An Inclusive Litany

6/1/98

Yet more offerings from the State University of New York Press, Summer/Fall 1998 catalog:

Object Lessons: How to Do Things With Fetishism, by E.L. McCallum

Object Lessons begins with the question, What can fetishism teach us? One answer, as this book makes clear, is that fetishism is a form of subject-object relation that informs us about basic strategies of defining, desiring, and knowing subjects and objects in Western culture. More importantly, in the way that it brings together peculiarly modern anxieties—especially those about sexuality, gender, belief, and knowledge—fetishism reveals how our basic categories for interpreting the world have been reduced to binary and mutually exclusive terms. By foregrounding concerns about sexual differences in examining fetishism's unique intersection of desire and knowledge, Object Lessons seizes on the promises fetishism offers to those who want to call into question the resurgence of conservative and even reactionary drives to lock down absolute definitions of sexual differences through either biological or cultural essentialism.

Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood, by Carl P. Eby

Demonstrates in painstaking detail and with reference to stunning new archival evidence how fetishism was crucial to the construction and negotiation of identity and gender in Hemingway's life and fiction.

Critics have long acknowledged Hemingway's lifelong erotic obsession with hair, but this book is the first to explain in a theoretically coherent manner why Hemingway was a fetishist and why we should care. Without reducing Hemingway's art to his psychosexuality, Eby demonstrates that when the fetish appears in Hemingway's fiction, it always does so with a retinue of attendant fantasies, themes, and symbols that are among the most prominent and important in Hemingway's work.

Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities, by Robin Patric Clair

Organizing Silence is a thought-provoking look at how silence is embedded in our language, society, and institutions. It provides an overview of the varied philosophical approaches to understanding the role of silence and communication. One particular view of silence/communication, as grounded in political and patriarchal frameworks, is given special attention. The author questions now only how dominant groups silence marginalized members of society, but also how marginalized groups privilege and abandon each other. Sexual harassment is given as an example of material and discursive practices that articulate both a micro and macro level of silence, and accounts of both women and men who have been sexually harassed are provided. The book provides an alternative aesthetic perspective as a way of understanding the realities we create, encouraging alternative ways to listen to the silence, and presenting novel possibilities for future research.

Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women's Travel in American Literature, by Marilyn C. Wesley

Travel is the root metaphor for Western progress, a fact particularly evident in a colonizing and immigrant nation like the United States. Despite changing historical circumstances from one American epoch to another, men have generally been associated with adventurous movement and women with domestic stasis, a bias that has obscured recognition of a significant trope: the woman traveler throughout American literature.

Secret Journeys examines the subversive and constructive narrative of female journey from the seventeenth century to the present in such works as John Greenleaf Whittier's Snowbound, Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mary Rowlandson, Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Edith Wharton's Summer, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Eudora Welty's short fiction, and Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. In recognizing the figure of the woman traveler, Wesley produces new readings of canonical texts that subvert social and political assumptions in texts by men and construct alternative arrangements in texts by women.

Eating Culture, Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz, editors

Explores the relationship between eating and culture from a variety of perspectives, including anthropology, sociology, philosophy, gender studies, race studies, architecture, and AIDS discourse.

Eating has never been simple, and contemporary eating practices seem more complicated than ever, demanding a multidimensional analysis that strives not for a reductive overview but for a complex understanding. Eating Culture offers a number of diverse outlooks on some of the prominent practices and issues associated with the domain of eating.

Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change, by Nah Dove

This book highlights the integrity of some Afrikan mothers who, under European domination within the United States and the United Kingdom, have used their own experience as a foundation for understanding the impact of cultural imposition on their children's lives. Most of these mothers have chosen to place their children in school environments that will educate their children about their cultural roots, in order that their cultural memory and knowledge of Afrikan people will be handed down intergenerationally. This book looks sensitively at the herstories of women who are undergoing their own process of transformation and offers insights into the historical and continuing struggle of Afrikan people as a cultural entity living within European-oriented societies.

Sport and Postmodern Times, Geneviéve Rail, editor

This book provides critical insight into the questions of race, gender, sexuality, and locality in sport and society. Topics discussed include postmodern sport writing; sport and the postmodern deconstruction of gender and sexuality; virtual sport and the postmodern mediascape; discipline, normalization, rationalization, surveillance, panopticism, and other forms of power used to "invest" postmodern sporting bodies; and new perspectives on sport and physical culture, consumer culture, and postmodern geography.