Bøger udgivet af Rutgers University Press

Alongside superheroes, supervillains, too, have become one of today's most popular and globally recognizable figures. However, it is not merely their popularity that marks their significance. Supervillains are also central to superhero storytelling to the extent that the superhero genre cannot survive without supervillains. Bringing together different approaches and critical perspectives across disciplines, author Nao Tomabechi troubles overly hero-centered works in comics studies to reconsider the modern American myths of the superheroes. Considering the likes of Lex Luthor, the Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Loki, Venom and more, Supervillians explores themes such as gender and sexuality, disability, and many forms of Otherness in relation to the notion of evil as it appears in the superhero genre. The book investigates how supervillains uphold and, at times, trouble dominant ideals expressed by the heroism of our superheroes.

Two scenes define Tyrus Wong's remarkable 106-year-old life. In the first scene, a small boy in padded Chinese jacket gazes forlorn behind iron bars, torn from his father and detained indefinitely in a desolate U.S. immigration center off the California coast. In the second scene, the boy is a young man, an aspiring artist in sunny Los Angeles whom Walt Disney suddenly promotes to a key role in the making of beloved animated film Bambi. How did the boy become an artist, and what role did that trauma play in the beautiful imagery he later created for Hollywood? How do the two scenes connect to the seventy years after Bambi, when Tyrus worked as a studio sketch artist for Warner Bros., designed best-selling Christmas cards that sold in the millions, and spent a nearly half-century retirement flying his beautifully unique handmade kites on Santa Monica beach? Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong is a kaleidescopic story about the immigrant origins of some of America's best loved visual imagery. A chronicle of art and Asian American experience set against the backdrop of over a century of American history, Background Artist speaks to lovers of art, film, animation, and illustration history, and readers of biography, Asian American, and California studies.

The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean's visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens' estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation/state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.

Haiti was once a beacon of Black liberatory futures, but now it is often depicted as a place with no future where emigration is the only way out for most of its population. But Reclaiming Haiti's Futures tells a different story. It is a story about two generations of Haitian scholars who returned home after particular crises to partake in social change. The first generation, called "jenerasyon 86," were intellectuals who fled Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986). They returned after the regime fell to participate in the democratic transition through their political leadership and activism. The younger generation, dubbed the "jenn doktè," returned after the 2010 earthquake to partake in national reconstruction through public higher education reform. An ethnography of the future, the book explores how these returned scholars resisted coloniality's fractures and displacements by working toward and creating inhabitability or future-oriented places of belonging through improvisation, rasanblaj (assembly), and radical imagination. By centering on Haiti and the Caribbean, the book offers insights not just into the Haitian experience but also into how fractures have come to typify more aspects of life globally and what we might do about it.

In Imprisoned Minds, Erik Maloney tells the stories of men in prison that few people ever hear. Six gripping, first-person narratives of incarcerated men form his imprisoned mind concept: the men's unimaginable childhood trauma and neglect set them on a pathway for prison or death. Maloney interviews his fellow prisoners with candor and savviness. He can do this because he is in prison alongside them--incarcerated for life at the age of 21. Joined by a correctional scholar, Maloney presents a unique and informed perspective that blends lived experience with academic knowledge. A trauma-informed corrections can empower men to acknowledge and repair the harms of their past to regain control over their minds and their futures. Maloney has broken free from the mindset--and others can, too. Imprisoned Minds reminds us of the humanity of the nearly two million people behind bars in the United States, and encourages solutions from within that can break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration.

Metagraffiti explores how graffiti art transmits ideas about graffiti culture. These insights, in turn, inspire a deeper understanding of the social construction of cities. Focusing on graffiti scenes from São Paulo and Santiago de Chile, this innovative visual ethnography examines diverse forms of self-reference and metareference that appear in Latin American graffiti art. Chandra Morrison Ariyo works across multiple scales of contemporary graffiti production - from tags to massive murals - to show how painting the city enables individuals to reimagine their own position within the material and social structures around them. She further reveals how practitioners such as Tinho, OSGEMOS, Speto, Graphis and many others use metagraffiti features to influence public perceptions about this artform and its effect on the urban environment. Ultimately, Metagraffiti proposes a novel conceptual framework that highlights graffiti's ability to forge alternative forms of movement, sociality, and value within Latin American cityscapes. These urban images invite us to imagine what the city could be, when seen as a site for action and for imagination.

The Future of Youth Violence Prevention: A Mixtape for Practice, Policy, and Research focuses on innovative approaches to youth violence prevention that utilize consistent principles found within existing best practices but are dynamic and adaptable across settings - and the socio-historical and cultural realities of those settings. This book features scholars anchored in applied practices who can ground these forward-thinking strategies in the substantive base of research and theory that has produced successful interventions across multiple disciplines. The scholarship and cutting-edge thinking assembled in this volume could produce new-era youth violence prevention coordinators prepared to serve in any setting - including community outreach programs, therapeutic group homes, day reporting centers, juvenile probation offices, schools, or clinics. These coordinators will be able to co-create intervention techniques using core prevention elements drawing from a range of ideas and a multitude of disciplines while embracing the assets and resources already in place.

Hollywood Unions is a unique collection that tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized motion picture and television labor: IATSE, the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, and the WGA. The Hollywood unions represent a wide swath of the workers making media: from directors and stars to grips and make-up artists. People today know some of these organizations from their glitzy annual awards celebrations, but the unions' actual importance is in bargaining with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on behalf of 331,000 workers in the motion picture and television industry. The Hollywood unions are not neutral institutions, but rather have long histories of jurisdictional battles, competitions with rival unions, and industry-altering strikes. They have supported the industry's workers through the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy era, the collapse of the studio system, the rise of television, runaway production, fights for gender parity, the digital revolution, and a global pandemic. The history of these unions has contributed to making media work sustainable in the long-term and helped shape the conditions and production cultures of Hollywood.

Looking at the US, New Zealand, and Central America, this book considers how cultural politics has been deeply reworked in our contemporary media environment. The authors analyze how rampant technological convergence has allowed stories to spill across media platforms as well as geographical borders, and how those stories re-emerge as transmediated events. The authors explore the cultural politics that have developed within this new media environment by moving across the mediated landscapes of the first, third and fourth (Indigenous people's) worlds, which are deeply intertwined and interconnected under contemporary conditions of neoliberal globalization and emergent regimes of authoritarian post-democracy. The book attends both to the platforms and digital networks of the new media environment and to the cultural forms and practices that have constituted television as the dominant medium of communication throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In the new media environment, transmediation works on behalf not only of those corporate mega-conglomerates that have become all too familiar to media consumers around the world, but also for many communities that have previously been excluded from access to the means of electronic textual production and circulation. For the latter, grassroots transmediation has become an important technique for the production of cultural citizenship.

In Grieving Pregnancy: Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism, Maureen L. Walsh compares how the two religious traditions respond ritually and discursively to miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion experiences marked by grief for the women involved. The experience of pregnancy loss has always been a part of women's lives, yet only recently has it garnered attention from religious leaders and scholars commensurate with its prevalence. This book examines pregnancy loss as a theological problem for both Buddhism and Catholicism and analyzes the rites and memorials that have developed to address it, such as Japanese Buddhist mizuko kuyō (water children rites) and emergent American Catholic memorial practices focused on pregnancy loss. These parallel practices have emerged within distinct religious landscapes--a fact reflected in their forms and purposes--and when considered together, they raise questions of keen interest to theological and religious studies about the goals of religious practice and the imagination of human life at its earliest stages.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Fire Department of the City of New York permitted firemen to keep one dog, one cat, or singing birds in their firehouse. These animals, in addition to the horses that pulled the apparatus, provided companionship for the men, who were required to work and live at their firehouses for weeks at a time with only a few hours off for meals and family time. Many fire companies in Old New York broke the rules and welcomed multiple mascots into their firehouses. Some companies also had unique firehouse pets, such as monkeys, goats, and turtles. The Bravest Pets of Gotham will take readers on a fun historical tour of the FDNY and firefighting in New York City via more than 100 amazing, emotive, and oftentimes hilariously absurd stories of the FDNY horses and mascots whose acts of bravery, extraordinary intelligence, and funny antics deserve to be told and preserved.

Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums examines a small but significant wave of new U.S. memorial museums that focus on slavery and its ongoing violent legacies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery's Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and Greenwood Rising, which commemorates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. These museums are challenging historical narratives of slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice, but they have opened in a period marked by growing racial tension, white nationalism and political division. Sodaro examines how the violence of U.S. slavery and its lasting legacies is negotiated in these museums, as well as their potential to contribute to the development of a more critical historical memory of race in the U.S. at this particularly volatile sociopolitical moment.

From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as "meritocracy," "family," "justice," "diversity," and "nation" in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism's entanglements with colonialism, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.

Cinema Under National Reconstruction calls for a revisionist understanding of state film censorship during successive Cold War military regimes in South Korea (1961-1988). Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive's digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Hye Seung Chung makes the case that, while political oppression/repression existed inside and outside the film industry during this period, film censorship was not simply a tool for authoritarian dictatorship. Through such case studies as Yu Hyun-mok's The Stray Bullet (1961), Ha Kil-jong's The March of the Fools (1975), and Yi Chang-ho's Declaration of Fools (1983), the author defines censorship as a dialogical process of cultural negotiations wherein the state, the film industry, and the public fight out a battle over the definitions and functions of national cinema. In the context of Cold War Korea, one cannot fully understand or construct film history without reassessing censorship as a productive feedback system where both state regulators and filmmakers played active roles in shaping the new narrative or sentiment of the nation on the big screen.

Given the many pressures facing leaders across higher education, the work of crisis leadership remains an imperative for leaders at all levels. Attention tends to center on strategies for engaging in leadership both prior to and during crisis, often leaving the post-crisis period as an afterthought. This book introduces a research-informed framework for this critical, and often neglected, phase of crisis leadership. With an underlying commitment to values-based, principle-oriented, and people-centered practices, this framework consists of five leadership practices that are recognized as especially critical in the aftermath of crisis: (a) encourage learning, (b) inspire growth, (c) stimulate meaning making, (d) pursue reinvention, and (e) advance renewal. Communication serves a critical role in each of the various dimensions of post-crisis leadership, and it is a communication orientation that can help to inform the paradoxes, processes, and patterns that arise during these periods of immense tension and, at times, transcendence.

In 2015, Ben Miller and his wife, the poet Anne Pierson Wiese, moved from New York City to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to explore their Midwestern roots and to focus on their writing careers. Working a day job in a hospital, Miller had a front-row seat to the Covid-19 pandemic as it moved from the coasts to the urban Midwest. Pandemonium Logs casts an unflinching eye on the state of the worker in the US healthcare system during a global pandemic, giving voice to the doctors, nurses, support staff, patients, and families caught in the complex swirl of daily dilemmas and crucial choices. In unsparing yet sympathetic prose, Ben Miller creates an intimate portrait of the impact of Covid on the diverse people of South Dakota. Through a wide range of characters--from understandably confused patients to quietly competent nurses--he explores the human complexities of the crisis. A doctor based in Mumbai who treats critically ill patients in the Dakotas via a tenuous hodge-podge of tele-health apparatus. A Hydra of six workplace trainers who together cannot train one employee to do one job. A Vice President of Corporate Hospitality who lives to rip down safety signs as fast as nurses post them. A ninety-year-old hospital volunteer who pushes wheelchairs containing patients half his age. In Pandemonium Logs, Miller provides precise and moving observations of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Bruce Songs: The Music of Bruce Springsteen, Album-by-Album, Song-by-Song is an authoritative guide coauthored by renowned music scholar Kenneth Womack and music historian Kenneth L. Campbell and offering an in-depth exploration of Bruce Springsteen's musical legacy. Covering Springsteen's entire discography, from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. to Only the Strong Survive, this unique book combines historical context, literary analysis, and meticulous research. Unlike any other resource, it provides detailed analyses of each album, essays on their historical significance, and a chronological examination of every studio song. Discover the stories behind the recordings and gain insight into Springsteen's creative process. Rich with contemporary reviews, insider accounts, photographs, and special sections highlighting pivotal moments and key figures, Bruce Songs is an indispensable companion for fans and scholars. It offers an immersive journey through the music of The Boss, making it an essential read for anyone captivated by Springsteen's enduring musical legacy.

In recent years, the world has been shaken by numerous events that have caused and continue to cause massive human suffering, from the COVID-19 pandemic to intrastate and interstate armed conflicts. Moreover, climate change continues to plow ahead, contributing to growing tensions, population movements, and resource scarcity. Meanwhile, the methods by which groups and group life are threatened, and the means by which violence is incited and perpetrated, continue to evolve. Such divergent crises, even when they overlap or intersect, confound definition and label. This book seeks not to answer the question, "What is genocide?" but rather "What is Genocide Studies?" When Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in 1944 he could not have foreseen what the world would look like today. Now is the time to think about current manifestations of genocide and those likely to emerge in the future.

Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the Covid-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post-Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century. The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar. By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyses thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested. Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of Covid-19.

Inaccessible Access ethnographically addresses barriers to inclusion within knowledge-making. It focuses on the social, environmental, communicative, and epistemological barriers that people with disabilities confront and embody throughout the course of their learning, living and in the specific context of their Higher Education Institutions and in research. It is presented by a neurodiverse, disabled, and non-cis cohort of authors, all of whom acknowledge a continuum of (in)access which is available to each contributor contingent on their inherent intersectionalities and alterities. The authors and editors of this book foreground the work that has yet to be done on recognising the value of non-normative ways of approaching, being in and knowing research and higher education, particularly in cases where disablity-centred epistemologies are side-lined in confrontation with institutional norms, even within existing discourses concerning equality and alterity.

Anthropologists have long considered kinship as the basis for social solidarity. Indeed, the idea that kinship is grounded in positive sociality has found its way into most anthropological accounts and has served as an orienting framework directing decades of scholarly research. But, what about when it is not? What about instances when kinship is anything but 'warm and fuzzy', but is characterized, instead, by neglect, violence, negative affect, or a lack of nurturance and care? In the three interlinked sections of this volume, the view that kinship is about "solidarity" and "care" is challenged by exploring how kin relations are not only about connection and inclusion, but are also about disconnection, exclusion, neglect, and violence. Kinship relationships that feel "positive" and "good" take a great deal of perseverance and work; there is nothing "natural" about kinship ties as being based on positive sociality. In these chapters, the contributors take seriously the contingency of kinship relations (the moments when kinship breaks down or is a source of suffering) and how this prompts scholars to develop new theoretical and methodological perspectives.

Rutgers University has come a long way since it was granted a royal charter in 1766. It migrated from a parsonage in Somerville, to New Brunswick-sited The Sign of the Red Lion tavern, to stately Old Queens, expanding northward along College Avenue, and beyond. Replete with more than 500 campus images, Rutgers, Then and Now offers stunning pictorial and historical evidence of what it was then, side by side, with what it is today, a vital hub for research and beloved home for students.

East Harlem native Christopher Bell takes you on three separate walking tours of his beloved neighborhood, sharing fascinating stories about its theatres, museums, art spaces, schools, churches, mosques, and synagogues. You’ll also learn about the people who have lived in this famously diverse community, including actress Cecily Tyson and opera singer Marian Anderson.