Rethinking Rufus

Rethinking Rufus

Author: Thomas A. Foster

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2019-05-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0820355216

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Rethinking Rufus is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men. Scholars have extensively documented the widespread sexual exploitation and abuse suffered by enslaved women, with comparatively little attention paid to the stories of men. However, a careful reading of extant sources reveals that sexual assault of enslaved men also occurred systematically and in a wide variety of forms, including physical assault, sexual coercion, and other intimate violations. To tell the story of men such as Rufus--who was coerced into a sexual union with an enslaved woman, Rose, whose resistance of this union is widely celebrated--historian Thomas A. Foster interrogates a range of sources on slavery: early American newspapers, court records, enslavers' journals, abolitionist literature, the testimony of formerly enslaved people collected in autobiographies and in interviews, and various forms of artistic representation. Foster's sustained examination of how black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women makes an important contribution to our understanding of masculinity, sexuality, the lived experience of enslaved men, and the general power dynamics fostered by the institution of slavery. Rethinking Rufus illuminates how the conditions of slavery gave rise to a variety of forms of sexual assault and exploitation that affected all members of the community.


Rethinking Rufus

Rethinking Rufus

Author: Thomas A. Foster

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2019-05-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0820355224

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Rethinking Rufus is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men. Scholars have extensively documented the widespread sexual exploitation and abuse suffered by enslaved women, with comparatively little attention paid to the stories of men. However, a careful reading of extant sources reveals that sexual assault of enslaved men also occurred systematically and in a wide variety of forms, including physical assault, sexual coercion, and other intimate violations. To tell the story of men such as Rufus-who was coerced into a sexual union with an enslaved woman, Rose, whose resistance of this union is widely celebrated-historian Thomas A. Foster interrogates a range of sources on slavery: early American newspapers, court records, enslavers' journals, abolitionist literature, the testimony of formerly enslaved people collected in autobiographies and in interviews, and various forms of artistic representation. Foster's sustained examination of how black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women makes an important contribution to our understanding of masculinity, sexuality, the lived experience of enslaved men, and the general power dynamics fostered by the institution of slavery. Rethinking Rufus illuminates how the conditions of slavery gave rise to a variety of forms of sexual assault and exploitation that affected all members of the community.


Slave Breeding

Slave Breeding

Author: Gregory D. Smithers

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0813059151

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For over two centuries, the topic of slave breeding has occupied a controversial place in the master narrative of American history. From nineteenth-century abolitionists to twentieth-century filmmakers and artists, Americans have debated whether slave owners deliberately and coercively manipulated the sexual practices and marital status of enslaved African Americans to reproduce new generations of slaves for profit. In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices. He argues that while social and economic historians have downplayed the significance of slave breeding, African Americans have refused to forget the violence and sexual coercion associated with the plantation South. By placing African American histories and memories of slave breeding within the larger context of America’s history of racial and gender discrimination, Smithers sheds much-needed light on African American collective memory, racialized perceptions of fragile black families, and the long history of racially motivated violence against men, women, and children of color.


Decolonizing Revelation

Decolonizing Revelation

Author: Rufus Burnett

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-03-16

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1978700466

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At a time when ideas like “post-racial society” and “#BlackLivesMatter” occupy the same space, scholars of black American faith are provided a unique opportunity to regenerate and imagine theological frameworks that confront the epistemic effects of racialization and its confluence with the theological imagination. Decolonizing Revelation contributes to this task by rethinking or “taking a second look” at the cultural production of the blues. Unlike other examinations of the blues that privilege the hermeneutic of race, this work situates the blues spatially, offering a transracial interpretation that looks to establish an option for disentangling racial ideology from the theological imagination. This book dislocates race in particular, and modernity in general, as the primary means by which God’s self-disclosure is read across human history. Rather than looking to the experience of antiblack racism as revelational, the work looks to a people group, blues people, and their spatial, sonic, and sensual activities. Following the basic theological premise that God is a God of life, Burnett looks to the spaces where blues life occurs to construct a decolonial option for a theology of revelation.


Bosom Friends

Bosom Friends

Author: Thomas J. Balcerski

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-08-02

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0190914602

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The friendship of the bachelor politicians James Buchanan (1791-1868) of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King (1786-1853) of Alabama has excited much speculation through the years. Why did neither marry? Might they have been gay? Or was their relationship a nineteenth-century version of the modern-day "bromance"? In Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, Thomas J. Balcerski explores the lives of these two politicians and discovers one of the most significant collaborations in American political history. He traces the parallels in the men's personal and professional lives before elected office, including their failed romantic courtships and the stories they told about them. Unlikely companions from the start, they lived together as congressional messmates in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse and became close confidantes. Around the nation's capital, the men were mocked for their effeminacy and perhaps their sexuality, and they were likened to Siamese twins. Over time, their intimate friendship blossomed into a significant cross-sectional political partnership. Balcerski examines Buchanan's and King's contributions to the Jacksonian political agenda, manifest destiny, and the increasingly divisive debates over slavery, while contesting interpretations that the men lacked political principles and deserved blame for the breakdown of the union. He closely narrates each man's rise to national prominence, as William Rufus King was elected vice-president in 1852 and James Buchanan the nation's fifteenth president in 1856, despite the political gossip that circulated about them. While exploring a same-sex relationship that powerfully shaped national events in the antebellum era, Bosom Friends demonstrates that intimate male friendships among politicians were--and continue to be--an important part of success in American politics.


That One Should Disdain Hardships - the Teachings of a Roman Stoic

That One Should Disdain Hardships - the Teachings of a Roman Stoic

Author: Musonius Rufus

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-02-18

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 0300226039

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Perennial wisdom from one of history's most important but lesser-known Stoic teachers "He knew that all a philosopher could do was respond well--bravely, boldly, patiently--to what life threw at us. That's what we should be doing now."--Ryan Holiday, Reading List email The Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus was one of the most influential teachers of his era, imperial Rome, and his message still resonates with startling clarity today. Alongside Stoics like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, he emphasized ethics in action, displayed in all aspects of life. Merely learning philosophical doctrine and listening to lectures, they believed, will not do one any good unless one manages to interiorize the teachings and apply them to daily life. In Musonius Rufus's words, "Philosophy is nothing else than to search out by reason what is right and proper and by deeds to put it into practice." At a time of renewed interest in Stoicism, this collection of Musonius Rufus's lectures and sayings, beautifully translated by Cora E. Lutz with an introduction by Gretchen Reydams-Schils, offers readers access to the thought of one of history's most influential and remarkable Stoic thinkers.


Rethinking Responsibility

Rethinking Responsibility

Author: K. E. Boxer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-02-07

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0199695326

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K. E. Boxer explores moral responsibility, and whether it is compatible with causal determinism. She suggests that to answer this question we must focus on responsibility in the sense of liability, and that an incompatibilist view may only be preserved on an understanding of the moral desert of punishment that many find morally problematic.


Kindred

Kindred

Author: Octavia E. Butler

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2004-02-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0807083704

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From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.


Freedom's Shore

Freedom's Shore

Author: Russell Duncan

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2021-07-01

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0820362050

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