Poor Folks Research Articles

No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black&Free in America

Reviewed by: No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America by Darnell L. Moore Robert Barry (bio) DARNELL L. MOORE, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America. Bold Type Books, 2019. vii + 247 pp. ISBN 1568589409. Darnell L Moore’s No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America is a noteworthy intervention within the discourse of Black liberation and contributes to the knowledge production of Black masculinities, transgenerational trauma, hope, and possibilities of healing. The debut memoir by the activist-author engages storytelling, outlined by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012), as a decolonized methodology that “articulates the diversities of truth” (p. 145). Moore complicates memoir through his interdisciplinary modality of pairing personal [End Page 157] narrative with sociocultural histories that inform the individual. Specifically, Darnell L. Moore explores the intricacies of coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s in Camden, New Jersey, as Black, male, and queer. In doing so, Moore writes to a body of literature that challenges static delineations of Black abjection and subverts literary traditions centered solely on cis-heteronormative experiences. No Ashes in the Fire locates itself within a collective of memoirs released in 2018–2019 that details the ruminations of Black existence within assemblies of racial and gendered domination (e.g., Heavy by Kiese Laymon, When They Call You a Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones). Moore’s narrative uncovers its originality among the sea of memoirs with self-accountability, accessibility, and Black liberation in mind. Comprised of eight chapters, not including the prologue and epilogue, Moore’s memoir inquires in what way do we verbalize freedom for “every day, ordinary folks who learn to create life amid death-dealing cultures of hatred and lies?” (p. 11). Chapter 1 seeks to retort such inquiry through the author’s theorization of extended family imperiled to “forces of economic disinvestment, political deceptions, and cultural pathologization” and how it’s precast in Camden and other cities (p. 33). Moore’s counter-story of state-induced inequalities does two things: first, it disrupts normalized American dream depictions of what family is supposed to look like, while also unearthing the living conditions forced on poor folks during the Nixon and Reagan eras. Chapters 2 and 3 further the counter-story of growing up Black and poor through Moore’s comprehensive initiation into Black masculinity—its performance, politics, and harmful measures taken by communities to protect the racialized and gendered construct. Moore encounters manhood’s duality at a young age through his father’s counterpart performances—compassionate and destructive. In particular, Moore speaks of his father as a mixture of care and harm—articulating how they mutually coexist in our complex web of human connection (p. 41). His father employs his hands to safeguard young Moore while also using them to injure his mother. Readers may note the level of care and vulnerability deployed by Moore in his rememory of his childhood. The ways in which he candidly uncovers the injurious technologies of intimate-partner violence while conceding his father’s actions as symptomatic retorts to systems of oppression is a great benefit of this book. As seen in liberatory spaces, this method of accountability reestablishes humanity for all parties involved—the harmed and the individuals subjecting harm. Moore comprehends how his individual experiences are in conversation with broader discourse surrounding race, gender, and sexuality. He details how, at [End Page 158] 14, his life was compromised by homophobia and patriarchy. Battered and nearly set afire for his presumed femininity by his peers left him vulnerable and unable to perform a form of masculinity that would protect him. Moore’s near-death experience unearths the socialization young boys encounter transgenerationally —the makings of a man is through his physicality and conquest of subordinate beings. No Ashes in the Fire has a significant focus on the harm encountered by the author while navigating the damage he’s affected on others in the name of masculinity. In Chapter 6, he pens his notes of accountability, where uncovers that his performance of masculinity can be traced back to his father. Moore argues...

Post kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis: A threat to elimination program.

Leishmaniasis remains a public health concern around the world that primarily affects poor folks of the developing world spanning across 98 countries with mortality of 0.2 million to 0.4 million annually. Post kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis (PKDL) is the late skin manifestation of visceral leishmaniasis (VL). It has been reported that about 2.5% to 20% of patients recovered from VL develop PKDL having stilted macular or nodular lesions with parasites. In the Indian subcontinent (ISC), it manifests a few months after recovery from VL, though in Africa it can occur simultaneously with VL or a little later. New cases of PKDL are also observed without prior VL in the ISC. These individuals with PKDL represent an important but largely neglected reservoir of infection that perpetuates anthroponotic Leishmania donovani transmission in the ISC and can jeopardize the VL elimination program as these cases can infect the sand flies and spread the endemic. Therefore, it becomes imperative to eradicate PKDL as a part of the VL elimination program. With the limited treatment options besides little knowledge on PKDL, this review stands out in focusing on different aspects that should be dealt for sustained VL elimination.

Is Advertising a Social Determinant of Health—You Bet!

As a 1980s child growing up in a drug-infested housing project, mass advertising by hospitals and insurance companies had no bearing on my community. On the airwaves, private hospitals promoted state-of-the-art facilities and rehabilitation centers. TV commercials touted porcelain, well-heeled, young couples bringing rustic floral arrangements to smiling elders in cozy post-surgical suites. These private hospital ads targeted middle and upper class, picket-fence, insured America. Poor folks were not their goal. We were not stakeholders in the eyes of competing hospitals. Instead of rustic flowers, we saw dilapidated placards and billboards that advertised cigarettes, malt-liquor, and funeral homes.

El Desarrollo Humano Integral en la teología cristiana

El autor realiza un recorrido a lo largo de la teología cristiana de los últimos cincuenta años sobre el concepto y modelo de desarrollo humano integral. La Iglesia que sale del concilio es especialmente consciente de que su misión sacramental en el mundo. Y no es posible el anuncio de la buena noticia al margen del compromiso por la mejora de las condiciones materiales y sociales de vida de los pueblos. la Iglesia va a plantear un “hecho moral”, el subdesarrollo no es responsabilidad de los indigentes, ni una fatalidad social o natural, sino un hecho que apela a la responsabilidad moral de todos, especialmente de los ciudadanos y de la política de los países desarrollados El desarrollo no es posible sin redistribución de la riqueza, pero el desarrollo no se reduce al simple crecimiento económico. Para ser auténtico debe ser integral, es decir, promover a todos los hombres y a todo el hombre.

Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music by Nadine Hubbs

<i>Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music</i> by Nadine Hubbs

Proximate, Fatty Acid and Mineral Composition of Orange-Spotted Grouper &lt;i&gt;Epinephelus coioides &lt;/i&gt;from Parangipettai Coast

The marine fish are extraordinarily nourishing food and are affluently accessible fish meat source. Fresh examined sample of grouper fish was collected from Mudasal odai fish landing center. The protein, carbohydrate, lipid, ash and moisture contents of Epinephelus coioides were found to be 19.07 mg, 4.03, 2.61, 77.38 mg and 1.21 mg/g respectively. The potassium and phosphorus are the predominant elements other nine components are present in considerable quantities in the total of 11 minerals. Palmitic acid, Oleic acid and Stearic acid were observed to be the major elements of total presented 15 fatty acids. In this current study we have concluded the grouper fish having rich source of protein and good fatty acids and it will facilitate to enhance the nutrition level on poor folks

Proximate, Fatty Acid and Mineral Composition of Orange-Spotted Grouper &lt;i&gt;Epinephelus coioides &lt;/i&gt;from Parangipettai Coast

The marine fish are extraordinarily nourishing food and are affluently accessible fish meat source. Fresh examined sample of grouper fish was collected from Mudasal odai fish landing center. The protein, carbohydrate, lipid, ash and moisture contents of Epinephelus coioides were found to be 19.07 mg, 4.03, 2.61, 77.38 mg and 1.21 mg/g respectively. The potassium and phosphorus are the predominant elements other nine components are present in considerable quantities in the total of 11 minerals. Palmitic acid, Oleic acid and Stearic acid were observed to be the major elements of total presented 15 fatty acids. In this current study we have concluded the grouper fish having rich source of protein and good fatty acids and it will facilitate to enhance the nutrition level on poor folks

Two Poems

In Defense of Passing Most of us call it cloaking, though the academic term for the practice slides just as smoothly off a teenager’s tongue: holographic deracination. Within days of wide-scale release, the Times will hail this device, its attendant social phenomena, as triumphs of modern technology, inevitable advance given the speed of post-racial desire, how expensive it is to purge the murk from an infant’s skin by most other means. The machine’s inventor will make no such claims. A plainspoken woman, she was. Stanford grad, white as a lab coat. Cited her time overseas as primary inspiration; all the suffering she’d seen caste cause. The device came to her in a lucid dream, this silver ellipse small enough to wear on the wrist or lapel, just one touch and any future you choose could be yours. Soft, false flesh, draped like a new lover over your body and just as clumsily until you work out the rhythm of it, the slang, how to maneuver this cold glass suit, light as it is. Believe it or not, protest didn’t last long. Sky-high pricing kept the cloaks an upper-class concern for months, years before poor folks got a hold of any prototype worth the worry. Once they did, you would think they had stolen something worth more than a date with the quarterback, or a job interview. You would think they had killed someone important, or blown up the moon, the way cops flooded the slums, clubs in hand, beating the color off of them. Two Poems by Joshua Bennett 48 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 cover feature bodies in literature photo : andrew toskin WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 49 Still Life with Toy Gun for Tamir Rice and John Crawford III after the after-party empties both of its fists the seven of us gather like a murder of crows to loose bread around the last table the dining hall has left. It’s late, and vegetarian pizza is the best thing the joint has going but we stay, mostly to partake in what we would never call gossip in front of our uncles but most certainly is: who left with how many numbers, top ten worst life choices made that weekend, how Lauryn’s cobalt dress lassoed every human breath in the room. Night unspools. Our attention plants its feet in late Clinton-era Everywhere and we sing of what we yearned for back then, back home, what mocked our small, stupefied hands like a white stove or the promise of beauty. Consensus lands on Super Soakers. B.B. guns. All manner of false weaponry we were barred from as boys because of a mother’s fear, her suspicion that the rules of a given game might shift and gunfire would be our only warning, the policeman’s voice an aftershock, his first mouth having already made its claim. Even now, no one among us calls this a kind of theft, which is to say, the term never launches like a hex from our tongues, but even if it did, somehow, rise and alight the air, if everything we missed during the years we grew tired trying not to die found its own body right then, right there in the dead center of campus, what difference could it make now that we have already mastered the rule book, the protocol we learned before we learned to slow dance, or smooth talk, or scream the lyrics of a favorite song in a group of two or more and not feel ashamed of all the noise a black body can make while it is still living Joshua Bennett is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University and has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Ford Foundation. Winner of the 2015 Erskine J. Poetry Prize, his poems have been published or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Callaloo, New England Review, and elsewhere. Bennett is also the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression. photo : eve ewing ...

Community Reparations to Transform Community Desolation

Community Reparations to Transform Community Desolation

Talking ‘bout poor folks (thinking ‘bout my folks): perspectives on comparative poverty in working class households

This paper explores concepts and narratives of comparative poverty articulated by residents of six working class neighbourhoods in Britain and examines how individuals’ assessments of self were influenced by comparisons to other social groups. The paper presents empirical findings to suggest the need for more nuanced sociological and policy understandings of working class experience and alternative explanations for quiescence with inequality. Our findings suggest disconnections between research emphasising relative deprivation and stigmatisation, a drive to evaluate economic status and the centrality of a comparative relational framework for perceptions of poverty; and the actual lens’ through which many working class individuals conceptualise their circumstances. The denial of a social comparative paradigm was generated by circumstances being doxic (or taken for granted), the rejection of a ‘poverty’ label, the importance of self-trajectories and the ambivalent and nuanced relationships between material wealth, happiness and moral worth. However, a limited comparative gaze upon more affluent groups was contrasted with strong narratives of respectability and legitimacy juxtaposed with those groups deemed not to adhere to these working class values. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for housing policy.

"She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes": Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies

"She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes"Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies Rebecca Sharpless (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution White women, mostly the wives of farm owners, and fewer African American women sought to enhance their family income through petty sales of everything from chickens to caramel cakes. The sales ranged from peddling foraged items such as blackberries to organized curb markets with firm rules of engagement and pricing. Curb market in Durham, North Carolina, 1948, courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, Durham County Library. [End Page 45] Buying local food is all the rage today. Serious students of food tout the advantages of produce from nearby regions both for flavor and environmental advantages. Long before the word locavore entered the national vocabulary, however, southern women developed their own regional food networks, both as producers and consumers. During the first third of the twentieth century, enterprising farm women produced and sold eggs, chickens, butter, fruit, and vegetables, and discerning urban housewives bought these products, sometimes from local stores and sometimes directly from the growers. That both groups tried to gain advantage in the exchange demonstrates the complexities created by people with disparate goals and by urbanization, which led to an increasing divide between town and farm people. Women showed their acumen in supplying food for the market and for their families, locally grown and purchased.1 The market relationships between rural and urban women were on the minds of many southerners in the 1920s and 1930s. Two fictional examples show the dual sides of the interplay. In William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, Cora Tull, a quintessential good wife, takes the advice of a Miss Lawington, probably a home demonstration agent, and scrapes and saves to buy some purebred chickens which produce superior eggs. Cora then contracts with a woman from town to buy her homemade cakes. After Cora has lavished her finest ingredients and enormous care in their production, the unnamed woman then decides not to have the party and declines to purchase the cakes. As Cora ministers to her dying neighbor, she ruminates over the rejected cakes: "So I baked yesterday, more careful than ever I baked in my life, and the cakes turned out right well. But when we got to town this morning Miss Lawington told me the lady had changed her mind and was not going to have the party after all." Cora's daughter Kate, who serves as something of a Cassandra figure in the novel, speaks bluntly: "She ought to have taken them . . . But those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks can't." The town woman is condemned by the country women (and perhaps by Faulkner) on several levels. First, she is frivolous, hosting parties which country people cannot afford. Second, she is capricious, changing her mind about the party at the last minute. Third, she is unscrupulous, refusing to buy the product for which she has contracted. For Cora, the producer, this unnamed woman is a consuming nightmare. Her perfidy casts a further note of gloom over the hot room where Addie Bundren lies on her deathbed.2 In the battle between town and country, the town dweller holds all the cards. In Dorothy Scarborough's 1929 novel Can't Get a Red Bird, a wealthy urban woman becomes the patron of a poor country woman. Honey Carr, whose family could not keep a milk cow on their sharecropper's farm, is determined to escape the life of a cotton sharecropper. She borrows cows and makes good butter, which her husband Johnny sells to a local grocer who is the vendor of choice for [End Page 46] Mrs. Blank, the wife of the mayor of Dallas. Mrs. Blank inquires of the product's source. When she expresses her delight with Honey's superior product, Johnny boldly asks the mayor's wife if she will buy directly from him, and she agrees, also requesting eggs and lamb. Mrs. Blank then arranges to sell the surplus to her neighbors and relatives. Johnny and Honey make enough money from this production to pay off their grocery debt. Through sheer luck, the young couple sells to...

"The Law Has No Feeling for Poor Folks Like Us!": Everyday Responses to Legal Compulsion in England's Working-Class Communities, 1871-1904

During the late Victorian period, the role of the state increased dramatically in England's working-class urban communities. New laws on labor, health, and education, enforced by a growing bureaucracy of elected and appointed officials, extended the reach of public authority into daily life on an unprecedented scale. Everyday negotiations between these officials and working-class men and women, I argue, were key moments for determining the practical impact of new social welfare policies. This was particularly true in the contestation over children's compulsory school attendance, as I demonstrate through a close examination of the daily encounters between parents and education officials. Despite the growing size and authority of the Victorian state, working-class parents effectively mitigated the impact of the compulsory education laws on their families. They were able to do so because the categories that governed the level of enforcement—age, household economic status, health, and labor—were themselves determined through daily dialogues between parents and education officials. Parents' familiarity with the law and with the dynamics of the public education bureaucracy were key factors in these negotiations, as were internal fractures within the Victorian state itself. Working-class parents, and mothers in particular, also countered officials' moral policy justifications with their own discourse of right and wrong, which focused on the legitimacy of parental authority, an insistence on just treatment, and the elevation of household needs over the laws' requirements.

The 'Mene Peuple' and the Polite Spectator: The Individual in the Crowd at Eighteenth-Century London Fairs

In an effort to memorialize Bartholomew Fair as it teetered on the brink of abolition, George Alexander Stevens, the author and actor most famous for his Lecture on Heads, composed a song in 1763. For the benefit of posterity he portrayed the fairground as ‘crowds against other crowds driving’ in a cacophony of noise from shows and rides, amongst a barrage of smells from the food stalls and the fair-goers.1 Full of attractions, the fair tempted people ‘By sound and by show, by trash and by trumpery, / The fal-lals of fashion, and frenchify’d frumpery’.2 To visit a fair was to be distracted by gaudy garments on sale in the fairground booths and worn on the bodies of gentlefolk who ‘strut in their silver and satins’ alongside ‘poor folks … tramping in straw hats and pattens’. Venturing into the fair left you at risk of being assailed mentally, as well as crushed physically.

Rebellious Identification, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Arabella

Rebellious Identification, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Arabella Lesley Goodman (bio) "I—I can't help liking her—just a little bit!" —Jude the Obscure (337) Rebellious Identification Sue Bridehead, along with other characters in and some readers of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, finds something about Arabella irresistibly attractive, even though both Sue and the readers have every reason to dislike Jude's coarse, selfish, troublesome wife. Arabella is responsible for much of Jude's and Sue's troubles, preventing their marriage multiple times and interrupting their lives repeatedly. She is crass and lewd and has no sympathy whatsoever for Jude's higher goals and ambitions; as Jude puts it, there is "something in her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream" (84). Readers are invited—by Jude, Sue, and Hardy himself—to resent Arabella's disruptions and unruly presence. Why might a reader resist this invitation to condemn Arabella? What could readers possibly find attractive about Arabella? If we are initially disgusted, along with Jude, at Arabella's false hair, practiced dimples, and readiness to entrap Jude into marriage, we might next react with exasperation at Jude's oversensitivity and refusal to acknowledge his own agency in courting and marrying Arabella. Similarly, we may initially admire Jude's sensitivity in killing the pig, but we may later—or instead—admire Arabella's pragmatism: "Poor folks must live" (111). While the text is clear that Jude should make better [End Page 163] decisions and that it is tragic that he finds himself "tricked" into marriage with Arabella, it also asks us to credit the genuineness of Jude's attraction to Arabella. Likewise, the novel suggests that this attraction is "against his intention—almost against his will" (83), later comparing it to the violent yank of a schoolboy by a schoolmaster who cared "little for his reason and his will" (87)—but it also acknowledges his emotional presence in their courtship. Jude's agency is present but variously glossed over or portrayed as an object of a reader's pity. Instead of focusing on the damage that Arabella seems to cause, a reader might consider Hardy's blaming her excessive and unfair. This reaction to Arabella typifies a particular readerly experience that I explore here and call rebellious identification. Rebellious identification is probably a familiar feeling to many readers: we read or contemplate a novel, we begin to feel that the author is somehow "unfair" in her treatment of one of the characters, and we begin to take that character's side—emotionally, imaginatively, rhetorically—against the author. Rebellious identification consists of two facets: an emotional logic that exists outside of fiction, the logic by which one emotionally comes to the defense of someone in reaction to a perceived injustice, even if that defense can have no possible effect; and a relationship, unique to fictional texts, between reader, character, and author.1 "Sometimes the reader feels that the author is unfairly running down one of her own characters," writes a nineteenth-century critic of George Eliot's Middlemarch in terms similar to those readers today might use to describe their responses to fictional characters: "Celia Brooke and Rosamond Vincy are, to use an expressive, though rude, schoolboy phrase, 'always catching it' from the authoress, till we feel decidedly disposed to take their sides" (Hutton 295).2 As a direct result of this authorial injustice, Hutton emphasizes, as do I, that the reader feels more affection and interest for these characters. The reader's willingness to affiliate with a character results from the sense that such sympathy is illicit, that this mis-identification is an act of rebellion against an author (or an implied author) who has certain designs upon our feelings.3 In what follows, I will offer an explanation of rebellious identification and will locate it within philosophical, cognitive, and narrative theories of fiction, arguing that the existence of a phenomenon like rebellious identification calls for a re-evaluation of many of these theories. I will then examine the relationship between ethics and affect in the response of rebellious identification, and finally...

HIV testing and conspiracy beliefs regarding the origins of HIV among African Americans.

Conspiracy beliefs regarding the origins of HIV are common among African Americans, and have been associated with engaging in HIV risk behaviors but also with earlier diagnosis among HIV patients. The objective of the present study was to test the association of HIV serostatus testing with conspiracy beliefs. A total of 1430 African Americans from low-income neighborhoods with high rates of drug use were surveyed in 1997-1999 in face-to-face interviews. Two 4-point items assessed if participants agreed that "AIDS was started by an experiment that went wrong" and "AIDS was created to kill blacks and poor folks." A binary variable indicated if the respondent agreed with the statements, on average. 22.5% of the sample endorsed conspiracy beliefs, 4.0% of whom reported not having had an HIV test, compared to 7.7% of those who did not endorse conspiracy beliefs. In multivariable logistic regression modeling, never having had an HIV test was significantly associated with conspiracy beliefs (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 0.43, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.3-4.3), having a high school education (AOR = 0.55, CI = 0.35-0.84), having depression (AOR = 1.61, CI = 1.02-2.52), female gender (AOR = 0.54, CI = 0.34-0.86), younger age, and a history of injection drug use (AOR = 0.36, CI = 0.23-0.56), but not sex risk behaviors (multiple partners, irregular condom use). The finding that individuals who have conspiracy beliefs are more likely to have been tested for HIV may partially explain why HIV-positive individuals who endorse conspiracy beliefs are more likely to obtain an earlier diagnosis.

Disturbing calculations: the economics of identity in postcolonial southern literature, 1912-2002

This title reveals affinities between antebellum southern and modern American capitalist psychology.In Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Margaret Leonard says, Never mind about algebra here. That's for poor folks. There's no need for algebra where two and two make five. Moments of mathematical reckoning like this pervade twentieth-century southern literature, says Melanie R. Benson. In fiction by a large, diverse group of authors, including William Faulkner, Anita Loos, William Attaway, Dorothy Allison, and Lan Cao, Benson identifies a calculation-obsessed, anxiety-ridden discourse in which numbers are employed to determine social and racial hierarchies and establish individual worth and identity.This narcissistic fetish of number speaks to a tangle of desires and denials rooted in the history of the South, capitalism, and colonialism. No one evades participation in these disturbing equations, says Benson, wherein longing for increase, accumulation, and superiority collides with repudiation of the means by which material wealth is attained. Writers from marginalized groups - including African Americans, Native Americans, women, immigrants, and the poor - have deeply internalized and co-opted methods and tropes of the master narrative even as they have struggled to wield new voices unmarked by the discourse of the colonizer.Having nominally emerged from slavery's legacy, the South is now situated in the agonized space between free market capitalism and social progressivism. Elite southerners work to distance themselves from capitalism's dehumanizing mechanisms, while the marginalized yearn to realize the uniquely American narrative of accumulation and ascent. The fetish of numbers emerges to signify the futility of both.

Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians by Timothy J. s&gt; Cooley (review)

REVIEWS 549 Vasilok, the blue cornflower'; chapter two 'Youth, Ukraine, the War, and post-war military service'; chapter three 'Lieutenant Bykaiu's prose'; chapter four 'Partisannovels: victims or victors?';chapter five 'On both sides of the front lines: Signs of misfortune'; chapter six 'Scars of war: Being hunted down'; chapter seven 'On oppression in war and peace: Poor folks';chapter eight 'There is no prophet in your fatherland:Vasil Bykau6's crossroadsand the politics of freedom';Epilogue 'Exile and a long way home'. The appendix offers a note on pronunciation and transliteration. The bibliography of primaryand secondary sources is comprehensive. For students or others interested in particularworks by Bykaiuthe Index is, at one level, very helpful, going beyond simple reference to analysis and critical opinion. It in fact ranges very wide indeed, with a quantity of broad items such as 'chance', 'conscience', 'moraltruth'or 'losstheme', to take four examples that referto only one page each. The firstof them concerns specifically Bykaiu'sinterest in existentialism, whilst the second and third are veritable leitmotivs in his writing as a whole. For anglophone readers, however , the translatedtitles of works do not appear separatelyin the Index, so that one of Bykau6's most popular and successfulnovels, Znakbiady(Sign of Misfortune)is given in this form, thus hindering immediate access; another novel, turaulinycyk, [sic]is without the English translationof the title. This is regrettable, for lack of access to a foreign audience is a continuing cry of Belarusianswanting to be discovered and heard in the world. On the other hand, the tone of the book is so committedand passionate,the layout so clear, that very few potential readerswill be deterredfrom findingwhat they want. Gimpelevich'snarrative,informedby a longstandingfriendshipwith the writer and his wife as well as many other prominent literary figures, is at once warmly personal and at the same time informative about the Belarusian cultural tradition (Marc Chagall, for instance, figures on seven pages), and itsplace in a Slavoniccontext, not ignoringBelarus'speculiarpoliticalposition (referencesto dictatorshipappear on nine pages and the word is also crossreferenced ). It is a rare event for a monograph on a Belarusianwriterto appear in any foreign language, and particularlyin English. Gimpelevich's labour of love should bring furtherrecognition to a man who, shortlybefore his death, was recommended for the Nobel Prizeby both Havel and Milosz. It deservesto be purchasedby not only specialistlibrariesor Slavists,but by all with an interest in the rich heritage of a major, stillneglected twentieth-centurywriter. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN Universiy College London Cooley, TimothyJ. Making Musicin thePolishTatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and MountainMusicians.Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis , 2005. xvii + 293 PP. Musical extracts. Illustrations.Glossary. Notes. Bibliography.Index. CD. !3I.95. TIMOTHYJ. COOLEY, author of this fascinating book, is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-editor 550 SEER, 84, 3, JULY 2006 (with Gregory F. Barz) of Shadows in theField:New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicologv (New York and Oxford, I997). As Cooley describes in the Prefaceto the book, the workfirstarose as a resultof his interestin the music and people of the Gorale or Tatra Mountain Highlanders, individual members of which he met when workingas a folkloristand ethnomusicologistat the IllinoisArts Council in Chicago. Chicago is, of course, renowned for its huge multi-ethnicpopulation,but Cooley was struckparticularlyby the factthat the Polish G6rale were most anxious to retain their distinct regional identity as Tatra mountaineers, despite being far removed from their native mountains. He was also impressedby the vigorous nature of the music and dance which was in a style completely unfamiliar to him, although it recalled, to some extent, the American old-time string band music associated with the Appalachian Mountains. It was in Chicago that, among the Gorale musicians, he met the pgymista (leadviolin)WiadyslawStyrczula-Mas'niak and his studentAndrzejTokarz a violinist, bagy(three-stringedcello-sized bowed lute), bagpipe and G6rale flute player. The virtuoso violin playing of Wladyslaw seemed to open up a new world to Cooley and led to meetingswith many other talentedmusicians resident in the Chicago area, Toronto and elsewhere. It was Wladyslaw too, who, when Cooley visited the Tatra District of Poland at a subsequent date, arranged accommodation at his father's house. Another...

Vasil BykaÅ­: His Life and Work by Z. I. Gimpelevich (review)

548 SEER, 84, 3, JULY 2006 Communism in Russia was still fighting the capitalist system in a life and death struggle.Russian writerswho derided the Soviet Union were betraying their own country. This analysis may now seem outmoded, but it formed the background of Sholokhov's thinking and led him to condemn many of the more vocal dissidents. He went on to attack corruption: just imagine Tolstoi coming into an editor'sofficeto give a fairwind to his son'smanuscript or that Rakhmaninovcould askShaliapinto let his niece sing alongsidehim in TheBarber of Seville.'Osipov goes on to remark:'It's a pity that we have not followedthisadvice. It has long been saidthat a prophetis not honouredin his own country.' This biographyis published in the seriesZhizn'zamechatel'nykh liudei,which is intended for a wide readership. The book has only one short page of bibliography and we cannot check sources, since there are few detailed references.If we accept these limitationsit may be said that Osipov providesa useful insight into Russian politics over some fiftyyears of Soviet power. Ramsden BRIAN MURPHY Gimpelevich, Z. I. VasilBykaicHis Lifeand Work. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, 2005. 26o pp. Notes. Index. Appendix. CAN $49.95: US $39.95: C25.95. VASIL BYKAU'(I924-2003) was without doubt the leading Belarusian prose writerof the twentieth centuryand this is the firstcriticalbiographyof his life and works in a Western language. The book's particular strength lies in Gimpelevich's detailed description of his life and, indeed, the passion and emotional language with which she lovingly creates what is perhaps more a Zyc#e(life of a saint) than a conventional literary study. Of all Belarusians, Vasil Bykaucertainlymeritssuch enthusiasm,being duringhis lifetimea symbol of the aspirationsand faithof nationallyconsciousBelarusianseverywhere. This is an unusual and necessarybook that deserves a warm welcome. The writingof Bykaiu, who survivedWorld War Two and variousforms of Soviet repression before seeing his long-sufferingcountry turn into 'the last dictatorshipin Europe', is morally consistent, although far from uniform or unchanging in form and theme. Best known as a war writerwho presentswar in microcosm ratherthan panoramas,he went on in the late Soviet period to stories about peacetime and, specifically, the long lasting traces of military conflict. In his last years, alreadyin exile, he turned not only to memoirs but to lapidaryyet profoundshortformsthat he termedparables.In each of these periods Bykaushowed a particularlyacute historical awareness that enabled him to bring out the springsof human behaviour,outsideas well as within the context of the immediate action; in many of his workslinksbetween past and present play a major thematic and psychologicalrole. This useful and, for the time being, unique biographyis divided into eight chapterswith an introductionand epilogue, each bearing descriptiveheadings that convey (even without capitals)something of the tone of the book: Introduction 'The generation that is almost no more'; chapter one 'Childhood: REVIEWS 549 Vasilok, the blue cornflower'; chapter two 'Youth, Ukraine, the War, and post-war military service'; chapter three 'Lieutenant Bykaiu's prose'; chapter four 'Partisannovels: victims or victors?';chapter five 'On both sides of the front lines: Signs of misfortune'; chapter six 'Scars of war: Being hunted down'; chapter seven 'On oppression in war and peace: Poor folks';chapter eight 'There is no prophet in your fatherland:Vasil Bykau6's crossroadsand the politics of freedom';Epilogue 'Exile and a long way home'. The appendix offers a note on pronunciation and transliteration. The bibliography of primaryand secondary sources is comprehensive. For students or others interested in particularworks by Bykaiuthe Index is, at one level, very helpful, going beyond simple reference to analysis and critical opinion. It in fact ranges very wide indeed, with a quantity of broad items such as 'chance', 'conscience', 'moraltruth'or 'losstheme', to take four examples that referto only one page each. The firstof them concerns specifically Bykaiu'sinterest in existentialism, whilst the second and third are veritable leitmotivs in his writing as a whole. For anglophone readers, however , the translatedtitles of works do not appear separatelyin the Index, so that one of Bykau6's most popular and successfulnovels, Znakbiady(Sign of Misfortune)is given in this form, thus hindering immediate access; another novel, turaulinycyk, [sic]is without the English translationof the title. This is...

Resistance and the Pedagogy of Ethnic Literature

whole sobby immigrant thing is starting to get a little old and am having trouble feeling compasion [sic] for every story.... would enjoy a story of success, or something completely off personal level. These words are taken from a student journal entry made about three weeks into a course titled Literature and Moral Imagination: Fiction of Immigrant Experience in response to short story Eileen by Mary Gordon. We discuss moral, political, social, and economic issues raised by immigration in United States and examine fictional representations of that experience. Additionally, we consider question of why fiction is an appropriate vehicle for such content--that is, as opposed to reading other nonfictional genres such as memoir, biography, or history. While teaching this course, found myself puzzling over resistant, even hostile, responses, such as one quoted above, to a number of works we read for course; equally troubling to me as a teacher were my own resistance to and impatience with such responses. think of Flannery O'Connor's The Teaching of Literature, in which she cites response of a frustrated reader communicating a critique via O'Connor's uncle: Tell that girl to quit writing about poor folks.... see poor folks every day and get mighty tired of them, and when read, don't want to see any more of (131, my emphasis). As a serious teacher (in a nod to another of O'Connor's essays, The Tired Reader and Serious Writer), how should respond to this emotional and intellectual fatigue? In Empowering Reader: Literary Response and Classroom Learning, David S. Miail explores teaching methods that inhibit rather than encourage meaningful literary experiences. He concludes by speculating on benefits of negative response in literature classroom: Perhaps a part of function of literature is to arouse our negative emotions. It is obvious that negative emotions we feel in everyday life are much more likely to be suppressed than positive; they are socially less acceptable, and to express them might result in socially disruptive or damaging consequences ... [thus,] literature induces us to reflect on nature of such emotions, to explore their implications, and perhaps to rethink them in productive ways, within a symbolic context that is one remove from actual world.... If we thwart this process by clumsy methods ... perhaps we do so at our own peril. (476) Thus, in this paper present a number of speculations about both kinds of resistance (student's and reader's), as well as, hope, a number of workable, practical solutions to making resistance a useful tool in teaching ethnic literature. So, back to the whole sobby immigrant thing. When built journal requirement into course, set out very general guidelines, and told students to respond to whatever struck them about day's assigned reading. expressly encouraged them to explore their responses, even if negative--the only rule was that they had to examine reasons for that reaction. I really liked this story, or I hated this assignment, or This was so boring would not be acceptable. wanted them to get more critically involved with exploring their response to text, to uncover expectations, values, and assumptions that inform their reading process. resistance encountered to this requirement took several forms: outright but unexamined negative response, refusal to respond at all (this form saw also, as most of us do, in averted gazes and roaring silence during class discussion), or use of plot summary as a substitute for reflection and analysis. One rare exception to these forms of resistance was a young woman responding to Grace Paley's The Loudest Voice: OK, have to admit, this girl [Shirley, story's narrator/ protagonist, a six-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant who has been chosen to star in her school's Christmas pageant] was getting on my nerves by end of story. …

"Poor White Folks" and "Western Squatters": James Henry Beard's Images of Emigration

"Poor White Folks" and "Western Squatters": James Henry Beard's Images of Emigration