Best of
Cultural-Studies

1991

The Production of Space


Henri Lefebvre - 1991
    His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.

Patrick White: A Life


David Marr - 1991
    But I am a monster . . .' Patrick WhitePatrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of more than a dozen novels and plays - including Voss, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair - lived an extraordinary life. David Marr's brilliant biography draws not only on a wide range of original research but also on the single most difficult and important source of all: the man himself. In the weeks before his death, White read the final manuscript, which for richness of detail, authority and balance is stunning.Throughout his exciting narrative, Marr explores the roots of White's writing and unearths the raw material of his remarkable art. He makes plain the central fact of White's life as an artist: the homosexuality that formed his view of himself as an outcast and stranger able to penetrate the hearts of both men and women. Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, Patrick White is a biography of classic excellence - sympathetic, objective, penetrating and as blunt, when necessary, as White himself.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics


Christopher Lasch - 1991
    Opposing this materialist view is the idea that condemns a boundless appetite for more and better goods and distrusts "improvements" that only feed desire. Tracing the opposition to the idea of progress from Rousseau through Montesquieu to Carlyle, Max Weber and G.D.H. Cole, Lasch finds much that is desirable in a turn toward moral conservatism, toward a lower-middle-class culture that features egalitarianism, workmanship and loyalty, and recognizes the danger of resentment of the material goods of others.

Angry Women


V. Vale - 1991
    Sixteen performance artists discuss human sexuality, racism, sexism, and the ways in which art can be used to break down taboos and dogma.

Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life


bell hooks - 1991
    Creating a spiritual, progressive, feminist, and ultimately organic definition of Black intellectuality, they passionately discuss issues ranging in subject matter from theology and the Left, to contemporary music, film, and fashion.

Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art


Hans Belting - 1991
    In this magisterial book, Hans Belting traces the longhistory of the sacral image and its changing role in European culture.Likeness and Presence looks at the beliefs, superstitions, hopes,and fears that come into play as people handle and respond to sacredimages, and presents a compelling interpretation of the place of theimage in Western history."A rarity within its genre—an art-historical analysis of iconographywhich is itself iconoclastic. . . . One of the most intellectuallyexciting and historically grounded interpretations of Christianiconography." —Graham Howes, Times Literary Supplement"Likeness and Presence offers the best source to survey the facts ofwhat European Christians put in their churches. . . . An impressivelydetailed contextual analysis of medieval objects." —Robin Cormack,New York Times Book Review"I cannot begin to describe the richness or the imaginative grandeur ofHans Belting's book. . . . It is a work that anyone interested in art,or in the history of thought about art, should regard as urgent reading.It is a tremendous achievement."—Arthur C. Danto, New Republic

Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture


Slavoj Žižek - 1991
    Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements of Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of the psycholanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan through the works of contemporary popular culture, from horror fiction and detective thrillers to popular romances and Hitchcock films.

Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History


Shoshana Felman - 1991
    Moving from the literary to the visual, from the artistic to the autobiographical, and from the psychoanalytic to the historical, the book defines for the first time the trauma of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing "the unprecedented historical occurrence of...an event eliminating its own witness." Through the alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, the authors focus on the henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event, literature and evidence, speech and survival, witnessing and ethics.

On Justification: Economies of Worth


Luc Boltanski - 1991
    Individuals, however, often misread situations, and many disagreements can be explained by people appealing, knowingly and unknowingly, to different principles. On Justification is the first English translation of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s ambitious theoretical examination of these phenomena, a book that has already had a huge impact on French sociology and is likely to have a similar influence in the English-speaking world.In this foundational work of post-Bourdieu sociology, the authors examine a wide range of situations where people justify their actions. The authors argue that justifications fall into six main logics exemplified by six authors: civic (Rousseau), market (Adam Smith), industrial (Saint-Simon), domestic (Bossuet), inspiration (Augustine), and fame (Hobbes). The authors show how these justifications conflict, as people compete to legitimize their views of a situation.On Justification is likely to spark important debates across the social sciences.

The Rediscovery of North America


Barry Lopez - 1991
    This provocative and superbly written book gives a true assessment of Columbus's legacy while taking the first steps toward its redemption. Even as he draws a direct line between the atrocities of Spanish conquistadors and the ongoing pillage of our lands and waters, Barry Lopez challenges us to adopt an ethic that will make further depredations impossible. The Rediscovery of North America is a ringingly persuasive call for us, at long last, to make this country our home.

Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism


Fredric Jameson - 1991
    Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland


Allen Feldman - 1991
    . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"—Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist"One of the best books to have been written on Northern Ireland. . . . A highly imagination and significant book. Formations of Violence is an important addition to the literature on political violence."—David E. Schmitt, American Political Science Review

Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture


Chris Knight - 1991
    This original and ingenious book presents a new theory of how this symbolic domain originated. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biography and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Chris Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behavior and argues instead that it was the product of an immense social, sexual, and political revolution initiated by women.

Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine


Barbara Maria Stafford - 1991
    It offers an exicting and provocative analysis of the body and body metaphors in an encyclopedic work of truly international and interdisciplinary nature".-- Louis Gottschalk Prize "Stafford's books is ... full of intriguing, even intoxicating, ideas. For anyone involved with images it opens unexplored avenues of thought, forcing one to question traditional assumptions about both images and text". -- Helene Roberts, Visual ResourcesIn this erudite and profusely illustrated history of perception, Barbara Stafford explores a remarkable set of body metaphors deriving from both aesthetic and medical practices that were developed during the enlightenment for making visible the unseeable aspects of the world. While she focuses on these metaphors as a reflection of the changing attitudes toward the human body during the period of birth of the modern world, she also presents a strong argument for our need to recognize the occurrence of a profound revolution -- a radical shift from a text-based to a visually centered culture.Co-recipient of the 1992 Louis Gottschalk Prize, The American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies

When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics


Trinh T. Minh-ha - 1991
    In one essay, taking off from ideas raised earlier by Zora Neale Hurston, Trinh considers with astonishment the search by Western "experts" for the hidden values of a person or culture, a process of legitimized voyeurism that, she argues, ultimately equates psychological conflicts with depth, while inner experience is reduced to mere personal feeling.When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. Feminist struggle is heterogeneous. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to "beat the master at his own game."

The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society


Carol Delaney - 1991
    Moreover, the symbols and meanings by which they represent procreation provide the means for understanding relationships between such seemingly disparate elements as the body, family, house, village, nation, this-world and other-world. Delaney points out that these symbols do not embellish reality; they provide the key to a particular conception of it, a conception that gives coherence to social life. The patterns revealed are not distinctly Turkish; they also comment on some of our own deeply-held assumptions and values about procreation.

The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism


Bernard Faure - 1991
    Faure focuses on Chan's insistence on "immediacy"--its denial of all traditional meditations, including scripture, ritual, good works--and yet shows how these mediations have always been present in Chan.

The Honey And The Hemlock: Democracy & Paranoia In Ancient Athens & Modern America


Eli Sagan - 1991
    The book draws from Athenian and American experience.

The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life


James Still - 1991
    Still joined the life of the scattered community. He raised his own food, preserved fruits and vegetables for the winter, and kept two stands of bees for honey. A neighbor remarked of Still, "He's left a good job, and come

The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories, Revised Edition


Roy A. Clouser - 1991
    This new edition has been completely revised and updated by the author.

Rock A Bye Baby: A Death Behind Bars


Anne Kershaw - 1991
    Many women in this frequently condemned prison have killed themselves, but none of their deaths has struck the same degree of horror into so many hearts. For the many friends and professionals who were drawn to Marlene and who tried valiantly to rescue her from the prison system and from herself her death was the final, tragic blow in a lifetime of unconscionable punishment. Marlene Moore lives on today as an eloquent and frightening example of just how badly our social and penal systems fail. This is the story of Marlene's life and death, superbly told by Kershaw and Lasovich. Their non-sensational approach and their keen insights into the nature of crime and punishment in Canada throw a steady light into the shadowed, tragic world behind the bars of Canada's prisons. With painstaking honesty they tell the heart-rending tale of one girl's free fall through the gaping holes in our "caring" society.

Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism


Sara Mills - 1991
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World


Sharon Zukin - 1991
    In this book Sharon Zukin links our ever-expanding need to consume with two fundamental shifts: places of production have given way to spaces for services and paperwork, and the competitive edge has moved from industrial to cultural capital. From the steel mills of the Rust Belt, to the sterile malls of suburbia, to the gentrified urban centers of our largest cities, the "creative destruction" of our economy--a process by which a way of life is both lost and gained--results in a dramatically different landscape of economic power. Sharon Zukin probes the depth and diversity of this restructuring in a series of portraits of changed or changing American places. Beginning at River Rouge, Henry Ford's industrial complex in Dearborn, Michigan, and ending at Disney World, Zukin demonstrates how powerful interests shape the spaces we inhabit. Among the landscapes she examines are steeltowns in West Virginia and Michigan, affluent corporate suburbs in Westchester County, gentrified areas of lower Manhattan, and theme parks in Florida and California. In each of these case studies, new strategies of investment and employment are filtered through existing institutions, experience in both production and consumption, and represented in material products, aesthetic forms, and new perceptions of space and time. The current transformation differs from those of the past in that individuals and institutions now have far greater power to alter the course of change, making the creative destruction of landscape the most important cultural product of our time. Zukin's eclectic inquiry into the parameters of social action and the emergence of new cultural forms defines the interdisciplinary frontier where sociology, geography, economics, and urban and cultural studies meet.

The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism


Gwendolyn Wright - 1991
    Nowhere is this more revealingly illustrated than in urban design, a field that encompasses architecture and social life, traditions and modernization. Here aesthetic goals and political intentions meet, sometimes in collaboration, sometimes in conflict. Here the formal qualities of art confront the complexities of history. When urban design policies are implemented, they reveal underlying aesthetic, cultural, and political dilemmas with startling clarity. Gwendolyn Wright focuses on three French colonies—Indochina, Morocco, and Madagascar—that were the most discussed, most often photographed, and most admired showpieces of the French empire in the early twentieth century. She explores how urban policy and design fit into the French colonial policy of "association," a strategy that accepted, even encouraged, cultural differences while it promoted modern urban improvements that would foster economic development for Western investors. Wright shows how these colonial cities evolved, tracing the distinctive nature of each locale under French imperialism. She also relates these cities to the larger category of French architecture and urbanism, showing how consistently the French tried to resolve certain stylistic and policy problems they faced at home and abroad. With the advice of architects and sociologists, art historians and geographers, colonial administrators sought to exert greater control over such matters as family life and working conditions, industrial growth and cultural memory. The issues Wright confronts—the potent implications of traditional norms, cultural continuity, modernization, and radical urban experiments—still challenge us today.

The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the EXXON Valdez: North American Landscape from Disney to the EXXON Valdez


Alexander Wilson - 1991
    Extensively illustrated.

Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money


Jacques Derrida - 1991
    It is, however, a short tale by Baudelaire, "Counterfeit Money," that guides Derrida's analyses throughout. At stake in his reading of the tale, to which the second half of this book is devoted, are the conditions of gift and forgiveness as essentially bound up with the movement of dissemination, a concept that Derrida has been working out for many years.For both readers of Baudelaire and students of literary theory, this work will prove indispensable.

The Shasta Indians of California and Their Neighbors


Elizabeth Renfro - 1991
    By Elizabeth Renfro. The Shasta Indians dwelled in relative peace with their neighbors for untold generations until the miners and settlers arrived and utterly disrupted their way of life. Under the shadow of sacred Mount Shasta, or Wyeka, the unique Shastan culture had flourished. Origins, community life, subsistence activities, ceremonies, marriage, birth and death are carefully explained.

The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China


Timothy Brook - 1991
    During that time, China, not Europe, was the center of the world: the European voyages of exploration were searching not just for new lands but also for new trade routes to the Far East. In this book, Timothy Brook eloquently narrates the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of the Ming (1368-1644), when China was transformed from a closely administered agrarian realm into a place of commercial profits and intense competition for status.The Confusions of Pleasure marks a significant departure from the conventional ways in which Chinese history has been written. Rather than recounting the Ming dynasty in a series of political events and philosophical achievements, it narrates this longue durée in terms of the habits and strains of everyday life. Peppered with stories of real people and their negotiations of a rapidly changing world, this book provides a new way of seeing the Ming dynasty that not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of the period but also provides an entertaining and accessible introduction to Chinese history for anyone.

D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph


Tom Gunning - 1991
    Will solidify the way in which film scholars, critics, and teachers conceive of not only Griffith's crucial contributions to film history but all early filmmaking in the U.S."- David Dresser"An all-encompassing vision of D.W. Griffith's early work. Gunning's study is full of new information and places the Biographs in a lucid historical-critical context that will serve any future scholar who ventures into the realm of early cinema."- Joyce E. Jesionowski

Angels and Aliens


Keith Thompson - 1991
    Blending the richly intellectual with the sensational, Angels & Aliens gives a uniquely contemporary twist to the world of visionary experience. "In a brilliant stroke, Keith Thompson takes a subject usually confined to sensationalistic expose & reveals its surprising literary richness, intellectual energy & symbolic depths. By offering a new, open-ended perspective which avoids the dogmatism of true believers & debunkers alike, Angels & Aliens invites readers to enter a fascinating world with profound implications for our understanding of the human spirit."—- Addison Wesley Publishing "Probably the most profound book on the UFO controversy yet to appear...Thompson chronicles the unfolding UFO story, from flying saucer sightings in 1947 to the millennial mythologizing they've stimulated ever since...Prepare to imagine the unimaginable."—Venture World (VA) "Thompson thinks neither the UFO debunkers nor the UFO buffs are asking the right questions. As a consequence, the phenomenon remains suspended in a sort of scientific & theological limbo."—Utne Reader