Congratulations to FFPP Alum Bret Maney (Lehman College) for the release of his translation of Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s Manhattan Tropics. Maney also edited this bilingual edition, published as Manhattan Tropics/Trópico en Manhattan. The first novel of the Puerto Rican mass migration to New York City, and one of the early novels of Puerto Rican New York, Manhattan Tropics appears as part of the “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Series” from Arte Público Press at the University of Houston.

Originally published in 1951 as Trópico en Manhattan, it was the first novel to focus on the postwar influx of Puerto Ricans to New York. Cotto-Thorner’s use of code-switching, or “Spanglish,” reflects the characters’ bicultural reality and makes the novel a forerunner of Nuyorican writing and contemporary Latino literature. This new bilingual edition contains a first-ever English translation by J. Bret Maney that artfully captures the style and spirit of the original Spanish. The novel’s exploration of class, race and gender—while demonstrating the community’s resilience and cultural pride—ensures its relevance today.

Imagining Queer Methods showcases the methodological renaissance unfolding in queer scholarship. The volume brings together emerging and esteemed researchers from all corners of the academy who are defining new directions for the field by asking “How do we do queer theory?”

From critical race studies, history, journalism, lesbian feminist studies, literature, media studies, and performance studies to anthropology, education, psychology, sociology, and urban planning, this impressive interdisciplinary collection covers topics such as humanistic approaches to reading, theorizing, and interpreting, as well as scientific appeals to measurement, modeling, sampling, and statistics.

Matt Brim is Associate Professor of Queer Studies in the English department at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His books include James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (U. of Michigan Press, 2014) and the forthcoming Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke U. Press, 2020), which reorients the field of queer studies away from elite institutions of higher education and toward working class schools, students, theories, and pedagogies. With Dr. Shelly Eversley, he is Academic Director of the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program.

Lara Saguisag (College of Staten Island), a 2014-15 FFPP Fellow, has won the Popular Culture Association’s Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Single Work by One or More Author for Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (Rutgers UP 2018). Lara has also been nominated for the Eisner award for Best Scholarly Work for Incorrigibles and Innocents.

Incorrigibles and Innocents examines the ways childhood was depicted and theorized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic strips. Drawing from and building on histories and theories of childhood, comics, and Progressive Era conceptualizations of citizenship and nationhood, Saguisag demonstrates that child characters in comic strips expressed and complicated contemporary notions of who had a right to claim membership in a modernizing, expanding nation.

Congratulations to Lara!

Congratulations to former FFPP Fellows Sarah C. Bishop (Baruch) and Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College), for the publications of their new books!  Our Community of Scholars is thrilled to celebrate the realization of your hard work.

Sarah’s book, Undocumented Storytellers:  Narrating the Immigrant Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2019)  offers “a critical exploration of the ways undocumented immigrant activists harness the power of storytelling to mitigate the fear and uncertainty of life without legal status and to advocate for immigration reform. Sarah C. Bishop chronicles the ways young people uncover their lack of legal status experientially — through interactions with parents, in attempts to pursue rites of passage reserved for citizens, and as audiences of political and popular media. She provides both theoretical and pragmatic contextualization as activist narrators recount the experiences that influenced their decisions to cultivate public voices.”

And Seth’s The Conservative Movement and the Vietnam War:  The Other Side of Vietnam (Routledge, 2019), explains how the conflict shaped modern conservatism. The war caused disputes between the pro-war anti-communists right and libertarian conservatives who opposed the war. At the same time, Christian evangelicals supported the war and began forming alliances with the mainstream, pro-war right. This enabled the formation of the New Right movement which came to dominate U.S. politics at the end of the twentieth century. The Conservative Movement and the Vietnam War explains the right’s changes between Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

The renowned literary and cultural critic Edward Said was one of our era’s most provocative and important thinkers. This comprehensive collection of his work, expanded from the earlier Edward Said Reader, now draws from across his entire four-decade career, including his posthumously published books, making it a definitive one-volume source.
The Selected Works includes key sections from all of Said’s books, including his groundbreaking Orientalism; his memoir, Out of Place; and his last book, On Late Style. Whether writing of Zionism or Palestinian self-determination, Jane Austen or Yeats, or of music or the media, Said’s uncompromising intelligence casts urgent light on every subject he undertakes. The Selected Works is a joy for the general reader and an indispensable resource for scholars in the many fields that his work has influenced and transformed.

Moustafa Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. His book, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by The Progressive magazine and was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Former FFPP Fellow Siraj Ahmed wins MLA Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies for his book, Archeology of Babel:  The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities (Stanford UP, 2018).

The Archeology of Babel “argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology’s foundational innovations originally served British rule in India.

Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.”

You can read the Prologue of his prize-winning book from Stanford University Press.

Siraj Ahmed is professor of English at the Graduate Center and comparative literature at Lehman College.