The "art of being free" is an essential part of democracy. It involves, Mark Reinhardt believes, bringing into being the multiple spaces in and practices through which individuals and groups help to constitute their lives, their selves, their worlds. Americans are presently witnessing a contraction of officially sanctioned spaces for citizen action. It is now crucial, Reinhardt argues, to identify ways of opening new spaces for the direct practice of democratic politics. Reinhardt treats the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt as exemplary sources for an expansion of political possibility. These writers indicate where and how the new spaces can be brought into being, and they reveal acts of making space as some of the prime moments of politics. Reinhardt's extended readings of these writers, never previously treated together, are quite unlike the familiar understandings of their thought. "Taking liberties," he brings the literary and political sensibility usually associated with postmodernism to a sympathetic if critical encounter with eminently modern thinkers. The result is a strong and idiosyncratic book, accessible and stylish, that mixes acute readings of canonical thinkers with more practical applications and illustrations. Reinhardt combines attention to textual detail and nuance with concern for contemporary politics, discussing as an unusually inventive example the AIDS activist group ACT UP.

The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties With Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Contestations)

Politics & Social Sciences

Reinhardt, Mark

Politics & Government

Cornell Univ Pr

Reinhardt treats the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt as exemplary sources for an expansion of political possibility. These writers indicate where and how the new spaces can be brought into being, and they reveal acts of making space as some of the prime moments of politics. Reinhardt's extended readings of these writers, who have never previously been treated together, are quite unlike the familiar understandings of their thought. "Taking liberties," he brings the literary and political sensibility usually associated with postmodernism to a sympathetic if critical encounter with eminently modern thinkers. The result is a strong and idiosyncratic book, accessible and stylish, which mixes acute readings of canonical thinkers with more practical applications and illustrations. Reinhardt combines attention to textual detail and nuance with concern for contemporary politics, discussing in an unusually inventive example the AIDS activist group ACT UP.

Cornell University Press

Who Speaks for Margaret Garner?

In January 1856, Margaret Garner and her family were at the center of one of the most dramatic and intensely contested fugitive slave cases in the nation's history. Just hours after escaping slavery in Kentucky and taking refuge in a home in Cincinnati, the Garners were cornered by authorities. As the captors sought to enter the house, Garner killed her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Mary. Reports suggested that she had tried to kill her three other children, too. These events were instantly sensationalized in the media, stimulating heated debates throughout the country: What did it mean that a mother would rather kill her children than see them returned to a life in slavery? What should happen to Margaret Garner? The conflicting answers to these questions exposed the fault lines over slavery within a nation already drifting toward civil war. While Garner's story has famously inspired Toni Morrison's most celebrated novel, Beloved, the details of the actual events remain largely unknown. In Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? Mark Reinhardt has assembled the most important primary documents concerning the case and its aftermath-newspaper accounts of the Garner family's escape, capture, and trial; sermons; editorials; legislative debates; and literary responses-opening up a new perspective on American culture and society on the eve of the Civil War.Immersing readers in a wealth of fascinating documentary evidence, this book offers not only a singular exploration of antebellum America's debates over such contentious issues as slavery and freedom, race and gender, party and region, and law and politics, but also an engrossing introduction to the work of historical and cultural interpretation.

History

Americas

Univ. of Minnesota Press

In January 1856, Margaret Garner and her family were at the center of one of the most dramatic and intensely contested fugitive slave cases in the nation's history. Just hours after escaping slavery in Kentucky and taking refuge in a home in Cincinnati, the Garners were cornered by authorities. As the captors sought to enter the house, Garner killed her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Mary. Reports suggested that she had tried to kill her three other children, too. These events were instantly sensationalized in the media, stimulating heated debates throughout the country: What did it mean that a mother would rather kill her children than see them returned to a life in slavery? What should happen to Margaret Garner? The conflicting answers to these questions exposed the fault lines over slavery within a nation already drifting toward civil war. While Garner's story has famously inspired Toni Morrison's most celebrated novel, Beloved, the details of the actual events remain largely unknown. In Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? Mark Reinhardt has assembled the most important primary documents concerning the case and its aftermath-newspaper accounts of the Garner family's escape, capture, and trial; sermons; editorials; legislative debates; and literary responses-opening up a new perspective on American culture and society on the eve of the Civil War. Immersing readers in a wealth of fascinating documentary evidence, this book offers not only a singular exploration of antebellum America's debates over such contentious issues as slavery and freedom, race and gender, party and region, and law and politics, but also an engrossing introduction to the work of historical and cultural interpretation.

“This collection of Walker's astonishing tableaux dramatizes black-white interactions via horrifically accurate imaginings of one-on-one encounters–encounters that, in their microcosms of exploitation and mutual dependency, seem to speak directly to current forms of black-white relations.” –Publishers Weekly

Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress

Arts & Photography

English, Darby

Berry, Ian

Patterson, Vivian

History & Criticism

Rizzoli

The Fatherhood

Literature & Fiction

Dorrance Pub. Co.

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Books by Reinhardt, Mark