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  [Introduction to] Platitudes: & the New Black Aesthetic

  Trey Ellis and Bertram D. Ashe

  A playful, irreverent look at the African-American literary community.

  Trey Ellis's uproariously funny debut novel Platitudes, first published in 1988, takes on conflicts within the African American literary community. Dewayne Wellington, a failing black experimental novelist, and Isshee Ayam, a radical feminist author, collaborate on Dewayne's latest sexist comedy. Alternately telling the story about the coming of age of Earle and Dorothy - two black middle-class teenagers, sex-starved in New York City - the battling writers sneak ever, and dangerously, closer to reconciling their literary disputes.

  This edition of Platitudes also includes "The New Black Aesthetic," a groundbreaking essay by Ellis that appeared in the journal Callaloo.

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  [Introduction to] The Professor's Guide to Teaching: Psychological Principles and Practices

  Donelson R. Forsyth

  The Professor's Guide to Teaching explores what research has revealed about effective teaching and mines this resource to offer useful suggestions and practical recommendations for both new and seasoned instructors. The book unfolds in a logical fashion, beginning with prepping and lecturing and ending with evaluating and documenting. Chapters achieve a rare blend of theoretical depth and practical utility. For example, Forsyth's analysis of lecturing as a form of communication includes recommendations for teaching that stress the importance of considering the source of the message, the nature of the message, and the characteristics of the receiver of the message. Similarly, the author approaches classroom testing from the standpoint of psychological assessment, and so considers how testing requires the same care that psychologists use when developing questionnaires and inventories.

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  [Introduction to] By the Hand of Mormon: the American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion

  Terryl Givens

  With over 100 million copies in print, the Book of Mormon has spawned a vast religious movement, but it remains little discussed outside Mormon circles. Now Terry L. Givens offers a full-length treatment of this influential work, illuminating the varied meanings and tempestuous impact of this uniquely American scripture.
  
  Givens examines the text's role as a divine testament of the Last Days and as a sacred sign of Joseph Smith's status as a modern-day prophet. He assesses its claim to be a history of the pre-Columbian peopling of the Western Hemisphere, and later explores how the Book has been defined as a cultural product--the imaginative ravings of a rustic religion-maker. Givens further investigates its status as a new American Bible or Fifth Gospel, one that displaces, supports, or, in some views, perverts the canonical Word of God. Finally, Givens highlights the Book's role as the engine behind what may become the next world religion.

  The most wide-ranging study on the subject outside Mormon presses, By the Hand of Mormon will fascinate anyone curious about a religious people who, despite their numbers, remain strangers in our midst.

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  [Introduction to] Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance

  Richard A. Grounds (Editor), George E. Tinker (Editor), and David E. Wilkins (Editor)

  Native peoples of North America still face an uncertain future due to their unstable political, legal, and economic positions. Views of their predicament, however, continue to be dominated by non-Indian writers. In response, a dozen Native American writers here reclaim their rightful role as influential voices in the debates about Native communities at the dawn of a new millennium. These scholars examine crucial issues of politics, law, and religion in the context of ongoing Native American resistance to the dominant culture. They particularly show how the writings of Vine Deloria, Jr., have shaped and challenged American Indian scholarship in these areas since the 1960s. They provide key insights into Deloria's thought, while introducing some of the critical issues still confronting Native nations today. Collectively, these essays take up four important themes: indigenous societies as the embodiment of cultures of resistance, legal resistance to western oppression against indigenous nations, contemporary Native religious practices, and Native intellectual challenges to academia. Individual chapters address indigenous perspectives on topics usually treated (and often misunderstood).

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  [Introduction to] Nationalism and Political Identity

  Sandra F. Joireman

  This is a lively and well-written textbook, which will prove a valuable addition to the IR textbook series - mainly because the ideas it covers have changed so fundamentally in the last ten years. Nationalism and ethnicity are uniquely considered within the context of both traditional IR theory and 'new' IR (ie Cold War perspectives). Joireman explains the conflict between primordialism (the view that ethnicity is inborn and ethnic division natural), instrumentalism (ethnicity is a tool to gain some larger, typically material end) and social constructivism (the emerging consensus that ethnicity is flexible and people can make choices about how they define themselves). Case studies are included on Quebec, Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Eritrea.

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  [Introduction to] Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature

  Suzanne W. Jones

  Something about the South has inspired the imaginations of an extraordinary number of America’s best storytellers—and greatest writers. That quality may be a rich, unequivocal sense of place, a living connection with the past, or the contradictions and passions that endow this region with awesome beauty and equally awesome tragedy. The stories in this superb collection of modern Southern writing are about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—in other words, about growing up in the South. Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” set in a South that remains segregated even after segregation is declared illegal, is the story of a white college student who chastises his mother for her prejudice against blacks. But black, white, aristocrat, or sharecropper, each of these 23 authors is unmistakably Southern—and their writing is indisputably wonderful.

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  [Introduction to] Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzche on Seeing and Saying

  Gary Shapiro

  While many acknowledge that Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have redefined our notions of time and history, few recognize the crucial role that "the infinite relation" between seeing and saying (as Foucault put it) plays in their work. Gary Shapiro reveals, for the first time, the full extent of Nietzsche and Foucault's concern with the visual.
  
  Shapiro explores the whole range of Foucault's writings on visual art, including the theory of visual resistance, the concept of the phantasm or simulacrum, and his interrogation of the relation of painting, language, and power in artists from Bosch to Warhol. Shapiro also shows through an excavation of little-known writings that the visual is a major theme in Nietzsche's thought. In addition to explaining the significance of Nietzsche's analysis of Raphael, Dürer, and Claude Lorrain, he examines the philosopher's understanding of the visual dimension of Greek theater and Wagnerian opera and offers a powerful new reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
  
  Archaeologies of Vision will be a landmark work for all scholars of visual culture as well as for those engaged with continental philosophy.

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  [Introduction to] Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era

  Thad Williamson, David Imbroscio, and Gar Alperovitz

  When pundits refer to the death of community, they are speaking of a number of social ills, which include, but are not limited to, the general increase in isolation and cynicism of our citizens, widespread concerns about declining political participation and membership in civic organizations, and periodic outbursts of small town violence. Making a Place for Community argues that this death of community is being caused by contemporary policies that, if not changed, will continue to foster the decline of community. Increased capital flow between nations is not at the root of the problem, however, increased capital flow within our nation is. Small towns shouldn't have to hope for a prison to open nearby and downtown centers shouldn't sit empty as suburban sparwl encroaches, but they do and it's a result of widely agreed upon public policies.

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  [Introduction to] From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Studies

  Bertram D. Ashe

  The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late 20th century.

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  [Introduction to] Race and the Rise of Standard American

  Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

  This study examines the effect of race-consciousness upon the pronunciation of American English and upon the ideology of standardization in the twentieth century. It shows how the discourses of prescriptivist pronunciation, the xenophobic reaction against immigration to the eastern metropolises - especially New York - and the closing of the western frontier together constructed an image of the American West and Midwest as the locus of proper speech and ethnicity. This study is of interest to scholars and students in linguistics, American studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, and studies in race, class, and gender.

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  [Introduction to] National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956

  David Brandenberger

  During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. Legendary heroes like Aleksandr Nevskii and epic events like the Battle of Borodino quickly eclipsed more conventional communist slogans revolving around class struggle and proletarian internationalism. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist "national Bolshevism" into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.

  Beginning with national Bolshevism's origins within Stalin's inner circle, Brandenberger next examines its projection into Soviet society through education and mass culture--from textbooks and belletristic literature to theater, opera, film, and the arts. Brandenberger then turns to the popular reception of this propaganda, uncovering glimpses of Stalin-era public opinion in letters, diaries, and secret police reports.

  Controversial insofar as Soviet social identity is commonly associated with propaganda promoting class consciousness, this study argues that Stalinist ideology was actually more Russian nationalist than it was proletarian internationalist. National Bolshevism helps to explain not only why this genre of populism survived Stalin's death in 1953, but why it continues to resonate among Russians today.

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  [Introduction to] From My People: 400 Years of African American Folklore

  Daryl Cumber Dance

  A magnificent celebration of―and an essential introduction to―African American life and culture. Folklore displays the heart and soul of a people. African American folklore not only hands down traditions and wisdom through the generations but also tells the history of a people banned from writing and reading during slavery. In this anthology, Daryl Cumber Dance collects a wealth of tales that have survived and been adapted over the years, many featuring characters (like Brer' Rabbit) from African culture. She leaves no genre of folklore out, including everything from proverbs and recipes to folk songs and rumor. There is a section on the unique style that African Americans have consciously fashioned, including works by and about Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jelly Roll Morton. Within the chapter on folk art, which includes a sixteen-page color insert, quilts, dolls, sculpture, and painting get their due. From the famous to the anonymous, From My People is Dance's gift back to her culture.

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  [Introduction to] Alegorías de la disidencia: El teatro de Agustín Gómez-Arcos

  Sharon G. Feldman

  This book is a case study of the relationship between art and oppression. It is the first book devoted to Gomez-Arcos, a member of a "lost" generation of Spanish dramatists who were silenced during the Franco era. It addresses three crucial issues that define both his literature and his life: censorship, exile, and bilingualism.

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  [Introduction to] On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought

  Jane Geaney

  Sense perception, which is of enormous importance in Western philosophical traditions, has scarcely attracted the notice of scholars of early China. As a result of little direct comment on the senses in the Chinese philosophical classics, sinologists have generally interpreted their occasional references to sense functions in familiar Western philosophical terms. This original work challenges this tradition, arguing that despite the scarcity of direct comment on the senses in these sources, it is possible to discern early Chinese views of sensory functions from a close reading of the texts. Working with metaphorical and structural analysis, the author reconstructs an understanding of sense perception that seems to have been taken for granted by the early Chinese philosophers. By departing from traditional sinological approaches, this method uncovers a detailed picture of certain shared underlying views of sense perception in the Lun Yu, the Mozi (including the Neo-Mohist Canons), the Xunzi, the Mencius, the Laozi, and the Zhuangzi.
  
  Based on its assembly of textual evidence, the book presents a conception of sense perception that diverges from the "five senses" model so prevalent in the modern world. It argues that in early Chinese texts the importance of hearing and seeing surpasses that of the other senses. These two modalities--aural and visual--are paired with one another and constitute the sensory foundation for trust and knowledge in the Chinese worldview. The work also draws on the parallels between the ears and eyes to challenge standard understandings of the early Chinese notion of reality.

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  [Introduction to] South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture

  Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith

  Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth.

  In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as “regionalism.” Part I, “Surveying the Territory,” theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In “Mapping the Region,” essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors’ transatlantic perspective, “Making Global Connections” challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts — from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner’s fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone.

  Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a “new place” in southern studies.

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  [Introduction to] Data Structures with Java: A Laboratory Approach

  Joe Kent and Lewis Barnett III

  This book is designed to present the key topics in the second course for computer science students using the Java programming language. For convenience, we cover exceptions and file operations in Java, although this may have been covered in the first course. We also cover material on the binary representation of data and Java's bitwise operations, with applications.These are topics needed for computer organization an operating systems courses.

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  [Introduction to] Generalized Analytic Continuation

  William T. Ross and Harold S. Shapiro

  The theory of generalized analytic continuation studies continuations of meromorphic functions in situations where traditional theory says there is a natural boundary. This broader theory touches on a remarkable array of topics in classical analysis, as described in the book. This book addresses the following questions: (1) When can we say, in some reasonable way, that component functions of a meromorphic function on a disconnected domain, are "continuations" of each other? (2) What role do such "continuations" play in certain aspects of approximation theory and operator theory? The authors use the strong analogy with the summability of divergent series to motivate the subject. In this vein, for instance, theorems can be described as being "Abelian" or "Tauberian". The introductory overview carefully explains the history and context of the theory.

  The authors begin with a review of the works of Poincaré, Borel, Wolff, Walsh, and Gončar, on continuation properties of "Borel series" and other meromorphic functions that are limits of rapidly convergent sequences of rational functions. They then move on to the work of Tumarkin, who looked at the continuation properties of functions in the classical Hardy space of the disk in terms of the concept of "pseudocontinuation". Tumarkin's work was seen in a different light by Douglas, Shapiro, and Shields in their discovery of a characterization of the cyclic vectors for the backward shift operator on the Hardy space. The authors cover this important concept of "pseudocontinuation" quite thoroughly since it appears in many areas of analysis. They also add a new and previously unpublished method of "continuation" to the list, based on formal multiplication of trigonometric series, which can be used to examine the backward shift operator on many spaces of analytic functions. The book attempts to unify the various types of "continuations" and suggests some interesting open questions.

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  Colonial Lessons: Africans' Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918-1940

  Carol Summers

  Studying of the meanings of education, mission identities, and cultural change in Southern Rhodesia, Summers shows how mission-educated Africans negotiated new identities for themselves and their communities within the confines of segregation. From the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the Second World War, Africans in Southern Rhodesia experienced massive changes. Colonialism was systematized, segregation grew rigid and intensive, and economic changes affected every aspect of life from assembling bridewealth to entrepreneurial opportunities. This book provides a challenging portrayal of the possibilities and limits of African agency within the colonial context.

  Mission-educated Africans who aspired to elements of European material culture experienced these transformations most directly. Individually and collectively, they met the barriers erected by an increasingly restive white settler population and Native administration. This book details the strikes organized by students and parents, struggles over curricula, efforts of African teachers to improve their professional status, and conflicts between colonial officials regarding administrative control over schools and development programs. Summers reveals the ways in which these tensions and conflicts allowed select groups of Africans to reconfigure and, to some extent, appropriate aspects of European power.

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  [Introduction to] Saving Adam Smith: A Tale of Wealth, Transformation, and Virtue

  Jonathan B. Wight

  Every once in a while a great business novel is published. This is one of those novels. Follow an up-and-coming graduate student on a picturesque adventure involving terroristics and love, and learn, or better yet, re-learn, correctly this time, a little economics.

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  [Introduction to] Basic Java Programming: A Laboratory Approach

  Lewis Barnett

  For first- and second-year undergraduates, an introduction to programming with Java, an object-oriented programming language that is a popular choice for Web applications. Kent and Barnett (U. of Richmond) introduce algorithms and problem-solving approaches that are important to programming general.

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  [Introduction to] Managing Human Resources in the Public Sector: A Shared Responsibility

  Gill Robinson Hickman and Dalton S. Lee

  This book is written for the large number of public administration students and practitioners who are interested in becoming department managers and supervisors in various areas of government service. It emphasizes the interdependence between the human resource department and line managers in implementing personnel functions. It also provides enough background and history about human resource management in the public sector for line managers to appreciate why the field functions as it does.

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  [Introduction to] Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law

  David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima

  In the early 1970s, the federal government began recognizing self-determination for American Indian nations. As sovereign entities, Indian nations have been able to establish policies concerning health care, education, religious freedom, law enforcement, gaming, and taxation. Yet these gains have not gone unchallenged. Starting in the late 1980s, states have tried to regulate and profit from casino gambling on Indian lands. Treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather remain hotly contested, and traditional religious practices have been denied protection. Tribal courts struggle with state and federal courts for jurisdiction. David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima discuss how the political rights and sovereign status of Indian nations have variously been respected, ignored, terminated, and unilaterally modified by federal lawmakers as a result of the ambivalent political and legal status of tribes under western law.

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  Instructor's Manual To Accompany The Leader's Companion: Insights on Leadership Through the Ages

  J. Thomas Wren

  The materials included in this handbook are, most obviously, intended to accompany The Leader's Companion: Insights on Leadership through the Ages (New York: The Free Press, 1995). Nonetheless, this manual seeks to serve a larger purpose as well. Most immediately, it is a teaching guide for those using The Leader's Companion in the classroom. In a larger sense, however, these materials serve as a primer for the conceptualization, organization, and implementation of an introductory course on leadership. The exercises contained herein, while geared to the specific readings of The Leader's Companion, can be adapted easily to other texts and reading (depending upon instructor desires and preferences) and thus can form the basis for a wide variety of introductory courses in leadership studies.

  Two difficulties confront an instructor charged with the task of teaching a course on leadership: (1) what materials to select to adequately convey a sense of this enormous and amorphous topic and (2) how to organize and teach such a unique course. The Leaders' Companion represents an effort to address the first problem. It collects in one place some of the most significant writings on leadership over the centuries, drawing upon a variety of sources and disciplines. Moreover, it organizes and annotates this collection in such a way that it presents a cogent and sequential treatment of the concept of leadership. The reader can thus take away from this anthology a sound introduction to this complex phenomenon. The response to this book from leadership educators has been gratifying, but it has been accompanied by a steady drumbeat of requests for further materials focusing on its implementation in the classroom. This manual, then, seeks to address the second difficulty: to take the further step of providing a guide to all aspects of teaching an introductory course in leadership.

  This manual, when coupled with The Leader's Companion or other texts of the instructor's choosing, is intended to make the teaching of an introductory course in leadership a "turnkey" operation. That is to say, an instructor with this manual has the necessary information and materials to produce a substantive and creditable course in leadership.

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  [Introduction to] Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War

  Edward L. Ayers

  Two communities in America's Great Valley--Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia--separated by only a few hundred miles, share much in their politics and ways of life. Yet they emerge on opposing sides of a war in which they zealously send their sons to fight and die. Here we see a Civil War that is not the inevitable conflict of rival societies, but a human drama, immediate, particular, engrossing.

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  [Introduction to] Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Auslander

  Kathrin M. Bower

  This is the first comparative study in English of two German-Jewish women poets who survived the Nazi genocide but did not escape its effects. The study begins with a reading of Sachs's and Ausländer's poetry in the context of the wider scope of 'Holocaust literature.' Focusing on the poet as witness bearing the double burden of survival and remembrance, the work argues that 'work of memory'achieved by Ausländer and Sachs exemplifies the complexity of poetic reflection on trauma and history.
  
  In addition to aesthetic considerations, the book concentrates on the implications of Sachs's and Ausländer's poetic engagement for an 'ethics of remembrance'. The poetic dialogue with memory exemplified in these poets' works offers a model for 'working through' the trauma of the past with significance not only for Holocaust studies, but also for investigations of memory and trauma. As conscientious yet troubled efforts at representing the diversity of individual and collective suffering embracing both 'Jewish' experience and the human condition, Sachs's and Ausländer's poems can be read as at once subjective and universal injunctions to an awareness of the connections, divisions, and tensions that memory brings to bear on social relations.