Tag: New Books on the Edge

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“New Books on the Edge” with K. Merinda Simmons

The cover of Changing the Subject by K. Merinda Simmons

“New Books on the Edge” is an ongoing blog series, which engages forthcoming manuscripts by Edge collective members.

Changing the Subject: Writing Women Across the African Diaspora

From diaspora to class, gender, subjectivity, migration, labor and much more – take us behind the scenes of Changing the Subject — how it came to be, what sorts of questions are raised in this project, and what data is being engaged?

My disciplinary training is in literary theory, and I have long been puzzled by a tendencyI see working in that domain of scholarship. Namely, while so much of the field has been influenced by what many—myself included—see as important poststructuralist intellectual moves, I nonetheless keep coming across analyses by prominent scholars that focus on “authenticity” in one manner or other. This seems an especially noticeable phenomenon within scholarship on texts deemed marginalized—and, as my data set when I began the work that would ultimately become this book was comprised of narratives by women of various African diasporas, I decided to delve into how and why the emphasis on something called authenticity appears in the criticism surrounding these texts. Continue reading ““New Books on the Edge” with K. Merinda Simmons”

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New Books on the Edge

New Books“New Books on the Edge” is an ongoing blog series, organized by our own Monica Miller, which engages forthcoming manuscripts by Edge collective members, providing a window into the impetus, theory, and methods of their work.

In these interviews, the authors also provide insight into the synergy between their own scholarship and the work that they do here at Culture on the Edge, in terms of theorizing identity and identification.

Read interviews with:

Leslie Dorrough Smith on Righteous Rhetoric (Oxford, 2014)
Russell T. McCutcheon on Entanglements (Equinox, 2014)

Stay tuned for more interviews!

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“New Books on the Edge” with Leslie Dorrough Smith

the cover of Righteous Rhetoric by Leslie DorroughRighteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America 

What sparked your initial interest in exploring what drives the “political power” of the New Christian Right (NCR) and Concerned Women for America (CWA)? How are such groups commonly approached and analyzed in scholarly discourse and the larger public imagination?

As with many scholars, I suppose, my interest in politically active conservative Christianity (a.k.a, the NCR) is at least somewhat autobiographical. I grew up in a social environment steeped in conservative evangelicalism, and so the claims made by these groups – namely, the valorization of the entire spectrum of conservative politics, including a religiously-rooted patriotism, traditional gender roles, and the superiority of the heterosexual, nuclear family – were not new to me.  In a very direct sense, then, my interest in these groups began when, as an undergraduate religious studies major, I was seeking to better understand the appeal of conservative evangelical ideas and their political impact. Continue reading ““New Books on the Edge” with Leslie Dorrough Smith”