Clark Authors

In this lively overview of the tremendously rich and varied artistic output of the area from southern Chile to northern California, Gauvin Alexander Bailey discusses viceregal and missionary as well as civic and rural architecture, alongside religious and secular painting, sculpture, metalwork, textiles and ceramics. But he also looks back to pre-colonial influences and concludes with an examination of how twentieth-century artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo interpreted their artistic heritage. Even today, the art of the colonial period remains at the centre of Latin American society, culture and identity. The result is a book that provides a new and comprehensive understanding of all the influences that led to one of the most cosmopolitan artistic outpourings in the whole history of art.

Bringing together texts from Puerto Rican literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how imaginings of national independence have served many competing purposes. They have given authority to the island's literary and artistic establishment but have also been a badge of countercultural cool. These ideas have been fueled both by nostalgia for an imagined past and by yearning for a better future. They have fostered local communities on the island, and still helped define Puerto Rican identity within U.S. Latino culture.

In clear, accessible prose, Acosta Cruz takes us on a journey from the 1898 annexation of Puerto Rico to the elections of 2012, stopping at many cultural touchstones along the way, from the canonical literature of the Generación del 30 to the rap music of Tego Calderón. Dream Nation thus serves both as a testament to how stories, symbols, and heroes of independence have inspired the Puerto Rican imagination and as an urgent warning about how this culture has become detached from the everyday concerns of the island's people.

A volume in the American Literature Initiatives series

In Erotic Exchanges, Nina Kushner reveals the complex world of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris by focusing on the professional mistresses who dominated it. In this demimonde, these dames entretenues exchanged sex, company, and sometimes even love for being "kept." Most of these women entered the profession unwillingly, either because they were desperate and could find no other means of support or because they were sold by family members to brothels or to particular men. A small but significant percentage of kept women, however, came from a theater subculture that actively supported elite prostitution. Kushner shows that in its business conventions, its moral codes, and even its sexual practices, the demimonde was an integral part of contemporary Parisian culture.Kushner's primary sources include thousands of folio pages of dossiers and other documents generated by the Paris police as they tracked the lives and careers of professional mistresses, reporting in meticulous, often lascivious, detail what these women and their clients did. Rather than reduce the history of sex work to the history of its regulation, Kushner interprets these materials in a way that unlocks these women's own experiences. Kushner analyzes prostitution as a form of work, examines the contracts that governed relationships among patrons, mistresses, and madams, and explores the roles played by money, gifts, and, on occasion, love in making and breaking the bonds between women and men. This vivid and engaging book explores elite prostitution not only as a form of labor and as a kind of business but also as a chapter in the history of emotions, marriage, and the family.

Judith Wagner DeCew provides a solid philosophical foundation for legal discussions of privacy by articulating and unifying diverse arguments on the right to privacy and on how it should be guaranteed in various contemporary contexts. Philosophers and legal theorists tend either to define privacy narrowly or to abandon privacy as conceptually incoherent, she claims. In order to assess how far privacy should extend, and determine how the wide range of specific cases can be reconciled, DeCew surveys the history of the notion of privacy as it first evolved in American tort law and constitutional law and then analyzes current characterizations. In different contexts, privacy has been defined on the basis of information, autonomy, property, and intimacy. DeCew's broader claim is that privacy has fundamental value because it allows us to create ourselves as individuals, offering us freedom from judgment, scrutiny, and the pressure to conform. Feminist theorists often view privacy as a tool for shielding abuses. DeCew responds to this feminist critique of privacy, as well as addressing the issues of abortion and of gay and lesbian sexuality in the context of specific landmark legal cases. In discussions of Roe v. Wade, Bowers v. Hardwick, and the Hart/Devlin debates on decriminalization of homosexuality and prostitution, DeCew applies her broad theory to sexual and reproductive privacy, anti-sodomy laws, and the legislation and enforcement of morals. She finally discusses the intersection of privacy with public safety concerns, such as drug testing, and in light of new communication technologies, such as caller ID.

New England Puritan sermon culture was primarily an oral phenomenon, and yet its literary production has been understood mainly through a print legacy. In Jeremiah's Scribes, Meredith Marie Neuman turns to the notes taken by Puritan auditors in the meetinghouse in order to fill out our sense of the lived experience of the sermon. By reconstructing the aural culture of sermons, Neuman shifts our attention from the pulpit to the pew to demonstrate the many ways in which sermon auditors helped to shape this dominant genre of Puritan New England.

Tracing the material transmission of sermon texts by readers and writers, hearers and notetakers, Jeremiah's Scribes challenges the notion of stable authorship by individual ministers. Instead, Neuman illuminates a mode of textual production that pervaded communities and occurred in the overlapping media of print, manuscript, and speech. Even printed sermons, she demonstrates, bore the traces of their roots in the oral culture of the meetinghouse.

Bringing material considerations to bear on anxieties over the perceived relationship between divine and human language, Jeremiah's Scribes broadens our understanding of all Puritan literature. Neuman examines the controlling logic of the sermon in relation to nonsermonic writing--such as conversion narrative--ultimately suggesting the fundamental permeability among disparate genres of Puritan writing.

Welcome to the inspiring story of Binti, a female octopus who lives in the Makoona coral reef, and Kemar, a Cambodian boy who fishes the reef.

As a mollusk without a shell, Binti believes she's missing something... but the reef is a dangerous place to search for anything, let alone the shell that will make her complete and let her communicate with the spirit-fish. But helped by her friends and a psychedelic octopus who speaks in Grateful Dead lyrics, the search is on.

Fifteen-year-old Kemar, a boatperson fleeing the Khmer Rouge, fishes the waters around Makoona where he crosses the path of a strange octopus and befriends both a Vietnam vet and an old American mechanic who claims she was once a world-famous aviator.

Makoona will make you laugh out loud as it transports you into the world of the coral reef and takes you on an island adventure that never loses sight of environmental concerns, personal fulfillment, friendship, self-awareness, and the tenets of eco-literature that Morano created in his unforgettable first novel, A Wing and a Prayer.

Like Wing, Makoona is a children's book for adults and a young adult novel with universal themes, a story that you can enjoy by yourself or share with the entire family.

Featuring a special introduction by Kathryn Fuller, President of the World Wildlife Fund.

The largest minority group in the United States, Latinos are also one of the most diverse. The New Americans? focuses on the three largest national origin groups--Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans--as well as two rapidly growing subgroups, Salvadorans and Dominicans, charting similarities and differences defined by country of origin, gender, tenure in the country, and language. Taking advantage of a unique natural experiment, Silber Mohamed's study also shows how the messages advanced during the 2006 protests led group members to raise immigration rights to the level of traditional concerns about economics and education and think differently about what it means to be American--and, furthermore, to think more distinctly of themselves as American.

A concise discussion of major developments in US immigration policy over the last fifty years, The New Americans? explores the varied historical experiences of the different Latino national origin groups. It also traces the evolving role of Latino social movements as a vehicle for political incorporation over the last century. In its in-depth analysis of the diversity of the Latino population, particularly in response to the politics of immigration, the book illuminates questions at the heart of American political culture: specifically, what does it mean to "become" American?

In Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary authors, politicians, and members of the medical establishment in German-speaking central Europe--and observes how consistently these writers, thinkers, and scientists associated the new nonnormative sexualities with places away from the German metropoles of Berlin and Vienna.

In the writings of Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Switzerland figured as a place for women in particular to escape the sexual confines of Germany. The sexual ethnologies of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack and the popular novels of Karl May linked nonnormative sexualities with the colonies and, in particular, with German Samoa. Same-sex desire was perhaps the most centrifugal sexuality of all, as so-called Greek love migrated to numerous places and peoples: a curious connection between homosexuality and Hungarian nationalism emerged in the writings of Adalbert Stifter and Karl Maria Kerbeny; Arnold Zweig built on a long and extremely well-developed gradation of associating homosexuality with Jewishness, projecting the entire question of same-sex desire onto the physical territory of Palestine; and Thomas Mann, of course, famously associated male-male desire with the fantastically liminal city of Venice, lying between land and sea, Europe and the Orient.

As Germany--and German-speaking Europe--became a fertile ground for homosexual subcultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what factors helped construct the sexuality that emerged? Peripheral Desires examines how and why the political, scientific and literary culture of the region produced the modern vocabulary of sexuality.

The View of the Courts from the Hill explores the current interactions and relationship between the U.S. Congress and federal courts using a "governance as dialogue" approach, which argues that constitutional interpretation in the United States is a continuous and complex conversation among all the institutions of government. Expanding on his previous work on this important theme, Mark C. Miller has interviewed numerous key players specifically for this book. His subjects include members of Congress, federal judges, congressional staff, employees of the judicial branch, lobbyists, and others with an interest in the courts. Their candid and thorough comments provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars eager to explore the dynamics between congressional and judicial forces as they have evolved over the past two decades.

The book examines customary interactions between Congress and the federal courts--especially the U.S. Supreme Court--as well as extraordinary conflicts between the two branches of government both today and throughout American history. Miller gives special attention to recent attempts by social conservatives in Congress to silence the voice of the courts in the inter-institutional dialogue through the use of court-stripping measures, threats of impeachment of federal judges, and a proposal for an inspector general for the courts. Particular focus is placed on the interactions between the courts and the House Judiciary Committee under Republican control, as well as the approach taken by the Religious Right toward federal judges and the federal courts in general. The book concludes with a call for the protection of judicial independence in order to preserve the voice of the federal courts in the constitutional interpretation dialogue.