Ingram

Not This Pig

Philip Levine

Music at Wesleyan

Mark Slobin

<P>This is the first account of the evolution of music at Wesleyan University, a campus known since the mid-nineteenth century for its musical life—first as the «Singing College of New England» and then, after 1960, as the home of a renowned undergraduate and graduate department that integrates world music studies with more traditional Western and experimental musical forms. Through excerpts from accounts in the campus newspaper over the earlier decades and eyewitness accounts by key figures in recent times, the book compactly surveys a wide range of musical formations, practices, repertoires, and events from the 1830s to the early 2000s. Vividly illustrated with both historical and contemporary images, Music at Wesleyan presents a portrait of the school that today blends educational innovation and cultural diversity with creative passion and intellectual rigor, and includes a foreword by Richard K. Winslow, the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, Emeritus at Wesleyan University. A companion digital archive at http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/maw_audio/ features audio files of glee club, gamelan, jazz, experimental, African, Indian, and other performances.</P>

The American Shore

Samuel R. Delany

<P>The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—"Angouleme" was first published in 1978 to the intense interest of science fiction readers and the growing community of SF scholars. Recalling Nabokov's commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Roland Barthes' commentary on Balzac's Sarazine, and Grabinier's reading of The Heart of Hamlet, this book-length essay helped prove the genre worthy of serious investigation. The American Shore is the third in a series of influential critical works by Samuel R. Delany, beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, first published in the late seventies and reissued over the last five years by Wesleyan University Press, which helped win Delany a Pilgrim Award for Science Fiction Scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association of America. This edition includes the author's corrected text as well as a new introduction by Delany scholar Matthew Cheney.</P>

Trisha Brown

Susan Rosenberg

<P>Trisha Brown re-shaped the landscape of modern dance with her game-changing and boundary-defying choreography and visual art. Art historian Susan Rosenberg draws on Brown's archives, as well as interviews with Brown and her colleagues, to track Brown's deliberate evolutionary trajectory through the first half of her decades-long career. Brown has created over 100 dances, six operas, one ballet, and a significant body of graphic works. This book discusses the formation of Brown's systemic artistic principles, and provides close readings of the works that Brown created for non-traditional and art world settings in relation to the first body of works she created for the proscenium stage. Highlighting the cognitive-kinesthetic complexity that defines the making, performing and watching of these dances, Rosenberg uncovers the importance of composer John Cage's ideas and methods to understand Brown's contributions. One of the most important and influential artists of our time, Brown was the first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship «Genius Award.»</P>

Running with the Devil

Robert Walser

<P>Dismissed by critics and academics, condemned by parents and politicians, and fervently embraced by legions of fans, heavy metal music continues to attract and embody cultural conflicts that are central to society. In Running with the Devil, Robert Walser explores how and why heavy metal works, both musically and socially, and at the same time uses metal to investigate contemporary formations of identity, community, gender, and power. This edition includes a new foreword by Harris M. Berger contextualizing the work and a new afterword by the author.</P>

Moving Toward Life

Anna Halprin

<P>Anna Halprin is one of the most important innovators in the history of modern dance, performance art, and post-modern dance. Moving Toward Life brings together for the first time her essays, interviews, manifestos, and teaching materials, along with over 100 illustrations, providing a rich account of the work that radicalized an entire generation of performers.</P><P>Since the late 1950s, Halprin has been at the forefront of experiments in dance, from improvisation and street theatre to dances in the environment and healing dances. A brief overview of Halprin's career shows how her work has prefigured – and transfigured – crucial developments in postmodern dance. In the 1960s, Halprin invented the «workshop,» and in the wake of the Watts riots, her multiracial company broke boundaries in their confrontational political performances. In the 1970s, she organized «community rituals» to explore how individual creativity feeds positively into group dynamics. These healing social events led to her current work with cancer survivors and people challenging AIDS and their caregivers.</P><P>Depicting Halprin's deep commitment to social change, Moving Toward Life presents an engaging, critical document of the life of one of the most influential and least known luminaries of American dance. Sally Banes and Janice Ross join Rachel Kaplan in providing introductory essays to sections of the book.</P>

Why Haiti Needs New Narratives

Gina Athena Ulysse

<P><B>Winner of the Haitian Studies Association Excellence in Scholarship Award (2015)</B></P><P>Mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic earthquake of January 12, 2010, reproduced longstanding narratives of Haiti and stereotypes of Haitians. Cognizant that this Haiti, as it exists in the public sphere, is a rhetorically and graphically incarcerated one, the feminist anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse embarked on a writing spree that lasted over two years. As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivers critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in a series of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti. Her complex yet singular aim is to make sense of how the nation and its subjects continue to negotiate sovereignty and being in a world where, according to a Haitian saying, tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm (All people are human, but all humans are not the same). This collection contains thirty pieces, most of which were previously published in and on Haitian Times, Huffington Post, Ms Magazine, Ms Blog, NACLA, and other print and online venues. The book is trilingual (English, Kreyòl, and French) and includes a foreword by award-winning author and historian Robin D.G. Kelley.</P>

A Connecticut Yankee in Lincoln’s Cabinet

Gideon Welles

<P>Gideon Welles, the Connecticut journalist-politician who served as Lincoln's secretary of the navy, was not only an architect of Union victory but also a shrewd observer of people, issues, and events. Fortunately for posterity, he recorded many of his observations in his extensive diary. A Connecticut Yankee in Lincoln's Cabinet brings together 250 of the most important and interesting excerpts from the diary, dealing with topics as varied as the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Marine Band's concerts in Washington's Lafayette Square, Lincoln's sense of humor, rivalries among cabinet members, Welles's often caustic opinions of prominent politicians and military leaders, demands for creation of a navy yard in his home state, the challenge of blockading 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline, the struggle against rebel commerce raiders, the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, the Fort Pillow massacre of African American troops, and Lincoln's assassination. Together, the excerpts provide a candid insider's view of the Civil War as it unfolded, and an introduction provides the reader with context. Published by the Acorn Club.</P>

A Momentary Glory

Harvey Shapiro

<P>The distinguished poet Harvey Shapiro passed away on January 7, 2013. The poems in this book, many of them previously unpublished and discovered only after his death, are a great gift, and the final confirmation of his extraordinary talent. Edited by Shapiro's literary executor, the poet and critic Norman Finkelstein, these last poems bear an unprecedented gravitas, and yet they are as supple, jazzy, and edgy as Shapiro's earlier work. All the themes for which he is known are beautifully represented here. There are poems of his experiences in World War II, the erotic life, and of daily moments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, all in search of a worldly wisdom and grace that the poet calls «a momentary glory.» As Shapiro tells us, the poem «Is an Egyptian / ship of the dead, / everything required / for life stored / in its hold.» The book includes an introduction by the editor.</P>

The Book of Landings

Mark McMorris

<P>The Book of Landings brings together the second and third parts of Mark McMorris's visionary trilogy «Auditions for Utopia,»—initiated in Entrepôt—and marks two stages in the evolution of the poet's conception of space. The first stage of the collection is the entrepôt, a space where disparate vectors of identity congregate, come into conflict, and finally merge into hybrid forms. The poetry follows a trajectory of diaspora, or exile, instigated by conquest, colonialism, wars, and political defeat in the search for Utopia. In The Book of Landings the promised dwelling has been removed from the realm of physical geography, and there is only transition—fragmentary episodes of arrival and departure, in transit from one entrepôt to another. These episodes of transit do not only compose a linear sequence only. Instead, they define a space or surface marked by repeated traversals over time—tracings and, importantly, re-tracings, by explorers, conquerors, migrants, merchants, slaves, refugees, and exiles—a city of palimpsests. An online reader's companion will be available at markmcmorris.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>