Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can be a 'powerful site for intervention, challenge and change'. And intervene, challenge and change is what hooks does best.

    This second edition builds upon and updates Omi and Winant's groundbreaking research. In addition to a preface to the new edition, the book provides a more detailed account of the theory of racial formation processes. It includes material on the historical development of race, the question of racism, race-class-gender interrelationships, and everyday life. A final chapter updates the developments in American racial politics up to the present, focusing on such key events as the 1992 Presidential election, the Los Angeles riots, and the Clinton administration's racial politics and policies."…required reading for scholars engaged in historical, sociological, and cultural studies of race. In the new edition, the authors further develop their provocative theory of 'racial formation' and extend their political analyses into the 1990s. They introduce the concept of 'racial project', linking race as representation with race as it is embedded in the social structure." -- Angela Y. Davis

    Race rebels, argues Kelley, have created strategies of resistance, movements, and entire subcultures. Here, for the first time, everyday race rebels are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present.

    In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it.Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men.But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."

    These are poets -- which include political activists, revolutionaries, guerilla combatants, and ordinary working people from around the world -- whose works are united in a desire for a world where human needs are met and justice is pursued.

    Published here in English for the first time Helene Cixous, Rootprints is an ideal introduction to Cixous's theory and her fiction, tracing her development as a writer and intellectual whose remarkable prespicacity and electrifying poetic force are known world-wide.Unprecedented in its form and content this collection breaks new ground in the theory and practice of auto/biography. Cixous's creative reflections on the past provide occasion for scintillating forays into the future.The text includes: * an extended interview between Cixous and Calle-Gruber, exploring Cixous's creative and intellectual processes* a revealing collection of photographs taken from Cixous's family album, set against a poetic reflection by the author * selections from Cixous's private notebooks* a contribution by Jacques Derrida* original 'thing-pieces' by Calle-Gruber.

    With countries such as China and India taking on a more significant role in the global business landscape, you can't afford not to know the practices, customs, and philosophies of other countries.Now fully revised, updated, and expanded with over sixty country profiles, Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands, 2nd Edition provides invaluable information on how to handle common business interactions with grace, respect, and an appreciation for different cultures.

    From traditional tunes to rhymes and hand games, De Colores has songs for all occasions and moods. Each song is accompanied by simple musical arrangements, with lyrics in both English and Spanish. Slightly abridged from the original edition, this is ideal for classroom use, multicultural studies, or just plain fun.

    The book 'multiculturalizes' media studies by looking at Hollywood movie genres such as the western, the musical and the imperial film from multicultural perspectives, examining issues from the racial politics of casting to colonialist discourse and gender and Empire.More than just a critique of Eurocentrism and racism, Unthinking Eurocentrism also confirms artistic, cultural and political alternatives, discussing a wide range of non-Eurocentric media including Third World films, rap video and indigenous media. Synthesising literary theory, meida theory and cultural studies to form a challenging interdisciplinary study, the authors argue that current debatess about Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism are merely surface manifestations of a deep-rooted shift: the decolonisation of global culture.

    Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power.Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestoes, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of "reactionary modernism," the rise of the "New Woman," Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism.While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. This will be a major resource and reference work for students and scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political thought; and cultural, film, German, and women's studies.

    Shows how the Sixties counterculture changed America and its view of Christianity forever, and explores various ways for believers to influence our world today.

    Providing both a chronicle of the radical sex movement in the United States, as well as the definitive opinions of America's most consistent and trenchant sexual critic, Public Sex is must-read material for anyone interested in sexual practices, feminism, censorship, or simply the art of the political essay.

    Jackson, a pioneer in the field of landscape studies, here takes us on a tour of American landscapes past and present, showing how our surroundings reflect important changes in our culture. Because we live in urban and industrial environments that are constantly evolving, says Jackson, time and movement are increasingly important to us and place and permanence are less so. We no longer gain a feeling of community from where we live or where we assemble but from common work hours, habits, and customs. Jackson examines the new vernacular landscape of trailers, parking lots, trucks, loading docks, and suburban garages, which all reflect this emphasis on mobility and transience; he redefines roads as scenes of work and leisure and social intercourse—as places, rather than as means of getting to places; he argues that public parks are now primarily for children, older people, and nature lovers, while more mobile or gregarious people seek recreation in shopping malls, in the street, and in sports arenas; he traces the development of dwellings in New Mexico from prehistoric Pueblo villages to mobile homes; and he criticizes the tendency of some environmentalists to venerate nature instead of interacting with it and learning to share it with others in temporary ways. Written with his customary lucidity and elegance, this book reveals Jackson's passion for vernacular culture, his insights into a style of life that blurs the boundaries between work and leisure, between middle and working classes, and between public and private spaces.

    Through 19 Native American stories and various activities, children learn the invaluable lesson that all living things are intertwined.

    And he does, warmed only by the sight of a distant fire. When his master refuses to recognize the boy's victory, the boy and his sister decide to beat the rich man at his own game.

    Delany, whose theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy has won him a broad audience among academics and fans of postmodernist fiction, offers insights into and explorations of his own experience as writer, critic, theorist, and gay black man in his new collection of written interviews, a form he describes as a type of "guided essay." Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of his thought and interests.

    One such institution is the museum, particularly the history museum, which, much like a history book, is popularly perceived as a repository of truth. But as Mining the Museum, a book based on the award-winning collaboration between The Contemporary, The Maryland Historical Society, and installation artist Fred Wilson illustrates, museums are not neutral places.

    Among the nearly two dozen short

    Contributors cover a wide range of subjects from analysis of the work of gay composers to queer readings of Schubert's 'Unfinished Symphony.'

    The ten essays collected here examine new forms of cultural expression in black film, photography and visual art exerging with a new generation of black British artists, and interprets this prolific creativity within a sociological framework that reveals fresh perspectives on the bewildering complexity of identity and diversity in an era of postmodernity. Kobena Mercer documents a wealth of insights opened up by the overlapping of Asian, African and Caribbean cultures that constitute Black Britain as a unique domain of diaspora.

    More than fifty contributions of poetry, prose, interviews, articles and artwork make this collection fascinating and important.

    Departing from the traditional definition of public art as sculpture in parks and plazas, new genre public art brings artists into direct engagement with audiences; definitive collection of writings on the subject.[art][current events][culture]

    Michael Jones Following up his best-seller, Degenerate Moderns, Jones reveals how major figures connected with modern music projected their own immorality into the field of music which has been the main vehicle of cultural revolution in the West. For the first time ever, a unified theory of music and cultural revolution links the work of figures like Wagner, Nietzsche, Schönborg, Jagger and others to show the connection between the demise of classical music and the rise of rock 'n' roll. Beginning with Nietzsche's appropriation of Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde, music became the instrument for cultural upheaval. What began at the barricades of Dresden in 1849 found its culmination at Woodstock and Altamont and the other Dionysian festivals of 1969. Jones shows the connection between the death of classical music and the rise of the African sensibility which Nietzsche saw as the antidote to Wagner prostrating himself before the cross in Parsifal. Nietzsche prophesied the end of the age of Christ/Socrates and the return of the spirit of music to philosophy. That return took place at the end of 1969 at an abandoned racetrack outside of San Francisco, and the world has never been the same."And a man who has not 'music' in him is apt to disintegrate states since music is equally suggestive of personal love or political concord." - G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest

    He argues rather that we live in an expanding historical culture, one which is newly alert to the evidence of the visual and which is altogether more pluralist than earlier versions of the national past.

    Lubell's artistic and literary sources support the argument that from the earliest moments of civilization, humans have respected and revered female sexual energy, graphically symbolized in the vulva, as an indispensable force in the balance of nature. Over the ages, the images of Baubo and her sisters assumed deviant and disturbing forms, but the basic lines of her legend and its visual manifestations were not completely obscured. Nor, as this book will show, has Baubo's essential power been destroyed even in our own age.

    How about "Moby-Dick"? Encyclopedia, novel or romance? Or even a 'singular medley, ' as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ... 'It is no longer a novel, ' T.S. Eliot said of "Ulysses." But if not novels, then what are they?" Literary history has long been puzzled by how to classify and treat these aesthetic monuments. In this highly original and interdisciplinary work, Franco Moretti builds a theory of the modern epic: a sort of super-genre that has provided many of the "sacred texts" of Western literary culture. He provides a taxonomy capable of accommodating "Faust," "Moby-Dick, The Nibelung's Ring, Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities "and "One Hundred Years of Solitude." For Moretti the significance of the modern epic reaches well beyond the aesthetic sphere: it is the form that represents the European domination of the planet, and establishes a solid consent around it. Political ambition and formal inventiveness are here continuously entwined, as the representation of the world system stimulates the technical breakthroughs of polyphony, reverie and leitmotif; of the stream of consciousness, collage and complexity. Opening with an analysis of Goethe's "Faust" and the different historical roles of epic and the novel, Moretti moves through a discussion of Wagner's "Ring" and on to a sociology of modernist technique. He ends with a fascinating interpretation of "magic realism" as a compromise formation between a number of modernist devices and the return of narrative interest, and suggests that the west's enthusiastic reception of these texts (and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in particular) constitutes a ritual self-absolution for centuries of colonialism.

    Some critics have explained the failure of social programs by citing our tradition of individual freedom and libertarian values, while others point to weaknesses within the working class. In The Color of Welfare, Jill Quadagno takes exception to these claims, placing race at the center of the American Dilemma, as Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal did half a century ago. The American creed of liberty, justice, and equality clashed with a history of active racial discrimination, says Quadagno. It is racism that has undermined the War on Poverty, and America must come to terms with this history if there is to be any hope of addressing welfare reform today. From Reconstruction to Lyndon Johnson and beyond, Quadagno reveals how American social policy has continually foundered on issues of race. Drawing on extensive primary research, Quadagno shows, for instance, how Roosevelt, in need of support from southern congressmen, excluded African Americans from the core programs of the Social Security Act. Turning to Lyndon Johnson's unconditional war on poverty, she contends that though anti-poverty programs for job training, community action, health care, housing, and education have accomplished much, they have not been fully realized because they became inextricably intertwined with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which triggered a white backlash. Job training programs, for instance, became affirmative action programs, programs to improve housing became programs to integrate housing, programs that began as community action to upgrade the quality of life in the cities were taken over by local civil rights groups. This shift of emphasis eventually alienated white, working-class Americans, who had some of the same needs--for health care, subsidized housing, and job training opportunities--but who got very little from these programs. At the same time, affirmative action clashed openly with organized labor, and equal housing raised protests from the white suburban middle-class, who didn't want their neighborhoods integrated. Quadagno shows that Nixon, who initially supported many of Johnson's programs, eventually caught on that the white middle class was disenchanted. He realized that his grand plan for welfare reform, the Family Assistance Plan, threatened to undermine wages in the South and alienate the Republican party's new constituency--white, southern Democrats--and therefore dropped it. In the 1960s, the United States embarked on a journey to resolve the American dilemma. Yet instead of finally instituting full democratic rights for all its citizens, the policies enacted in that turbulent decade failed dismally. The Color of Welfare reveals the root cause of this failure--the inability to address racial inequality.

    Also included is the Lesbian Avengers Handbook.

    You saw the flashing red lights, you found a good attorney, you even begged for mercy. Now You Are Going To Prison and there's not a damn thing you can do about it... except learn how to make the time go easier. Jim Hogshire guides you through the correctional system, pointing out all the dangers and scams, leading you toward the safest path. If you or a loved one are about to be swallowed up by the system, you need this information if you hope to come out whole. Topics covered include: * Custody: Dealing with police * Why you should sometimes tell the cops exactly where your stash is * Handling confrontations in jail * Making bail * And much more. * Trial: Why public defenders are often the best attorneys * How to plea bargain * Mike Tyson's second biggest mistake * The importance of the pretrial sentencing report * And much more. * Prison: Rape: Everything you ever wanted to know, and some stuff you'll wish you didn't * Improvised weapons, including zip guns, knives and torchings * The best prison jobs * Selling food and drugs, and other prison hustles * Toilet bowl wine * And much more. * Jailhouse Justice: Your rights in prison * Segregation and "Marionization," some of the cruelest punishments ever inflicted on human beings * Filing grievances and lawsuits * And much more. * Execution: Life on death row * "Deathwatch," a minute-by-minute account of a convict's last days * Lethal injection * Electrocution * Gas chambers * Hanging * And much more. You Are Going To Prison is the most accurate, no-bullshit guide to prison life we have ever seen. You don't want to read this book unless you're going to do time, because you won't be able to get the sickening images out of your head.

    He who serves his fellows is the greatest of all. If a man is as wise as a serpent, he can be as gentle as a dove. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. A sin against a neighbor is an offense against the Great Spirit.

    Earl Ofari Hutchinson offers a searing, controversial indictment of our society’s attitudes toward black men.The black male image, he argues, has been battered, maligned, and assaulted by academics, the press, and Hollywood, as well as by some black rappers, comedians, feminists, filmmakers, and novelists—many of whom he accuses of reinforcing, and profiting from, ethnic and sexual stereotypes. Offering both a wide historical perspective and acute insights into such racially charged events as the O. J. Simpson trial, the Clarence Thomas hearings, and the Million Man March, Hutchinson brilliantly counters the image of the black male as a figure entrenched in crime, drugs, and violence. At the same time, he issues a deeply moving call to rethink the way we view African American men.

    The poems range in tone from the spiritual longing of an isolated monk to the erotic ecstasy of a court princess—but share the extraordinary simplicity and luminosity of language that marks Kenneth Rexroth's verse style. An introduction by the poet and translator Sam Hamill, the editor of this collection, and short biographies of the poets are included. The Shambhala Library is a series of exquisitely designed and produced cloth editions of the world's spiritual and literary classics, both ancient and modern. Perfect for collecting or as gifts, each volume features a sewn binding, decorative endsheets, and a ribbon marker—a delightful-to-hold 4 ¼ x 6 ¾ trim size.

    This book showcases fifty-eight of his brushworks—poems, seed syllables, and phrases as well as abstract images. Facing them are short, pertinent quotations from his prose and poetry. An essay entitled "Heaven, Earth, and Man," based on one of Trungpa's "dharma art" workshops, is also included. Here he emphasizes what he called "art in everyday life": the cool, peaceful expression of unconditional beauty that offers us the possibility of being able to relax enough to perceive the phenomenal world and our own senses properly. He goes on to show how the dynamic of heaven, earth, and man (the ancient Oriental hierarchy of the cosmos) is basic to any artistic endeavor—painting, building a city, or designing an airplane—as well as to perceiving the art that surrounds us. He also introduces the idea that "the discipline of art-making" can be used to organize and create a decent society.

    Janet Farrell Brodie introduces this engaging pair early in a book that is certain to be the definitive study of family limitation in nineteenth-century America. She makes adroit use of Mary's diaries and letters to lift a curtain on the intimate life of a Victorian couple attempting to control the size of their family.Were the Poors typical? Who used reproductive control in the years between 1830 and 1880? What methods did they use and how did they learn about them? By examining a wide array of sources, Brodie has determined how Americans gradually were able to get birth control information and products that allowed them to choose among newer, safer, and more effective contraceptive and abortive methods.Brodie's findings in druggists' catalogues, patent records, advertisements, vice society'' documents, business manuscripts, and gynecological advice literature explain how information spread and often taboo matters were made commercial. She retraces the links among obscure individuals, from itinerant lecturers, to book publishers, to contraceptive goods manufacturers and explains the important contributions of two nascent networks-medical practitioners known as Thomsonians and watercurists, and iconoclastic freethinkers.Brodie takes her narrative to the backlash at the end of the century, when American ambivalence toward abortion and contraception led to federal and state legislative restrictions, the rise of special purity legions, the influence of powerful reformers such as Anthony Comstock, and the vehement opposition of medical professionals. In this balanced and timely book Brodie shows a keen sensitivity to the complex factors behind today's politically, emotionally, and intellectually charged battles over reproductive rights.

    

    "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting."Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself."

    In a world tour that touches down in Havana, Port-au-Prince, Kingston, Budapest, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, George Lipsitz explores the fusion of immigrant and mainstream cultures to be found in world music including rap, jazz, reggae, zouk, bhangra, juju, swamp pop, Puerto Rican bugalu and Chicano punk.

    Sinfield renews his call for an 'Englit' that incorporates ongoing study of the cultures of ethnicity, gender and sexuality.Challenging the assumptions that have shaped the study of English literature, Sinfield engages provocatively with topics such as the gendering of literary culture, the sexual politics of psychoanalysis during the Cold War and the history of cultural materialism. He discusses such key figures as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Arthur Miller, Holly Hughes, Audre Lorde and Jeanette Winterson.This influential investigation of the principles and practice that may form dissident reading, forms compelling argument for intellectual allegiances beyond the academy.

    Thanks to this broad perspective, the editors have successfully pulled together many voices and viewpoints into a balanced and accomplished collection that includes unknown and often unidentified writers along with Mark Doty, Paul Monette and Harold Brodkey. The late Iris de la Cruz, a former prostitute, drug user and emergency medical technician, writes plainly and openly about her past and about feeling "like I was the only woman in the world with AIDS. It was all gay white men." Christine Boose tells how her best friend from high school discovered she was HIV-positive when she got pregnant, then killed herself. One of several anonymous contributors, a 21-year-old college student, ruminates on why she continues to have unsafe sex, while another anonymous contributor mourns the passing of her drug-addicted daughter, "her girl-child ravaged and addicted and hunted down like an animal." Denise Ribble relates a bizarre incident from New York City's Community Health Project: a woman calls and asks whether she's at risk because she's a lesbian vampire who consumes the menstrual blood of other women. "If I'm really a vampire, I don't have anything to worry about because I'm immortal. But if I'm just a fucked-up woman who drinks other women's blood, I'm at risk aren't I?" Some of this writing is very intense, some is more reflective, but all of it contributes to creating an effective whole.

    In "Mandate of Heaven" Orville Schell, one of America's foremost China specialists, interprets these conflicting developments and brilliantly documents the new power structures, economic initiatives, and cultural changes that have transformed China since the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. Schell takes readers on a series of journeys inside this latter-day People's Republic and introduces us to a broad spectrum of people, from students and workers to entrepreneurs, pop stars, and party officials, who, although they acted out the drama of the Square, are now playing the prominent roles in China's high-speed economic rush into the future.As China's role on the world stage grows, it becomes increasingly important that the West acquaint itself with the people who will be leading it into the twenty-first century. "Mandate of Heaven" is the authoritative and definitive account of this generation as it moves into a capitalist economic future while still clinging to the structures of its communist past.

    Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the technological sublime (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely.Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the technological sublime (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely.American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness.What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day consumer sublime as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.

    Their frank and open dialogue on contemporary art and culture ranges widely, from censorship and obscenity to the social conditions of artistic creativity. Among the examples they discuss are the controversies surrounding the exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, the debates concerning multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, and the uses of art as a means of contesting and disrupting symbolic domination. They also explore the central themes of Hans Haacke's work, which is used to illustrate the book.

    A theory that the Bayeaux tapestry originated in Bayeaux itself.

    Also heard from are the event's organizers and the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, who wrote the foreword for this terrific tribute.

    Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business-all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity.Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

    'The Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology is a welcome addition to the reference literature. Bringing together authoritative, incisive and scrupulously edited contributions from some three dozen authors. The book achieves an impressive breadth of coverage of specialist areas.' - Times Higher Educational Supplement'Recommended for all anthropology collections, especially those in academic libraries.' - Library Journal'This is a marvellous book and I am very happy to recommend it.' - Reference Reviews

    Leading scholars from the Americas and Great Britain discuss aspects of Mexico's popular culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The vast range of Mexican expression is examined, including Corpus Christi celebrations, New Spain, stone murals, and folk theater. Filling a need that becomes ever more pressing, this volume provides fresh insights.

    He plumbs the depths of the ways our culture impoverishes and does violence to our private selves and spaces. He addresses himself to the role of ideals in psychoanalysis and brings a Kleinian perspective to bear on the schizoid nature of modern culture; the emptiness of the addict; the crisis in education; feminism and the shattering of male narcissism.

    This lively, highly readable book by Timothy Mitchell is the first full-length investigation of flamenco as well as an absorbing introduction to the cultural psychology of Spain itself. With an arsenal of critical theories honed to a sharp polemical edge, the author targets racialist and politicized mystifications of flamenco and deflates the still-influential primitivism of de Falla and Lorca. He demonstrates that flamenco is a densely historical phenomenon, whose "moods and musical techniques alike are inseparable from alcohol abuse." The denizens of saloons, bordellos, and prisons poured out their woes in guttural deep song, and their haunting cries and brash guitars were quickly taken up by the playboy-philanthropists who frequented the dives. Performers of deep song explored every painful aspect of tragic love; male singers told of having their hearts trampled by some dark-skinned dancer, females of having been abandoned or battered by their men. Guitarists were often expected to double as pimps. Flamenco artistry as we know it today makes sublime psychodrama out of alcoholism, fatalism, masochism, and ethnic rivalry. Mitchell's scholarship sparkles with irony and anecdotes drawn from two centuries of untranslated works. Ultimately he confronts the crucial question: Why does flamenco deep song appeal to people who never shared the traumas that precipitated its birth?

    Hawai'i version of "The 12 Days of Christmas."

    This interdisciplinary book describes and analyzes four trends of thought that have prevailed at one time in most of Europe over the last two centuries: the idea of the responsible citizen, the concept of patriotism or nationalism, the loss of self, and "suffering" as a formative element in the "national character." In a section devoted to Vaclav Havel, Pynsent treats Havel's notion of personal identity as expressed in personal responsibility. Another section concerning national identity looks in particular at two early nineteenth-century Slovaks who rejected Slovak nationalism and whose ideas ultimately had a profound impact on East European thinking on nationality up to the fall of communism. A third section deals with the beginnings of Modernism and the apparent disintegration of the self in West European and Czech writers. The final section addresses Vladimir Paral's expositions of the Czech cult of national martyrs since St. Wenceslas and the extent to which the "martyr" complex remains part of Czech self-identification."

    The book Real Choices gives an inside look at the reasons women make the tragic decision for abortion-as described by women who themselves chose abortion. The book goes on to explore how pro-life supporters can help both mother and child by ministering to women in their need with . . . Real choices.

    Early's cultural ruminations on the sport of prize-fighting form the intellectual core and central metaphor of this book. That is to say, his subject, when writing about boxing, is not just the culture of bruising or the world of the prizefighter but rather the culture as bruising - as a structure of opposition against the individual. Early's subjects range far and wide - essays in which he shares with us his considerable insights and expertise on such various subjects as multiculturalism and Black History Month, baseball, racist memorabilia, performance magic and race, Malcolm X, early jazz music, and finally, the raising of daughters. In every essay the form strengthens the content and gracefully balances the elements of research and opinion. Early becomes by turns the critic, skeptic, autobiographer, biographer, storyteller, cultural and literary scholar, detached citizen, and bemused parent. He integrates these voices with the skill of an accomplished choirmaster. The Culture of Bruising is an important and captivating collection of essays that treats issues of justice and racism in the context of sports, music, and other activities Americans value most. Early is a vigilant and highly sensitive observer of our culture, a culture based on the paradoxical combination of self-destruction and violence with personal empowerment and triumph.