The Insistent Call

"Throughout the nineteenth century, African heritage played an important role in black America, as personal memories and cultural practices continued to shape the everyday experience of people of African descent living under the shadow of slavery. Resisting efforts to de-Africanize their values, customs, and beliefs, black Americans invoked their African roots in public arguments about their identity and place in the "new" world. At the outset of the twentieth century many still saw Africa primarily as the source of a common cultural and spiritual past. But after the 1920s, the meaning of African heritage changed as people of African descent expressed new relationships between themselves, the United States, and the African Diaspora. In The Insistent Call, Aric Putnam studies the rhetoric of newspapers, literature, and political pamphlets that expressed this shift. He demonstrates that as people of African descent debated the United States' occupation of Haiti, the Liberian labor crisis, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, they formed a new collective identity, one that understood the African Diaspora in primarily political rather than cultural terms. In addition to uncovering a neglected period in the history of black rhetoric, Putnam shows how rhetoric that articulates the interests of a population not defined by the boundaries of a state can still motivate collective action and influence policies."--Project Muse.

Includes report of the New Jersey Agricultural College Experiment Station.

The renowned theologian “brings Luther and cosmology into dialogue with radical theological movements that have their point of departure in deconstruction” (George Pattison, author of Eternal God/Saving Time). John D. Caputo stretches his project as a radical theologian to new limits in this groundbreaking book. Mapping out his summative theological position, he identifies with Martin Luther to take on notions of the hidden god, the theology of the cross, confessional theology, and natural theology. Caputo also confronts the dark side of the cross with its correlation to lynching and racial and sexual discrimination. Caputo is clear that he is not writing as any kind of orthodox Lutheran but is instead engaging with a radical view of theology, cosmology, and poetics of the cross. Readers will recognize Caputo’s signature themes—hermeneutics, deconstruction, weakness, and the call—as well as his unique voice as he writes about moral life and our strivings for joy against contemporary society and politics. “This work will be eagerly awaited and immediately read by John D. Caputo’s many followers. They will be looking for him to fill out the ‘big picture’ which makes manifest for the first time all the parts and pieces he has contributed to the theological project he launched early in the previous decade.” —Carl Raschke, author of Postmodern Theology “Caputo is always distinctive.” —George Pattison, author of Eternal God/Saving Time

Short stories of life in an big middle western university. -- P.W.