Best of
Cultural-Studies

1995

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics


bell hooks - 1995
    Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

Hoop Dreams


Ben Joravsky - 1995
    25 photos.

Walt Whitman's America


David S. Reynolds - 1995
    This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres


Julie Ault - 1995
    His work challenged the notions of public and private space, originality, authorship and--most significantly--the authoritative structures in which he and his viewers functioned. Editor Julie Ault has amassed the first comprehensive monograph to span Gonzalez-Torres's career. In the spirit of his method, she rethinks the very idea of what a monograph should be. The book, which places strong emphasis on the written word, contains newly commissioned texts by Robert Storr and Miwon Kwon among other notables, as well as significant critical essays, exhibition statements, transcripts from lectures, personal correspondence, and writings that influenced Gonzalez-Torres and his work. Ample visual documentation adds another important layer of content. We see works not just in their completed state, but often in process, which for Gonzalez-Torres could mean the process of disappearing as viewers interacted with them. A crucial reference.

Twisted


Jessica Zafra - 1995
    Generation X icon Zafra continues her quest for world domination as she rants, complains, reminisces, and comments on anything and everything under the sun with her usual acerbic humor.

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest


Anne McClintock - 1995
    Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding


Naomi Baumslag - 1995
    Dr. Richard Jolly, Acting Executive Director UNICEFBreastfeeding is a beautiful process. It involves the participation of both mother and child and cannot be duplicated by a glass bottle and rubber nipple. So why does the United States have the lowest breastfeeding rate in the industrialized world? In Milk, Money and Madness, Baumslag and Michels examine the issue of breastfeeding, clearly drawing a line between fact and fiction. Among the main points addressed are: o How U.S. taxpayers unwittingly support and encourage bottle-feeding by spending over $500 million each year to provide 37% of the infants in the U.S. with free formula. o How a product created to help sick children and foundlings was transformed into a powerful international industry with revenues of $22 million a day. o How an intimate and self-affirming life experience that is responsible for the survival of our species has been reduced to just one feeding option. Milk, Money, and Madness provides parents and health professionals with the information they need to fully appreciate and advise about this critical life choice. By reviewing the history, culture, biology, and politics of breastfeeding, Milk, Money, and Madness gives the reader a more complete understanding of the uniqueness of breastfeeding.The crucial decision between breastfeeding and formula feeding is increasingly complicated by misinformation and unfounded theories which cloud the actual facts. By all accounts, breastmilk is the most amazing life-sustaining fluid known to humanity. Many women who breastfeed characterize it as perhaps the most fulfilling life experience they will ever know. Scientific research supports the fact that breastfed babies are healthier, have lower infant mortality rates and fewer chronic illnesses throughout their lives than formula-fed babies. Similarly, women who breastfeed are significantly less likely to contract serious illnesses such as breast cancer. Alarmingly few people are aware of the unique benefits of breastfeeding and do not understand the dangers and risks of feeding an infant formula. In fact, the United States has the lowest breastfeeding rate in the industrialized world. Why has our society defied common sense and scientific data when breastfeeding has so many biological, emotional, environmental, and even financial advantages over laboratory blends?Milk, Money, and Madness is a thought-provoking book that offers honest answers and straight facts about breastfeeding. This book is designed to provide women, men, health workers, doctors, nurses, and midwives with the knowledge they need to advise or decide about the most suitable means of nourishment for infants. Baumslag and Michels consider the effects of 50 years of clever marketing and advertising which have transformed this society into one where bottle feeding is the norm and infant formula is considered to be essential to women's liberation and the forming of a paternal-infant bond. They also examine attitudes toward breastfeeding in cultures all around the world as compared to the antipathy toward breastfeeding that pervades the United States. Milk, Money, and Madness cuts through the myths and paranoia to offer an enlightening, culturally significant look at one of the most fundamentally beautiful functions of the human experience.

Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters


J. Jack Halberstam - 1995
    Jack Halberstam offers a rereading of the monstrous that revises our view of the Gothic. Moving from the nineteenth century and the works of Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary horror film exemplified by such movies as Silence of the Lambs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Candyman, Skin Shows understands the Gothic as a versatile technology, a means of producing monsters that is constantly being rewritten by historically and culturally conditioned fears generated by a shared sense of otherness and difference.Deploying feminist and queer approaches to the monstrous body, Halberstam views the Gothic as a broad-based cultural phenomenon that supports and sustains the economic, social, and sexual hierarchies of the time. She resists familiar psychoanalytic critiques and cautions against any interpretive attempt to reduce the affective power of the monstrous to a single factor. The nineteenth-century monster is shown, for example, as configuring otherness as an amalgam of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Invoking Foucault, Halberstam describes the history of monsters in terms of its shifting relation to the body and its representations. As a result, her readings of familiar texts are radically new. She locates psychoanalysis itself within the gothic tradition and sees sexuality as a beast created in nineteenth century literature. Excessive interpretability, Halberstam argues, whether in film, literature, or in the culture at large, is the actual hallmark of monstrosity.

The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism


Tina Rosenberg - 1995
    Here, she approaches a similar theme in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, telling a series of riveting human stories to illuminate the paradox that rabid anti-Communism at times resembles Communism. In the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and the former East Germany, she talks to erstwhile dissidents now victimized because they are named in old police registers; to low-level agents accused of crimes that were not crimes when committed; and to high officials who now run things just like before. She convincingly suggests that the best antidote to Communism may be, not revenge, but "tolerance and the rule of law."

Shadows of Tender Fury


Subcomandante Marcos - 1995
    Here are the words of Marcos, words that recast Mexican politics and revived rebel imaginations everywhere. They look back to the traditions of Indian resistance and the dormant ideals of the Mexican revolution; they look forward to political strategies, styles, and theories that challenge the dominance of capitalism. The Introduction by John Ross situates the Zapatistas in the context of Mexican history and the Afterword by Frank Bardacke discusses their language and politics, as well as their meaning for the U.S. left. This edition also includes an "exclusive" prologue by Subcomandante Marcos and his speech to the Zapatista's August 1994 national convention.

Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917


Gail Bederman - 1995
    Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.

Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body


Lennard J. Davis - 1995
    Davis argues forcefully against 'ableist' discourse and for a complete recasting of the category of disability itself. Enforcing Normalcy surveys the emergence of a cluster of concepts around the term 'normal' as these matured in Western Europe and the United States over the past 250 years. Linking such notions to the concurrent emergence of discourses about the nation, Davis shows how the modern nation-state contracted its identity on the backs not only of colonized subjects, but of its physically disabled minority. In a fascinating chapter on contemporary cultural theory, Davis explores the pitfalls of privileging the figure of sight in conceptualizing the nature of textuality. And in the treatment of nudes and fragmented bodies in Western art, he shows how the ideal of physical wholeness is both demanded and denied in the classical aesthetics of representation. Enforcing Normalcy redraws the boundaries of political and cultural discourse. By insisting that disability be added to the familiar triad of race, class, and gender, the book challenges progressives to expand the limits of their thinking about human oppression.

Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America


Charles Bowden - 1995
    The figures he casts before us-from Pancho Villa to a modern-day drug lord, from General Sherman to a skid-row Sioux named Robert Sundance-trace a story not so much of rapaciousness as of fear and loathing. Bowden twines it with the natural history of the hammer orchid, a carnivore whose deceptive delicacy comes to stand for the terror and hypocrisy that have perverted our love of the land, its peoples, and our very natures.

Conversations with Susan Sontag


Leland Poague - 1995
    Many are translations of interviews that originally appeared in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or Swedish periodicals. Several are published here for the first time in any language. Giving attention to Sontag's education and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, they cover Sontag's rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist, and cultural critic.Born in New York City, reared in Arizona and California, educated at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne, appointed to teaching positions in English, philosophy, and religion, she is a woman whose restlessly independent and resolutely transcultural temperament was already well established when she boxed up the manuscript of The Benefactor and submitted it to Farrar & Straus in 1962. By 1992, when her much acclaimed novel The Volcano Lover: A Romance was published, The Benefactor alone

Somewhere in the World Right Now


Stacey Schuett - 1995
    School Library Journal called Stacey Schuett's stunning authorial debut "a book that is perfect for sparking an interest in geography, emphasizing the amazing concept that at the same moment we are getting ready to sleep, other people are starting a new day." And in a starred review, Publishers Weekly added, "Schuett proves as nimble with words as with a paintbrush."  It's a good-night wish that circles the globe.

The Temptation of Innocence - Living in the Age of Entitlement


Pascal Bruckner - 1995
    This highly insightful essay dissects the culture of dependency and its damaging effects on the moral fiber of society, from corporate welfare to affirmative action.

The Spivak Reader: Selected Works


Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - 1995
    Although her rigorous reading of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with poststructuralism, this collection makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading.

Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans


Farai Chideya - 1995
    Drawing from government sources, published studies, and polls on a wide range of economic and social issues, this book provides African Americans who find themselves confronting ignorant or stereotyped comments or images with the ammunition they need to fight the pervasive misinformation surrounding racial issues in this country.

The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy


Christopher Lasch - 1995
    In this spirited work, Lasch calls out for a return to community, schools that teach history not self-esteem, and a return to morality and even the teachings of religion. He does this in a nonpartisan manner, looking to the lessons of American history, and castigating those in power for the ever-widening gap between the economic classes, which has created a crisis in American society. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy is riveting social commentary.

Banal Nationalism


Michael Billig - 1995
    While traditional theorizing has tended to the focus on extreme expressions of nationalism, the author turns his attention to the everyday, less visible forms which are neither exotic or remote, he describes as `banal nationalism'.The author asks why people do not forget their national identity. He suggests that in daily life nationalism is constantly flagged in the media through routine symbols and habits of language. Banal Nationalism is critical of orthodox theories in sociology, politics and social psychology for ignoring this core feature of national identity. Michael Billig argues forcefully that wi

Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism


Lewis R. Gordon - 1995
    Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. Gordon argues that the concept of bad faith militates against any human science that is built upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an analysis of antiblack racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human.

Women Writing Culture


Ruth Behar - 1995
    How are feminists redefining the poetics and politics of ethnography? What are the contradictions of women studying women? How have gender, race, class, and nationality been scripted into the canon?Through autobiography, fiction, historical analysis, experimental essays, and criticism, the contributors offer exciting responses to these questions. Several pieces reinvestigate the work of key women anthropologists like Elsie Clews Parsons, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, while others reevaluate the writings of women of color like Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, and Alice Walker. Some selections explore how sexual politics help to determine what gets written and what is valued in the anthropological canon. Other pieces explore new forms of feminist ethnography that 'write culture' experimentally, thereby challenging prevailing, male-biased anthropological models.

Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, And The Commodification Of Difference


Deborah Root - 1995
    Across the country in New York, opera patrons weep to the death scene of Madam Butterfly. These seemingly unrelated events intertwine in Cannibal Culture as Deborah Root examines the ways Western art and Western commerce co-opt, pigeonhole, and commodify so-called “native experiences.” From nineteenth-century paintings of Arab marauders to our current fascination with New Age shamanism, Root explores and explodes the consumption of the Other as a source of violence, passion, and spirituality.Through advertising images and books and films like The Sheltering Sky, Cannibal Culture deconstructs our passion for tourism and the concept of “going native,” while providing a withering indictment of a culture in which every cultural artifact and ideology is up for grabs—a cannibal culture. This fascinating book raises important and uncomfortable questions about how we travel, what we buy, and how we determine cultural merit. Travel—be it to another country, to a museum, or to a supermarket—will never be the same again.

The Great World Tour


Kamini Khanduri - 1995
    Each picture brings to life a different place, from a market in Thailand to a ski resort in the Alps. Small pictures around the edge of the page show things to spot, and easy-to-read captions provide snippets of information. There is also a present to find on every double-page spread and clues on where to go next - it won't be the next page in the book.

English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas


Coco Fusco - 1995
    Known for using performance to explore the boundaries of ethnicity in art, Coco Fusco has now brought her talents to bear in a volume of cultural criticism and theory, English is Broken Here. Infused with a unique cultural sensibility, English is Broken Here examines cross-cultural art issues in America at a crucial moment. Coco Fusco adds an original and eloquent voice to a growing debate over cultural identity and visual politics.

The Threshold of the Visible World


Kaja Silverman - 1995
    In The Threshold of the Visible World she creates an aesthetic model capable of assisting us in the seemingly impossible task of loving bodies which are both different from our own, and culturally despised. At the heart of this model is a provocative rethinking of idealizaiton and the culturally transformative uses to which it might be put. Linking Benjamin's notion of the aura with Brecht's notion of alienation, she articulates an entirely new set of formal parameters for political representation.The Threshold of the Visible World also provides a psychoanalytic examination of the field of vision. While offering extended discussions of the gaze, the look, and the image, Silverman is concerned above all else with establishing what it means to see. She shows that our look is always impinged upon by our desires and our anxieties, and mediated in complex ways by the representations which surround us. These psychic and social constraints lead us to commit involuntary acts of visual violence against others. Silverman explores the conscious and unconscious circumstances under which such acts of violence might be undone, and the look induced to see and affirm what is abject, and alien to itself.In The Threshold of the Visible World Kaja Silverman advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic, exploring the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies.

Circus Americanus


Ralph Rugoff - 1995
    Exploring its remote corners and bizarre byways, Ralph Rugoff takes us on a tour of theme park slums and mystical police cars, futurist war and the “aesthetics of safe chaos.” With an idiosyncratic eye for detail, he maps a culture in which “reality” has become just another theme, revealing an America much stranger than the glamorous kitsch of its surfaces. Whether he is writing about Las Vegas casinos, forensic cartoons, the enigma of Napoleon’s preserved penis or the aesthetics of sewage treatment, Rugoff considers everyday marvels with a concern for how we live together in a world beyond belief.

Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography


David M. Halperin - 1995
    Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to beginwork on what would become one of the most influential novels ever written. The subject she had hesitated to meddle with was slavery, and the novel, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Still debated today for its portrayal of African Americans and its unresolved place in the literary canon, Stowe'sbest-known work was first published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852. It caused such a stir in both the North and South, and even in Great Britain, that when Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862 he is said to have greeted her with the words, So you are the little woman whowrote the book that created this great war! In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multilayered world of nineteenth century morals and mores, exploring theinfluence of then-popular ideas of true womanhood on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched andsustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women's lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, and thegreat social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement and the entry of women into public life. Here are Stowe's public triumphs, both before and after the Civil War, and the private tragedies that included the death of her adored eighteen month old son, the drowning of another son, and the alcohol and morphine addictions of two of her other children. The daughter, sister, and wife ofprominent ministers, Stowe channeled her anguish and her ambition into a socially acceptable anger on behalf of others, transforming her private experience into powerful narratives that moved a nation. Magisterial in its breadth and rich in detail, this definitive portrait explores the full measure of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life, and her contribution to American literature. Perceptive and engaging, it illuminates the career of a major writer during the transition of literature from anamateur pastime to a profession, and offers a fascinating look at the pains, pleasures, and accomplishments of women's lives in the last century.

Barbie's Queer Accessories


Erica Rand - 1995
    She’s Barbie—an icon of femininity to generations of American girls. She’s also multiethnic and straight—or so says Mattel, Barbie’s manufacturer. But, as Barbie’s Queer Accessories demonstrates, many girls do things with Barbie never seen in any commercial. Erica Rand looks at the corporate marketing strategies used to create Barbie’s versatile (She’s a rapper! She’s an astronaut! She’s a bride!) but nonetheless premolded and still predominantly white image. Rand weighs the values Mattel seeks to embody in Barbie—evident, for example, in her improbably thin waist and her heterosexual partner—against the naked, dyked out, transgendered, and trashed versions favored by many juvenile owners and adult collectors of the doll.Rand begins by focusing on the production and marketing of Barbie, starting in 1959, including Mattel’s numerous tie-ins and spin-offs. These variations, which include the much-promoted multiethnic Barbies and the controversial Earring Magic Ken, helped make the doll one of the most profitable toys on the market. In lively chapters based on extensive interviews, the author discusses adult testimony from both Barbie "survivors" and enthusiasts and explores how memories of the doll fit into women’s lives. Finally, Rand looks at cultural reappropriations of Barbie by artists, collectors, and especially lesbians and gay men, and considers resistance to Barbie as a form of social and political activism.Illustrated with photographs of various interpretations and alterations of Barbie, this book encompasses both Barbie glorification and abjection as it testifies to the irrefutably compelling qualities of this bestselling toy. Anyone who has played with Barbie—or, more importantly, thought or worried about playing with Barbie—will find this book fascinating.

Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine


Laurinda S. Dixon - 1995
    Dixon shows how paintings reflect changing medical theories concerning women. While she illuminates a tradition stretching from antiquity to the present, she concentrates on art from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and particularly on paintings from seventeenth-century Leiden.Bearing such titles as The Doctor's Visit and The Lovesick Maiden, certain seventeenth-century Dutch paintings are familiar to museum browsers: an attractive young woman--well dressed, but pale and listless--reclines in a chair, languishes in bed, or falls to the floor in a faint. Weathered crones or impish boys leer suggestively in the background. These paintings traditionally have been viewed as commentary on quack doctors or unmarried pregnant women. The first to examine images of women and illness in the light of medical history. Perilous Chastity reveals a surprising new interpretation.

Rebels and Devils: The Psychology of Liberation (Revised) (Revised)


Christopher S. Hyatt - 1995
    Some (William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Aleister Crowley, Israel Regardie, Christopher S. Hyatt, Austin Osman Spare, Jack Parsons, and Osho Rajneesh) are world famous. Some others (Genesis P-Orridge, Lon Milo DuQuette, S. Jason Black, James Wasserman, Phil Hine, and Richard Kaczynski, Ph.D.) are well-accomplished in their own fields, but are not known in the wider world. Every contributor, every article, in every aspect of their lives has had but one focus--to bring freedom to their world. In all of human history the essence of the independent mind has been the need to think and act according to standards from within, not without. To follow one's own path, not that of the crowd. Inevitably it follows that anyone with an independent mind must become "one who resists or opposes an authority or established convention"--a rebel. Usually rebellion is done so quietly that no one notices. But when others (especially others with power) recognize the disobedience, the rebel becomes the rebel. And if enough people come to agree with (and follow) the rebel, we have a devil. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have greatness. Until the new unorthodoxy becomes the established norm, and the cycle of rebellion starts up all over again.

Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology


E. Michael Jones - 1995
    Michael Jones completes the trilogy as he reveals in this book how modern architecture arose out of the disordered moral lives of its creators. Beginning with the simultaneous collapse of both his marriage and the Austro-Hungarian empire, Walter Gropius formulated an architectural rhetoric that would speak to the needs of the newly emerging modern man. As a sexually liberated social monad, modern man would have no need for home or family, no need to be rooted in a particular time or place. He was to live henceforth in the "international style." Soon that deeply materialistic, sterile architectural vision would conquer the world. From the suburbs of Moscow to the south side of Chicago, the new man would live in machines, "living machines", to use Gropius' words. Jones' book is an explanation of where that vision came from, where it led, and why it failed. Illustrated.

I Am a Palestinian Christian


Mitri Raheb - 1995
    Clearly and without rancor, his book situates the continuing plight of Palestinians in the unique history of the Palestinian Christians, the national and regional struggles since World War II, and the rich yet complex juncture of the world's three major monotheistic religions. In the pains and hopes of his people, Raheb reveals an emerging Palestinian Christian theology.

The Gullywasher


Joyce Rossi - 1995
    A tall tale of how the biggest gullywasher ever turned Abuelito from a strong young vaquero into the grandfather Leticia knows.

The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny


Terry Castle - 1995
    The Female Thermometer brings together Castle's essays on the phantasmagoric side of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Taking as her emblem the fanciful female thermometer, an imaginary instrument invented by eighteenth-century satirists to measure levels of female sexual arousal, Castle explores what she calls the impinging strangeness of the eighteenth-century imagination--the ways in which the rationalist imperatives of the age paradoxically worked to produce what Freud would later call the uncanny. In essays on doubling and fantasy in the novels of Defoe and Richardson, sexual impersonators and the dream-like world of the eighteenth-century masquerade, magic-lantern shows, automata, and other surreal inventions of Enlightenment science, and the hallucinatory obsessions of Gothic fiction, Castle offers a haunting portrait of a remarkable epoch. Her collection explores the links between material culture, gender, and the rise of modern forms and formulas of subjectivity, effectively rewriting the cultural history of modern Europe from a materialist and feminist perspective.

The First Passage: Blacks in the Americas 1502-1617


Colin A. Palmer - 1995
    They called themselves Twi, Yoruba, Zulu, Ashanti, and Kumba, among other names. In the early sixteenth century Europeans turned to Africa for the labor force needed to mine, cultivate, and process the bounty of natural resources in the newly colonized Americas. As many as 12 million Africans from varied ethnic backgrounds endured forced migration and enslavement. Out of their suffering was forged a new people--no longer simply Twi, Yoruba, Ashanti, or Kumba. In the Americas, they first became Africans and then African Americans. The First Passage examines the first century of the recorded black presence in the Americas. The ordeal of the Atlantic crossing gave way to the isolation and humiliation of slavery and the loss of friends and family. Some slaves attempted rebellion and escape. Others maintained as many religious and cultural traditions as possible and as the African-American population grew, forged new traditions and new ties of kinship. This history remains at the core of black life in the Americas. Colin Palmer tells a story of extraordinary suffering. But The First Passage is also a timeless lesson in endurance and survival.

History of Structuralism: Volume 1: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966


François Dosse - 1995
    Francois Dosse tells the story of structuralism's beginnings in postwar Paris to its culmination as a movement that would reconfigure French intellectual life and reverberate throughout the Western world. This essential guide is a cogent map of the dizzying array of personalities and ideas involved in the movement.

Screening The Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture


Lisa Cartwright - 1995
    But how and when did such issues come to be established and accepted sources of knowledge about the body in medical culture? How are the specialized techniques and codes of these imaging techniques determined, and whose bodies are studied, diagnosed and treated with the help of optical recording devices? "Screening the Body" traces the unusual history of scientific film during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, presenting material that is at once disturbing and engrossing. Lisa Cartwright looks at films like "The Elephant Electrocution". She brings to light eccentric figures in the history of the science film such as William P. Spratling who used Biograph equipment and crews to film epileptic seizures, and Thomas Edison's lab assistants who performed x-ray experiments on their own bodies. Drawing on feminist film theory, cultural studies, the history of film, and the writings of Foucault, Lisa Cartwright illustrates how this scientific cinema was a part of a broader tendency in society toward the technological surveillance, management, and physical transformation of the individual body and the social body. She frequently points out the similarities of scientific film to works of avant-garde cinema, revealing historical ties among the science film, popular media culture and elite modernist art and film practices. Ultimately, Cartwright unveils an area of film culture that has rarely been discussed, but which will leave readers scouring video libraries in search of the films she describes.

Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France


Nicholas Mirzoeff - 1995
    Nicholas Mirzoeff shows how the French Revolution transformed the ancien r�gime metaphor of painting as silent poetry into a nineteenth-century school of over one hundred deaf artists. Painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic artists all emanated from the Institute for the Deaf in Paris, playing a central role in the vibrant deaf culture of the period. With the rise of Darwinism, eugenics, and race science, however, the deaf found themselves categorized as savages, excluded and ignored by the hearing. This book is concerned with the process and history of that marginalization, the constitution of a center from which the abnormal could be excluded, and the vital role of visual culture within this discourse.Based on groundbreaking archival and pictorial research, Mirzoeff's exciting and intertextual analysis of what he terms the silent screen of deafness produces an alternative history of nineteenth-century art that challenges canonical views of the history of art, the inheritance of the Enlightenment, and the functions, status, and meanings of visual culture itself. Fusing methodologies from cultural studies, poststructuralism and art history, his study will be important for students and scholars of art history, cultural and deaf studies, and the history of medicine, and will interest a general audience concerned with the relationship of the deaf and the larger society.

Witi Ihimaera: Changing


Umelo Ojinmah - 1995
    He traces the development of Ihimaera's vision of bi-culturalism: the hope for a shared future for Maori and Pakeha that involves both races coming to terms with the past.

Cybernetics of cybernetics: Or, the control of control and the communication of communication


Heinz von Foerster - 1995
    

The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant Garde


Peter Osborne - 1995
    More specifically, Osborne claims, such ideas involve distinct “temporalizations” of history, giving rise to conflicting politics of time.His book begins with a consideration of the main aspects of modernity and develops though a series of critical engagements with the major twentieth-century positions in the philosophy of history. He concludes with a fascinating history of the avant-garde intervention into the temporality of everyday life in surrealism, the situationists and the work of Henri Lefebvre.

Secret Of The Sangraal: A Collection Of Writings


Arthur Machen - 1995
    

Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives


Felicity Nussbaum - 1995
    Describing how women's reproductive labor was harnessed to that task, Nussbaum explores issues such as the production of life, of goods, and of desire. She also considers a variety of cultural practices (usually construed as exotic) in England and the empire, including polygamy, infanticide, prostitution, homoeroticism, and arranged marriages.Torrid Zones includes new readings of significant texts by and about female subjects, including novels by Defoe, Richardson, Johnson, Cleland, Lennox, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Phebe Gibbes. It also considers the more broadly defined texts of culture such as travel narratives, medical documents, legal records, and engravings."I take as a central metaphor for the consideration of maternity and sexuality the concept of torrid zones, both the geographical torrid zones of the territory between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, and the torrid zone mapped onto the human body, especially the female body. A premise of my study is that the contrasts among the torrid, temperate, and frigid zones of the globe are formative in imagining that a sexualized woman of empire is distinct from domestic English womanhood. The general category of 'woman' muddles the binaries between mother and whore, self and Other, center and periphery."—from the Introduction

Hate Speech


Rita K. Whillock - 1995
    This thought-provoking book explores the voice of rage - in the media, popular culture, political rhetoric and in the more general public sphere. Adopting both ethnographic and theoretical perspectives, the contributors address the ways in which hate is rationalized, invoked, expressed and institutionalized, illustrating the debate with current social issues - including abortion and gay rights - which have incited hatred and polarized positions.

Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation


Reina Lewis - 1995
    Drawing on the little-known work of Henriette Browne, other `lost' women Orientlist artists and the literary works of George Eliot, Reina Lewis challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze.Gendering Orientalism argues that women did not have a straightforward access to an implicitly nale position of western superiority, Their relationship to the shifting terms of race, nation and gender produced positions from which women writers and artists could articulate alternative representations of racial difference. It is this different, and often less degrading, gaze on the Orientalized `Other' that is analysed in this book. By revealing the extent of women's involvement in the popular field of visual Orientalism and highlighting the presence of Orientalist themes in the work of Browne, Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, reina Lewis uncovers women's roles in imperial culture and discourse.Gendering Orientalism will appeal to students, lecturers and researchers in cultural studies, literature, art history, women's studies and anthropology.

Caminemos Con Jesus: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment


Roberto S. Goizueta - 1995
    Roberto Goizueta, a Cuban-American theologian, aware that "Hispanic" and "Latino" can be terms imposed artificially on diverse peoples, finds a common link in the Spanish language and in a shared culture. Central to this culture is the experience of exile, of being a people at the margins of a society, who must find and make their way together. Central also is faith, and its grounding in this experience of being in exile. In delineating the very particular nature and worldview of Hispanic/Latino theology, Caminemos con Jesus challenges both traditional Euro-American theologies and modern Western epistemological assumptions. It examines the implications of this theological method for the Church and the academy, as well as for the future of the Latino community and North American society. Caminemos con Jesus provides lessons in discipleship for non-Hispanics and Hispanics alike, for students of contemporary theology, and all those engaged in pastoral and church-based work.

On the New


Boris Groys - 1995
    As ideas move from one context to another, newness is created. This continuous shifting of the line that separates the valuable from the worthless, culture from profanity, is at the center of Boris Groys's investigation which aims to map the uncharted territory of what constitutes artistic innovation and what processes underpin its recognition and appropriation.

Manipulating Needs: Capitalism and Culture


Conrad Lodziak - 1995
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Pornography and Difference


Berkeley Kaite - 1995
    It engages questions about masculinity and masculine sexuality such as "Is there a necessary relation between difference and phallic desire?" "Can the masculine subject imagine otherness?" "Is there a will-to-asceticism in this (masculine) sexual surrender to indifferentiation?"

Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus


Antoine Faivre - 1995
    Since that time, we have published 45 books, including five volumes of Alexandria, a book-length journal of cosmology, philosophy, myth, and culture.The year 2000 marks our fifteen-year anniversary, and we are working to bring out more interdisciplinary works, including books on creativity, psychology, literature, and the intersections between science, spirituality, and culture.Hermes -- the fascinating, mercurial messenger of the gods, eloquent revealer of hidden wisdom, and guardian of hidden knowledge -- has played a central role in the development of esotericism in the West. Drawing upon many rare books and manuscripts, this highly illustrated work explores the question of where Hermes Trismegistus came from, how he came to be a patron of the esoteric traditions, and how the figure of Hermes has remained lively and inspiring to our own day.

The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "The Other" and the Myth of Modernity


Enrique Dussel - 1995