A staple of American popular culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show seemed to vanish after the Second World War. But as Rachel Adams reveals in Sideshow U.S.A., images of the freak show, with its combination of the grotesque, the horrific, and the amusing, stubbornly reappeared in literature and the arts. Freak shows, she contends, have survived because of their capacity for reinvention. Empty of any inherent meaning, the freak's body becomes a stage for playing out some of the twentieth century's most pressing social and political concerns, from debates about race, empire, and immigration, to anxiety about gender, and controversies over taste and public standards of decency. Sideshow U.S.A. begins by revisiting the terror and fascination the original freak shows provided for their audiences, as well as exploring the motivations of those who sought fame and profit in the business of human exhibition. With this history in mind, Adams turns from live entertainment to more mediated forms of cultural expression: the films of Tod Browning, the photography of Diane Arbus, the criticism of Leslie Fiedler, and the fiction Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, and Katherine Dunn. Taken up in these works of art and literature, the freak serves as a metaphor for fundamental questions about self and other, identity and difference, and provides a window onto a once vital form of popular culture. Adams's study concludes with a revealing look at the revival of the freak show as live performance in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Celebrated by some, the freak show's recent return is less welcome to those who have traditionally been its victims. At the beginning of a new century, Adams sees it as a form of living history, a testament to the vibrancy and inventiveness of American popular culture, as well as its capacity for cruelty and injustice. "Because of its subject matter, this interesting and complex study is provocative, as well as thought-provoking."—Virginia Quarterly Review

Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination

Adams, Rachel

Humor & Entertainment

University of Chicago Press

A staple of American popular culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show seemed to vanish after the Second World War. But as Rachel Adams reveals in Sideshow U.S.A., images of the freak show, with its combination of the grotesque, the horrific, and the amusing, stubbornly reappeared in literature and the arts. Freak shows, she contends, have survived because of their capacity for reinvention. Empty of any inherent meaning, the freak's body becomes a stage for playing out some of the twentieth century's most pressing social and political concerns, from debates about race, empire, and immigration, to anxiety about gender, and controversies over taste and public standards of decency. Sideshow U.S.A. begins by revisiting the terror and fascination the original freak shows provided for their audiences, as well as exploring the motivations of those who sought fame and profit in the business of human exhibition. With this history in mind, Adams turns from live entertainment to more mediated forms of cultural expression: the films of Tod Browning, the photography of Diane Arbus, the criticism of Leslie Fiedler, and the fiction Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, and Katherine Dunn. Taken up in these works of art and literature, the freak serves as a metaphor for fundamental questions about self and other, identity and difference, and provides a window onto a once vital form of popular culture. Adams's study concludes with a revealing look at the revival of the freak show as live performance in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Celebrated by some, the freak show's recent return is less welcome to those who have traditionally been its victims. At the beginning of a new century, Adams sees it as a form of living history, a testament to the vibrancy and inventiveness of American popular culture, as well as its capacity for cruelty and injustice. "Because of its subject matter, this interesting and complex study is provocative, as well as thought-provoking."—Virginia Quarterly Review

Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America

North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. Continental Divides is the first book to study the patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. 
Rachel Adams considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. She investigates how our understanding of key themes, genres, and periods within U.S. cultural study is deepened, and in some cases transformed, when Canada and Mexico enter the picture. How, for example, does the work of the iconic American writer Jack Kerouac read differently when his Franco-American origins and Mexican travels are taken into account? Or how would our conception of American modernism be altered if Mexico were positioned as a center of artistic and political activity? In this engaging analysis, Adams charts the lengthy and often unrecognized traditions of neighborly exchange, both hostile and amicable, that have left an imprint on North America’s varied cultures.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. Continental Divides is the first book to study the patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Rachel Adams considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. She investigates how our understanding of key themes, genres, and periods within U.S. cultural study is deepened, and in some cases transformed, when Canada and Mexico enter the picture. How, for example, does the work of the iconic American writer Jack Kerouac read differently when his Franco-American origins and Mexican travels are taken into account? Or how would our conception of American modernism be altered if Mexico were positioned as a center of artistic and political activity? In this engaging analysis, Adams charts the lengthy and often unrecognized traditions of neighborly exchange, both hostile and amicable, that have left an imprint on North America’s varied cultures.

Artists as voyagers who leave their studios to make art, including Nancy Holt, Vito Acconci, Sophie Calle, and Richard Long.
Wanderlust highlights artists as voyagers who leave their studios to make art. This book (and the exhibition it accompanies) is the first comprehensive survey of the artist's need to roam and the work that emerges from this need. Wanderlust presents the work of under-recognized yet pioneering artists alongside their well-known counterparts, and represents works that vary in process, with some artists working as solitary figures implanting themselves physically on the landscape while others perform and create movements in a collaborative manner or in public.
Many of the earlier works use what were at the time nontraditional methods of art making. In Trail Markers (1969), for example, Nancy Holt spent time in the English countryside, where she documented the painted orange trail markers she found dotting the landscape. Vito Acconci explored his body's “occupancy” of public space through the execution of preconceived actions or activities. In Following Piece (1969), Acconci followed one randomly chosen stranger through the streets of New York. A Line Made by Walking(1967), a black-and-white photograph of Richard Long's imprint of a straight line in a field, was Long's first walking art work, made on a journey to St Martin's from his home in Bristol. Ana Mendieta's influential Silueta Works in Mexico (1977) documents performances by the artist during her travel between Iowa and Mexico, in which she imprints her body on the landscape while addressing issues of displacement.
Each of these works recognizes the walk and the journey as much more than just a basic human act. Rebecca Solnit observes that walking replicates thinking, adding “the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.” These works trace the motions of wandering artists' focused minds.
Artists Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Nevin Aladag, Francis Alÿs, Janine Antoni, John Baldessari, Kim Beck, Roberley Bell, Blue Republic, Sophie Calle, Rosemarie Castoro, Cardiff/Miller, Zoe Crosher, Fallen Fruit, Mona Hatoum, Nancy Holt, Kenneth Josephson, William Lamson, Richard Long, Marie Lorenz, Mary Mattingly, Anthony McCall, Ana Mendieta, Teresa Murak, Wangechi Mutu, Efrat Natan, Gabriel Orozco, Carmen Papalia, John Pfahl, Pope.L, Teri Rueb, Michael X. Ryan, Todd Shalom, Mary Ellen Strom, and Guido van der Werve. 
Contributors Rachel Adams, Lucy Ainsworth, Andrew Barron, Pamela Campanaro, Andy Campbell, Hannah Cattarin, Ian Cofre, Jamie DiSarno, Katherine Finerty, Joshua Fischer, Natalie Fleming, Melanie Flood, Jason Foumberg, Allison Glenn, Kate Green, Ross Stanton Jordan, Anna Kaplan, Jamilee Lacy, Jennie Lamensdorf, Toby Lawrence, Jane McFadden, Lynnette Miranda, Conor Moynihan, Liz Munsell, Karen Patterson, Ariel Lauren Pittman, Sean Ripple, Eve Schillo, Holly Shen, Rebecca Solnit, Lexi Lee Sullivan, Whitney Tassie, Charlie Tatum, Zoë Taleporos, Lori Waxman

Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967-2017 (Mit Press)

Arts & Photography

The MIT Press

A mother’s deeply moving account of raising a son with Down syndrome in a world crowded with contradictory attitudes toward disabilities Rachel Adams’s life had always gone according to plan. She had an adoring husband, a beautiful two-year-old son, a sunny Manhattan apartment, and a position as a tenured professor at Columbia University. Everything changed with the birth of her second child, Henry. Just minutes after he was born, doctors told her that Henry had Down syndrome, and she knew that her life would never be the same. In this honest, self-critical, and surprisingly funny book, Adams chronicles the first three years of Henry’s life and her own transformative experience of unexpectedly becoming the mother of a disabled child. A highly personal story of one family’s encounter with disability, Raising Henry is also an insightful exploration of today’s knotty terrain of social prejudice, disability policy, genetics, prenatal testing, medical training, and inclusive education. Adams untangles the contradictions of living in a society that is more enlightened and supportive of people with disabilities than ever before, yet is racing to perfect prenatal tests to prevent children like Henry from being born. Her book is gripping, beautifully written, and nearly impossible to put down. Once read, her family’s story is impossible to forget.

Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Yale University Press

Transparency (New Trajectories in Law)

This book critiques the contemporary recourse to transparency in law and policy. This is, ostensibly, the information age. At the heart of the societal shift toward digitalisation is the call for transparency and the liberalisation of information and data. Yet, with the recent rise of concerns such as 'fake news', post-truth and misinformation, where the policy responses to all these phenomena has been a petition for even greater transparency, it becomes imperative to critically reflect on what this dominant idea means, whom it serves, and what the effects are of its power. In response, this book provides the first sustained critique of the concept of transparency in law and policy. It offers a concise overview of transparency in law and policy around the world, and critiques how this concept works discursively to delimit other forms of governance, other ways of knowing and other realities. It draws on the work of Michel Foucault on discourse, archaeology and genealogy, together with later Foucaultian scholars, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler, as a theoretical framework for challenging and thinking anew the history and understanding of what has become one of the most popular buzzwords of 21st century law and governance. At the intersection of law and governance, this book will be of considerable interest to those working in these fields; but also to those engaged in other interdisciplinary areas, including society and technology, the digital humanities, technology laws and policy, global law and policy, as well as the surveillance society.

Reference

Routledge

Claudia Wieser's artistic practice draws from history, architecture, and design, often playing with time and space. Influenced by artists who embraced spirituality--such as Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee--she considers abstraction and physiological experience in her installations. The Berlin-based artist's practice includes hand-painted ceramics, carved wooden sculptures, tiled mirrored works, drawings, and site-specific wallpaper with images mined from her vast archive. Claudia Wieser: Generations highlights her first solo exhibition in the United States held at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Smart Museum of Art. Alongside images of her work, this publication features essays by curators Rachel Adams and Jennifer Carty and three interviews conducted by Maggie Taft, Igor Siddiqui, and Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy.

Claudia Wieser: Generations

Carty, Jennifer

Individual Artists

Smart Museum Of Art, The University Of C

In a world where 76+ countries still have laws against homosexuality, a same-sex kiss can lead to a prison sentence or even death. In those countries, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people face arrest for loving the wrong people. Here, in their own words, activists tell what’s going on: &gt;A man sentenced to prison for sending an amorous text. &gt;A transgender woman who needs anonymous health care. &gt;An archbishop who wonders: Dildos for AIDS widows? &gt;A gay priest who struggles with his own homophobia. &gt;Gay rights groups under attack from police and mobs. &gt;The exuberance of Uganda’s first Pride Parade. The authors include LGBT activists in Cameroon, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Zimbabwe. Many chapters of this book appeared first in the “Erasing 76 Crimes” blog, which exposes the human toll of anti-LGBT laws. Proceeds from the sale of the book will be used to support the blog as well as the work of activists seeking a better life for sexual minorities worldwide.

From Wrongs to Gay Rights: Cruelty and change for LGBT people in an uncertain world

Politics & Social Sciences

Stewart, Colin

Ogle, Rev. Albert

Lembembe, Eric O.

Tanhira, Miles

Kopsa, Andy

Byarugaba, Clare

Social Sciences

P.C. Haddiwiggle Publishing Company

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Adams, Rachel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Adams, Rachel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Adams, Rachel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination

Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination

Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America

Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America

Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967-2017 (Mit Press)

Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery

Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery

Transparency (New Trajectories in Law)

Claudia Wieser: Generations

From Wrongs to Gay Rights: Cruelty and change for LGBT people in an uncertain world