Psychedelic Modernism: Literature and Film

Raj Chandarlapaty

February 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-823-5
Availability: In stock
268pp. ¦ $78 £62 €72

The primary purpose of 'Psychedelic Modernism: Literature and Film' is to trace the development of ideas and perspectives from the writing and private ambitions of 20th-century modernist writers, including Aldous Huxley. The purpose of the book is to offer a rough chronology during which ideas were first given a literary imagination, then transposed onto discussions of science and psychology, and then theoretically democratized to bring fruit to a relatively de-centered process where images, text, and interviews could re-conceptualize the modern Being from an admixture of modernist, historical, and pop roots that could express a greater moment in the human action. The work includes discussions from scientists such as Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, rock stars such as Jerry Garcia, and unconfirmed mystics such as Carlos Castaneda. The primary focus of this work isn’t literature per se, but the literary imagination as it may correspond to greater, wider, and more impactive goals than the writing of 20th-century fiction. While there is some outreach that favors de-centered models such as the Beat Generation, the author’s primary purpose is to assemble an anthology covering the study and quests for knowledge from as many sides as could power the relative 1960s countercultural movement.

The History of Domestication of Speech

Kazım Tolga Gürel

February 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-818-1
Availability: In stock
142pp. ¦ $55 £44 €52

Throughout history, speech has been forbidden or at least restricted to the laboring classes. Enslaved people laboring in ancient Egypt or working on Latin American plantations were forbidden to speak during work. In the early period of nation-states, the language of many peoples was forbidden because of the sovereignty of the lingua franca. Censorship has taken various forms in the history of all states. Talk amongst the laboring classes could lead to revolt and revolution; for this reason, speech was restricted during the harshest periods of labor. However, speech could be commercialized and reproduced in a society where all individuals were atomized entirely and isolated, in an environment where meaning was almost lost. In short, speech was supervised and controlled for the oppressed until the second half of the 20th century. However, especially in the postmodern period, speech has been supported at every point and subjected to significant inflation as if it were detached from meaningfulness. The pressures previously placed on the speech of workers and marginalized groups have suddenly diminished; speech everywhere has been commercialized and reproduced. This book analyses the causes of this evolution.

Being and Power. A Phenomenological Ontology of Forms of Life

Daniel Rueda Garrido

January 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-817-4
Availability: In stock
146pp. ¦ $55 £44 €51

Why do we act as we do? Why do we assume that the way of being and behaving in our community is right, good, and common sense? Why do we fail to understand those who are, act, and feel differently? These are some of the questions that this book raises and attempts to answer. This ontology is rooted in the phenomenological tradition but with the innovation of taking the "form of life" as the central ontological unit. We are our form of life, but, as a transcendental-immanent reality, this is not directly equivalent to culture or society; it is rather the "political" realisation in the world of an image of the human being shared by a given community. This overcomes the traditional dualities of individual and society, consciousness and body, facticity and freedom, actuality and possibility. The subject is a subject because it identifies with that image, which is equivalent to the intersubjective consciousness of how one should act and be in the world. This gives rise to multiple forms of life. The latter implies a certain power to be who one wants to be. In this way, the book is an invitation to self-examination, for if our form of life is voluntary (i.e., capitalism), it shatters the illusion that one cannot live in any other way, and places us before the anguished but inevitable task of justifying its adoption or resorting to its abandonment. The book offers a dynamic analysis of human existence as the actualisation of a form of life that is, at the same time, the exercise of a certain power over those who seek to live otherwise, especially when that form is institutionalised by a government as the essence of the national or transnational community.

A Shot in the Dark: A History of the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group

Paul Jeffrey Cook, Temple University

February 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-816-7
Availability: In stock
358pp. ¦ $81 £65 €76

This book presents the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) as an example of successful change by the Army in wartime. It argues that creating the AWG required senior leaders to create a vision differing from the Army’s self-conceptualization, change bureaucratic processes to turn the vision into an actual unit, and then place the new unit in the hands of uniquely qualified leaders to build and sustain it. In doing this, it considers the forces influencing change within the Army and argues the two most significant are its self-conceptualization and institutional bureaucracy. The work explores three major subject areas that provide historical context. The first is the Army’s institutional history from the early 1950s through 2001. This period begins with the Army seeking to validate its place in America’s national security strategy and ends with the Army trying to chart a path into the post-Cold War future. The Army’s history is largely one of asymmetric warfare. The work thus examines several campaigns that offered lessons for subsequent wars. Some lessons the Army took to heart, others it ignored. As the AWG was a direct outgrowth of the failures and frustrations the Army experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, the book examines these campaigns and identifies the specific problems that led senior Army leaders to create the AWG. Finally, the work chronicles the AWG’s creation in 2006, growth, and re-assignment from the Army staff to a fully-fledged organization subordinate to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2011 to its deactivation. This action resulted not from the unit’s failure to adapt to a post-insurgency Army focusing on modernization. Rather, it resulted from the Army failing to realize that while the AWG was a product of counterinsurgency, it provided the capability to support the Army during a period of great strategic and institutional uncertainty.

Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway: A Gordian Love Affair

Complete Correspondence with Critical Commentary

M. Andrew Holowchak

January 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-815-0
Availability: In stock
156pp. ¦ $56 £45 €53

This is the only book to offer the complete correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway, a talented artist for whom Jefferson fell while in France. There is agreement in the secondary literature that Jefferson’s affection for Hemings was reciprocated. This book shows that that cannot be believed. Holowchak also shows that Hemings, through letters late in life, much longs for Jefferson’s company, suggestive of regret for not having earlier in life reciprocated Jefferson’s feelings—hence, the importance of a book with the complete correspondence. Holowchak also offers in the introduction a short psychobiography of Cosway that shows the significance of key early-life events—e.g., her childhood in a tavern, her removal to a convent, her introduction to art, and two singular dreams. Cosway would ever be tugged antipodally by the lure of earthy living as well as the asceticism of Catholic piety.