José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture—not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process “disidentification,” and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. By examining the process of identification in the work of filmmakers, performance artists, ethnographers, Cuban choteo, forms of gay male mass culture (such as pornography), museums, art photography, camp and drag, and television, Muñoz persistently points to the intersecting and short-circuiting of identities and desires that result from misalignments with the cultural and ideological mainstream in contemporary urban America.Muñoz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of color—in Carmelita Tropicana’s “Camp/Choteo” style politics, Marga Gomez’s performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Davis’s “Terrorist Drag,” Isaac Julien’s critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s performances of “disidentity,” and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, a person with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial environment of the MTV serial The Real World.

    This 1999 revised work includes material that builds on issues and concerns raised in the first edition: Native Hawaiian student organizing at the University of Hawai'i; the master plan of the Native Hawaiian self-governing organization Ka Lahui Hawai'i and its platform on the four political arenas of sovereignty; the 1989 Hawai'i declaration of the Hawai'i ecumenical coalition on tourism; and a typology on racism and imperialism. Brief introductions to each of the previously published essays brings them up to date and situates them in the current Native Hawaiian rights discussion.

    Whether he is writing a scholarly book or an article for Newsweek, whether he is speaking of Emerson, Gramsci, or Marvin Gaye, his work radiates a passion that reflects the rich traditions he draws on and weaves together: Baptist preaching, American transcendentalism, jazz, radical politics. This anthology reveals the dazzling range of West's work, from his explorations of ”Prophetic Pragmatism” to his philosophizing on hip-hop.The Cornel West Reader traces the development of West's extraordinary career as academic, public intellectual, and activist. In his essays, articles, books, and interviews, West emerges as America's social conscience, urging attention to complicated issues of racial and economic justice, sexuality and gender, history and politics. This collection represents the best work of an always compelling, often controversial, and absolutely essential philosopher of the modern American experience.

    This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history.This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meanaing.Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

    Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 42nd Street was once known for its peep shows, street corner hustlers and movie houses. Over the last two decades the notion of safety-from safe sex and safe neighborhoods, to safe cities and safe relationships-has overcome 42nd Street, giving rise to a Disney store, a children's theater, and large, neon-lit cafes. 42nd Street has, in effect, become a family tourist attraction for visitors from Berlin, Tokyo, Westchester, and New Jersey's suburbs.Samuel R. Delany sees a disappearance not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there: the points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany tackles the question of why public restrooms, peepshows, and tree-filled parks are necessary to a city's physical and psychological landscape. He argues that starting in 1985, New York City criminalized peep shows and sex movie houses to clear the way for the rebuilding of Times Square. Delany's critique reveals how Times Square is being renovated behind the scrim of public safety while the stage is occupied by gentrification. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between classes, and disguising its fears of cross-class contact as family values. Unless we overcome our fears and claim our community of contact, it is a picture that will be replayed in cities across America.

    Many were created by the musicians themselves and demonstrate the emphasis within the punk scene on individuality and the manic urge of its members to create things new. Images were compiled out of whatever material could be found, often photocopied and, still warm, stapled to the nearest telephone pole to warn the world about next week's gig. One glance and you can sense the fury of live performances by bands such as Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys and The Minutemen, and, through the subtext the reader is exposed to the psyche of a generation of musicians stripped bare: The Germs, J.F.A, NOFX, X, The Circle Jerks, Devo, The Exploited, The Screamers, The Cramps, The Dils, The Avengers and more.

    Its accessible and vivid prose makes clear the links between crime and politics in a period of gathering economic crisis.

    The monkey is not alone. A lion, a jackal, a turtle, and a dove bicker in the cramped space, until a statue of Buddha comes to life. "Hush, children, hush." Buddha says. "I will tell you a story to pass the time." From the tale of the clever monkey outwidding a hungry crocodile to that of a bird and turtle rescuing a friend, the six amusing parables told by the Buddha will introduce young readers to the famous cycle of fables in Buddhist literature known as the Jatakas, or birth stories, which Buddha originally told to his disciples to illustrate his teachings. Joined with stunning linocut illustrations, Jeanne M. Lee's retellings form a book notable for both its beauty and its wisdom.

    Volume 2 of Selected Writings, covering the years 1927 to 1934, displays the full spectrum of Benjamin's achievements at this pivotal stage in his career.Previously concerned chiefly with literary theory, Benjamin during these Years does pioneering work in new areas, from the stud of popular Culture (a discipline he virtually created) to theories of the media and the visual arts. His writings on the theory of modernity-most of them new to readers of English--develop ideas as important to an understanding of the twentieth century as an contained in his widely anthologiied essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility.This volume brings together previously untranslated writings on major figures such as Brecht, Valery and Gide, and on subjects ranging from film, radio, and the novel to memory, kitsch, and the theory of language. We find the manifoldly inquisitive Benjamin musing on the new modes of perception opened tip by techniques of photographic enlargement and cinematic montage, on the life and work of & Goethe at Weimar, on the fascination of old toys and the mysteries of food, and on the allegorical significance of Mickey Mouse.

    Conceived by acclaimed novelist Walter Mosley and sponsored by the New York University Africana Studies Program and the Institute of African American Affairs, this book originated as a series of community conversations where "visionaries with solutions" shared powerful views on personal and communal struggles, triumphs, and aspirations. The list of contributors suggests the range of perspectives and talents brought to bear on such issues as economics, political power, work, authority, and culture. Black Genius is a point of departure for vigorous discussion of our current realities and goals for the future-and a portrait of "genius" that leads the way to enriching American life in the twenty-first century.

    Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.American life is filled with talk of progress and equality, especially when the issue is that of race. But has the history of race in America really been the continuous march toward equality we'd like to imagine it has? This sweeping history of race in America argues quite the opposite: that progress toward equality has been sporadic, isolated, and surrounded by long periods of stagnation and retrenchment.

    He examines the rise of a new black political class in the aftermath of the civil rights era, and bluntly denounces black leadership that is not accountable to a black constituency; such leadership, he says, functions as a proxy for white elites. Reed debunks as myths the 'endangered black male" and the "black underclass, " and punctures what he views as the exaggeration and self-deception surrounding the black power movement and the Malcolm X revival. He chastises the Left, too, for its failure to develop an alternative politics, then lays out a practical leftist agenda and reasserts the centrality of political action.

    In this exciting new book, Anton Kaes argues that masterworks such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Nibelungen, and Metropolis, even though they do not depict battle scenes or soldiers in combat, engaged the war and registered its tragic aftermath. These films reveal a wounded nation in post-traumatic shock, reeling from a devastating defeat that it never officially acknowledged, let alone accepted.Kaes uses the term "shell shock"--coined during World War I to describe soldiers suffering from nervous breakdowns--as a metaphor for the psychological wounds that found expression in Weimar cinema. Directors like Robert Wiene, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang portrayed paranoia, panic, and fear of invasion in films peopled with serial killers, mad scientists, and troubled young men. Combining original close textual analysis with extensive archival research, Kaes shows how this post-traumatic cinema of shell shock transformed extreme psychological states into visual expression; how it pushed the limits of cinematic representation with its fragmented story lines, distorted perspectives, and stark lighting; and how it helped create a modernist film language that anticipated film noir and remains incredibly influential today.A compelling contribution to the cultural history of trauma, Shell Shock Cinema exposes how German film gave expression to the loss and acute grief that lay behind Weimar's sleek fa�ade.

    Exploring themes such as global gender relations and the practical uses of masculinity research, this text looks at the implications for the field, particularly with regard to understanding current world issues.

    In 1945 he escaped with a Vatican passport and fled to South America. In May 1960 the Israelis located and kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina, and brought him to trial in Israel, where he was convicted and hanged, his remains cremated and scattered. For nearly a year prior to his trial Eichmann was interrogated by Captain Avner W. Less, a German Jew whose father and numerous relatives perished in Nazi concentration camps. Eichmann Interrogated is a superbly edited condensation of their 275-hour exchange, representing ten percent of the 3,564-page total. Amid his lies, distortions, evasions, half-truths, and startling admissions, Eichmann fully acknowledges the reality of the Holocaust while attempting to minimize his central role in its execution. As his life from traveling salesman to mass murderer unfolds, Eichmann's defense becomes a chilling self-indictment and a warning of Evil's often unassuming visage.

    Reaching beyond both medieval and queer studies, Dinshaw demonstrates in this challenging work how intellectual inquiry into pre-modern societies can contribute invaluably to current issues in cultural studies. In the process, she makes important connections between past and present cultures that until now have not been realized. In her pursuit of historical analyses that embrace the heterogeneity and indeterminacy of sex and sexuality, Dinshaw examines canonical Middle English texts such as the Canterbury Tales and The Book of Margery Kempe. She examines polemics around the religious dissidents known as the Lollards as well as accounts of prostitutes in London to address questions of how particular sexual practices and identifications were normalized while others were proscribed. By exploring contemporary (mis)appropriations of medieval tropes in texts ranging from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to recent Congressional debates on U.S. cultural production, Dinshaw demonstrates how such modern media can serve to reinforce constrictive heteronormative values and deny the multifarious nature of history. Finally, she works with and against the theories of Michel Foucault, Homi K. Bhabha, Roland Barthes, and John Boswell to show how deconstructionist impulses as well as historical perspectives can further an understanding of community in both pre- and postmodern societies. This long-anticipated volume will be indispensible to medieval and queer scholars and will be welcomed by a larger cultural studies audience.

    Few visit its shores-until Poseidon marries a beautiful woman named Cleito and transforms the island into a rich and fertile paradise, where all things flourish. A magnificent city arises. Poseidon names his perfect island Atlantis. Atlantis prospers and its people live in peace, but as the years pass, Poseidon's descendants start to act less like gods and more like men. When the people incur the wrath of their god, a terrible curse is carried out and the entire island sinks forever beneath the waves.This retelling of the history of fabled Atlantis is based on Plato's Timaeus and Critias. It features a note by internationally known historian Geoffrey Ashe, who has written extensively in the area of mythology.

    How Like a Leaf will be a welcome inside view of the author's thought.

    This book features advertisements for such classics as Mr. Bubble, Maypo, Mr. Wiggle, Shake-A-Pudd'n, Tang and Space Food Sticks.

    Now Dr. Bonnie J. Morris takes readers on an breathtaking insider's journey through 25 years of this cultural phenomenon. From Michigan to Mississippi, Eden Built by Eves is a splendidly full archive of festival herstory: conflicts, scandals, new music, rain, sun work, family, joy. What does festival culture mean to the audiences, artists, and activists who loyally return each year? A vibrant and soaring tribute to the work of thousands of women, this volume brims with candid backstage interview with festival performers and produces, moving testimony, and often hilarious anecdotes from "festiegoers." A plethora of photographs, articles, comic strips, illustrations, and excerpts from festival literature provide a thorough explanation of the music, relationships, and issues that have shaped an entire generation of lesbian memories in America. With affection, intensive research, and the experience of a lifetime attending festivals, Morris has created a stunning and important contribution to both musical and women's history.

    It allows all of the family members to speak candidly about their lives, their relationships, and the ways in which they have dealt with the pressures of homophobia.Included in the book are people from a diverse array of racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, representing a wide range of family structures. Together, they provide clear evidence that family roles and responsibilities need not be based on gender, and that children thrive in an atmosphere in which understanding, respect, and love transcend the prejudices of the day.

    A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the native informant through various cultural practices--philosophy, history, literature--to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.A major critical work, Spivak's book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.

    Biafra on Tipper Gore & more.

    In

    Coyote, Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry, and many other cartoon favorites. Beginning with black-and-white silent cartoons, Barrier offers an insightful account, taking us inside early New York studios and such Hollywood giants as Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM. Barrier excels at illuminating the creative side of animation--revealing how stories are put together, how animators develop a character, how technical innovations enhance the realism of cartoons. Here too are colorful portraits of the giants of the field, from Walt and Roy Disney and their animators, to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. Based on hundreds of interviews with veteran animators, Hollywood Cartoons gives us the definitive inside look at this colorful era and at the creative process behind these marvelous cartoons.

    How have maps and mapping served to order and represent physical, social and imaginative worlds? How has the practice of mapping shaped modern seeing and knowing? In what ways do contemporary changes in our experience of the world alter the meanings and practice of mapping, and vice versa?In their diverse expressions, maps and the representational processes of mapping have constructed the spaces of modernity since the early Renaissance. The map's spatial fixity, its capacity to frame, control and communicate knowledge through combining image and text, and cartography's increasing claims to scientific authority, make mapping at once an instrument and a metaphor for rational understanding of the world.Among the topics the authors investigate are projective and imaginative mappings; mappings of terraqueous spaces; mapping and localism at the 'chorographic' scale; and mapping as personal exploration.With essays by Jerry Brotton, Paul Carter, Michael Charlesworth, James Corner, Wystan Curnow, Christian Jacob, Luciana de Lima Martins, David Matless, Armand Mattelart, Lucia Nuti and Alessandro Scafi

    According to Japanese mythology, the cosmos took form spontaneously from chaos.  Lighter elements formed the abode of the gods, while heavier ones became the shapeless Earth.  Many divinities emerged in these two realms, but the seventh celestial couple consisted of Izanagi and Izanami, a god and goddess whose destiny was to establish the sea-kissed islands of Japan in the unruly waters far below.This pair created innumerable further deities, or kami, responsible for the world’s natural phenomena, though the greatest of all their offspring was the sun goddess Amaterasu.  She was brought forth by Izanagi and given dominion over the sky.  The eight gods and goddesses she produced with her brother Susano are said to be the ancestors of Japan’s emperors.Many other tales can be found in Realm of the Rising Sun: Japanese Myth, one volume in an exciting series called Myth and Mankind, a culture-by-culture examination of world myth and its historical roots.  Whether exploring the myths of Persia, early America, China or Greece, each book brings an ancient culture to life as never before.As a result, this is a world history like no other.  Every book is filled with the strange stories, mystic rites, angry gods, vision quests and magic symbols at the heart of all cultures – but left out of most history books.  Such myths are central to understanding how, since the dawn of time, people around the world have sought to explain birth, death, creation, love and other mysteries of life.  These myths lie at the intersection of imagination and history, wisdom and experience, dreams and reality.

    It is divided into the following main sections:origins and transformations sociology, race and social theory racism and anti-Semitism colonialism, race and the other feminism, difference and identity changing boundaries and spaces.Each section begins with a brief editorial introduction, providing a guide to the readings by historically contextualizing them and relating them to other writings throughout the book. Cross-national in content, historical in scope and offering a variety of topical perspectives, Theories of Race and Racism will be an invaluable resource for undergraduates across a range of disciplines.

    Merry Wiesner-Hanks assesses the role of personal faith and the church itself in the control and expression of all aspects of sexuality. The book ranges over developments within Europe and beyond to the European colonies including Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Goa, which were establishing themselves around the world. Christian missionaries and rituals and structures accompanied all of the imperial powers and the control of the sexuality of both indigenous peoples and colonists was an essential part of policy. The book is introduced with a clear, original and engaging account of the central concepts in the study of sexuality in Christianity, such as shame, sin, the body, marriage and gender. Drawing on diverse evidence including literary, medical and historical the following sections chart changes in Western Christianity in the Late Middle Ages, Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe, Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe and Russia, and finally the Spanish, Portuguese, English and Dutch Colonies. Merry Wiesner-Hanks exciting book covers both the ideas and effects in each period. Christianity and Sexuality in the early Modern World includes discursive bibliographies which discuss major books and articles at the end of each chapter.

    This book brings together her most important and influential essays, ranging over such topics as the necessity for racially diverse school curricula, the construction of literary canons, Zora Neale Hurston’s portraits of “the Folk,” C.L.R. James and Trinidadian nationalism and black women blues artists, and the necessity for racially diverse school curricula.Carby’s analyses of diverse aspects of contemporary culture are invariably sharp and provocative, her political insights shrewd and often against the grain. A powerful intervention, Culture in Babylon will become a standard reference point in future debates over race, ethnicity and gender.

    Its wide range of contributions locate the important historical developments, interdisciplinary perspectives, and key discourses that have shaped this dynamic area of feminist theory.

    . . is a loosely related collection of past and present acts of Congress, treaties and agreements, executive orders, administrative rulings, and judicial opinions, connected only by the fact that law in some form has been applied haphazardly to American Indians over the course of several centuries. . . . Indians in their tribal relation and Indian tribes in their relation to the federal government hang suspended in a legal wonderland. In this book, two prominent scholars of American Indian law and politics undertake a full historical examination of the relationship between Indians and the United States Constitution that explains the present state of confusion and inconsistent application in U.S. Indian law. The authors examine all sections of the Constitution that explicitly and implicitly apply to Indians and discuss how they have been interpreted and applied from the early republic up to the present. They convincingly argue that the Constitution does not provide any legal rights for American Indians and that the treaty-making process should govern relations between Indian nations and the federal government.

    FRIENDSHIP AND SOCIETY is a fascinating volume meant for those interested in what one of history's greatest minds had to say about life in an imperfect world. Bridging expert scholarship and a popular readership, this volume assumes no in-depth knowledge of philosophy or prior acquaintance with Augustine's writings. An introductory reflection on the human predicament is followed by a clear and accurate outline of Augustine's thought on such relevant topics as ethics, politics, society, history, the family, war and peace, crime and punishment, and church and state. Unifying the book is a powerful argument that "friendship" can be the tie that binds us all.

    From Nubia's ancient empire, which for a time ruled Egypt and centuries before had established the earliest known African city, to the fabled town of Timbuktu, where during the medieval period there thrived a center of scholars that rivaled any in Europe and where books were as prized as gold, to Ethiopia's Christian kingdom, where the Lost Ark of the Covenant is said to reside under perpetual vigil, Gates reveals an Africa little known to Westerners. And as he shows us the achievements that exploiters of the continent have ignored or denied for centuries, he introduces us as well to the fascinating variety of modern-day Africans, many of whom are descended from the great peoples who built Africa's most formidable cultures, including the Asante, the Swahili, the Tuareg, and the Shona.As Gates's compelling narrative shows, the continent's past continues to be felt in the lives of many Africans today. And in America for the descendants of those brought here as slaves, that past has been a controversial inheritance, passionately embraced by some, fiercely rejected by others. For this reason, Gates's deeply personal account of discovery is charged throughout by a question posed by Countee Cullen in his 1925 poem "Heritage" and perennially asked by African Americans: What is Africa to me? Finally, though, it is the wisdom of this book that the legacy of Africa, no less than that of Greece or Rome, belongs to all the world's civilized peoples. Illustrated with spectacular full-page photographs specially commissioned from the internationally acclaimed Lynn Davis, Wonders of the African World is Africa as we have never known or seen it before.With 66 photographs by Lynn Davis, 132 illustrations in black-and-white and full color, and 7 full-color maps

    However, since the 1980s, the field has broadened to encompass a more holistic vision of the earth as a system of interconnected relationships. A major issue today is how humans can develop a more acceptable relationship with the environment that supports them. With this comes a renewed interest in the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples as a source of valuable information on how to best utilize and respect our natural resources.Growing interest in traditional ecological knowledge is perhaps indicative of two things: the need for ecological insights from indigenous practices of resource use, and the need to develop a new ecological ethic in part by learning from the wisdom of traditional knowledge holders. This book explores both of these ideas together specifically in the context of natural resource management. It discusses the importance of traditional knowledge for complementing scientific ecology, and its cultural and political significance for indigenous groups themselves.Dr Berkes approaches traditional ecological knowledge as a knowledge-practice-belief complex. This complex considers four interrelated levels: local knowledge (species specific); resource management systems (integrating local knowledge with practice); social institutions (rules and codes of behavior); and world view (religion, ethics, and broadly defined belief systems). Divided into three parts that deal with concepts, practice, and issues, respectively, the book first discusses the emergence of the field, its intellectual roots and global significance. Substantivematerial is then included on how traditional ecological and management systems actually work. At the same time it explores a diversity of relationships that different groups have developed with their environment, using extensive case studies from research conducted with the Cree Indians of James Bay, in the eastern subarctic of North America. The final section examines traditional knowledge as a challenge to the positivist-reductionist paradigm in Western science, and concludes with a discussion of the potential of traditional ecological knowledge to inject a measure of ethics into the science of ecology and resource management.

    While in the early years of the century Catholics in America were for the most part distrusted outsiders with respect to the dominant culture, by the 1960s the mainstream of American Catholicism was in many ways "the culture’s loudest and most uncritical cheerleader." Mark Massa explores the rich irony in this postwar transition, by examining key figures in American culture in the last century.

    It claims that savages and ancients were judged alike because they used language similarly, in contrast to modern Europeans who used disciplined language in scientific, philosophical and legal projects.

    Hey Paesan is the first-ever look at the homophobia, silence and invisibility faced by members of an ethnic group that have been stereotyped as mafiosi and femme fatales. It's a long overdue contribution to the growing awareness about multiculturalism in the Americas. It's also queer pride, Italian style!

    This handy companion also covers all the best book-related markets, thrift shops, auctions, and fairs; major libraries and literary museums; sites of literary interest, academic courses, and literary walks; and the best book-related web sites. It is an outstanding reference, complete with a general, area, and subject index.

    The emperor failed to recognize him; his time had not yet arrived. But Shen Guang Knelt for nine years as Bear's Ear Mountain and became Hui Ke after the snow was stained by his severed arm. The Master transmitted the mind seal of the Great Dharma to him as the Second Patriarch, continuing the wise traditions. Poisoned six times, the Master was never harmed in the least. Carrying a single shoe, he returned to the West, never to be forgotten.

    Material culture records human intrusion in the environment. It is the way we imagine a distinction between nature and culture, and then rebuild nature to our desire, shaping, reshaping, and arranging things during life. We live in material culture, depend upon it, take it for granted, and realise through it our grandest aspirations. Thirty years ago, it seemed that material culture would become the realm within which relativistic and existential thinking would be extended to history and art, the issues of human significance and human excellence. Then the gears locked, the machine stopped, and began to run in reverse. We slid backward, rediscovering the energies of early modernism and naming our effort - in obeisance to the ideology of progress - postmodern. Humanist busied themselves with the reinvention of ideas they could have learned from the old masters of anthropology. Social scientists struggled to contrive ideas they could have learned by reading the great literature of the past. This retrograde motion was caused by more than adjustment to the conservative mood of the age. another. What has changed can change again; the moment at which I write will pass. Groping over old territory, relocating the critical purpose of scholarly endeavour, rediscovering subjectivity and situation, the diversity of orders and the interconnectedness of things, we will find points of convergence that will become the basis for a new transdisciplinary practice, at once humanistic and scientific. Renewed in oneness, we will be able to get on with our work, fashioning a view of humanity fit to the needs of the world's people. The concept of culture seems a secure achievement. In the future, history and art, as well as science and philosophy, will be understood to be, like culture, the creations of people who are alike in humanity, but different in tradition and predicament. Problematising is easy and endless. New ideas are a dime a dozen. What matters is how ideas fare in the world, what they yield in hard application. Our work will recognise the reality of the individual. traditions that unfold only within human control and among uncontrollable circumstances. It will expand through cross-cultural comparisons that bring us understanding at once of the universal and the particular. - Henry Glassie, from the Onward.

    It begins with the notion that such activity is attractive in its very repulsion, and that it creates something sacred even in the most secular of societies and circumstances. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface. This surfacing is made all the more subtle and ingenious, not to mention everyday, by the deliberately partial exposures involved in "the public secret"—defined as what is generally known but, for one reason or another, cannot easily be articulated.Arguing that this sort of knowledge ("knowing what not to know") is the most powerful form of social knowledge, Taussig works with ideas and motifs from Nietzsche, William Burroughs, Elias Canetti, Georges Bataille, and the ethnography of unmasking in so-called primitive societies in order to extend his earlier work on mimesis and transgression. Underlying his concern with defacement and the public secret is the search for a mode of truth telling that unmasks, but only to reenchant, thereby underlining Walter Benjamin's notion that "truth is not a matter of exposure of the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it."

    Egypt is a perfect case in point, almost a blank slate for most of us as it regards details of their everyday life. This useful and informative book attempts to set the record straight by offering a distinctive take on that most mythologized of epochs. Who would have guessed, for example, that the first strike in recorded history took place in 1152 BC during work on the necropolis in the Valley of the Kings, a protest by construction workers against delayed deliveries of oil and flour? Two fairly banal commodities maybe, but essential: oil protected the skin against the savage desert climate, whilst flour was the base ingredient for thirty different kinds of nutritional cake. It is this detailed examination of the evidence that distinguishes this volume, with chapters on

    It was originally published in Spanish as a manual for health workers in Mayan areas to bridge the gulf between Western medcal technique and Mayan medical knowledge. Mexican physicians Hernan Garcia, Antonio Sierra, and Hiberto Balam discovered that the similarities between Mayan medicine and traditional Chinese medcine were profound and helpful in their medical work.

    Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted. He shows us how religion needs to be reinterpreted along the lines of cultural studies. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, such as Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, King provides us with a challenging series of reflections on the nature of Religious Studies and Indology.

    This book examines the hidden dynamic within utopian thinking and the danger it poses when it is adopted by groups who use it to serve their interests.

    In so doing they inadvertently played into the hands of those who wanted to push God to the margins, or even to deny him altogether. The result was to lay the foundations of modernism, as well as secular humanism. In this book, the foundations are laid of a theology of culture in the tradition of de Lubac and J.H. Newman. In reaffirming the importance of symbolism and sacrament, in resisting the temptations of integralism and extreme traditionalism, Jean Borella recalls us to the adventure of becoming human.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

    In its intellectual honesty and clarity Tudor′s book will stand as an authoritative basis for further developments in the coming years′ - David Chaney Decoding Culture offers a concise and accessible account of the development of cultural studies from the late 1950s to the 1990s. Focusing on the significant theoretical and methodological assumptions that have informed the cultural studies project - the text: covers the key thinkers and key perspectives including, structuralism and post-structuralism, Screen theory, the Birmingham School, and audience analysis; offers a timely corrective t

    Suitable for toddlers and ages upwards, this illustrated book with about 200-words, aims to bring to life the story of The Ten Commandments.

    Victorian Sappho traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late-nineteenth-century England. Yopie Prins argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho's reception; what we now call "Sappho" is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics. Prins reads the Sapphic fragments in Greek alongside various English translations and imitations, considering a wide range of Victorian poets--male and female, famous and forgotten--who signed their poetry in the name of Sappho. By "declining" the name in each chapter, the book presents a theoretical argument about the Sapphic signature, as well as a historical account of its implications in Victorian England. Prins explores the relations between classical philology and Victorian poetics, the tropes of lesbian writing, the aesthetics of meter, and nineteenth-century personifications of the "Poetess." as current scholarship on Sappho and her afterlife. Offering a history and theory of lyric as a gendered literary form, the book is an exciting and original contribution to Victorian studies, classical studies, comparative literature, and women's studies.

    In the process, Franco has played a crucial role in developing cultural studies in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. Critical Passions is the first volume to gather a wide-ranging selection of Franco’s influential essays. A key participant in the major debates in Latin American studies—beginning with the “boom” period of the 1960s and continuing through debates on ideology and discourse, Marxism, mass culture, and postmodernism—Franco is recognized for her feminist critique of Latin American writing. While her principal books are all readily available, Franco’s several dozen articles are dispersed in a variety of periodicals in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Although many of these essays are considered pioneering and classic, they have never before been collected in a single work. In this volume, Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman have organized the essays into four interrelated sections: feminism and the critique of authoritarianism, mass and popular culture, Latin American literature from the “boom” onward, and the cultural history of Mexico. As a group, these writings demonstrate Franco’s ability to reflect on and judge with equal seriousness all spheres of expression, whether subway graffiti, a fashion manual, or an avant-garde haiku. A bona fide fan of popular and mass media, Franco never allows her critiques to dissolve into the puritanical or reductive; instead, she finds ways to present and debate complex theoretical questions in direct and accessible language. This volume will draw an extensive readership in Latin American, cultural, and women’s studies.

    Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists: modern life seems to have become a "pyrotechnic insanitarium," Mark Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety-a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic Monthly has written, "Mark Dery confirms once again what writers and thinkers as disparate as Nathanael West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Oliver Sacks have already shown us: the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes."

    Staging swordplay, learning to juggle, and creating authentic costumes like a flamboyant shirt with slashed sleeves or a lady’s lace-trimmed glove bring the theater arts to life. Making a quill pen and using it to write a story, binding a simple book by hand, creating a fragrant pomander ball and a dish of stewed apples show what daily life was like in Elizabethan times. Inspired by scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, kids can invent new words, write songs, and devise scathing or comical insults just as he did. Fascinating and accurate historical information and 21 fun activities open a dramatic new world of learning for children ages 8 and up.

    Not only were African-American viewers watching disproportionately more network television than the general population but, as Nielsen finally realized, they preferred black shows. As a result, African-American producers, writers, directors, and stars were given an unusual degree of creative control over shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Roc, Living Single, Martin, and New York Undercover.Locating a persistent black nationalist desire--a yearning for home and community--in shows produced by and for African Americans, Kristal Brent Zook shows how these productions revealed complex and contradictory politics of gender, sexuality, and class. Incorporating interviews with such prominent executives, producers, and stars as Keenen Ivory Wayans, Quincy Jones, Robert Townsend, Charles Dutton, and Yvette Lee Bowser, this study looks at both production and reception among African-American viewers. Zook provides nuanced readings of the shows themselves as well as the political and historical contexts in which they emerged.Though much of black television during this time was criticized for being trivial or buffoonish, Color by Fox reveals its deep-rooted ties to African-American protest literature, autobiography, and a collective desire for social transformation.

    Throughout this important volume, the author underscores two vital themes: one, that visual presentation of slavery in England and America has been utterly dishonest to its subject, and the other a meditation on whether the ruptures of the slave experience - middle passage, bondage, and torture -- can be adequately represented and remembered.