Democracy as Fetish

Ralph Cintron

“Democracy as Fetish is necessary reading for today. Cintron demonstrates democracy’s fetishization in contemporary theorizing and guides readers through a new framework with the radical potential to explain the political maelström we live in. Cintron wildly blends fieldwork, theory, and textual analysis, constructing what reads like lively dialogue between conversationalists who are excited and invested and who care. Democracy as Fetish will stick with you long after you finish the final pages. Its ideas will return to you in random moments, you will mention it in conversation, and you will recommend it many times over to colleagues and acquaintances.”—Sara McKinnon, coeditor of Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method

Uncanny Bodies

Superhero Comics and Disability

Edited by Scott T. Smith and José Alaniz

“A remarkably significant contribution to both disability studies and comics studies. The essays collected here interrogate how superhero comics have struggled with reconciling the fantasy of the superbody with a growing concern, among producers and readers, for a more diverse and more adequate treatment of disabilities ranging from autism and dissociative identity disorder to deafness and progressive muscular dystrophy. A truly eye-opening book!”—Daniel Stein, University of Siegen

Paul Verlaine

A Bilingual Selection of His Verse

Paul Verlaine
Translated by Samuel N. Rosenberg, edited by Nicholas Valazza

“This anthology gives a fuller picture of Verlaine’s poetry than many translations have offered in the past, providing some of his most famous verse but also some political and homoerotic works for which he is less known. The translations capture and reproduce Verlaine’s variety of registers and style in lively renderings that are faithful to the spirit of the buoyant original verse”—Joseph Acquisto, author of The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy

Religion Around Bono

Evangelical Enchantment and Neoliberal Capitalism

Chad E. Seales

“From the parking lot of a Baptist church in the Florida Panhandle to Dublin, New York, Johannesburg, and the G-8 Summit at Gleneagles, Seales takes his readers on a tour of the evangelical grammar of humanitarian neoliberalism with Bono as his guide. Seales convincingly argues that when Bono speaks for Africa, he speaks for religious, cultural, and economic systems far more complex—and far less empowering—than his identity as a rock-and-roll saint may imply.”—Jill DeTemple, author of Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories: Religion and Community Development in Rural Ecuador

Jews in China

Cultural Conversations, Changing Perceptions

Irene Eber
Edited with an introduction by Kathryn Hellerstein

Irene Eber was one of the foremost authorities on Jews in China during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—a field that, in contrast to the study of the Jewish diaspora in Europe and the Americas, has been critically neglected. This volume gathers fourteen of Eber’s most salient articles and essays on the exchange between Jewish and Chinese cultures, making available to students, scholars, and general readers a representative sample of the range and depth of her important work in the field of Jews in China.

Ableist Rhetoric

How We Know, Value, and See Disability

James L. Cherney

“Cherney shows how the powerful but mostly invisible rhetoric of ableism shapes beliefs about disability. Carefully argued case studies—from The Exorcist, to the cochlear implant debate, to the Casey Martin controversy—illustrate how ableism operates through the warrants of ‘deviance is evil,’ ‘normal is natural,’ ‘body is able’ and across epistemic, ideological, and visual dimensions. They form the heart of the book, making it accessible and engaging for use in an undergraduate rhetoric or disability studies course.”—Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, coeditor of Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture

Cuneiform Texts from the Folios of W. G. Lambert, Part One

Edited by A. R. George and Junko Taniguchi

W. G. Lambert’s line drawings of cuneiform tablets from the British Museum, together with his meticulous editions of their contents, form a contribution to Assyriology unrivaled in his generation. Upon his death in 2011, Lambert bequeathed his academic legacy to A. R. George, who discovered among its contents approximately 1,400 unpublished pencil drawings. He and Junko Taniguchi took over the task of converting the drawings into images suitable for. . . (more)

Ruled Reading and Biblical Criticism

Matthew T. Bell

In Ruled Reading and Biblical Criticism, Matthew T. Bell contends that the gulf in interpretive priorities between ancient and modern readers has been exaggerated and that careful study of early Christian reading practices suggests that it is both possible and productive to recontextualize early Christian “ruled reading” for a postmodern setting.

Modern prejudice holds that ancient Christian interpretation was. . . (more)