Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures approaches the subject of the self and its becoming through the exploration of modes of its transformation, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations; embodied participation in therepeutic prorams like psychoanalysis and gendered care services; and through political activism or relationships with animals. The essays in this collection show that both minor and major modes of self-alteration exist in many places and times, and across very different modern societies.
 

Providing a critical history of Tandem Productions, the company behind nearly all the hit Black sitcoms of the 1970s, including Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and Diff’rent Strokes, Adrien Sebro explores how their sitcom plots paralleled what was happening behind the scenes, as talented African-Americans devised strategies to gain creative agency and fair financial compensation.   
 

Barbara Smith has been doing groundbreaking work since the early 1970s, describing a Black feminism for Black women. This collection contains some of her major essays on Black women's literature, Black lesbian writing, on racism in the women's movement, Black-Jewish relations, and homophobia in the Black community. Her forays into these areas ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers were addressing at the time, and which, sadly, remain pertinent to this day. This 25th anniversary edition, in a beautiful new package, retains the urgency these essays had when they were first written.  

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.