When most people think that “little girls should be seen and not heard,” a noisy, riotous scream can be revolutionary. But that’s not the case anymore. (Cis/Het/White) Girls aren’t supposed to be virginal, passive objects, but Poly-Styrene-like sirens who scream back in spectacularly noisy and transgressive ways as they “Lean In.” Resilience is the new, neoliberal feminine ideal: real women overcome all the objectification and silencing that impeded their foremothers. Resilience discourse incites noisy damage, like screams, so that it can be recycled for a profit. It turns the crises posed by avant-garde noise, feminist critique, and black aesthetics into opportunities for strengthening the vitality of multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy (MRWaSP). Reading contemporary pop music – Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Calvin Harris – with and against political philosophers like Michel Foucault, feminists like Patricia Hill Collins, and media theorists like Steven Shaviro, /Resilience & Melancholy/ shows how resilience discourse manifests in both pop music and in feminist politics. In particular, it argues that resilient femininity is a post-feminist strategy for producing post-race white supremacy. Resilience discourse allows women to “Lean In” to MRWaSP privilege because their overcoming and leaning-in actively produce blackness as exception, as pathology, as death. The book also considers alternatives to resilience found in the work of Beyonce, Rihanna, and Atari Teenage Riot. Updating Freud, James calls these pathological, diseased iterations of resilience “melancholy.” Melancholy makes resilience unprofitable, that is, incapable of generating enough surplus value to keep MRWaSP capitalism healthy. Investing in the things that resilience discourse renders exceptional, melancholic siren songs like Rihanna’s “Diamonds” steer us off course, away from resilient “life” and into the death.

Musical media and the audio recording industry have an important and complex history in Newfoundland and Labrador: professional musicians, community songwriters, local institutions, and even politicians have gone on record. The result is a widespread body of work that undercuts the idea of recorded music as a cultural commodity and deepens the province's tradition of cultural activism. Drawing on contemporary testimony and over fifty years of interviews, On Record explores how recording projects have served as sonic signatures, forms of protest, homage, or parody of the foibles of those in power. Beverley Diamond examines how audio recording in Newfoundland and Labrador has been shaped not merely by creative individuals, but by such events as resettlement, residential schools, the cod moratorium, technological change, and disasters that have befallen those who live and work on the North Atlantic. A chapter by ethnomusicologist and musician Mathias Kom examines the widespread response to a unique annual "challenge" to make an audio recording. Spanning both commercial and community-oriented initiatives, this book reflects the vibrant, socially engaged, and resilient nature of communities that value simultaneously and equally the highest professional standards and the creative potential of every citizen. Encompassing music from both settler and Indigenous communities, On Record redefines the culture of a province that has most often been associated with traditional music, demonstrating that recording goes beyond the creation of a commodity: it responds to the present and to constructs of public memory.

In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

“This is a book about what it would mean to be a bit moody in the midst of being theological and political. Its framing assumption is that neoliberal economics relies on narratives in which not being in the right mood means a cursed existence.” So begins Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed, which mounts a challenge to neoliberal narratives of redemption. Mapping the contemporary state of political theology, Karen Bray brings it to bear upon secularism, Marxist thought, affect theory, queer temporality, and other critical modes as a way to refuse separating one’s personal mood from the political or philosophical. Introducing the concept of bipolar time, she offers a critique of neoliberal temporality by countering capitalist priorities of efficiency through the experiences of mania and depression. And it is here Bray makes her crucial critical turn, one that values the power of those who are unredeemed in the eyes of liberal democracy—those too slow, too mad, too depressed to be of productive worth—suggesting forms of utopia in the poetics of crip theory and ordinary habit. Through performances of what she calls grave attending—being brought down by the gravity of what is and listening to the ghosts of what might have been—Bray asks readers to choose collective care over individual overcoming. Grave Attending brings critical questions of embodiment, history, and power to the fields of political theology, radical theology, secular theology, and the continental philosophy of religion. Scholars interested in addressing the lack of intersectional engagement within these fields will find this work invaluable. As the forces of neoliberalism demand we be productive, efficient, happy, and flexible in order to be deemed worthy subjects, Grave Attending offers another model for living politically, emotionally, and theologically. Instead of submitting to such a market-driven concept of salvation, this book insists that we remain mad, moody, and unredeemed. Drawing on theories of affect, temporality, disability, queerness, work, and race, Bray persuades us that embodying more just forms of sociality comes not in spite of irredeemable moods, but through them.

How does the sudden onset of disability impact the sense of self in a person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of what is culturally understood to be an "able" body? How does this experience make visible the structures enabling society's shared notions of heteronormative masculinity? In the United States, the Second World War functioned as a key moment in the emergence of modern understandings of disability, demonstrating that an increased concern with disability in the postwar period would ultimately lead to greater incoherence in the definitions and cultural meanings of disability in America. The Illegible Man examines depictions of disability in American film and literature in twentieth-century postwar contexts, beginning with the first World War and continuing through America's war in Vietnam. Will Kanyusik searches for the origin of discourse surrounding disability and masculinity after the Second World War, examining both literature and film—both fiction and documentary—their depictions of disability and masculinity, and how many of these texts were created by the relationship between the culture industry and the Office of War Information in the 1940s. Supported by original archival research, The Illegible Man presents a new understanding of disability, masculinity, and war in American culture.

From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.