This chapter offers an analysis of Private Romeo, director Alan Brown’s 2012 film production of the play. Set in a boys’ military high school, Private Romeo appropriates Romeo and Juliet to tell the story of two young men falling in love with one another. But, where Romeo and Juliet is a tale of tragedy, Private Romeo is very much a tale of male same-sex love’s triumph. Indeed, the happy ending of Private Romeo can be considered the film’s queerest aspect of all. Hence, as far as queer is understood in its most ‘simplistic’ sense as a challenge to all things heteronormative, Private Romeo shows how Romeo and Juliet can be thoroughly queered as opposed to merely incorporating ‘gay’ elements into otherwise ‘straight’ productions. At the same time, some critics might be troubled by Private Romeo’s representation of queerness because that queerness is wholly inflected by assimilationist capitulations. Its depiction of same-sex marriage as an ideal, inevitable outcome can be interpreted as an imposition of the kind of conformity that merely apes heteronormative conventions. Hence the need to both queer and unqueer Private Romeo.

This chapter addresses Sterling A. Brown’s essays and blues-based poems, particularly those appearing in his 1932 collection Southern Road, to raise questions of commodification in the context of the technologized recording and dissemination of African American musical forms, especially the blues. The chapter claims that in Brown’s work (and that of other commentators), the folksong collector emerges as a figure antithetical to the commodification of folk forms suggested by the phonograph. Brown’s attitude toward the phonograph was ambivalent: He embraced it at times, and at others dismissed it as an emblem of commodification and cultural appropriation. The phonograph, however, emerged within a shifting set of cultural practices in which the boundaries between live performance and recorded sound, as well as bodies and recording apparatuses, became permeable and negotiable. Thus, even when Brown’s poems celebrate the blues as an uncommodified oral cultural form indissociable from its social and material milieu in the folk community, as in his iconic poem “Ma Rainey,” the phonograph becomes a kind of vanishing mediator between the poem and its vernacular sources, as Brown’s poems’ constructions of orality are underwritten by its inescapable technologized presence.

This chapter discusses Herder’s Fragments: On Recent German Literature. In this work, Herder provided a comprehensive ‘patriotic’ assessment of the current situation of the German language and literature, including also excerpts from several smaller essays on the origins of poetry, language, and society. Previous scholarly discussions have mainly focused on Herder’s evolving historicism, aesthetics or philosophical hermeneutics as set out in these early essays. However, it is not sufficiently acknowledged that Herder’s theory of German linguistic and literary patriotism rested on a philosophical history of humanity, which he devised in dialogue with several other such histories. Engaging with Iselin’s and Goguet’s ideas, Herder sought to provide a response and alternative to Rousseau’s account of early human history. His own account closely paralleled that of John Brown. Both Brown and Herder traced all human culture and politics back to humans’ original creative agency, while Herder also drew rather optimistic conclusions from this. If it was the human capacity for poetry that demonstrated the dignity of human nature and had, from the earliest times, sustained human societies, one could hope that some form of poetry could also supply a remedy to the ‘current malaise of the world’.

The relative freedom and political stability of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain produced an intellectual milieu amenable to advances in the natural sciences and philosophy. The major theme of British psychological thought was empirical, emphasizing knowledge acquired through sensation. The mechanism of this acquisition process was association. Founded by Hobbes but fully articulated by Locke, British empiricism retained the necessity of the mind construct while underlining the importance of sensations. Berkeley, Hume, and Hartley evolved skeptical positions concerning the reality of matter and mind that could have left the British movement in the same sterile position as French sensationalism. In addition, James Mill, although he was somewhat salvaged by the utilitarian influence, reduced associations to mental compounding. However, the Scottish common sense writers succeeded in restoring empiricism to a more flexible and open-ended position that recognized complex and integrative psychological phenomena. Thus, the later empiricism of John Stuart Mill, while adhering to scientific inductive methods, adopted a broadly based model of psychology that viewed mental operations and physiological processes as complementary and necessary dimensions of psychological inquiry. By the nineteenth century British philosophy was providing strong support for the study of psychology.

For many Black and Brown professors their herculean efforts to excel in academia, despite the limitations imposed by chronic interpersonal and institutional racism, can result in their humanity being overlooked. The unrelenting exigencies of teaching, researching, publishing, administrating, and mentoring all the while cultivating vibrant personal lives can amass enormous strain on their health and wellbeing. The price of being one of few professors of color in predominantly White spaces can be arduous, as conditions of isolation, exclusion, and cultural taxation further compound the psychological stress experienced. The immense value educators of color bring to institutions has been well documented, and thus attention must be given to addressing their unique experiences if their presence in the field is to be maintained, and eventually expanded. In this chapter, the author will explore the various mental health challenges faced by professionals of color in academia and propose effective strategies for addressing them.

This chapter tells the story of the long struggle to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson and desegregate American schools - culminating with the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion Brown v. Board of Education. The chapter then examines the application of Brown, detailing how subsequent rulings purporting to stem from Brown have, in fact, failed to carry out its central command to desegregate all American schools. Much of this checkered legal history arose due to the Court’s insistence on delineating between de jure (legally mandated) and de facto (arising incidentally as a result of non-legally mandated conduct) segregation This distinction led to the 2007 PICS ruling, which dramatically circumscribes the use of race to achieve a desegregated educational environment for districts which experience de facto rather than de jure discrimination. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the growing “resegregation” of American schools, tracing its deleterious effects on all students.