Pier Groups

Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront

Jonathan Weinberg

“[T]he result of 16 years of research: Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront (Penn State University Press, $34.95). . . . focuses on the 1970s, when Weinberg himself used to trawl Manhattan’s West Side piers for both sexual and artistic gratification. The rambling, blighted structures that once represented the city’s reputation as a booming seaport were newly rife for site-specific artwork and documentation by the likes of Gordon Matta-Clark, whose 1975 ‘Days End’—five gaping incisions into the now-destroyed Pier 52—presided over the comings and goings of gay men looking for connection and satisfaction. It’s an alluring homage to a time, a community and a landscape that have long since vanished.”
—Jermey Allen, from the New York Times “Queer Coffee Table: 10 L.G.B.T.Q. Books to Usher in World Pride”

Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas

Edited by Cécile Fromont

“A compelling collection of essays that map out the transplantation of Kongo and Central African Christian traditions in the Americas by exploring the crucial role African Christian festivals played in the Americas. This is a timely multidisciplinary text that invites readers to explore representation and performance expressed in ideas, music, and art deployed by Africans to assert the will to thrive in the context of domination and to forge a vibrant Christian presence and practice.”
—Elias Bongmba, author of The Dialectics of Transformation in Africa

Staging Habla de Negros

Nicholas R. Jones

“A crucial intervention in discussions about black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Focusing specifically on early modern Spain, Jones offers insightful and nuanced readings of the ways in which (mostly) white Spanish writers appropriated black speech in staged performances and poetry, arguing that such appropriations actually encode black African agency. Importantly, he decenters the author and asks readers to approach these literary forms from the margin to understand how forces beyond the author influence text formation. Jones’s careful, against-the-grain readings open up to readers new archives (and re-present familiar ones from fresh, intriguing perspectives) for the study of black cultural experiences in the Renaissance era.”
—Cassander L. Smith, author of Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World

Love in a Time of Slaughters

Susan McHugh

“McHugh’s emphasis on multispecies affective bonding and shared living across texts and histories reshapes the terrain of literary animal studies, posing new lines of inquiry for scholars across many fields. Bringing interspecies lifeways and indigenous knowledges to consciousness within animal studies discourses, Love in a Time of Slaughters models a crucial new set of interpretive geographies for our social and ecological moment.”
—Carrie Rohman, author of Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance

Against Our Will

George Sand

Neo-Assyrian Sources in Context

Thematic Studies of Texts, History, and Culture

Edited by Shigeo Yamada

Since the 1980s, projects such as the State Archives of Assyria have made great strides in the philological study of Neo-Assyrian inscriptional sources, producing text editions and hand-copies of administrative and legal texts, letters, religious and literary works, and royal and private commemorative inscriptions with a high standard of accuracy. And yet, nearly thirty years later, we are only beginning to scratch the surface of what these texts have to offer. This volume advances. . . (more)

Tell el-Borg II

Excavations in North Sinai

Edited by James K. Hoffmeier

This is the second and final volume of scientific and interdisciplinary reports on the excavations and research conducted at Tell el-Borg, north Sinai, between 1998 and 2008, written by the scholars and specialists who worked on the site under the direction of Professor James K. Hoffmeier.

This volume focuses on the cemetery areas, which yield more than a dozen tombs, typically made of mud brick, some of which were constructed for a single occupant and some of which were larger tombs that accommodated. . . (more)