Sweeping the Way: Divine Transformation in the Aztec Festival of Ochpaniztli

Incorporating human sacrifice, flaying, and mock warfare, the pre-Columbian Mexican ceremony known as Ochpaniztli, or “Sweeping,” has long attracted attention. Although it is among the best known of eighteen annual Aztec ceremonies, Ochpaniztli’s significance nevertheless has been poorly understood. Ochpaniztli is known mainly from early colonial illustrated manuscripts produced in cross-cultural collaboration between Spanish missionary-chroniclers […]

Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska’s New Deal Totem Parks

Among Southeast Alaska’s best-known tourist attractions are its totem parks, showcases for monumental wood sculptures by Tlingit and Haida artists. Although the art form is centuries old, the parks date back only to the waning years of the Great Depression, when the US government reversed its policy of suppressing Native practices and began to pay […]

The Real Cost of Cheap Food, Second Edition

This thought-provoking but accessible book critically examines the dominant food regime on its own terms, by seriously asking whether we can afford cheap food and by exploring what exactly cheap food affords us. Detailing the numerous ways that our understanding of food has narrowed, such as its price per ounce, combination of nutrients, yield per acre, or calories, the book argues for a more contextual view of food when debating its affordability.

Nature and Wealth: Overcoming Environmental Scarcity and Inequality

The world economy today is facing two major threats: increasing environmental degradation and a growing gap between rich and poor. Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, this book argues that these two threats are symptomatic of a growing structural imbalance in all economies – how nature is exploited to create wealth. The root of this […]

The Water Paradox: Overcoming the Global Crisis in Water Management

For millennia, we have perceived water as an abundant and easily accessible resource. But water shortages are fast becoming a persistent reality for all nations, rich and poor. If water is so valuable and scarce, then why is it so poorly managed? Edward Barbier argues that the current water crisis is as much a failure […]

Spool

“Spool’s a year ‘written in threes’—its three word lines forming narrow columns or perhaps threads. ‘Thread’ is a word Cooperman explicitly associates with the lyric here and it is also Ariadne’s thread of rescue or at least return though, at times, ‘the tape is/broken now so / sick and sick.’ To change up the metaphor, […]

NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified)

“In their compelling and moving collaboration, Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman chronicle the challenges and occasional triumphs of raising a child with autism. The three letters of the book’s title, NOS, embody the reduction—the negation—of individuals and bodies to medical and psychoanalytic acronyms. The poets realize, however, that the designation of autism to describe their […]

Suburban Dreams: Imagining and Building the Good Life

Starting with the premise that suburban films, residential neighborhoods, chain restaurants, malls, and megachurches are compelling forms (topos) that shape and materialize the everyday lives of residents and visitors, Greg Dickinson’s Suburban Dreams offers a rhetorically attuned critical analysis of contemporary American suburbs and the “good life” their residents pursue. Dickinson’s analysis suggests that the […]

Reimagining Popular Notions of American Intellectualism: Literacy, Education, and Class

The image of the lazy, media-obsessed American, preoccupied with vanity and consumerism, permeates popular culture and fuels critiques of American education. In Reimagining Popular Notions of American Intellectualism, Kelly Susan Bradbury challenges this image by examining and reimagining widespread conceptions of intellectualism that assume intellectual activity is situated solely in elite institutions of higher education. […]