differing styles of performance: the humanist style and the skeptical strain. The humanist style, made mainstream by the Beats and their imitators, is characterized by faith in the power of presence, emotional communion, and affect. The skeptical strain emphasizes openness of interpretation and multivalent meaning, a lack of stability or consistency, and ironic detachment.
By comparing these two dominant styles of reading, Allison argues that attention to sixties poetry readings reveals poets struggling between the kind of immediacy and presence that readings suggested and a private retreat from such performance-based publicity, one centered on the text itself. Recordings of Robert Frost, Charles Olson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Larry Eigner, and William Carlos Williams—all of whom emphasized voice, breath, and spoken language and who were inveterate professional readers in the sixties—expose this struggle in often surprising ways. In deconstructing assertions about the role and importance of the poetry reading during this period, Allison reveals just how dramatic, political, and contentious poetry readings could be. By discussing how to "hear" as well as "read" poetry, Bodies on the Line offers startling new vantage points from which to understand American poetry since the 1960s as both performance and text.
By comparing these two dominant styles of reading, Allison argues that attention to sixties poetry readings reveals poets struggling between the kind of immediacy and presence that readings suggested and a private retreat from such performance-based publicity, one centered on the text itself. Recordings of Robert Frost, Charles Olson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Larry Eigner, and William Carlos Williams—all of whom emphasized voice, breath, and spoken language and who were inveterate professional readers in the sixties—expose this struggle in often surprising ways. In deconstructing assertions about the role and importance of the poetry reading during this period, Allison reveals just how dramatic, political, and contentious poetry readings could be. By discussing how to "hear" as well as "read" poetry, Bodies on the Line offers startling new vantage points from which to understand American poetry since the 1960s as both performance and text.
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A Broken Thing
Poets on the Line
Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee
University of Iowa Press, 2011
In the arena of poetry and poetics over the past century, no idea has been more alive and contentious than the idea of form, and no aspect of form has more emphatically sponsored this marked formal concern than the line. But what, exactly, is the line? Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee’s anthology gives seventy original answers that lead us deeper into the world of poetry, but also far out into the world at large: its people, its politics, its ecology. The authors included here, emerging and established alike, write from a range of perspectives, in terms of both aesthetics and identity. Together, they offer a dynamic hybrid collection that captures a broad spectrum of poetic practice in the twenty-first century.
Rosko and Vander Zee’s introduction offers a generous overview of conversations about the line from the Romantics forward. We come to see how the line might be an engine for ideals of progress—political, ethical, or otherwise. For some poets, the line touches upon the most fundamental questions of knowledge and existence. More than ever, the line is the radical against which even alternate and emerging poetic forms that foreground the visual or the auditory, the page or the screen, can be distinguished and understood.
From the start, a singular lesson emerges: lines do not form meaning solely in their brevity or their length, in their becoming or their brokenness; lines live in and through the descriptions we give them. Indeed, the history of American poetry in the twentieth century could be told by the compounding, and often confounding, discussions of its lines. A Broken Thing both reflects upon and extends this history, charting a rich diffusion of theory and practice into the twenty-first century with the most diverse, wide-ranging and engaging set of essays to date on the line in poetry, revealing how poems work and why poetry continues to matter.
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Crossing over the Line
Legislating Morality and the Mann Act
David J. Langum
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Crossing over the Line describes the folly of the Mann Act of 1910—a United States law which made travel from one state to another by a man and a woman with the intent of committing an immoral act a major crime. Spawned by a national wave of "white slave trade" hysteria, the Act was created by the Congress of the United States as a weapon against forced prostitution.
This book is the first history of the Mann Act's often bizarre career, from its passage to the amendment that finally laid it low. In David J. Langum's hands, the story of the Act becomes an entertaining cautionary tale about the folly of legislating private morality.
Langum recounts the colorful details of numerous court cases to show how enforcement of the Act mirrored changes in America's social attitudes. Federal prosecutors became masters in the selective use of the Act: against political opponents of the government, like Charlie Chaplin; against individuals who eluded other criminal charges, like the Capone mobster "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn; and against black men, like singer Chuck Berry and boxer Jack Johnson, who dared to consort with white women. The Act engendered a thriving blackmail industry and was used by women like Frank Lloyd Wright's wife to extort favorable divorce settlements.
"Crossing over the Line is a work of scholarship as wrought by a civil libertarian, and the text . . . sizzles with the passion of an ardent believer in real liberty under reasonable laws."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
This book is the first history of the Mann Act's often bizarre career, from its passage to the amendment that finally laid it low. In David J. Langum's hands, the story of the Act becomes an entertaining cautionary tale about the folly of legislating private morality.
Langum recounts the colorful details of numerous court cases to show how enforcement of the Act mirrored changes in America's social attitudes. Federal prosecutors became masters in the selective use of the Act: against political opponents of the government, like Charlie Chaplin; against individuals who eluded other criminal charges, like the Capone mobster "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn; and against black men, like singer Chuck Berry and boxer Jack Johnson, who dared to consort with white women. The Act engendered a thriving blackmail industry and was used by women like Frank Lloyd Wright's wife to extort favorable divorce settlements.
"Crossing over the Line is a work of scholarship as wrought by a civil libertarian, and the text . . . sizzles with the passion of an ardent believer in real liberty under reasonable laws."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
[more]
Crossing the Line
Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
Gayle Wald
Duke University Press, 2000
As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires.
Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and
Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.”
Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.
Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and
Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.”
Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.
[more]
Cultural Boundaries of Science
Credibility on the Line
Thomas F. Gieryn
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Why is science so credible? Usual answers center on scientists' objective methods or their powerful instruments. In his new book, Thomas Gieryn argues that a better explanation for the cultural authority of science lies downstream, when scientific claims leave laboratories and enter courtrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms. On such occasions, we use "maps" to decide who to believe—cultural maps demarcating "science" from pseudoscience, ideology, faith, or nonsense.
Gieryn looks at episodes of boundary-work: Was phrenology good science? How about cold fusion? Is social science really scientific? Is organic farming? After centuries of disputes like these, Gieryn finds no stable criteria that absolutely distinguish science from non-science. Science remains a pliable cultural space, flexibly reshaped to claim credibility for some beliefs while denying it to others. In a timely epilogue, Gieryn finds this same controversy at the heart of the raging "science wars."
Gieryn looks at episodes of boundary-work: Was phrenology good science? How about cold fusion? Is social science really scientific? Is organic farming? After centuries of disputes like these, Gieryn finds no stable criteria that absolutely distinguish science from non-science. Science remains a pliable cultural space, flexibly reshaped to claim credibility for some beliefs while denying it to others. In a timely epilogue, Gieryn finds this same controversy at the heart of the raging "science wars."
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Dancing out of Line
Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture
Molly Engelhardt
Ohio University Press, 2009
Dancing out of Line transports readers back to the 1840s, when the craze for social and stage dancing forced Victorians into a complex relationship with the moving body in its most voluble, volatile form.
By partnering cultural discourses with representations of the dance and the dancer in novels such as Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Daniel Deronda, Molly Engelhardt makes explicit many of the ironies underlying Victorian practices that up to this time have gone unnoticed in critical circles. She analyzes the role of the illustrious dance master, who created and disseminated the manners and moves expected of fashionable society, despite his position as a social outsider of nebulous origins. She describes how the daughters of the social elite were expected to “come out” to society in the ballroom, the most potent space in the cultural imagination for licentious behavior and temptation. These incongruities generated new, progressive ideas about the body, subjectivity, sexuality, and health.
Engelhardt challenges our assumptions about Victorian sensibilities and attitudes toward the sexual/social roles of men and women by bringing together historical voices from various fields to demonstrate the versatility of the dance, not only as a social practice but also as a forum for Victorians to engage in debate about the body and its pleasures and pathologies.
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Desert Duty
On the Line with the U.S. Border Patrol
By Bill Broyles and Mark Haynes
University of Texas Press, 2010
While politicians and pundits endlessly debate immigration policy, U.S. Border Patrol agents put their lives on the line to enforce immigration law. In a day's work, agents may catch a load of narcotics, apprehend groups of people entering the country illegally, and intercept a potential terrorist. Their days often include rescuing aliens from death by thirst or murder by border bandits, preventing neighborhood assaults and burglaries, and administering first aid to accident victims, and may involve delivering an untimely baby or helping stranded motorists. As Bill Broyles and Mark Haynes sum it up, "Border Patrol is a hero job," one that too often goes unrecognized by the public.
Desert Duty puts a human face on the Border Patrol. It features interviews with nineteen active-duty and retired agents who have worked at the Wellton, Arizona, station that watches over what is arguably the most perilous crossing along the border—a sparsely populated region of the Sonoran Desert with little water and summer temperatures that routinely top 110°F. The agents candidly discuss the rewards and frustrations of holding the line against illegal immigrants, smugglers, and other criminals—while often having to help the very people they are trying to thwart when they get into trouble in the desert. As one agent explains, "The thrill is tracking 'em up before they die. It's a rough ol' way to go—run outta water in this desert."
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Drawing the Line
Comics Studies and INKS, 1994–1997
Lucy Shelton Caswell and Jared Gardner
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Drawing the Line: Comics Studies and INKS, 1994–1997 collects some of the most important essays from INKS: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies, the first peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted exclusively to comics studies. The volume, edited by Lucy Shelton Caswell, the journal’s founding editor, and Jared Gardner, editor of the new Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, celebrates this foundational moment in the fast-growing field of comics studies and also serves as a call to contemporary scholars to revisit the roads-not-taken mapped out by these scholars and cartoonist critics.
Included in the volume are essays by pioneering comics scholars on newspaper comic strips, Japanese manga, Chinese lianhuanhua, comic books, graphic novels, and editorial cartoons, alongside writings and artwork by celebrated cartoonists such as Will Eisner, Oliver Harrington, Charles Schulz, and Frank Stack. This volume serves as an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and study of the comics form, visual culture, or the history of journalism.
Included in the volume are essays by pioneering comics scholars on newspaper comic strips, Japanese manga, Chinese lianhuanhua, comic books, graphic novels, and editorial cartoons, alongside writings and artwork by celebrated cartoonists such as Will Eisner, Oliver Harrington, Charles Schulz, and Frank Stack. This volume serves as an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and study of the comics form, visual culture, or the history of journalism.
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Drawing the Line
The Irish Border in British Politics
Ivan Gibbons
Haus Publishing, 2017
Though once a source of violent conflict, the border dividing the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland has been relatively stable in recent years. The border’s creation in 1921 exacerbated hostile relations between Ireland and Britain in the subsequent decades, hostility that frequently broke out into violent conflict until the breakthrough Good Friday Agreement of 1998. That landmark policy declared that there will be no change in the status of the border unless there is a majority decision in Northern Ireland in favor, and the relaxation in tensions it brought has been hailed as one of the great breakthroughs for peace in our era. Now, however, as the UK prepares to leave the European Union in 2019, the Irish border is once again a hot-button issue and pivotal to any settlement reached. To enable a fuller understanding of this open question, Drawing the Line provides a concise explanation of the current controversy by sketching it in its full historical context.
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End of the Line
AUTOWORKERS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
Edited by Richard Feldman and Michael Betzold
University of Illinois Press, 1988
"This marvelous book captures in a most poignant and accurate way what life is like for the millions who still make up the 'blue collar' backbone of American industry."--Barry Bluestone, author of The Deindustrialization of America
"A richly detailed, well-crafted portrait of a cross section of autoworkers in the midst of an identity crisis and a crisis gripping the U.S. auto industry."--Frank Hammer, President, United Auto Workers Local 909
"A richly detailed, well-crafted portrait of a cross section of autoworkers in the midst of an identity crisis and a crisis gripping the U.S. auto industry."--Frank Hammer, President, United Auto Workers Local 909
[more]
The End of the Line
Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America
Kathryn Marie Dudley
University of Chicago Press, 1994
The End of the Line tells the story of the 1988 closing of the Chrysler assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kathryn Marie Dudley uses interviews with residents to chart the often confusing process of change that deindustrialization forced on every corner of the community. This honest, moving portrait of one town's radical shift from a manufacturing to a postindustrial economy will redefine the way Americans think about our families, communities, and future.
"An excellent study not only of the cultural disruptions caused by the shutdown of Chrysler's operations in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but also of the ideology of progress that abetted the shutdown."—Stephen Amberg, Industrial and Labor Relations Review
"With the eye of an anthropologist, [Dudley] examines the tensions between the 'culture of hands' and the 'culture of mind.' Her account is especially instructive because, by many measures, Kenosha has successfully recovered, yet for many the pain still remains."—Booklist
"Exceptional. . . . Should be widely read."—Douglas Harper, Contemporary Sociology
"Make[s] clear what a tenuous concept economic security is, especially when the rules for achieving security are in flux."—Barbara Presley Noble, New York Times
"An excellent study not only of the cultural disruptions caused by the shutdown of Chrysler's operations in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but also of the ideology of progress that abetted the shutdown."—Stephen Amberg, Industrial and Labor Relations Review
"With the eye of an anthropologist, [Dudley] examines the tensions between the 'culture of hands' and the 'culture of mind.' Her account is especially instructive because, by many measures, Kenosha has successfully recovered, yet for many the pain still remains."—Booklist
"Exceptional. . . . Should be widely read."—Douglas Harper, Contemporary Sociology
"Make[s] clear what a tenuous concept economic security is, especially when the rules for achieving security are in flux."—Barbara Presley Noble, New York Times
[more]
Fast Break to Line Break
Poets on the Art of Basketball
Todd Davis
Michigan State University Press, 2012
If baseball is the sport of nostalgic prose, basketball’s movement, myths, and culture are truly at home in verse. In this extraordinary collection of essays, poets meditate on what basketball means to them: how it has changed their perspective on the craft of poetry; how it informs their sense of language, the body, and human connectedness; how their love of the sport made a difference in the creation of their poems and in the lives they live beyond the margins. Walt Whitman saw the origins of poetry as communal, oral myth making. The same could be said of basketball, which is the beating heart of so many neighborhoods and communities in this country and around the world. On the court and on the page, this “poetry in motion” can be a force of change and inspiration, leaving devoted fans wonderstruck.
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Jumping the Line
The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical
William Herrick
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998
An eye-opening account of time served in the great battles of our century— for workers’ rights, against Fascism, Communism, and racism—Jumping the Line is the life story of an American original. William Herrick chronicles his adventures and misadventures on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, in (and very much out of) the Communist Party, driving a tractor on a communal farm in Michigan, jumping the line as a hobo, organizing African American sharecroppers in Georgia, at work with Orson Welles, and immersed in his own writing.
Herrick chronicles a life of great conviction and great disillusion. He went to Spain in 1936 to fight against the Fascists and there witnessed the horrifying acts that Fascists and Communists alike committed, before he was felled by a near-fatal wound. Here he tells about the life that led him, a working-class Jewish kid from New York, into the idealism and then the murky politics of this internecine conflict. From the bloody fight in Spain he takes us to the battlefields of the Communist movement in the U.S., where he found himself parading up and down the garment district of Manhattan, denouncing his former comrades.
When Paul Berman interviewed Herrick in the Village Voice in 1986, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Herrick’s remarks so incensed other veterans of the Abraham Lincoln battalion that they picketed the paper. What William Herrick has to say doesn’t always go down easily. But for those who like the truth, with a dash of wit and a healthy dose of history, it can be exhilarating.
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Just Below the Line
Disability, Housing, and Equity in the South
Korydon H. Smith
University of Arkansas Press, 2010
With America on the brink of the largest number of older adults and persons with disabilities in the country’s history, the deceleration in housing production during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and a continued reliance on conventional housing policies and practices, a perfect storm has emerged in the housing industry. The lack of fit between the existing housing stock and the needs of the U.S. population is growing pronounced. Just as housing needed to be retooled at the end of WWII, the American housing industry is in dire need of change today. The South—with its high rates of poverty, older residents, residents with disabilities, extensive rural areas, and out-of-date housing policies and practices—serves as a “canary in the coal mine” for the impending, nationwide housing crisis. Just Below the Line discusses how reworking the policies and practices of the housing industry in the South can serve as a model for the rest of the nation in meeting the physical and social needs of persons with disabilities and aging boomers. Policy makers, designers, builders, realtors, advocates, and housing consumers will be able to use this book to promote the production of equitable housing nationwide.
Published in collaboration with the Fay Jones School of Architecture.
Published in collaboration with the Fay Jones School of Architecture.
[more]
Laboring Below the Line
The New Ethnography of Poverty, Low-Wage Work, and Survival in the Global Economy
Frank Munger
Russell Sage Foundation, 2002
As the distribution of wealth between rich and poor in the United States grew more and more unequal over the past twenty years, this economic gap assumed a life of its own in the popular culture. The news and entertainment media increasingly portrayed the lives of the poor with such stereotypes as the lazy welfare mother and the thuggish teen, offering Americans few ways to learn how the "other half" really lives. Laboring Below the Line works to bridge this gap by synthesizing a wide range of qualitative scholarship on the working poor. The result is a coherent, nuanced portrait of how life is lived below the poverty line, and a compelling analysis of the systemic forces in which poverty is embedded, and through which it is perpetuated. Laboring Below the Line explores the role of interpretive research in understanding the causes and effects of poverty. Drawing on perspectives of the working poor, welfare recipients, and marginally employed men and women, the contributors—an interdisciplinary roster of ethnographers, oral historians, qualitative sociologists, and narrative analysts—dissect the life circumstances that affect the personal outlook, ability to work, and expectations for the future of these people. For example, Carol Stack views the work aspirations of an Oakland teenager for whom a job is important, even though it strains her academic performance. And Ruth Buchanan looks at low-wage telemarketing workers who are attempting to move up the economic ladder while balancing family, education, and other important commitments. What emerges is a compelling picture of low-wage workers—one that illustrates the precarious circumstances of individuals struggling with the economic conditions and institutions that surround them Each chapter also explores the capacity for economic survival from a different angle, with ancillary commentary complementing the ethnographies with perspectives from other fields of study, such as economics. At this moment of governmental retrenchment, ethnography's complex, nonstereotypical portraits of individual people fighting against poverty are especially important. Laboring Below the Line reveals the ambiguities of real lives, the potential for individuals to change in unexpected ways, and the even greater intricacy of the collective life of a community.
[more]
Latinas on the Line
Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications
Melissa Villa-Nicholas
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Latinas on the Line provides a compelling analysis and historical and theoretical grounding of the oral histories, never before seen, of Latina information workers in the Bell System from their entrance in 1973 to their retirements by 2015. Author Melissa Villa-Nicholas demonstrates the importance of Latinas of the field of telecommunications through their own words and uses supporting archival research to provide an overview of how Latinas engage and remember a critical analysis of their work place, information technologies, and the larger globalized economy and shifting borderlands through their intersectional identities as information workers. The book offers a rich and engaging portrait of the critical history of Latinas in telecommunications, from their manual to automated to digitized labor.
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Line of Fall
Miles Wilson
University of Iowa Press, 1989
With a full range of narrative techniques, the fourteen stories in this volume explore the arcs people trace as they make their way in the world. Miles Wilson's compelling narrative presents characters at crucial moments in their trajectories, when the nature and outcome of their lives can be illuminated. Though built out of the texture of ordinary life, these stories concentrate their focus where the luminous intersects the commonplace.
Many of the stories are set in the American West, which often rises out of the background, virtually assuming the role of another character. In "Outsider," a fable of the artist and society is played out as a metaphysical western. "Wyoming" portrays a college professor, his career hanging by a thread, who meets an uncanny woman on a strange journey through a Wyoming blizzard. And in "Fire Season," a U.S. Forest Service firefighter undergoes an apocalyptic Santa Ana fire that takes him to the bewildering margins of the human and natural worlds.
[more]
Line Of Sight
American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965
Paul Arthur
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
For three decades, Paul Arthur has been a leading observer and critic as well as a direct participant in America’s avant-garde cinema. In A Line of Sight, he provides a sweeping new account of the extravagant energies of American experimental cinema since 1965.
Balancing close analysis of both major and lesser-known films with detailed examinations of their production, distribution, and exhibition, Arthur addresses the avant-garde’s cultural significance while offering a timely reconsideration of accepted critical categories and artistic options. Rather than treating American avant-garde cinema as a series of successive artistic breakthroughs, A Line of Sight emphasizes the importance of social and institutional networks, material exchanges, and historical disruptions and continuities. Throughout, Arthur pays close attention to themes and visual practices neglected or underrepresented in previous studies, scrutinizing portraiture as a vehicle for projecting dissident identities, highlighting the essay film and the contemporary city symphony, and assessing the contributions of regional and African American filmmaking to the avant-garde. He also explores thematic and formal questions that have been central to the avant-garde achievement: experimental film's relationship with mainstream narrative cinema and postwar American painting as well as the legacy of sixties’s counterculture; the uses and theoretical implications of found footage and the allegorizing of technology; and the schism between a poetic, expressive cinema and the antisubjective, rationalist bias of structural filmmaking.
Amid the current resurgence of experimental filmmakers and the emergence of a new audience for their work, A Line of Sight reaffirms the extraordinary breadth and diversity of the avant-garde tradition in America.
[more]
Lives on the Line
Dispatches from the U.S.-Mexico Border
Miriam Davidson
University of Arizona Press, 2000
Straddling an international border, the twin cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are in many ways one community. For years the border was less distinct, with Mexicans crossing one way to visit family and friends and tourists crossing the other to roam the curio shops. But as times change, so do places like Nogales. The maquiladora industry has brought jobs, population growth, and environmental degradation to the Mexican side. A crackdown against undocumented immigrants has brought hundreds of Border Patrol agents and a 14-foot-tall steel wall to the U.S. side. Drug smuggling has brought violence to both sides. Neither Nogales will ever be the same.
In Lives on the Line, Miriam Davidson tells five true stories from these border cities to show the real-life effects that the maquiladora boom and the law enforcement crackdown have had on the people of "Ambos (Both) Nogales." Readers will meet Yolanda Sánchez, a single mother who came to work in the factories; Jimmy Teyechea, a cancer victim who became an outspoken environmental activist; Dario Miranda Valenzuela, an undocumented immigrant who was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent; Cristina, a "tunnel kid" who aspired to flee the gang lifestyle; and Hope Torres and Tom Higgins, maquiladora managers who have made unique contributions to the community.
In sharing these stories of people transformed by love and faith, by pain and loss, Davidson relates their experiences to larger issues and shows that, although life on the border is tough, it is not without hope. Lives on the Line is an impassioned look at the changes that have swept the U.S.-Mexico border: the rising tension concerning free trade and militarization, the growing disparity between the affluent and the impoverished. At the same time, the book highlights the positive aspects of change, revealing challenges and opportunities not only for the people who live on the border but for all Americans.
In Lives on the Line, Miriam Davidson tells five true stories from these border cities to show the real-life effects that the maquiladora boom and the law enforcement crackdown have had on the people of "Ambos (Both) Nogales." Readers will meet Yolanda Sánchez, a single mother who came to work in the factories; Jimmy Teyechea, a cancer victim who became an outspoken environmental activist; Dario Miranda Valenzuela, an undocumented immigrant who was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent; Cristina, a "tunnel kid" who aspired to flee the gang lifestyle; and Hope Torres and Tom Higgins, maquiladora managers who have made unique contributions to the community.
In sharing these stories of people transformed by love and faith, by pain and loss, Davidson relates their experiences to larger issues and shows that, although life on the border is tough, it is not without hope. Lives on the Line is an impassioned look at the changes that have swept the U.S.-Mexico border: the rising tension concerning free trade and militarization, the growing disparity between the affluent and the impoverished. At the same time, the book highlights the positive aspects of change, revealing challenges and opportunities not only for the people who live on the border but for all Americans.
[more]
Male Matters
Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line
Calvin Thomas
University of Illinois Press, 1996
Calvin Thomas's Male Matters
reveals the act and production of writing as a bodily, material process
that transgresses the boundaries of gender. Wise and quirky, sophisticated
and coarse, serious and hilarious, this look at male identity and creativity
and dislocation at the end of the twentieth century definitely will not
assuage male anxiety!
"An excellent and important
book. . . . By mixing high and low, by speaking candidly about what we
usually keep in the (water) closet, while simultaneously engaging the
'highest' philosophies of language and culture, Thomas calls the entire
enterprise of criticism into question." -- Jeremy Earp, Journal
of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity
"A brave, indispensable
exercise in writing the male body, and a tour de force of theoretically
informed close reading." -- Kevin Floyd, Journal of the Midwest
Modern Language Association
"Both analyzes and performs
our anxieties about masculinity. . . . This experiment in criticism transgresses
boundaries of theory, gender, and academic taste in ways sure to delight
and infuriate its readers." -- Gregory Jay, author of America
the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History
"Calvin Thomas is able
to hint at a way out of the prison-house, as he puts it, of straight male
identity." -- Kathy Acker, author of In Memoriam to Identity
reveals the act and production of writing as a bodily, material process
that transgresses the boundaries of gender. Wise and quirky, sophisticated
and coarse, serious and hilarious, this look at male identity and creativity
and dislocation at the end of the twentieth century definitely will not
assuage male anxiety!
"An excellent and important
book. . . . By mixing high and low, by speaking candidly about what we
usually keep in the (water) closet, while simultaneously engaging the
'highest' philosophies of language and culture, Thomas calls the entire
enterprise of criticism into question." -- Jeremy Earp, Journal
of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity
"A brave, indispensable
exercise in writing the male body, and a tour de force of theoretically
informed close reading." -- Kevin Floyd, Journal of the Midwest
Modern Language Association
"Both analyzes and performs
our anxieties about masculinity. . . . This experiment in criticism transgresses
boundaries of theory, gender, and academic taste in ways sure to delight
and infuriate its readers." -- Gregory Jay, author of America
the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History
"Calvin Thomas is able
to hint at a way out of the prison-house, as he puts it, of straight male
identity." -- Kathy Acker, author of In Memoriam to Identity
[more]
Manhood on the Line
Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland
Stephen Meyer
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Stephen Meyer charts the complex vagaries of men reinventing manhood in twentieth century America. Their ideas of masculinity destroyed by principles of mass production, workers created a white-dominated culture that defended its turf against other racial groups and revived a crude, hypersexualized treatment of women that went far beyond the shop floor. At the same time, they recast unionization battles as manly struggles against a system killing their very selves. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Meyer recreates a social milieu in stunning detail--the mean labor and stolen pleasures, the battles on the street and in the soul, and a masculinity that expressed itself in violence and sexism but also as a wellspring of the fortitude necessary to maintain one's dignity while doing hard work in hard world.
[more]
Moscow to the End of the Line
Venedikt Erofeev, translated from the Russian by H. William Tjalsma
Northwestern University Press, 1994
In this classic of Russian humor and social commentary, a fired cable fitter goes on a binge and hopes a train to Petushki (where his "most beloved of trollops" awaits). On the way he bestows upon angels, fellow passengers, and the world at large a magnificent monologue on alcohol, politics, society, alcohol, philosophy, the pains of love, and, of course, alcohol.
[more]
A Nation on the Line
Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines
Jan M. Padios
Duke University Press, 2018
In 2011 the Philippines surpassed India to become what the New York Times referred to as "the world's capital of call centers." By the end of 2015 the Philippine call center industry employed over one million people and generated twenty-two billion dollars in revenue. In A Nation on the Line Jan M. Padios examines this massive industry in the context of globalization, race, gender, transnationalism, and postcolonialism, outlining how it has become a significant site of efforts to redefine Filipino identity and culture, the Philippine nation-state, and the value of Filipino labor. She also chronicles the many contradictory effects of call center work on Filipino identity, family, consumer culture, and sexual politics. As Padios demonstrates, the critical question of call centers does not merely expose the logic of transnational capitalism and the legacies of colonialism; it also problematizes the process of nation-building and peoplehood in the early twenty-first century.
[more]
A New Generation Draws the Line
'Humanitarian' Intervention and the Standards of the West
Noam Chomsky
Pluto Press, 2012
The Newark Teacher Strikes
Hopes on the Line
Golin, Steve
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Winner of the Richard P. McCormick 2003 Prize for Scholarly Publication, given by the New Jersey Historical Commission
For three weeks in 1970 and for eleven weeks in 1971, the schools in Newark, New Jersey, were paralyzed as the teachers went on strike. In the wake of the 1971 strike, almost two hundred were arrested and jailed. The Newark Teachers Union said their members wanted improved education for students. The Board of Education claimed the teachers primarily desired more money. After interviewing more than fifty teachers who were on the front lines during these strikes, historian Steve Golin concludes that another, equally important agenda was on the table, and has been ignored until now. These professionals wanted power, to be allowed a voice in the educational agenda.
Through these oral histories, Golin examines the hopes of the teachers as they picketed, risking arrest and imprisonment. Why did they strike? How did the union represent them? How did their action—and incarceration—change them? Did they continue to teach in impoverished schools? Golin also discusses the tensions arising during that period. These include differences in attitudes toward unions among black, Jewish, and Italian teachers; different organizing strategies of men and women; and conflict between teachers’ professional and working-class identities.
The first part of the book sets the stage by exploring the experience of teachers in Newark from World War II to the 1970 strike. After covering both strikes, Golin brings the story up to 1995 in the epilogue, which traces the connection between educational reform and union democracy. Teacher Power enhances our understanding of what has worked and what hasn’t worked in attempts at reforming urban schools. Equally importantly, the teachers’ vivid words and the author’s perceptive analysis enables us to view the struggles of not just Newark, but the entire United States during a turbulent time.
[more]
No Day without a Line
From Notebooks by Yury Olesha
Yury Olesha
Northwestern University Press, 1998
First published in 1965 and reprinted many times in the U.S.S.R. and Russia, No Day without a Line is a series of thematically assembled journal entries which together form an unusual and engaging personal memoir. Ranging from Olsesha's prerevolutionary childhood, to notable cultural figures, to Russian and Western literature, the entries are a fundamental piece of the legacy of a major Russian writer and an important contribution to the literature of autobiography and memoir.
[more]
Nowhere Near the Line
Pain and Possibility in Teaching and Writing
Elizabeth H. Boquet
Utah State University Press, 2016
“When I was starting College Presidents for Gun Safety, one of the concerns I heard was the idea that there were just too many issues on which to articulate an opinion. Where would it stop? Where would we draw the line? . . . In light of this latest tragedy, on a college campus that could have been any of ours, I would say: ‘We are nowhere near the line yet.’” (Lawrence Schall, quoted in “Tragedy at Umpqua,” by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2015)
In this short work, Elizabeth Boquet explores the line Lawrence Schall describes above, tracing the overlaps and intersections of a lifelong education around guns and violence, as a student, a teacher, a feminist, a daughter, a wife, a citizen and across the dislocations and relocations that are part of a life lived in and around school. Weaving narratives of family, the university classroom and administration, her husband’s work as a police officer, and her work with students and the Poetry for Peace effort that her writing center sponsors in the local schools, she recounts her efforts to respond to moments of violence with a pedagogy of peace. “Can we not acknowledge that our experiences with pain anywhere should render us more, not less, capable of responding to it everywhere?” she asks. “Compassion, it seems to me, is an infinitely renewable resource.”
In this short work, Elizabeth Boquet explores the line Lawrence Schall describes above, tracing the overlaps and intersections of a lifelong education around guns and violence, as a student, a teacher, a feminist, a daughter, a wife, a citizen and across the dislocations and relocations that are part of a life lived in and around school. Weaving narratives of family, the university classroom and administration, her husband’s work as a police officer, and her work with students and the Poetry for Peace effort that her writing center sponsors in the local schools, she recounts her efforts to respond to moments of violence with a pedagogy of peace. “Can we not acknowledge that our experiences with pain anywhere should render us more, not less, capable of responding to it everywhere?” she asks. “Compassion, it seems to me, is an infinitely renewable resource.”
[more]
On the Line
Harvey Swados
University of Illinois Press, 1957
A classic of the literature of work, On the Line reveals the essential vision of a writer who, almost alone of his generation, portrayed America's families and factories with empathy, compassion, and intelligence. Swados's important essay "The Myth of the Happy Worker" has been included as an appendix.
[more]
Ordinary Medicine
Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line
Sharon R. Kaufman
Duke University Press, 2015
Most of us want and expect medicine’s miracles to extend our lives. In today’s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see—it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears, and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories anchor Ordinary Medicine. Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals.
[more]
Out of Line and Offline
Queer Mobilizations in '90s Eastern India
Pawan Dhall
Seagull Books, 2020
The 1990s and early 2000s were heady days for Indian queer people and their networks as they emerged from the shadows. They grouped together to deal with covert and overt forms of stigma, discrimination, and violence in different spheres of life. Tracing the life stories of around a dozen queer individuals and their allies from eastern India, Out of Line and Offline dwells on the many ways in which queer communities were mobilized in the first decade of the movement in India, and how such mobilization affected the lives of queer people in the long run. Pawan Dhall draws on in-depth interviews, which generate compelling stories of individual lives and experiences amid a society that was slowly being pressured to change. Dhall also delves into the archives of some of the earliest queer support forums in eastern India to reveal the ways in which the movement developed and grew. A thoroughly researched and poignantly human document, this volume will find an important place in the canon of literature on queer movements across the world.
[more]
Patriarchy on the Line
Labor, Gender, and Ideology in the Mexican Maquila Industry
Susan Tiano
Temple University Press, 1994
Race on the Line
Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880–1980
Venus Green
Duke University Press, 2001
Race on the Line is the first book to address the convergence of race, gender, and technology in the telephone industry. Venus Green—a former Bell System employee and current labor historian—presents a hundred year history of telephone operators and their work processes, from the invention of the telephone in 1876 to the period immediately before the break-up of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1984. Green shows how, as technology changed from a manual process to a computerized one, sexual and racial stereotypes enabled management to manipulate both the workers and the workplace.
More than a simple story of the impact of technology, Race on the Line combines oral history, personal experience, and archival research to weave a complicated history of how skill is constructed and how its meanings change within a rapidly expanding industry. Green discusses how women faced an environment where male union leaders displayed economic as well as gender biases and where racism served as a persistent system of division. Separated into chronological sections, the study moves from the early years when the Bell company gave both male and female workers opportunities to advance; to the era of the “white lady” image of the company, when African American women were excluded from the industry and feminist working-class consciousness among white women was consequently inhibited; to the computer era, a time when black women had waged a successful struggle to integrate the telephone operating system but faced technological displacement and unrewarding work.
An important study of working-class American women during the twentieth century, this book will appeal to a wide audience, particularly students and scholars with interest in women’s history, labor history, African American history, the history of technology, and business history.
More than a simple story of the impact of technology, Race on the Line combines oral history, personal experience, and archival research to weave a complicated history of how skill is constructed and how its meanings change within a rapidly expanding industry. Green discusses how women faced an environment where male union leaders displayed economic as well as gender biases and where racism served as a persistent system of division. Separated into chronological sections, the study moves from the early years when the Bell company gave both male and female workers opportunities to advance; to the era of the “white lady” image of the company, when African American women were excluded from the industry and feminist working-class consciousness among white women was consequently inhibited; to the computer era, a time when black women had waged a successful struggle to integrate the telephone operating system but faced technological displacement and unrewarding work.
An important study of working-class American women during the twentieth century, this book will appeal to a wide audience, particularly students and scholars with interest in women’s history, labor history, African American history, the history of technology, and business history.
[more]
Woman Walk the Line
How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives
By Holly Gleason
University of Texas Press, 2017
Full-tilt, hardcore, down-home, and groundbreaking, the women of country music speak volumes with every song. From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d. lang to Taylor Swift—these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives. Whether it’s Rosanne Cash eulogizing June Carter Cash or a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considering the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee, it’s the humanity beneath the music that resonates.
Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers. Acclaimed historian Holly George Warren captures the spark of the rockabilly sensation Wanda Jackson; Entertainment Weekly’s Madison Vain considers Loretta Lynn’s girl-power anthem “The Pill”; and rocker Grace Potter embraces Linda Ronstadt’s unabashed visual and musical influence. Patty Griffin acts like a balm on a post-9/11 survivor on the run; Emmylou Harris offers a gateway through paralyzing grief; and Lucinda Williams proves that greatness is where you find it.
Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country, Americana, and bluegrass and the women who make them, Woman Walk the Line is a very personal collection of essays from some of America’s most intriguing women writers. It speaks to the ways in which artists mark our lives at different ages and in various states of grace and imperfection—and ultimately how music transforms not just the person making it, but also the listener.
[more]
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