In this chapter, which focuses on race, I enter into a conversation with Black and womanist theologies, and explore their witness to the Black Christ. I argue in the light of that engagement that Jesus’ consubstantiality with humanity, established in the incarnation, cannot be thought of as a bland universality. It is a relationship in which the poor, those who mourn, and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness come first. It makes sense for Christians in contexts like mine, when looking amidst the many forms of devotion to Jesus that surround us, and seeking to make discernments about what the Spirit might be teaching us about him, to turn first to those with whom Jesus first shared his life. The landscape of forms of Christian devotion is, in other words, not level, but is tilted toward justice, and those places where the love of God most clearly stands against all that denies and betrays this justice are the true heartlands of the imagining of Jesus. It would be wise for those of us not already caught up in such movements of the Spirit to turn first in their direction when seekinig to know Jesus more truly.

This chapter describes two theological utopian alternatives to capitalism: the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank and the political theology of Jürgen Moltmann, giving special attention to how each highlights a specific instance of capitalism’s double movement of social cohesion and liberation to propose an alternative. The chapter shows that while both are insightful for clarifying the theological elements at stake, they fail to provide a real alternative even as they point together to an apocalyptic theopolitics.

Turning to a renewed understanding of apocalyptic shaped by a biblical perspective, this chapter reads history confessionally to see in Jesus Christ a radical opening of history by God’s faithful action, the power of which is gathering a new people under Christ’s lordship freed from the dominion of the Powers and Principalities. From his particular life, message, and ministry, a new humanity of interdependence, solidarity, nonviolence, and mutual provision offers the prospect of an alternative path for history out of capitalism and into social renewal.

The Cold War involved a set of ethical, moral, and even aesthetic struggles alongside the economic, scientific, political, and military competition between the West and the Soviet Bloc. Individuals, no less than nations, were pressured to choose between self-actualized enactments of freedom or submission to presumed systems of constraint, whether that constraint came in the guise of political totalitarianism, complacent middle-class conformity, or even aesthetic rigidity. For nearly half a century, American narrative literature featured protagonists whose journeys toward knowledge, self-mastery, worldliness, and agency were expressed in a Cold War rhetoric of freedom and choice. We can posit, in opening this volume, that American literature of the era was shaped by affective geopolitics: American experience as recorded in cultural documents was ineluctably rendered in a Cold War discourse that pitted freedom against constraint – that envisioned the aspirational subjectivity of human beings as engaged on almost every front in a contentious battle with the forces of unfreedom. This introduction also briefly surveys the themes of the upcoming chapters of The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Cold War.

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, although almost entirely unknown for the first seven decades of the twentieth century, can be read as the inaugural text in a tradition of literary fiction about white women in New Orleans who enjoy relatively privileged class affiliations but who nonetheless struggle – with mixed results, if any – against a male-dominated society and the insidious resilience of its multifaceted networks of oppression. Shirley Ann Grau’s The House on Coliseum Street (1961), among Grau’s nine other books of fiction, is a summit of this legacy, and paved the way for Ellen Gilchrist’s fourteen collections of short stories and seven novels.

Chapter 7 reviews the main findings of the analyses presented in Chapters 1-6. These identify essential characteristics of ideology and demonstrate that the appeals exhibit these characteristics and that the methods typically used for the analysis of nefarious ideologies can be profitably applied to liberational ones. They augment Verschueren’s analytic procedures with technical and theoretical devices to account for the interplay among implicit and explicit meanings, indices of discourse interaction, and metapragmatic activities. It reviews the claim that the appeals are designed for at least two audiences: their addressees and Amnesty members. It revisits discussion of ideology in light of the analyses of the Amnesty documents, contrasting these and other human rights documents with mythic and ritualistic elements of two US Nazi documents. The chapter concludes by discussing unexpected findings, changes in human rights, Amnesty’s adaptations to changes in communication technologies, reasons for counterscreening and an invitation to use the additional corpus of appeals in Appendix 3 for this purpose, and suggestions for further research on oppositional activist discourses.

The word “liberation” has dominated recent American history of the Second World War in Europe. The celebratory “liberation narrative,” in which American GIs brought freedom to France, Italy and Germany, does not accurately portray the war’s end, at least from the perspective of Europeans themselves. To them, the allied victory and occupation brought freedom, but also a bitter taste of defeat, as well as exploitation and repression. U.S. officers often viewed the French, Italians, and Germans with condescension, even contempt. They looked the other way when their subordinates committed acts of theft and sexual assault. Throughout Europe the American word “liberation” became a neologism for looting. Defeat meant different things to different peoples, depending on their geographical location, their status as an occupied, victorious, or defeated nation. Still, female sexuality and heterosexual relations played major symbolic roles in how Europeans understood the war’s end. The prostitution and rape of female civilians became powerful signifiers of defeat and emasculation. Likewise women who sexually engaged with American GIs symbolized national betrayal and decline.

In the wake of the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine conflict, NYC-based graffiti bomber Miss17 visualized her solidarity with the Palestinian people by filling her tag name with the colors of the Palestinian flag. In 2024, the largest all-woman graffiti crew in the United States – Few & Far – completed a mural with a feminist take on the “Forbidden Fruit” idea, which gave the grrlz the space to publicly claim their opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by painting watermelons – a symbol of Palestinian resistance similar in effect and meaning to the flag. In this chapter, visual arts scholar Dr. Pabón-Colón examines these works, the sociopolitical context in which they were made, and their reception on social media to argue that by performing their feminism in their graffiti these grrlz rejected US imperialism in favor of modeling transnational feminist solidarity.

The end of the War saw an expansion in the aims and contents of technology. Upon his appointment to the University of Lyon, Leroi-Gourhan quickly acquired fieldwork and training experience in ethnology and also in prehistoric archaeology. This led him to pay greater attention to the achievements of experimental flintknapping (as notably practised by François Bordes). Studying the different techniques used throughout prehistory for knapping stone tools could serve to characterize distinct epochs and civilizations, but also, so claimed Leroi-Gourhan from 1950 onwards, to ‘follow the gestures, flake by flake, [so as] to reconstruct with certainty an important part of the mental structure of the maker’. This innovative search for the ‘prehistoric mentality’ sets Leroi-Gourhan as a forerunner of ‘cognitive archaeology’, and it also led him to formulate the concept of the chaîne opératoire, which follows processes of manufacture and use from raw material to finished product.

In this chapter the authors provide critical analysis of the child welfare system as the basis for cultivating the necessary reflection and action among supervisors, leaders, and practitioners to co-create truly anti-oppressive approaches to supervision and leadership. Utilizing a Black Critical Race Theory/BlackCrit lens (applying the principles of Critical Race Theory exclusively to the unique and significantly marginalized experiences of Black people) the authors interrogate the oppressive practices and motivations of historic and modern child welfare systems across the United States that are disproportionately harmful to Black children and families. Motivated to foster hope and facilitate systems change, the authors utilize case studies to support skills development in anti-oppressive supervision and leadership, while re-imagining the potential for an anti-racist child empowerment and support system for Black children and families. Readers are invited to embrace tools and skills that digress from strategies informed by white supremacy and social control. Ultimately, strategies presented in the chapter lay a foundation for rebuilding and reimagining supportive processes that preserve families and children.

This chapter argues that by any measure – mass conscription, full economic mobilization, blurring of civilians and combatants, blockades, sieges, scorched earth, murderous occupation, unfree labour, and state control – the Soviet Union was involved in ‘Total War’. The Soviet state set a new benchmark in its exhaustive mobilization of resources, including human labour. The government, reaching the height of its power, achieved a mobilization of resources for the front so complete that the home front population was close to collapse by the war’s end. Covering the period from the invasion in 1941 to the end of the war, the chapter examines the mass evacuation of people, industry, and herds in the face of invasion; the rationing system and supplementary food policies; compulsory labour mobilization of free citizens and prisoners; labour laws and repression; propaganda and popular support; and the liberation of the occupied territories. It examines the deep sacrifices made by ordinary people in terms of consumption, living and working conditions, and daily life in order to provision the front.

This chapter examines the drastic deterioration of US–Soviet relations from 1945 to Stalin’s death in 1953. It argues that the “cold war” was neither inevitable nor an objective reality. Instead, the shift from negotiation to confrontation was spurred by misconceptions, and the intense mutual enmity stemmed from subjective constructions as much as divergent fundamental interests. US leaders’ expectations that America’s unrivalled economic strength and monopoly on nuclear weapons would lead the USSR to go along with US plans for the postwar world collided with Soviet leaders’ determination not to be intimidated or to relinquish their domination of Eastern Europe. Journalists and propagandists on both sides worked to reshape public images of their former allies, stoking fears and inflaming ideological differences that had been set aside earlier. Key US officials, particularly George F. Kennan, exaggerated the US ability to shake the Communist system’s hold on the peoples of the USSR. through propaganda and covert action. Meanwhile, Soviet propagandists misleadingly depicted American media demonization of their country as part of US preparation for war against the USSR.

The ten years between Joseph Stalin’s death and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought both dangerous crises and fitful steps toward an easing of superpower tensions. While this chapter describes the confrontations in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere, it also emphasizes four breakthroughs toward coexistence and cooperation: the Geneva summit of 1955; the agreement on cultural exchanges in 1958; Nikita Khrushchev’s tour of the United States in 1959; and the conclusion of a partial test ban treaty in 1963. Such progress was delayed and complicated both by domestic political dynamics and by international rivalries in an era of accelerating decolonization and the fraying of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Yet perhaps most remarkable was how far top political leaders, journalists, scientists, musicians, dancers, and others were able to go to transcend ideological tensions and negative stereotypes through dialogue, negotiation, travel, and cultural exchange.

This chapter engages with the philosophy of liberation of the Algerian philosopher and anticolonial thinker Malek Bennabi (1905–1973). It argues that Bennabi’s decolonization theory aims at transforming the structural conditions of the colonized that made colonization even possible. The chapter lays out some of the significant aspects of Bennabi’s theory, focusing on how Bennabi conceived the problem of colonialism/colonizability and what answers he attempted to offer to overcome it. The chapter also examines Bennabi’s theory of society and its elementary aspects before explicating Bennabi’s politics of liberation that aims at transforming (and perfecting) both the means of transformation and the humans as its agents. Bennabi’s philosophy of liberation is not predicated on changing the political system or institutions but on the transformation of their sociopsychological infrastructures in which the behaviors of the individuals can be molded, making their social actions engender a different kind of politics.

Early African American humour functioned as a method of cultural formation, an in-group way of communicating based on the needs and experiences of the enslaved community. Contemporary Black stand-up has been a foundation upon which to reveal realities of Black life and make those realities accessible and entertaining to an increasingly global audience. This chapter explores the innovative styles and approaches to the artform as an indication that the limits of Black stand-up are expanding. Using three case studies, it demonstrates the Afrofuturistic trajectory of the genre. Elements of resistance have given way to comedic approaches that centre imagination; fleeting moments of revenge are superseded by the materiality of the emancipated Black body; a sense of contentment and personal growth are foregrounded, ephemeral pleasures looming still; and rituals of play produce Afrofuturistic otherworlds where difference matters, disabused of its regulatory power to rank and marginalise.