Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Crooked Data: (Mis)Information In Contemporary Art, N. Elizabeth Schlatter

Exhibition Catalogs

The University of Richmond Museums exhibited Crooked Data: (Mis)Information in Contemporary Art on February 9 through May 5, 2017, in the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art. The exhibition features art by twenty-one contemporary artists and studios who work with data in nontraditional ways. Some artists incorporate data from known sources, using it as an aesthetic device divorced from its originally intended interpretive function. Others gather and manifest data that might normally be considered not worthy of collecting. And some of the works explore alternatives to standard data visualization forms and practices.

Some of the works featured in Crooked …

[Introduction To] The Writing Of The Nation: Expressing Identity Through Congolese Literary Texts And Films, Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Bookshelf

The book is the study of literary texts and films seen as the manifestations of the Congolese consciousness and a response to the colonial discourse of denial, deletion and co-optation. It is a historical and ideological account of how writers and filmmakers have conceptualized the DRC or Zaire as a space supposedly out of a chaotic mode in need of domestication. Extending back to the precolonial times, it studies the epistemic foundations that underlie literary writings at various historical periods: an area to discover, to evangelize to exploit and to civilize. At the same time, the book addresses the problematic …

[Introduction To] The Dream Is Lost: Voting Rights And The Politics Of Race In Richmond, Virginia, Julian Maxwell Hayter

Bookshelf

Once the capital of the Confederacy and the industrial hub of slave-based tobacco production, Richmond, Virginia has been largely overlooked in the context of twentieth century urban and political history. By the early 1960s, the city served as an important center for integrated politics, as African Americans fought for fair representation and mobilized voters in order to overcome discriminatory policies. Richmond’s African Americans struggled to serve their growing communities in the face of unyielding discrimination. Yet, due to their dedication to strengthening the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African American politicians held a city council majority by the late 1970s. …

[Introduction To] Psychopathology Of American Capitalism: Critical Political Theory And Radical Practice, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Bookshelf

This book synthesizes psychoanalytic and Marxist techniques in order to illuminate the resistance to a socialization of the American economy, the protectionist discourses of anomalous American capitalism, and the suppression of the capitalist welfare state. After the Second World War, Democrats and Republicans effectively eliminated the communist and socialist parties from the American political spectrum and suppressed their allied labor movements. The right-wing shift of both parties fabricated a false opposition of left and right that does not correspond to political oppositions in the industrialized democracies. Marxist perspectives can account for the massive inequality of the political economy, but they …

[Introduction To] Feeding The Flock: The Foundations Of Mormon Thought: Church And Praxis, Terryl L. Givens

Bookshelf

Feeding the Flock, the second volume of Terryl L. Givens's landmark study of the foundations of Mormon thought and practice, traces the essential contours of Mormon practice as it developed from Joseph Smith to the present. Despite the stigmatizing fascination with its social innovations (polygamy, communalism), its stark supernaturalism (angels, gold plates, and seer stones), and its most esoteric aspects (a New World Garden of Eden, sacred undergarments), as well as its long-standing outlier status among American Protestants, Givens reminds us that Mormonism remains the most enduring-and thriving-product of the nineteenth-century's religious upheavals and innovations. Because Mormonism is founded …

[Introduction To] Darkness Falls On The Land Of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings In Eighteenth-Century New England, Douglas L. Winiarski

Bookshelf

This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors …

[Introduction To] Ambassadors Of The Working Class: Argentina's International Labor Activists And Cold War Democracy In The Americas, Ernesto Seman

Bookshelf

In 1946 Juan Perón launched a populist challenge to the United States, recruiting an army of labor activists to serve as worker attachés at every Argentine embassy. By 1955, over five hundred would serve, representing the largest presence of blue-collar workers in the foreign service of any country in history. A meatpacking union leader taught striking workers in Chicago about rising salaries under Perón. A railroad motorist joined the revolution in Bolivia. A baker showed Soviet workers the daily caloric intake of their Argentine counterparts. As Ambassadors of the Working Class shows, the attachés' struggle against US diplomats in Latin …

[Introduction To] The Thin Light Of Freedom: The Civil War And Emancipation In The Heart Of America, Edward L. Ayers

Bookshelf

A landmark Civil War history told from a fresh, deeply researched ground-level perspective.

At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable.

In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. …

[Introduction To] Heroes Of Richmond: Four Centuries Of Courage, Dignity, And Virtue, Scott T. Allison

Bookshelf

A gorgeous river city blessed with abundant resources, Richmond, Virginia has also been called the city of “contradictions” and “crises”, a city with a “complicated history” replete with “struggles and wounds”. Richmond has been a magnet for heroism and villainy, a place where the best and worst of human nature have collided over several centuries. This volume, Heroes of Richmond: Four Centuries of Courage, Dignity, and Virtue, captures the complex heroic history of a complex city. Authored by a group of outstanding students at the University of Richmond, this book provides coverage of Richmond’s heroes from the first Euro …

[Introduction To] Representing Heresy In Early Modern France, Gabriella Scarlatta, Lidia Radi

Bookshelf

Heresy is a fluid concept, not easy to define or pinpoint, and certainly one that defies religious and political boundaries. Heresy could be said to be a cultural construct manufactured by competing narratives. The articles in this volume examine the varieties of perceptions and representations of heresy in early modern France. In so doing, they reveal that such perceptions and representations have had more of an impact on our understanding of heresy than heresy itself. This, in turn, provides us with new and stimulating viewpoints on how heresy was recognized and depicted at the intersections of faith, art, gender, poetry, …

[Introduction To] Reasoning Against Madness: Psychiatry And The State In Rio De Janeiro, 1830-1944, Manuella Meyer

Bookshelf

Reasoning against Madness: Psychiatry and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1944 examines the emergence of Brazilian psychiatry, looking at how its practitioners fashioned themselves as the key architects in the project of national regeneration. The book's narrative involves a cast of varied characters in an unstable context: psychiatrists, Catholic representatives, spiritist leaders, state officials, and the mentally ill, all caught in the shifting landscape of modern state formation. Manuella Meyer investigates the key junctures at which psychiatrists sought to establish their authority and the ways in which their adversaries challenged this authority. These moments serve as productive points from …

[Introduction To] Natsional-Bol'shevizm: Stalinskaia Massovaia Kul'tura I Formirovanie Russkogo Natsional'nogo Samosoznaniia, 1931-1956, David Brandenberger

Bookshelf

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 …