Best of
Cultural-Studies

1988

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black


bell hooks - 1988
    bell hooks writes about the meaning of feminist consciousness in daily life and about self-recovery, about overcoming white and male supremacy, and about intimate relationships, exploring the point where the public and private meet.

The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy


E.D. Hirsch Jr. - 1988
    Now in this newly revised and updated edition, the authors provide a comprehensive look at cultural literacy for the nineties. New entries reflect suggestions from hundreds of readers. The dictionary takes into account the growing consensus over the specifics of multiculturalism, the political and geographic changes in the world, and the new ideas and terms that flow constantly from scientific research and technological development. The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy challenges us to find out more about what we know and helps us make sense of what we read, hear, and learn. It is a "must have" book for every home.

All It Takes Is Guts


Walter E. Williams - 1988
    Williams destroys a number of prevailing social myths and explains why the nature of congressmen is not to act in the national interest.

Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville


David S. Reynolds - 1988
    David Reynolds reveals how these authors broadly assimilated the themes and images of popular culture. Their classic works--among them Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass, Walden, and the tales of Poe--are given strikingly original reading when viewed against the rich, often startling background of long neglected popular writings of the time. Reynolds also explores a whole lost world of sensational literature, including grisly novels, openly sold on the street, that combined intense violence with explicit eroticism. He demonstrates as well how common concerns with issues of religion, slavery, and workers' (as well as women's) rights resonate in the major writings.

Streetwise


Mary Ellen Mark - 1988
    Meet Tina, a 13-year-old prostitute with dreams of diamonds and furs; Rat and Mike, 16-year-olds who eat from dumpsters; and Dewayne, a 16-year-old boy who hanged himself in a juvenile facility when faced with the prospect of returning to the streets. 57 duotone photographs.

Way of the Animal Powers, Part 1


Joseph Campbell - 1988
    

Buddhist Masters of Enchantment: The Lives and Legends of the Mahasiddhas


Abhayadatta - 1988
    A highly readable translation of legends from the Tibetan oral tradition. Recounts stories of the masters who embodied various paradigms for psychic and spiritual awakening. There is no better illustration of the nature of Tantric Buddhism than the lives of the masters who founded it. Extraordinary men and women who attained enlightenment and magical powers by disregarding convention and penetrating to the core of life, the Mahasiddhas show us a way through human suffering into a spontaneous and free state of oneness with the divine. Keith Dowman's highly readable translation of these legends from Tibetan oral tradition is enhanced by the beautifully realized illustrations of the Tantric saints by artist Robert Beer.

Conversing With Cage


Richard Kostelanetz - 1988
    Filled with the witty aphorisms that have made Cage as famous as an esthetic philosopher as a composer, the book offers both an introduction to Cage's way of thinking and a rich gathering of his many thoughts on art, life, and music.

The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left


Stuart Hall - 1988
    Hall's critical approach is elaborated here in essays on the formation of the SDP, inner city riots, the Falklands War and the signficance of Antonio Gramsci. He suggests that Thatcherism is skillfully employing the restless and individualistic dynamic of consumer capitalism to promote a swingeing programme of 'regressive modernization'.The Hard Road to Renewal is as concerned with elaborating a new politics for the Left as it is with the project of the Right. Hall insists that the Left can no longer trade on inherited politics and tradition. Socialists today must be as radical as modernity itself. Valuable pointers to a new politics are identified in the experience of feminism, the campaigns of the GLC and the world-wide response to Band Aid.

The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity


Heinz R. Pagels - 1988
    In the provocative, enlightening style of James Gleick's Chaos, The Dreams of Reason reveals how the conjunction of the revolutionary new sciences and computer technology is changing our view of reality.

Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984


Michel Foucault - 1988
    Drawing upon his revolutionary concept of power as well as his critique of the institutions that organize social life, Foucault discusses literature, music, and the power of art while also examining concrete issues such as the Left in contemporary France, the social security system, the penal system, homosexuality, madness, and the Iranian Revolution.

Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel


Claudia L. Johnson - 1988
    "The best (and the best written) book about Austen that has appeared in the last three decades."—Nina Auerbach, Journal of English and Germanic Philology"By looking at the ways in which Austen domesticates the gothic in Northanger Abbey, examines the conventions of male inheritance and its negative impact on attempts to define the family as a site of care and generosity in Sense and Sensibility, makes claims for the desirability of 'personal happiness as a liberating moral category' in Pride and Prejudice, validates the rights of female authority in Emma, and stresses the benefits of female independence in Persuasion, Johnson offers an original and persuasive reassessment of Jane Austen's thought."—Kate Fullbrook, Times Higher Education Supplement

Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art


James Clifford - 1988
    Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, James Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in post-colonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group's identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and "the other" clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations?In chapters devoted to the history of anthropology, Clifford discusses the work of Malinowski, Mead, Griaule, L�vi-Strauss, Turner, Geertz, and other influential scholars. He also explores the affinity of ethnography with avant-garde art and writing, recovering a subversive, self-reflexive cultural criticism. The surrealists' encounters with Paris or New York, the work of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the Coll�ge de Sociologie, and the hybrid constructions of recent tribal artists offer provocative ethnographic examples that challenge familiar notions of difference and identity. In an emerging global modernity, the exotic is unexpectedly nearby, the familiar strangely distanced.

The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers Of Jews In Nazi Europe


Samuel P. Oliner - 1988
    Why, during the Holocaust, did some ordinary people risk their lives and the lives of their families to help others--even total strangers--while others stood passively by? Samuel Oliner, a Holocaust survivor who has interviewed more than 700 European rescuers and nonrescuers, provides some surprising answers in this compelling work.

Not a Hazardous Sport


Nigel Barley - 1988
    After Nigel Barley's insurance company determined that anthropology was not a hazardous sport, he was free to set off for Torajaland, a remote district of Indonesia. His visit sparked an enduring love afair which led his friends, the Torajans, to London. Their hilarious visit makes a fitting climax to Barley's book.

Burden Of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories


John Tagg - 1988
    But how did photographs come to be established and accepted, what sort of agencies and institutions have the power to enforce this status and, more generally, what concept of photographic representation is entailed and what are its consequences? In addressing such issues, John Tagg traces a previously unexamined history which has profound implications not only for the theory and practice of conventionally separated areas of amateur, professional, technical, documentary and art photography, but also for the understanding of the role of photography in processes of modern social regulation.

House Davion: The Federated Suns


Boy F. Peterson Jr. - 1988
    After two and a half centuries of devastating interstellar warfare, the Inner Sphere is poised on the brink of a new age, as signaled by the recent alliance between Davion and House Steiner's Lyran Commonwealth. The Davions and Steiners have powerful enemies, though, all of whom have grouped together in a desperate attempt to prevent an irretrievable tilt in the balance of power...This ComStar casebook covers the history of the Federated Suns and its ruling family, its military forces, government, economy, culture and daily life, along with dozens of full-color illustrations. Also included are unit deployment charts, dossiers on prominent individuals, an atlas of key Federation planets, and much, much more.

Voces de Hispanoamerica: Antologia Literaria


Raquel Chang-Rodríguez - 1988
    VOCES DE HISPANOAMERICA, the market-leading anthology, includes authors from the colonial period to the present and incorporates some of the most influential writers in Latin America."

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism


Henry Louis Gates Jr. - 1988
    Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the Talking Book, a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. The second volume in an enterprising trilogy on African-American literature, The Signifying Monkey--which expands the arguments of Figures in Black--makes an important contribution to literary theory, African-American literature, folklore, and literary history.

A Country Far Away


Nigel Gray - 1988
    . . with very different results. The text appears in the middle of the page, and two sets of pictures, above and below, show the same actions in two very different cultures: a small African village and a modern suburban setting. . . . The format makes this an interesting picture book. . . . Children will enjoy finding the similarities and differences for themselves.-- School Library Journal.

On Strike for Respect: The Clerical and Technical Workers' Strike at Yale University, 1984-85


Toni Gilpin - 1988
    Members of Local 34, with a strong female majority, mobilized themselves and the public, breathing new life into the labor movement as they fought for and won substantial gains. A short update on current conditions concludes this volume.

The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis


Clark Ashton Smith - 1988
    

Documenting America, 1935-1943


Lawrence W. Levine - 1988
    Photographs taken by this celebrated group, whose ranks included Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee and Walker Evans, have since become icons of the 1930s and 1940s. In recent years, however, their work has been reproduced with little discussion of the particular circumstances surrounding its creation.Documenting America takes a fresh look at these remarkable photographs. The book opens with two incisive essays by Lawrence Levine and Alan Trachtenberg that examine issues central to photography and American culture. While Levine explains how the pictures portray the complexity of life in the period, balancing scenes of Depression hard times with images of the pleasures of life, Trachtenberg analyzes the way in which viewers read photographs and the role of the government picture file that stands between the creation of the photographs and their use. Both essayists raise important questions about Stryker's grand ambition of a photographic record of America, about the "ways of seeing" that have grown up around the most famous of these photographs, and about the whole enterprise of documentary photography and the conventions of realism.The images themselves are presented in series selected from groups of pictures created by single photographers. A documentary photographer often makes dozens of exposures to portray different elements of the subject, experiment with camera angles, and cover the stages of an event or steps of a process. By studying these pictures in series, we come closer to the photographer working in the field. We see a tenant farming community in Gee's Bend, Georgia, the activities of the Salvation Army in San Francisco, and the hubbub and commotion that filled Chicago's Union Railway Station in 1943. Texts accompanying each of the book's fifteen series describe the circumstances that gave rise to the creation of the pictures and discuss the relation between government policy and the subjects of the photographs. The nearly three hundred images included vividly portray America in the last bitter years of the Great Depression and the first years of the Second World War.

Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy


Philip L. Fradkin - 1988
    Fradkin covers the story of one court trail and the US govenrment's coverup.

Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous


Susan Sellers - 1988
    

Performance Theory


Richa Schechner - 1988
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture


Ted Gioia - 1988
    He argues that because improvisation--the essence of jazz--must often fail under the pressure of on-the-spot creativity, we should view jazz as an imperfect art and base our judgments of it on an aesthetics of imperfection.Incorporating the thought of such seminal thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jos� Ortega y Gasset, and Roland Barthes, The Imperfect Art offers vivid portraits of the giants of jazz and startling insights into this vital musical form and the interaction of society and art.

The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Culture Meet, Revised Edition


Virgilio Elizondo - 1988
    This book speaks to the largest demographic change in twentieth-century United States history-the Latinization of music, religion, and culture.

Baby Boomers: Growing Up in Australia in the 1940s, 50s And 60s


Helen Townsend - 1988
    The red brick childhood of the Baby Boomers, in the second half of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, with its inkwells, Saturday afternoon serials and Meccano sets has gone forever.Read this book and relive your childhood. Experience the horror of your first dance. Taste the warm school milk. Feel the weight of your Globite school case.As a Baby Boomer you had an extraordinary childhood. This book brings it all flooding back. Everything from Brylcream to Boleros, tadpole collecting, getting the cane at school and cracker night.See your feet through the shoe shop's x-ray machine. Fall off your two-wheeler again. Smell Mum's chook cooking on Christmas Day.The magic of your childhood hasn't disappeared. It's here.

Europeans


Jane Kramer - 1988
    Thirty brilliant pieces from that column are gathered together in Europeans to form a compelling portrait of Europe today.