Books published by Fordham University Press

This volume examines the historical connections between the United States¿ Reconstruction and the country¿s emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism.In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation¿s betrayal of the South¿s fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons.Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding Americäs Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.

However divergent their analyses may be in other ways, some prominent anti-capitalist critics have remained critical of contemporary debates over reparative justice for groups historically oppressed and marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual identity, sexual preference, and/or ability, arguing that the most these struggles can hope to produce is a more diversity-friendly capital. Meanwhile, scholars of gender and sexuality as well as race and ethnic studies maintain that, by elevating the socioeconomic above other logics of domination, anti-capitalist thought fails to acknowledge specific forms and experiences of subjugation.The thinkers and activists who appear in Totality Inside Out reject this divisive logic altogether. Instead, they aim for a more expansive analysis of our contemporary moment to uncover connected sites of political struggle over racial and economic justice, materialist feminist and queer critique, climate change, and aesthetic value. The re-imagined account of capitalist totality that appears in this volume illuminates the material interlinkages between discrepant social phenomena, forms of oppression, and group histories, offering multiple entry points for readers who are interested in exploring how capitalism shapes integral relations within the social whole.Contributors: Brent Ryan Bellamy, Sarah Brouillette, Sarika Chandra, Chris Chen,Joshua Clover, Tim Kreiner, Arthur Scarritt, Zoe Sutherland, Marina Vishmidt

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln¿s promise of a ¿new birth of freedom¿ in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones¿to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for Americäs Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln¿s promise of a ¿new birth of freedom¿ in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones¿to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for Americäs Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

Since publication of The Black Loyalist Directory in 1996, the primary component, The Book of Negroes, has become one of the most-cited of American Revolutionary primary sources. This new edition salutes The Book of Negroes by using the original title of this famous accounting of Black freedom. On the surface, The Book of Negroes is a laconic, ledger-style enumeration of 3,000 self-emancipated and free Blacks who departed as part of the British evacuation of Loyalists from New York City in the summer and fall of 1783 for Nova Scotia, England, Germany, and other parts of the world. Created under orders from Sir Guy Carleton (Lord Dorchester), Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America, to placate an angry George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army (USA), who regarded the Black Loyalists as fugitive slaves, The Book of Negroes is, as Alan Gilbert has observed, a ¿roll of honor.¿

Living in Death descends into the ordinary life of people who execute hundreds every day, the same way others go to the office. Bringing philosophical sophistication to the ordinary, the book constitutes both an anthropology of mass killers and a challenge to the conditions that make genocide possible.

This volume engages women¿s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to Orthodox Christianity in multiple, varied localities, discussing both contemporary and pre-1989 developments. It critically engages the pluralist and changing character of Orthodox forms of institutional and social life in relation to gender by using feminist epistemologies and drawing on original ethnographic research.

An electrifying feminist poetics combining language and visual collage to explore gender, landscape, taxidermy, and the idea of a ¿natural body¿An innovative book-length poem that delves into the intricacies of natural history dioramas, taxidermy, landscape, and women naturalists, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners is an experience of looking for ¿Woman¿s Work¿ in American natural history museums. Why, for instance, have the contributions of taxidermist and naturalist Martha Maxwell, the first person to create a ¿habitat group¿ display in the United States, and Delia Akeley, the wife of the ¿father of modern taxidermy,¿ been largely erased?Sarah Mangold mines language from natural history texts and taxidermy manuals from the 1800s to explore the perception and the reception of women in male-dominated scientific pursuits, as well as the doctrine of nature as pure, unpopulated, and outside historical and political time. A stunning work of visual and textual collage, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners creates a vibrant textual ecology that utilizes language as landscape while reshaping notions of nature and the natural.

Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Derrida's work as a philosopher, his public lectures and his teaching, along with the question of the "speech act" that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways.