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Within days of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians of any era, the troubled genius who brought modernism to jazz and became a defining cultural force for musicians, writers, and artists of every stripe. Arguably the most significant musician in the country at the time of his death, Parker set the standard many musicians strove to reach—though he never enjoyed the same popular success that greeted many of his imitators. Today, the power of Parker’s inventions resonates undiminished; and his influence continues to expand. This book presents account of the life and legend of Charlie Parker. This book overturns many of the myths that have grown up around Parker. It cuts a fascinating portrait of the period, from Parker’s apprentice days in the 1930s in his hometown of Kansas City to the often difficult years playing clubs in New York and Los Angeles, and reveals how Parker came to embody not only musical innovation and brilliance but the rage and exhilaration of an entire generation.

Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction asks what happens to the kinds of persons inhabiting the richly material landscapes of American realist and naturalist fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when they find themselves in more modernist interiors? Addressed to modernist and American literary scholars, media theorists, and architectural historians, Corridor is a study of novels and corridors, and what the relationship between the two reveals about the modern media. It situates in the discourses of reflexive modernity the particular dynamics of exchange between physical circulation systems and media forms that constitute the landscape out of which modernist American fiction emerges, and through which it observes its own operations. It shows how a range of novels enact and encode their medial processes in the concrete structures of American modernity–its infrastructural systems, contagious institutional spaces, its corridors–to demonstrate that the consequences for this recursive movement between novels, spatial structures, and media extend to modern individuals and the interiors that house them. Corridor challenges subject-centered accounts of modernist interiority and its narrative modes, and the tradition of modernist literary criticism that examines the architectural materialities of the novel from this perspective. By attending to the relays between physical and informational communication, and the cross-identifications of interiors and interiority as they are expressed as medial forms in these texts, Corridor develops a counter-narrative of what it means to figure modern persons and their communicative environment in the wayward novels of American modernism.

The “Hip-hop Nation” has been scouted, staked out, and settled by journalists and scholars alike. This book asks questions aimed at interrogating how nation is conceptualized within the context of hip-hop. What happens, the text asks, to notions of authenticity based on hip-hop’s apparent blackness when Filipino youth make hip-hop their own? The book draws on interviews with Bay Area-based Filipino American DJs to explore the authenticating strategies they rely on to carve out a niche within DJ culture. It shows how Filipino American youth involvement in DJing reconfigures the normal boundaries of Filipinoness predicated on nostalgia and cultural links with an idealized homeland. The book makes the case that while the engagement of Filipino youth with DJ culture speaks to the broadening racial scope of hip-hop—and of what it means to be Filipino—such involvement is also problematic in that it upholds deracialized accounts of hip-hop and renders difference benign.

This book rethinks narrative and media through systems theory. Reconceiving interrelations among subjects, media, significations, and the social, this study demonstrates second-order systems theory’s potential to provide fresh insights into the familiar topics of media studies and narrative theory. This book offers a synthesis of the neocybernetic theories of cognition formulated by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, incubated by cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and cultivated in Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. From this foundation, it interrogates media theory and narrative theory through a critique of information theory in favor of autopoietic conceptions of cognition. Clarke’s purview includes examinations of novels (Mrs. Dalloway and Mind of My Mind), movies (Avatar, Memento, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and even Aramis, Bruno Latour’s idiosyncratic meditation on a failed plan for an automated subway.

What if we were to understand indigenous people as the active agents of global exploration, rather than the passive objects of that exploration? What could such a new perspective on the project of global exploration reveal about the meaning of geographical understanding and its place in struggles over power in the context of colonialism? The World and All the Things upon It addresses these questions by tracing how Kānaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiian people) in the nineteenth century explored the outside world and generated their own understandings of it. Written with passion, it draws on long-ignored Hawaiian-language sources. Using them, it demonstrates that the powerful words—stories, songs, chants, and political prose—of Native Hawaiian people reveal Kanaka Maoli reflections on the nature of global geography and their place in it. This book looks at travel, sexuality, spirituality, print culture, gender, labor, education, and race to shed light on how constructions of global geography became a site through which Hawaiians as well as their would-be colonizers understood and contested imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism. Rarely have historians asked how non-Western people imagined and even forged their own geographies of their colonizers and the broader world. This study takes up that task. It emphasizes, moreover, that there is no better way to understand the process and meaning of global exploration than by looking out from the shores of a place, such as Hawai‘i, that was allegedly the object, and not the agent, of exploration.