Melville, SC was out of money, it was out of jobs, it was out of hope, and now it was out of astronauts. There'd only been two to begin with, and one of them was currently stuck up on the International Space Station, abandoned to his fate as both the American and Soviet space programs were cut to the bone due to budget problems. If you're going to get anything done, you've usually got to do it yourself and so Melville's burned-out, bored, and economically body-slammed residents decide to build their own rocket to bring their boy home. As they attempt to reach low earth orbit, they defy insurance regulations, shred international missile launch treaties, step on the toes of the FBI, and ultimately show that everyone's got the right stuff, even if their house is underwater, they love beer a little too much, and they never graduated from high school.
Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY, during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.
A stunning four-color biography of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the bestselling tradition of Notorious RBG and Pelosi that explores her explosive rise and impact on the future of American culture and politics. The candidate was young—twenty-eight years old, a child of Puerto Rico, the Bronx, and Yorktown Heights. She was working as a waitress and bartender. She was completely unknown, and taking on a ten-term incumbent in a city famous for protecting its political institutions. “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a video launching her campaign, the camera following her as she hastily pulled her hair into a bun. But she did. And in perhaps the most stunning upset in recent memory, she won. At twenty-nine, she was sworn in as the youngest member of the 116th Congress and became the youngest woman to serve as a representative in United States history. Before long, Ocasio-Cortez had earned her own shorthand title—AOC—and was one of the most talked-about public figures (loved and loathed) in the world. Her natural ability to connect with everyday people through the social media feeds grew her following into the multimillions. Every statement she made, every tweet and Instagram Live, went viral, and her term had barely begun before people were speculating that she could one day be president. The question seemed to be on everyone’s mind: How did this woman come from nowhere to acquire such influence, and so fast? Now, in Take Up Space, that question is answered through a kaleidoscopic biography by the editors of New York magazine that features the riveting account of her rise by Lisa Miller, an essay by Rebecca Traister that explains why she is an unprecedented figure in American politics, and multiform explorations (reportage, comic, history, analysis, photography) of AOC’s outsize impact on American culture and politics. Throughout, AOC is revealed in all her power and vulnerability, and understood in the context of the fast-changing America that made her possible—and perhaps even inevitable.
Occupy Wall Street, as centered in New York City, received much publicity. Little attention, however, has been granted to the hundreds of Occupy groups in marginal locations whose creative politics were certainly not limited by the influential example of Occupy in Zuccotti Park. This volume rectifies this oversight, with thirteen essays critically addressing the politics of occupation in places such as Indiana, Oregon, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Montana, and California. It initiates an interdisciplinary and critical discussion concerned with the importance of the ‘local’ to contemporary politics; the evolution of Occupy Wall Street tactics as they changed to fit differing, non-spectacular contexts; and what worked or did not work politically in various contexts. All of the above is designed to inform and improve that as-of-yet-unnamed movement which will come after Occupy. Boasting scholars from sociology, English, anthropology, peace studies, and history, the volume is divided into three major sections: Occupying the Local: Promise and Predicament; Occupying Space and Borders: South, East, and West; and Occupying the Media: Local, Regional, and National Dilemmas.
This book explores a variety of forms of radical political subjectivity. It takes its cue from the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the Occupy Movement and the European Anti-Austerity Movement, alongside the wider opposition to authoritarian and neoliberal forms of governance from which they sprang, in order to ask an urgent series of questions about the subject of radical politics: Who or what is it that engages in resistance? Who or what should they be? And how are we to negotiate the many complexities of that second question? The contributions, drawing on a wide range of theoretical traditions, offer a rich series of provocations towards new ways of conceptualising, evaluating and imagining radical political praxis. They engage different kinds of subjects, including protestors, dancers, self-burners, academics, settlers and humans, in order to think through the ways in which contemporary subjects are constituted within and work to unsettle dominant relations of power. Together, the chapters open up spaces to think about how political and intellectual commitment to social change can be enlivened through attention to the subject of radical politics. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.
This book is a clear and concise history of the soul in western philosophy, from Plato to cutting-edge contemporary work in philosophy of mind. Packed with arguments for and against a range of different, historically significant philosophies of the soul Addresses the essential issues, including mind-body interaction, the causal closure of the physical world, and the philosophical implications of the brain sciences for the soul's existence Includes coverage of theories from key figures, such as Plato, Aquinas, Locke, Hume, and Descartes Unique in combining the history of ideas and the development of a powerful case for a non-reductionist, non-materialist account of the soul
