Editor’s Note: The following books have been published by the U-M Press.
The Walls of Jericho, by Rudolph Fisher. A physician and writer, Fisher was the author of several short stories and novels. Fisher, who lived most of his life in Harlem and Jamaica, Long Island, died at the age of 37 in 1934. The Walls of Jericho portrays “Negro” society in New York City during the 1920s. Black lawyer Ralph Merrit buys a house in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem. In their reactions to Merrit and to one another, the characters in Merrit’s life provide an invaluable view of the social and philosophical milieu of the times. Fisher evokes the biblical tale of Joshua to illustrate his concern for the African American’s search for a “true nature.” It is in this spiritual battle that the divergent segments of Harlem are drawn together in order to battle the “establishment” inside the walls of Jericho.
Surveillance, Privacy and the Law: Employee Drug Testing and the Politics of Social Control by John Gilliom, assistant professor of political science, Ohio University. Rippling with a subtle but unmistakable urgency, Surveillance, Privacy and the Law boldly questions the underpinnings of America’s war on drugs and, in so doing, casts a harsh glare on the Supreme Court-mandated practice of employee drug-testing and its implications for our fundamental rights as citizens of a democratic society.
The Emigrantsby George Lamming. Lamming is the author of seven books, including In the Castle of My Skin and Natives of My Person. He has lectured as a visiting professor at some of the finest universities in the world. Barbados remains his home. The Emigrants is the epic journey of a group of West Indians who emigrate to Great Britain in the 1950s in search of educational opportunities unavailable at home. Seeking to redefine themselves in the “mother country,” an ideal landscape that they have been taught to love, the emigrants settle uncomfortably in England’s industrial cities. There they discover the meaning of their marginality in the British Empire in an environment that is unexpectedly hostile and strange. For some, alienation prompts a new sense of community, a new sense of identity as West Indians. For others, alienation leads to a crisis of confrontation with the law and fugitive status.
A Poetics of Resistance: Women Writing in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States by Mark K. DeShazer, professor of English and coordinator of women’s studies, Wake Forest University. The recent critical works that look at literature as a weapon of resistance have frequently neglected the genre of poetry, particularly the poetry of Third World women writers. A Poetics of Resistance is the first book-length examination of poetry written by women from El Salvador, South Africa and the United States, and the ways it bears witness to political struggle and produces new kinds of knowledge.
Cosa: The Lamps by Cleo Rickman Fitch, an artist and independent scholar in New York City, and Norma Wynick Goldman, adjunct professor, College of Lifelong Learning, Wayne State Univer-sity. The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce the publication of a new volume in the series “The Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome” and “The Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome.” The first volume to appear under the imprint of the U-M Press is Cosa: The Lamps. This is the fifth volume of materials from the Italian city of Cosa, which was excavated by Frank E. Brown, L. Richardson Jr. and Russell T. Scott, together with their colleagues at the American Academy. Fitch and Goldman have compiled a wonderfully thorough and precise catalog of the diverse clay lamps employed at Cosa, both moldmade and wheelmade.
