A tender, poetic coming-of-age tale drawn from author Carmine Abate’s childhood in the village of Carfizzi, The Round Dance transforms southern Italy into a magical realist wonderland that rivals Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo. A multicultural masterpiece inspired by ancient Albanian oral traditions, publisher Mondadori named it among the one hundred greatest Italian novels of the twentieth century.

 

The Brodsky Center at Rutgers: Three Decades, 1986-2017, chronicles the history and artists involved with an internationally acclaimed print and papermaking studio at Rutgers University. Judith K. Brodsky conceived, founded, and directed the atelier, which, from its onset, provided state-of-the-arts technology and expertise for under-represented contemporary artists — women, Indigenous, and from diasporas of the African, Eastern European, Latin and Asian communities — to make innovative works on paper. These artistic creations presented new narratives to American and global visual arts from voices previously not heard or seen.

Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema studies the poetics of the auteur-driven widescreen image, offering nimble, expansive analyses of the work of four distinctive filmmakers – Jean Negulesco, Blake Edwards, Robert Altman, and John Carpenter – who creatively inhabited the nooks and crannies of widescreen moviemaking during the final decades of the twentieth century.

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, feaures writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminisms foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package. 

Exploring the surprising parallels between Long Islander Billy Joel and Asbury Park, NJ native Bruce Springsteen, cultural historian Jim Cullen places their music within a longer tradition of the New York metropolitan sound. By recombining classic influences in unique ways, each man created music that appealed to wide audiences in a rapidly changing America. 

AntoloGaia offers a vivid first-hand account of the rise of the gay liberation movement in Italy, revealing how it was intimately intertwined with other forms of left-wing activism. Porpora Marcasciano conveys both the heartbreak of living through an era of institutionalized homophobia and the queer joy of encountering Italy’s unique gay and trans communities.

 

Drawing on original archival research and interviews, Peter C. Kunze offers a revisionist account of the Disney Renaissance that foregrounds the role of theatrically-trained talent in revitalizing Disney Animation. In so doing, he situates this impressive turnaround at the intersection of two dynamic entertainment industries with a long, underexamined relationships, Hollywood and Broadway.

In the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order.

This book highlights the modernity of Polish Jewish culture through its literature, poetry, film, cabaret, theater, architecture, the visual arts, and music in urban centers large and small. The contributors expertly reassert the belonging of Jews in Polish lands and showcase the multivalent texture of Polish Jewish cultural production before World War II.