Bücher veröffentlicht von University of Georgia Press

Born into slavery in Hampton County, Virginia, orphaned soon thereafter, and raised for almost two years among Native Americans, the charismatic Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1860-May 20, 1909) rose from humble and challenging beginnings to emerge as an inventive and passionate activist and educator who championed social justice. During the post- Reconstruction era and early twentieth century, Stanford traversed the United States, Canada, and England advocating for the rights of African Americans, including access to educational opportunities; attainment of the full rights and privileges of citizenship; protections from racial violence, social stereotyping, and a predatory legal system; and recognition of the artistic contributions that have shaped national culture and earned global renown. His imprint on working-class urban residents, Afro-Canadian settlements, and African American communities survives in the institutions he led and the works that presented his imaginative, literate, ardent, and often comic voice. With a reflection by Highgate Baptist Church's former pastor, Rev. Dr. Paul Walker, this collection highlights Stanford's writings: sermons, lectures, newspaper columns, entertainments, and memoirs. Editors Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini annotate his life and work throughout the volume, placing him within the context of his peers as a writer and editor. As an American expatriate, Stanford was seminal in redirecting antislavery activism into an international antilynching movement and a global campaign to dismantle slavery and slave trading. This book squarely inserts this influential thinker and activist in the African American literary canon.

A seventy-year-old Northwestern journalism professor and two twenty-something Northwestern journalism students emabarked on 14,063-mile road trip in search of America's identity. The result is this book - part oral history, part shoe-leather reporting, part search for America's future, part memoir, and part travel journal.

Although Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) published only two novels-Ultramarine and Under the Volcano-in his lifetime, numerous other works, most of which have since been edited for publication, were in various stages of composition at his death. La Mordida, the longest and most significant of the manuscripts that have not been previously published, is a draft of a novel based on Lowry's visit to Mexico in 1945-46, which ended in the arrest and deportation of Lowry and his wife following a nightmarish run-in with corrupt immigration authorities. On its most immediate level, the title La Mordida-which means "the little bite," Mexican slang for the small bribe that officials are apt to demand in order to expedite matters-refers to the autobiographical protagonist's legal difficulties. In a larger sense, however, it also represents his inability to escape his past, to repay the fine, or debt, that he owes.The central narrative of La Mordida involves a descent into the abyss of self, culminating in the protagonist's symbolic rebirth at the book's end. Lowry planned to use this basic narrative pattern as the springboard for innumerable questions about such concerns as art, identity, the nature of existence, political issues, and alcoholism. Above all, La Mordida was to have been a metafictional work about an author who sees no point in living events if he cannot write about them and who is not only unable to write but suspects that he is just a character in a novel.A reading of La Mordida in the context of Lowry's aesthetic theories and psychological problems shows why he dreaded the completion of his projects to such an extent that he called success a "horrible disaster" and compared death to "the accepted manuscript of one's life." The reason, La Mordida makes clear, lies partly in the aesthetic theories that led Lowry to attempt a book that he prophetically called "something never dreamed of before, a work of art so beyond conception it could not be written."Patrick A. McCarthy's edition of La Mordida is based on materials held in the Malcolm Lowry Archive at the University of British Columbia. Its publication provides essential evidence for a balanced assessment of Lowry's creative processes and his achievement as a writer.

Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment is an essay collection that explores the inner and outer natures of remarkable human and nonhuman beings. It is a book about paying attention--with the mind and with the heart. The essays confront the ethical and personal challenges Renata Golden faced in a harsh and isolated environment and examine the power of nature to influence her understanding of the human spirit. The lessons she learned on the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico jolted her out of her customary way of seeing the world--which is the transformative power of a thin place, where the borders between the sublime and the profane melt away. The essays call attention to the animals that are often shunned--pack rats, rattlesnakes, ants, prairie dogs, and other desert dwellers that some consider better dead than alive. Many of the animals in these essays are at risk of extinction. The essays honor these animals for the role they play in the wild world and for their unique abilities, such as cooperative societies and complex language skills. By recognizing the animals' value, Golden gives readers reasons to be moved to save them, if it's not too late.

"If they are going to kill us anyway, we might as well die in our lands." With these words and a shrug of shoulders, a leader of the Unified Peasant Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) explains their decision to occupy more than 20,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the Bajo Aguán region in Northern Honduras after the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. The Coup under the Palm Treesinterrogates the Honduran present, through an exploration of the country's spatiotemporal trajectory of agrarian change since the mid-twentieth century. It tells the double history of how the Aguán region went from a set of "empty" lands to the centerpiece of the country's agrarian reform in the 1980s and a central site for the palm oil industry and drug trade, while a militarized process of state formation took place between the coups of 1963 and 2009. Rather than a case of failed democratic transition, the book shows how the current Honduran crisis--exemplified by massive outmigration towards the United States, blatant narco-state links, and the 2009 coup--is better understood within longer historical processes in which violence, exclusion, and dispossession became the central organizational principles of the state.

With Central City's Joy and Pain, Jerome E. Morris explores complex social issues through personal narrative. He does so by blending social-science research with his own memoir of life in Birmingham, Alabama. As someone who lived in the Central City housing project for two transitional decades (1968-91) and whose family continued to reside there until 1999, when the city razed the community, the author provides us with the often unexplored bottom-up perspective on Black public-housing residents' experiences. As Morris's experiential and authoritative narrative voice unfolds in the pages of Central City's Joy and Pain, both the scholarly and lay reader are brought on a journey of what life is like for people who live and die at the intersection of race and poverty in a rapidly evolving southern urban center. The setting of a historic public-housing community provides a rich canvas on which to paint a world through the author's personal experience of growing up there--and his later observations as a researcher and academic. Through its syncopation of personal stories and scholarly research, Central City's Joy and Pain captures what it means to be Black, poor, and full of dreams. In this setting, dreams are realized by some and swallowed up for others in the larger historical, social, economic, and political context of African Americans' experiences during and after the civil rights movement.

"At Treasure Island, a humanly made island in the San Francisco Bay, a performance troupe dressed in hazmat suits articulate gestures that resemble toxic remediation. As they become more attuned to the site and to its history and ecology, enigmatic presences infiltrate their spacetime. Are they from the past, the present, or the future? What is the significance of their sudden arrival? What happens when historical and geological eras converge? Meanwhile, elsewhere, various earth scientists at sites around the globe search for the "golden spike": a telltale geologic marker that synchronously indicates a definitive time change in the strata-a change from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. Within their data is Earth's biography, but how is humanity insinuated within this chronology? Throughout Presence, encounter and contact are the major elements of consequence, action, implication, and resounding significance. Encounter and contact between timeframes, cultures, ecologies, persons, intuitions, ways of living, and worlding. At these junctures are the moments of possibility-of violence and/or of budding community"--

With Central City's Joy and Pain, Jerome E. Morris explores complex social issues through personal narrative. He does so by blending social-science research with his own memoir of life in Birmingham, Alabama. As someone who lived in the Central City housing project for two transitional decades (1968-91) and whose family continued to reside there until 1999, when the city razed the community, the author provides us with the often unexplored bottom-up perspective on Black public-housing residents' experiences. As Morris's experiential and authoritative narrative voice unfolds in the pages of Central City's Joy and Pain, both the scholarly and lay reader are brought on a journey of what life is like for people who live and die at the intersection of race and poverty in a rapidly evolving southern urban center. The setting of a historic public-housing community provides a rich canvas on which to paint a world through the author's personal experience of growing up there--and his later observations as a researcher and academic. Through its syncopation of personal stories and scholarly research, Central City's Joy and Pain captures what it means to be Black, poor, and full of dreams. In this setting, dreams are realized by some and swallowed up for others in the larger historical, social, economic, and political context of African Americans' experiences during and after the civil rights movement.

"If they are going to kill us anyway, we might as well die in our lands." With these words and a shrug of shoulders, a leader of the Unified Peasant Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) explains their decision to occupy more than 20,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the Bajo Aguán region in Northern Honduras after the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. The Coup under the Palm Trees interrogates the Honduran present, through an exploration of the country's spatiotemporal trajectory of agrarian change since the mid-twentieth century. It tells the double history of how the Aguán region went from a set of "empty" lands to the centerpiece of the country's agrarian reform in the 1980s and a central site for the palm oil industry and drug trade, while a militarized process of state formation took place between the coups of 1963 and 2009. Rather than a case of failed democratic transition, the book shows how the current Honduran crisis--exemplified by massive outmigration towards the United States, blatant narco-state links, and the 2009 coup--is better understood within longer historical processes in which violence, exclusion, and dispossession became the central organizational principles of the state.

Survival Strategies is a love story wrapped in a reckoning. Arranged in three parts, this collection of poems follows a narrative arc.The speaker, who is returning to the Sonoran of her birth after many years away, takes us with her on a journey of enlightenment. In the course of the first section, "The Sunniest Place on Earth," we learn that the speaker has developed a deep hatred of the desert (a reflection of herself) due to the way she was treated and what she witnessed while being raised there. As we move through to part 2, "Estivate So You Don't Die," we see the speaker grappling with her past as a sensitive person amid the rugged realities of life in the Southwest. As this section closes, there is a long-form prose poem assembled as a mythopoetic fable titled, "The Mother and the Mountain," that explores her mother's childhood. This section brings revelation to some of what precedes it and reveals the speaker as the buttress of this family who, though an outsider, walks a path first laid by her mother. The final section is titled simply, "After," and as its title suggests, is a short set of poems that wrap up the arc and bring peace to our speaker as she comes to realize she never hated the desert, nor herself, as she is set free by the ocean of the Pacific Northwest.