... cultural critics, race theorists, and, most recently, “postpositivist realists.” Yet academic scholarship continues to read essentialism in ontological terms, as Walter Benn Michaels does. Ontological readings focus attention on the ways in which essentialism involves positing a presocial being who is...

...Don James McLaughlin Abstract Through an analysis of Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) by Joel Chandler Harris and The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899) by Charles Chesnutt, this essay attempts to account for a late nineteenth-century genre termed the queer fantastic...

... the history of sentimental and domestic discourse in the United States and the pivotal role that discourse played in the formation of a two-track US welfare state. Attentive to the racist effects of the New Deal’s long-term provisions for African Americans, Wright’s novel gives us the story of a...

... by white, male Americans who fought in the war, reported on the war, or had some other ties to the US military. Work of this phase renders the Korean War in terms of the bipolar global imaginary dictated by the Cold War: even as this imaginary is ultimately unsuitable for capturing the complexities...

...Will Norman Abstract In this article I argue for a new understanding of the term hard-boiled by tracing the relationship between literary style and historical shifts in intellectual labor in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Novels representing the culture industry, such as Raymond...

... the material and intellectual terms of Taylor’s initial critical reception and on the political forces and critical assumptions that bear on those terms. Taylor’s devotional Meditations offer an exemplary case for understanding how many of the ordinary labors associated with recovery and publication...

...Hester Blum In 2007, a Russian submarine planted a titanium flag on the seabed under the North Pole, laying the groundwork for Russia’s claim to Arctic oil and gas resources. Blum’s essay explores the prehistory of Russia’s polar land grab in terms of the influential (if satirized) early-nineteenth...

...Thomas Gordon Perrin Perrin's essay examines the late work of Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot, both accused of having descended into “middlebrow” territory during the post—World War II years when the term was most in vogue. Perrin argues that Eliot's and Hemingway's middlebrow work develops an...

... of hunger in Mary Rowlandson's 1682 captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God , serve as the essay's principal case study. The essay argues that rethinking the history of sexuality in terms of the cultivation of sensations forces a reconsideration of the archives from which examples of...

... narrative Black Power , Wright figures the movement of decolonization in terms of dreaming and waking. Here, his engagement with oneirocriticism continues the work of the postcolonial and African diasporic writers who have been drawn to Shakespeare's Caliban in their efforts to conceptualize (post...

... the electric chair at Sing Sing prison alongside James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man , the essay argues that these texts invite us to recast early twentieth-century black resistance in electrical terms, terms that expose racial violence as a function of...

... to a richer understanding of the terms on which early Americans valued fiction, bringing into view a series of historical contestations over fictionality’s cultural meaning and purpose. These contestations, in turn, reveal just how delimited a sense of fiction’s value and possible uses underpins our...

...” (Gordon 1997 , 4–5) and as an interdisciplinary “term of analysis and history rather than personhood” (Chuh 2003a , 9), this article argues that ethical alienation as pedagogical practice can lead us to a differently ordered set of disciplinary priorities. Copyright © 2017 by Duke University Press 2017...

... in so doing camouflages him or her among the crowds of caricatures that inhabit West’s Hollywood. The second is what I term grotesque laughter —an affective overspill that dismantles subjectivity into a series of ontologically unstable performances. Copyright © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016...

... well as those that inform and motivate our work in the first place—in relative and relational terms. Apathy is more than a generational disposition of postmoderns or the cool, emotionless province of “critique” that Rita Felski identifies with what she (after the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur) names...

... ( 2016 ) of the title character’s black female comrades-in-arms, this reading interrogates how race consciousness and colonial legacies inform the discourses of desire operating within the text. The term desiring blackness describes an orientation to reading that defers to African Americanist and black...

... for thinking through the contemporary terms and framework of conversations about state killing. Ryan argues that the play stimulates reform and elicits sympathy by substituting a false rhetoric of universal vulnerability for a more accurate assessment of imprisonment and judicial murder. The attempt...