For years the best black Shakespeare performers in America were itinerant “readers” or elocutionists. Denied access to white-dominated theatrical venues and refusing the minstrel stage, they traveled the country, usually alone, reciting key speeches and scenes from Shakespeare's works in school auditoriums, church halls and the occasional rented venue. Little is known about their audience's experiences of Shakespeare (which was often performed with other authors like Paul Laurence Dunbar). This essay experiments with using the author's personal history to interpret an anecdote from actor Richard Berry Harrison's unpublished memoir in which he recounts Frederick Douglass performing scenes from Shakespeare's Othello.

From 1931 until 1986, at the annual Texas Prison Rodeo, incarcerated people performed before massive crowds. In this negotiated space, prison officials, audience members, and imprisoned riders welded together a performance of violent range labor with a discourse of social rehabilitation. Responsible for funding all educational and recreational programs for the incarcerated population of Texas, the rodeo purported to save lives even as it risked them. Prisoner-led reforms in the 1960s and 1970s, however, helped expose the failures of Texas's labor regime, stripping the rodeo of its rehabilitative pretenses and contributing to the eventual demise of prison rodeo in Texas.

Although entropy has been identified as a theme in urban American fiction of the 1960s, it is far more significant in a strand of 1970s suburban fiction, in Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974), John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and the stories of Raymond Carver. I argue that in these texts the suburbs function as closed systems, subject to entropy, and that the suburbanite protagonists have a heightened sense of physical and metaphysical entropy, a reflection in part of the prevailing sense of irreversible economic and cultural decline and decay in that decade

The AIDS crisis in the US in the 1980s radically transformed the relationship between sexual minorities and capitalism. Opportunistic infections given free rein in human bodies by HIV rendered employees visible to employers and to health care providers as an economic risk, and set the stage for battles between health capitalists, politicians, and AIDS activists over access to health care. Health capitalism in 1980s America was both an arena of integration of queer Americans into mainstream society and also a political cul-de-sac, blunting the radical possibilities of sexual politics that were alive in the years before the AIDS crisis. In this article I focus on activist groups, primarily ACT UP, Gay Men's Health Crisis, National Gay Rights Advocates, and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the liberal politicians who led legislative battles at federal and state level to force the health care system to respond to AIDS. In shifting our gaze from the Reagan administration and the religious right as the primary foils to AIDS activism, we can gain new insights into the direction of liberal politics in an era of supposed conservative ascendancy. An understanding of how AIDS activists and their allies negotiated questions of health access suggests that health care activism was in part a marker of class privilege, as gay activists and liberal Democrats openly embraced a medical model for sexual minorities that lifted them above the stigma of a public welfare system and integrated them further into heteronormative capitalism.