A bold and impassioned meditation on injustice in our country that punctures the illusion of a postracial America and reveals it as a place where authoritarianism looms large. Whether the issues are protest, labor, patriotism, or class division, it is clear that professional sports are no longer simply fun and games. Rather, the industry is a hotbed of fractures and inequities that reflect and even drive some of the most divisive issues in our country. The nine provocative and deeply personal essays in Full Dissidence confront the dangerous narratives that are shaping the current dialogue in sports and mainstream culture. The book is a reflection on a culture where African Americans continue to navigate the sharp edges of whiteness—as citizens who are always at risk of being told, often directly from the White House, to go back to where they came from. The topics Howard Bryant takes on include the player-owner relationship, the militarization of sports, the myth of integration, the erasure of black identity as a condition of success, and the kleptocracy that has forced America to ask itself if its beliefs of freedom and democracy are more than just words. In a time when authoritarianism is creeping into our lives and is being embraced in our politics, Full Dissidence will make us question the strength of the bonds we think we have with our fellow citizens, and it shows us why we must break from the malignant behaviors that have become normalized in everyday life.

Returning to the early modern period, this study questions and develops issues of post-modernity. It shows how literature histories and sub-cultures of sexual and gender dissidence may be relevant to current debates and discusses topics ranging from homophobia to transgression and its containment.

Liliana Wilson’s art of resistance and protest, dissidence and dreams, consistently calls attention to injustice. Wilson belongs to a group of Chilean artists who were intimately shaped by the political turmoil and repression in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s and who have become self-exiled artists working outside of Chile but who are still tied to the political period and to its issues and concerns. From a working class family that struggled financially, Wilson nonetheless was able to study law, which facilitated her successful immigration to the United States in 1977. She moved to Texas and in Austin found a cultural oasis that permitted her art to blossom. Now, after some thirty years of artistic work in Texas, she is recognized as a major Latina artist, whose influence extends beyond US borders. A crusader for justice and against oppression, she paints and draws in various media and has become an inspiration for younger artists concerned with not only political repression and inequality but also individual fear and despair. Ofrenda: Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams highlights some of Wilson’s most representative works, accompanied by biographical background and scholarly interpretation.

In her groundbreaking new book, Silencing Political Dissent, constitutional expert Nancy Chang examines how the Bush administration's fight against terrorism is resulting in a disturbing erosion of First Amendment rights and increase of executive power. Chang's compelling analysis begins with a historical review of political repression and intolerance of dissent in America. From the Sedition Act of 1798, through the Smith Act of the 1940s and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, to the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO program of the 1960s, Chang recalls how during times of crisis and war, the U.S. government has unjustly detained individuals, invaded personal privacy, and hampered the free speech of Americans. Chang's expertise as a senior constitutional attorney shines through in the power and clarity of her argument. Meticulously researched and footnoted, Chang's book forces us to challenge the government when it is unpopular to do so, and to consider that perhaps "our future safety lies in the expansion, rather the contraction, of the democratic values set forth in the Constitution."

From the PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of Lucky Girls comes an intricately woven novel about secrets, love, art, identity, and the shining chaos of every day American life. Yuan Zhao, a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident, has accepted a one-year artist's residency in Los Angeles. He is to be a Visiting Scholar at the St. Anselm's School for Girls, teaching advanced art, and hosted by one of the school's most devoted families: the wealthy if dysfunctional Traverses. The Traverses are too preoccupied with their own problems to pay their foreign guest too much attention, and the dissident is delighted to be left alone—his past links with radical movements give him good reason to avoid careful scrutiny. The trouble starts when he and his American hosts begin to view one another with clearer eyes.

Drawing on a range of philosophical, anthropological and political theories, Athena Athanasiou offers a new way of thinking about agonistic performativity with its critical connections to national and gender politics and alongside the political intricacies of affectivity, courage and justice. Through an ethnographic account of the urban feminist and antinationalist movement Women in Black of Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars, she shows that we might understand their dissident politics of mourning as a means to refigure political life beyond sovereign accounts of subjectivity and agency.

Recent critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework—while refining and resisting it in places—to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge us today. One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as Classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects. This volume will be essential reading for students of British literary and cultural history as well as for those interested in feminist, gay, and lesbian studies. Contributors are: Oliver Buckton, Richard Dellamora, Dennis Denisoff, Regenia Gagnier, Eric Haralson, Andrew Hewitt, Christopher Lane, Thaïs Morgan, Yopie Prins, Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Julia Saville, Robert Sulcer, Jr., Martha Vicinus.