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TOME initiative monographs

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Cornell University is one of 15 participating universities in the TOME initiative, which was launched in 2017 by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of University Presses (AUP) to support the publication of Open Access digital monographs. TOME is designed to advance the wide dissemination of long-form, peer-reviewed scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members. More information about TOME for Cornell authors.

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    High Stakes, High Hopes: Urban Theorizing in Partnership
    Oldfield, Sophie (University of Georgia Press, 2023-09-01)
    High Stakes, High Hopes tracks the building of urban theorizing in a decade-long urban research and teaching partnership in Cape Town, South Africa. An argument for collaborative urbanism, this book reflects on what was at stake in the partnership and its creative, and at times, conflictive, evolution. Oldfield explores how research and assessment were reshaped when framed in neighborhood questions and commitments, and what was reoriented in urban theorizing when community activism and township struggles were recognized as sites of valid knowledge-making.
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    Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable
    Dadi, Iftikhar (University of Washington Press, 2022)
    The post-Partition cinema produced between 1956 and 1969-the long '60s-in Lahore, Pakistan, drew promiscuously from Hindu mythology, Bengali performance traditions, Islamicate legends, Sufi conceptions of the self, Punjabi and Sindhi oral narratives, Parsi theater, Urdu lyric poetry, historical and social realism, Hollywood musicals, the psychological and sensorial stimulus of modernity, and more. Consideration of this rich field of influence offers insights into not only the decade that led to the overthrow of the Ayub Khan government, followed in 1971 by the loss of Bangladesh, but also into cultural affiliation in the fraught South Asian present, when frameworks of multiplicity and plurality are in jeopardy. Urdu-language films from Lahore made during this period reveal ways that cinematic form and narrative intersect with cultural memory and with the challenges of their time, characterized by trauma in the aftermath of Partition in 1947, a constricted socio-political horizon, and accelerating modernity. In Lahore Cinema Iftikhar Dadi probes the role of language, rhetoric, and lyric in the making of meaning, and the relevance of the Urdu cultural universe to the genesis of Bombay filmmaking. He argues that commercial cinema in South Asia is among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization. It has provided affective and imaginative resources for its audiences to navigate an accelerating modernity and a fraught politics by anchoring social change across the terrain of deeper cultural imaginaries. And it has played an influential progressive role during the mid-twentieth century, by constituting publics beyond existing social divides, in forging a shared and expanded experience of modernity that extends beyond regional, ethnic, and sectarian affiliations, and in affectively challenging the selective amnesia of nation-state ideologies
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    Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child
    Brady, Mary Pat (Duke University Press, 2022)
    In Scales of Captivity, Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive or cast-off child in Latinx and Chicanx literature and art between chattel slavery’s final years and the mass deportations of the twenty-first century. She shows how Latinx expressive practices expose how every rescaling of economic and military power requires new modalities of capture, new ways to bracket and hedge life. Through readings of novels by Helena María Viramontes, Oscar Casares, Lorraine López, Maceo Montoya, Reyna Grande, Daniel Peña, and others, Brady illustrates how submerged captivities reveal the way mechanisms of constraint such as deportability ground institutional forms of carceral modernity and how such practices scale relations by naturalizing the logic of scalar hierarchies underpinning racial capitalism. By showing how representations of the captive child critique the entrenched logic undergirding colonial power, Brady challenges racialized modes of citizenship while offering visions for living beyond borders.
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    Emancipation's Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body
    Richardson, Riché (Duke University Press, 2021)
    In Emancipation's Daughters, Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States. Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson shows how five emblematic black women—Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé—have challenged white-centered definitions of American identity. By using the rhetoric of motherhood and focusing on families and children, these leaders have defied racist images of black women, such as the mammy or the welfare queen, and rewritten scripts of femininity designed to exclude black women from civic participation. Richardson shows that these women's status as national icons was central to reconstructing black womanhood in ways that moved beyond dominant stereotypes. However, these formulations are often premised on heteronormativity and exclude black queer and trans women. Throughout Emancipation's Daughters, Richardson reveals new possibilities for inclusive models of blackness, national femininity, and democracy.
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    Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema
    Starr, Deborah A. (University of California Press, 2020)
    In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi's work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful- and queer-use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi's films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi's contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.