bahareads's reviews
1065 reviews

This book recounts Miles journey to haunted sites and reports on her investigation of ghost tours, ghost stories, and historical events attached to the haunted places in the South. Miles believes ghosts stories function as projections of contemporary feelings about historical relationships at a safe distance. The book is focused on three key narratives that share characteristics (Sorrel-Weed House, Madame Lalaurie House, and Myrtles Plantation). They are linked by slavery and haunting.

Miles is 'ghost-writing' this book. She is telling the stories of the ghosts who cannot speak for themselves, and as reality is shifting she had to write and rewrite the narrative.

Miles explore how slave ghost tales function in Southern tourism and why portrayals of enslaved black ghosts are on the rise. She considers what the phantoms signal about memories of slavery in contemporary american culture and what the evocation of ghostly memory might tell us about the realities of historical slavery and gender relations.

Miles says "Ghost stories as a form of historical narrative therefore do double work: they call to mind disturbing historical knowledge that we feel compelled to face, but they also contain the threat of that knowledge by marking it as unbelievable."

Tales from the Haunted South is a very personable book. Its size is deceptive, as Miles covers a lot in such a compact book.

I'll end with this: Miles says "We can call forth the power of ghosts as scholars, writers, artists, teachers, and stewards of historic sites, as indeed we must if we are to place progressive social justice visions in contention with a culture possessed by ghost fancy."

Ishi Robinson covers some great topics with her book; colorism, favorism in families, neglect, socio-economic challenges, and other things. However Robinson never delves deep into the themes. The character development for Pumpkin came out of nowhere. We do not unpack glaringly bad things. The plot was paced bad, it dragged then it rushed. I thought the audiobook was great; I enjoyed listening to it.

Snyder explores how the region's Native Americans practiced and understood captivity. Through the lens of captivity, she shows a new look at early American history because it touched Europeans, Africans, and Indians both captured and captor alike.

By exploring the long history of captivity among Native people, she gives a new perspective on race, slavery, and freedom. American and Native history cannot be separated because they are intertwined. Snyder says the opposite of slavery was kinship, not freedom. Kinship ties conferred power. Native captivity practices and ideas of race remained fluid long after White ones had hardened. Only with the second seminole war would they start to change.

Kei Miller is fantastic. I listened to this on audiobook, but I have to go back and read a physical copy. Miller covers a range of topics; his essays are impactful and meaningful. They resonate.

War on Record is one of the most interest books on the archive that I have read in a long time. Sternhell tells the story of the an archive composed of official records created during the Civil War and collected by the Federal Government in the aftermath.

She wants to know how the archival processes shape what we recognise today as Civil War history. Sternhell claims that she is unearthing the forces that shaped Washington's Civil War archive and learning how the archival records figured in the fraught reality of postbellum era. She reconstructed the process through the records that created tools of war. How Civil War history is shaped by the archive, and the demonstrated extend to which archival labour is rooted in cultural contexts.

There is very little literature on how non-archivists chose to record documents. Scholars have and do contemplate these problems. This particular archive, and others, have never been studied as rigorously as it deserves. She investigates the decision-making process that shaped the compilation: the personal, political, and institutional.

Historians, including Sternhell, agree that archives are deceptive. They are unstable, constructed, and susceptible to influences. Archival records are not static objects. Archives do not simply reflect the past but they shape the present and the future.

Sternhell says "Historians like to think of themselves as the original interpreters of archival records. Yet long before they set foot in the reading room, the records they will be working with had been interpreted in ways they do not understand and cannot escape."

Sternhell conducts her study by 'reading along the grain.' She focuses on the people who managed the records while also studying archival users.

or being a debut book, Parker-Chan did her big one! I read this primarily as a audiobook, when I tried to switch to an e-book it got really confusing to track the characters. It was still confusing to trace the POVs even with the audiobooks.

The novel was so readable; though the military portions caused me to zone out from time to time. They were well written but so dense. I enjoyed the darkness of the book. I supposed most of the characters could be called anti-heroes. They played their parts well.

The f*sting incident was not all that. You guys are just f*cking horny. I did enjoy the romance between Ma and Zhu. I would like to see that grow, and I want to see Ma become a little darker.

I wish Parker-Chan had gone more into depth about the ghosts haunting Zhu and Oyoung. I had a few theories but as the book went along, they kept getting crushed. I felt that Parker-Chan was dragging with non-explantations. Zhu's constant reminder that she was her brother started to get annoying as hell. The pronoun switches was interesting, based on the POV.

She Who Became the Sun reminded my academic of Passing to America by Thomas Abercrombie. The idea of shifting bodies, gender performance, and transgenderism were so prevalent in here. I need an English or Literature major to make this a part of their thesis.

Parker-Chan gets only three stars because because the book dragged, some things were left unexplained (lazy writing), the POVs got confusing, and the military jargon was too much at times.

I enjoyed a Tempest a lot. I would have liked to read it side by side with the original. I have never read anything else by Cèsaire, so far, so this was a treat. I enjoyed the critiques I could find throughout the play. I think it would be fruitful to go back and read an annotated version of it, to see things I perhaps missed.

A classic in history and other academic genres, Michael-Rolph Trouillot stands the test of time. Silencing the Past is about history as knowledge and narrative, though it embraces the ambiguity in the two sides of historicity.

Trouillot has history listed as social process that puts people in three categories: agent, actors, and subjects. Silences enter into the historical processes at four stages: the moment of creation, the moment of fact assembly, the moment of fact retrieval, and the moment of retrospective significance.

The production of history interacts with not just academic work but also with history produced outside of the academy. History both suggests what happened and what was said to have happened. Which in turn places an empahsis on the sociohistorical process and the knowledge of that process respectively.

Vincent Brown looks at how Mortuary Politics shaped the course of history for the contending groups in Jamaica. Brown looks at how death shaped daily life, and how it bleeds over into property, authority, morality, territory, and belonging is the base of the book. Brown is coming from an Atlantic perspective, claiming the history of Jamaica can be seen clearer in the wider web of the connections and comparisons with other parts of the Atlantic basin.

What is mortuary politics? The social meaning from beliefs and practices with death and how they are employed. Brown says the linkage with death makes the dead integral to social and political organization and mobilization, and therefore vital to historical transformation.

Brown uses a plethora of source material: tombstone inscriptions, wills, diaries, parish vestry mins, plantation account papers, court returns, travellers reports, assembly mins, visual images, archaeology of burial sites.

Shared experiences of death and dislocation helped form common assumptions, idioms, and beliefs that would shape meaning in the new world among African persons.

A Master of Djinn draws you in. Clark does a fantastic job building the world of Cairo. I enjoyed learning more about the Djinn. I think the next few books will be excellent. The twist wasn't a huge surprise. Some of the characters were too archetype.