The Indignant Generation is the first narrative history of the neglected but essential period of African American literature between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights era. The years between these two epochs saw the rise of Richard Wright\, Gwendolyn Brooks\, Ralph Ellison\, Lorraine Hansberry\, James Baldwin\, and many other influential black writers. While these individuals have been duly celebrated\, little attention has been paid to the political and artistic milieu in which they produced their greatest works.
Looking at the tumultuous decades surrounding World War II\, Lawrence P. Jackson restores the “indignant” quality to a generation of African American writers shaped by Jim Crow segregation\, the Great Depression\, the growth of American communism\, and an international wave of decolonization.
Fully exploring the cadre of key African American writers who triumphed in spite of segregation\, Jackson paints a vivid portrait of American intellectual and artistic life in the mid-twentieth century in this award-winning book.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120208T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120208T010000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jake-austen-flying-saucers-rock-n-roll-conversations-unjustly-obscure-rock-n-soul-eccentrics URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jake-austen-flying-saucers-rock-n-roll-conversations-unjustly-obscure-rock-n-soul-eccentrics SUMMARY:Jake Austen - Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll\: Conversations with Unjustly Obscure Rock 'n' Soul Eccentrics DESCRIPTION:For nearly twenty years\, the much-beloved music magazine Roctober has featured work by some of the best underground cartoonists\, exhaustive examinations of made-up genres such as "\;robot rock\,"\; and an ongoing exploration of everything Sammy Davis Jr. ever sang\, said\, or did. But the heart of the magazine has always been the lengthy conversations with overlooked or forgotten artists. Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll gathers the most compelling of these interviews. Eccentric\, important artists--including the rockabilly icon Billy Lee Riley\, the jazz musician and activist Oscar Brown Jr.\, the "\;Outlaw Country"\; singer David Allan Coe\, and the pioneer rock 'n' roll group the Treniers--give the most in-depth interviews of their lengthy careers. Obscure musicians\, such as the Armenian-language novelty artist Guy Chookoorian and the frustrated interstellar glam act Zolar X\, reveal fascinating lives lived at rock's margins. Roctober's legendarily dedicated writers convey telling anecdotes in the fervent\, captivating prose that has long been appreciated by music enthusiasts. Along with the entertaining interviews\, Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll features more than sixty images from the pages of Roctober and ten illustrations created for the book by the underground rock 'n' roll artist King Merinuk.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120210T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120210T010000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jennifer-ratner-rosenhagen-american-nietzsche-history-icon-and-his-ideas URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jennifer-ratner-rosenhagen-american-nietzsche-history-icon-and-his-ideas SUMMARY:Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen - American Nietzsche\: A History of an Icon and His Ideas DESCRIPTION:If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans\, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all\, in his blazing career\, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life\: Christian morality\, the Enlightenment faith in reason\, and the idea of human equality. Despite that\, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture.
In American Nietzsche\, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche’s philosophy\, and America’s reception of it\, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson\, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently\, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century\, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God\, his challenge to universal truth\, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time\, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture\, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120210T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120210T013000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/world-beyond-headlines-hal-weitzman-latin-lessons-how-south-america-stopped-listening-united-s URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/world-beyond-headlines-hal-weitzman-latin-lessons-how-south-america-stopped-listening-united-s SUMMARY:World Beyond the Headlines\: Hal Weitzman - Latin Lessons\: How South America Stopped Listening to the United States & Started Prospering DESCRIPTION:Thanks to demand from big emerging economies\, most South American governments have become increasingly “resource nationalistic” and have ramped up social spending to meet the needs of the poor and the indigenous\, causing poverty levels to drop – at the same time as poverty has been on the increase in the United States.
Will the U.S. continue losing influence in Latin America? Will China soon dominate the area both commercially and strategically? Can the U.S. do business with countries from Mexico to Argentina without interfering in their internal affairs? Journalist Hal Weitzman provides an in-depth analysis of these questions in Latin Lessons\: How South America Stopped Listening to the United States and Started Prospering.
The World Beyond the Headlines lecture series is a project of the Center for International Studies. This event is cosponsored by International House and the Seminary Coop Bookstores.
Please click here to register for this event.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120216T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120216T010000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/dan-chaon-stay-awake-stories URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/dan-chaon-stay-awake-stories SUMMARY:Dan Chaon - Stay Awake\: Stories DESCRIPTION:In these haunting\, suspenseful stories\, lost\, fragile\, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss\, grief or loneliness\, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected\, dire\, and sometimes unfathomable situations.
A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned\; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother\, whose actions were unthinkable\; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”\; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden\, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills\, inside a magazine\, stapled to the side of a tree\; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off\, something sinister\, in his late parents’ house.
Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families\, unfulfilled dreamers\, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up\, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120217T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120217T010000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/dorothy-roberts-fatal-invention-how-science-politics-and-big-business-re-create-race-twenty-fi URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/dorothy-roberts-fatal-invention-how-science-politics-and-big-business-re-create-race-twenty-fi SUMMARY:Dorothy Roberts - Fatal Invention\: How Science\, Politics and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century DESCRIPTION:A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race\, the emerging fields of personalized medicine\, reproductive technologies\, genetic genealogy\, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes. In this provocative analysis\, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level\, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in our society and legitimizing state brutality against communities of color at a time when America claims to be post-racial.
Moving from an account of the evolution of race—proving that it has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science—Roberts delves deep into the current debates\, interrogating the newest science and biotechnology\, interviewing its researchers\, and exposing the political consequences obscured by the focus on genetic difference. Fatal Invention is a provocative call for us to affirm our common humanity.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120221T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120221T010000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/lauren-willig-garden-intrigue URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/lauren-willig-garden-intrigue SUMMARY:Lauren Willig - The Garden Intrigue DESCRIPTION:In the ninth installment of Lauren Willig's bestselling Pink Carnation series\, an atrocious poet teams up with an American widow to prevent Napoleon's invasion of England.
Secret agent Augustus Whittlesby has spent a decade undercover in France\, posing as an insufferably bad poet. The French surveillance officers can't bear to read his work closely enough to recognize the information drowned in a sea of verbiage.
New York-born Emma Morris Delagardie is a thorn in Augustus's side. An old school friend of Napoleon's stepdaughter\, she came to France with her uncle\, the American envoy\; eloped with a Frenchman\; and has been rattling around the salons of Paris ever since. Widowed for four years\, she entertains herself by drinking too much champagne\, holding a weekly salon\, and loudly critiquing Augustus's poetry.
As Napoleon pursues his plans for the invasion of England\, Whittlesby hears of a top-secret device to be demonstrated at a house party at Malmaison. The catch? The only way in is with Emma\, who has been asked to write a masque for the weekend's entertainment.
Emma is at a crossroads\: Should she return to the States or remain in France? She'll do anything to postpone the decision-even if it means teaming up with that silly poet Whittlesby to write a masque for Bonaparte's house party. But each soon learns that surface appearances are misleading. In this complicated masque within a masque\, nothing goes quite as scripted- especially Augustus's feelings for Emma.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120224T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120224T013000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jamal-joseph-panther-baby-life-rebellion-and-reinvention URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jamal-joseph-panther-baby-life-rebellion-and-reinvention SUMMARY:Jamal Joseph - Panther Baby\: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention DESCRIPTION:Jamal Joseph discusses and signs his new book\, Panther Baby\: A Life of Rebellion &\; Reinvention. Jamal Joseph vividly recounts his introduction to The Black Panther Party\, and his progression from a naïve street kid to an outspoken member of a national movement\, his years in prison\, and later to an Oscar nominee and now as a full professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts Film Program. Joseph’s story spans and illuminates a ground-shifting and volatile period of New York and national history.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120224T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120224T010000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/john-s-oconnor-things-being-what-they-are URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/john-s-oconnor-things-being-what-they-are SUMMARY:John S. O'Connor - Things Being What They Are DESCRIPTION:John S. O’Connor is the author of four books including a recent book on teaching creative nonfiction called This Time It’s Personal and a book of haiku called Things Being What They Are\, which was just shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. An award winning teacher – including 10 years at the U of C Lab Schools – O’Connor has written essays on education for WBEZ radio\, and wrote a Notable Essay in Best American Essays\, 2011. His poems have appeared in places like Poetry East\, Rhino and River Oak Review.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120224T173000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120224T183000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/dylan-ratigan-greedy-bastards-how-we-can-stop-corporate-communists-banksters-and-other-vampire URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/dylan-ratigan-greedy-bastards-how-we-can-stop-corporate-communists-banksters-and-other-vampire SUMMARY:***NEW DATE/TIME\:*** Dylan Ratigan - Greedy Bastards DESCRIPTION:Dylan Ratigan is mad as hell. Infuriated by government corruption and corporate communism\, incensed by banksters shaking down taxpayers\, and despairing of an ailing health care system\, an age-old dependency on foreign oil\, and a failing educational system\, Ratigan sees an America that has allowed itself to be swindled and robbed. In this book\, his first\, he rips the lid off our deeply crooked system—and offers a way out.
This country\, now more than ever\, needs passionate debate and smart policy\, a brazen willingness to scrap what doesn’t work\, and the entrepreneurial spirit to try what does. Ratigan has compiled brash and fresh solutions for building a new and better America\, and with this book he has started the debate America deserves.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120228T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120228T013000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/nathan-englander-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-anne-frank URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/nathan-englander-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-anne-frank SUMMARY:Nathan Englander - What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank DESCRIPTION:Nathan Englander\, the internationally acclaimed author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges\, discusses and signs his latest story collection\, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.
These eight new stories display Englander grappling with the great questions of modern life\, with a command of language and the imagination that place him at the forefront of contemporary American fiction.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120229T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120229T010000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/john-snyder-hill-beans-coming-age-last-days-old-south URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/john-snyder-hill-beans-coming-age-last-days-old-south SUMMARY:John Snyder - Hill of Beans\: Coming of Age in the Last Days of the Old South DESCRIPTION:n/a END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120301T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120301T010000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/john-donatich-variations URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/john-donatich-variations SUMMARY:John Donatich - The Variations DESCRIPTION:The Variations is a powerful debut novel about a priest who has lost his church\, his mentor\, and\, most upsetting\, his ability to pray. How can Father Dominic protect or guide his parish when everything he loves falls away? How can he counsel Dolores\, a troubled teenager prone to emotional panic and spiritual monomania? Or James\, a promising African American pianist\, struggling to realize his artistic ambitions by bringing his own voice to a piece that has been played by the world's most brilliant pianists\, Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Into this malaise comes Andrea\, a sophisticated New York editor attracted at first by Dom's blog and then by the man himself. Dom's journey from the cloth into the secular world will offer carnal knowledge\, but also something deeper\, a more resistant knowledge as life fails to offer happiness or redemption. In prose both searching and muscular\, John Donatich's The Variations has located the right metaphor for our spiritual crisis in this story of one man's spiritual disillusion and ache for self-knowledge.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T164128Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120301T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120301T013000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/world-beyond-headlines-charles-kupchan-no-ones-world-west-rising-rest-and-coming-global-turn URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/world-beyond-headlines-charles-kupchan-no-ones-world-west-rising-rest-and-coming-global-turn SUMMARY:World Beyond the Headlines\: Charles Kupchan - No One's World\: The West\, The Rising Rest\, and the Coming Global Turn DESCRIPTION:Although most strategists recognize that the dominance of the West is on the wane\, they are confident that its founding ideas—democracy\, capitalism\, and secular nationalism—will continue to spread\, ensuring that the Western order will outlast its primacy. In No One’s World\: The West\, the Rising Rest\, and the Coming Global Turn\, Charles Kupchan challenges this view\, arguing that the world is headed for political and ideological diversity\; he believes the ascent of the West was the product of social and economic conditions unique to Europe and the United States.
As other regions now rise\, they are following their own paths to modernity and embracing their own conceptions of domestic and international order. The twenty-first century will not belong to America\, China\, Asia\, or anyone else. It will be no one‘s world. For the first time in history\, Kupchan says\, the world will be interdependent—but without a center of gravity or global guardian.
The World Beyond the Headlines lecture series is a project of the Center for International Studies. This event is cosponsored by International House and the Seminary Coop Bookstores.
To register for this event\, please click here.
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