This study examines the complex relations between the figure of the ghost, the textual figure of metaphor and history, in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Offers the first queer reading of all ten of Morrison’s novels. Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts radically intervenes in one of the most established and sacred topics in Toni Morrison scholarship, love. Moving beyond Morrison’s representation of ghosts as the forgotten or occluded past, Juda Bennett uncovers how Morrison imagines the spectral sphere as always already queer, a provocation and challenge to heteronormativity—with the ghost appearing as an active participant in disruptions of compulsory heterosexuality, as a figure embodying closet desires, or as a disembodied emanation that counterpoints homophobia. From The Bluest Eye to Home, Morrison’s novels have included many queer ghosts that challenge our most cherished conceptions of love and speak to cultural anxieties about black sexualities, gay marriage, AIDS, lesbian visibility, and transgender identities. Not surprisingly, the scene-stealing ghost Beloved appears at the very heart of this book, but Bennett cautions against interpretative stasis, inviting readers to break free of the stranglehold Beloved has had on imaginations, so as not to miss the full force of Morrison’s lifelong project to queer love.

This book examines representations of the specter in American twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction. David Coughlan’s innovative structure has chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, particularly within the context of his 1993 text, Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter—that is, without ghost writing.

Women’s writing in the twentieth century has shown a dramatic shift in its preoccupations and intentions. Rather than occupying itself with the trivialities of the social and domestic spheres, the writing by women in the latter half of the twentieth century and approaching the twenty-first century inheres concerns such as political, historical, questions of gender equity and rights, interrogations of normative and patriarchal practices and other such issues that have not been adequately addressed in women’s writing thus far. The four essays in the present volume are certainly not exhaustive or adequate in this regard — that of addressing this lacuna in literary scholarship — but it may be viewed as a attempt to bridge the proverbial gap. As a precursor to further scholarly works in the area, already existing as well as forthcoming, the essays discuss the works of Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Bapsi Sidhwa, Manju Kapur and Sunanda Sikdar. Although the essays purport to exploring select areas of the authors’ oeuvre, the distinctive fictional structures of the authors help us to explore wider theoretical and critical issues such as postmodernity, postcolonialism, feminism, globalism, nationalism and other related issues.

This book explores diasporic identities and lived experiences that emerge in global patterns of oppression and considers the consequences of treatment and cure when patients experience mental illness due to war, displacement and surveillance. Going beyond psychiatric institutions and conventional psychiatric knowledge by focusing on informal networks, socially contingent value systems, and cultural sites of healing, this book considers how communities utilize trauma productively for healing. The chapters in this volume consider the detection of mental illness and its treatment through claims to citizenship and belonging as well as denials of social identity and psychic experiences by institutions of the state. A multidisciplinary team of contributors and international range of case studies explore topics such as colonial trauma, feminized trauma, reproductive violence, military mental health and more. This book is an essential resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as scholars and those involved in policymaking and practice.

What does it mean to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, a global crisis? How can Greek tragedy address urgent contemporary troubles? One of the outstanding and most widely read theorists in the discipline, Mario Telò, brings together a deep understanding of Greek tragedy and its most famous icons with contemporary times. In close readings of plays such as Alcestis, Antigone, Bacchae, Hecuba, Oedipus the King, Prometheus Bound, and Trojan Women, our experience is precariously refracted back in the formal worlds of plays named after and, to an extent, epitomized by tragic characters. Structured around four thematic clusters – Air Time Faces, Communities, Ruins, and Insurrections – this book presents timely interventions in critical theory and in the debates that matter to us as disaster becomes routine in the time-out-of-joint of a (post-)pandemic world. Violently encompassing all pre-existing and future crises (relational, political and ecological), the pandemic coincides with the queer unhistoricism of tragedy, and its collapsing of present, past, and future readerships.

Timbre is among the most important and the most elusive aspects of music. Visceral and immediate in its sonic properties, yet also considered sublime and ineffable, timbre finds itself caught up in metaphors: tone “color”, “wet” acoustics, or in Schoenberg's words, “the illusory stuff of our dreams.” This multi-disciplinary approach to timbre assesses the acoustic, corporeal, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of tone color in Western music practice and philosophy. It develops a new theorization of timbre and its crucial role in the epistemology of musical materialism through a vital materialist aesthetics in which conventional binaries and dualisms are superseded by a vibrant continuum. As the aesthetic and epistemological questions foregrounded by timbre are not restricted to isolated periods in music history or individual genres, but have pervaded Western musical aesthetics since early Modernity, the book discusses musical examples taken from both “classical” and “popular” music. These range, in “classical” music, from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the belcanto opera and electronic music to saturated music; and, in “popular” music, from indie through soul and ballad to dark industrial.

This book pursues a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to assess presidential impeachments in Latin America. Mixing methodologies from legal studies and political science, it provides a novel and comprehensive assessment of some of the most controversial questions regarding the constitutional function of impeachment and its place in the theory of government. Presidential impeachments have become frequent in Latin America, yet they are still largely misunderstood by legal practitioners and the general public. As such, impeachments frequently provide for heated and polarizing debates. The misunderstandings stem from skewed expectations arising from different theories of government, legal interpretation, and presidential impeachment. The empirical evidence and arguments presented here will help to find common ground on these topics and pacify some latent tensions in society and academia. In addition, the book’s case studies cover cases that have been rarely or incompletely addressed in the literature. Some cover events so recent that they have never been analyzed elsewhere. The book proposes reconsidering certain assumptions made about systems of government, which are based on skewed expectations of impeachments. It also draws on new evidence to re-examine existing impeachment theories and develop new ones. By doing so, it offers valuable insights that may guide lawmakers to redesign their own systems, optimizing them to achieve certain goals. It will also acquaint legal practitioners with the strategies of prosecution, defense, and decision-making in connection with impeachments.