Kinney - Hood

The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinaryeven banalobjects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once youve read a few of these, youll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: I wonder what the story is behind this thing?

Steven Johnson , author of Where Good Ideas Come From and How We Got to Now

In 1957 the French critic and semiotician Roland Barthes published Mythologies , a groundbreaking series of essays in which he analysed the popular culture of his day, from laundry detergent to the face of Greta Garbo, professional wrestling to the Citron DS. This series of short books, Object Lessons, continues the tradition.

Melissa Harrison , Financial Times

PRAISE FOR HOTEL BY JOANNA WALSH:

A slim, sharp meditation on hotels and desire.... Walsh invokes everyone from Freud to Forster to Mae West to the Marx Brothers. Shes funny throughout, even as she documents the dissolution of her marriage and the peculiar brand of alienation on offer in lavish places.

Dan Piepenbring , The Paris Review

Evocative ... Walshs strange, probing book is all the more affecting for eschewing easy resolution.

Publishers Weekly

Walshs writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery ... Hotel is a boldly intellectual work that repays careful reading. Its semiotic wordplay, circling prose and experimental form may prove a refined taste, but in its deft delineation of a complex modern phenomenonand, perhaps, a modern malaiseits a great success.

Melissa Harrison , Financial Times

Walsh has been praised to the skies by Chris Kraus and Jeff Vandermeer, and it isnt hard to see why. Her writing sways between the tense and the absurd, as if its hovering between this world and another.

Jonathan Sturgeon , Flavorwire

PRAISE FOR DRONE BY ADAM ROTHSTEIN:

Adam Rothsteins primer on drones covers (such themes as) the representation of drones in science fiction and popular culture. The technological aspects are covered in detail, and there is interesting discussion of the way in which our understanding of technology is grounded in historical narratives. As Rothstein writes, the attempt to draw a boundary between one technology and another often ignores the fact that new technologies are not quite as new as we think.

Christopher Coker , Times Literary Supplement

A book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Series Editors:

Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg

Advisory Board:

Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins, Graham Harman, rene hoogland, Pam Houston, Eileen Joy, Douglas Kahn, Daniel Miller, Esther Milne, Timothy Morton, Kathleen Stewart, Nigel Thrift, Rob Walker, Michele White.

In association with

BOOKS IN THE SERIES

Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott

Golf Ball by Harry Brown

Drivers License by Meredith Castile

Drone by Adam Rothstein

Silence by John Biguenet

Glass by John Garrison

Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly

Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees

Waste by Brian Thill

Hotel by Joanna Walsh

Hood by Alison Kinney

Dust by Michael Marder

Shipping Container by Craig Martin

Cigarette Lighter by Jack Pendarvis

Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne

Tree by Matthew Battles (forthcoming)

Bread by Scott Cutler Shershow (forthcoming)

Hair by Scott Lowe (forthcoming)

Password by Martin Paul Eve (forthcoming)

Eye Chart by William Germano (forthcoming)

Questionnaire by Evan Kindley (forthcoming)

Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton (forthcoming)

Blanket by Kara Thompson (forthcoming)

Doorknob by Thomas Mical (forthcoming)

Sock by Kim Adrian (forthcoming)

hood

ALISON KINNEY

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

On March 28, 2012, US Representative Bobby L. Rush spoke on the floor of the House. Removing his jacket and pulling up the hood of his gray sweatshirt, he said, Racial profiling has to stop, Mr. Speaker. Just because someone wears a hoodie, does not make them a hoodlum.... Just because someone is a young Black male and wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum.... I applaud the young people across this nation who are making a statement about hoodies and the real hoodlums, particularly those who tread on our laws wearing official or quasi-official cloaks.

Representative Gregg Harper said, Members need to remove their hoods or leave the floor. The sergeant-at-arms escorted Representative Rush from the chamber.

CONTENTS

The Grim Reaper. The executioner and the executed.

Two murals. The Ku Klux Klan. Lynching. The Spanish Inquisition. A timeline of hooding. Abu Ghraib.

Our bodies, our hoods. The Seattle WTO protests. Black blocs and pink blocs.

Everybodys hoods. Anti-hoodie initiatives. Black Lives Matter.

Ive long believed that the content of fashion does not materialize spontaneously but, in ways both mysterious and uncanny, emerges from the fabric of the times. That fabric has recently been darkly threaded by war and uncertainty.

ANNA WINTOUR,

Editor-In-Chief of American Vogue

We all wear hoods: judges, athletes, rappers, torturers, politicians, and toddlers. We don hoods to attend school, commute to the construction site or office, go to war or protests, take a hike, walk the dog, ride the Maid of the Mist, or visit our grannies in the woods. We dress babies in animal-eared hooded onesies to enhance their resemblances to other species (and, if were Anne Geddes, to conquer the world); we zip kids into hooded snowsuits to induce them, infallibly, to pee. Coaches, firefighters, fishers, boxers, beekeepers, and Mark Zuckerberg wear hoods professionally. Skaters, cosplayers, fetishists, presidents, and the entire Knowles-Carter family wear them to play.

Its very simple: everybody with style, everybody venturing out into the rain, everybody not completely resistant to one of the worlds most practical, ubiquitous garments of the past couple millennia wears hoods.

The hoods in this book come in wool, polyester, leather, cotton, pasteboard, hide, palm leaves, and plastic. Their designs range from garments wed all agree were hoods, to objects that stretch the definition, objects we wouldnt call hoods in other contexts. Anne Boleyns round headdress was a French hood; the Queen of Heartss pointed headdress was an English hood. Professors in formal academic dress sling gabardine and silk hoods around their necks. At Abu Ghraib, plastic sandbags and womens panties served as hoods. Languages, cultures, practices, several continents, and thousands of years of style mean that, for the purposes of this book, if people are wearing them and can agree that theyre hoods, theyre hoods. (Sorry, but youll have to wait for the sequel to get car hoods, stove hoods, and Mount Hood.)

We all wear hoods. In the second century, there lived a man named Docilianus, who loved his hood until he suffered a changing-room mishap at the spas in Roman Bath. He lodged a complaint, inscribed in a lead tablet, for management and for all posterity: I curse him who has stolen my hooded cloak, whether man or woman, whether slave