Best of
Cultural-Studies

2000

Where We Stand: Class Matters


bell hooks - 2000
    Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection--personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest--on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.

The Architect's Brother


Robert ParkeHarrison - 2000
    I want there to be a combination of the past juxtaposed with the modern. I use nature to symbolize the search, saving a tree, watering the earth. In this fabricated world, strange clouds of smog float by; there are holes in the sky. These mythic images mirror our world, where nature is domesticated, controlled, and destroyed. Through my work I explore technology and a poetry of existence. These can be very heavy, overly didactic issues to convey in art, so I choose to portray them through a more theatrically absurd approach.--Robert ParkeHarrison

My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home


Amber L. Hollibaugh - 2000
    Hollibaugh is a lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, feminist, Left political organizer, public speaker, and journalist. My Dangerous Desires presents over twenty years of Hollibaugh’s writing, an introduction written especially for this book, and five new essays including “A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home,” “My Dangerous Desires,” and “Sexuality, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism.” In looking at themes such as the relationship between activism and desire or how sexuality can be intimately tied to one’s class identity, Hollibaugh fiercely and fearlessly analyzes her own political development as a response to her unique personal history. She explores the concept of labeling and the associated issues of categories such as butch or femme, transgender, bisexual, top or bottom, drag queen, b-girl, or drag king. The volume includes conversations with other writers, such as Deirdre English, Gayle Rubin, Jewelle Gomez, and Cherríe Moraga. From the groundbreaking article “What We’re Rollin’ Around in Bed With” to the radical “Sex Work Notes: Some Tensions of a Former Whore and a Practicing Feminist,” Hollibaugh charges ahead to describe her reality, never flinching from the truth. Dorothy Allison’s moving foreword pays tribute to a life lived in struggle by a working-class lesbian who, like herself, refuses to suppress her dangerous desires. Having informed many of the debates that have become central to gay and lesbian activism, Hollibaugh’s work challenges her readers to speak, write, and record their desires—especially, perhaps, the most dangerous of them—“in order for us all to survive.”

The Karma Of Brown Folk


Vijay Prashad - 2000
    E. B. Du Bois of black Americans in his classic The Souls of Black Folk. A hundred years later, Vijay Prashad asks South Asians, "How does it feel to be a solution?"In this kaleidoscopic critique, Prashad looks into the complexities faced by the members of a model minority—one, he claims, that is consistently deployed as a weapon in the war against black America. On a vast canvas, The Karma of Brown Folk attacks the two pillars of the model minority image—that South Asians are both inherently successful and pliant—and analyzes the ways in which U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated these stereotypes.Prashad uses irony, humor, razor-sharp criticism, personal reflections, and historical research to challenge the arguments made by Dinesh DSouza, who heralds South Asian success in the U.S., and to question the quiet accommodation to racism made by many South Asians. A look at Deepak Chopra and others whom Prashad terms Godmen shows us how some South Asians exploit the stereotype of inherent spirituality, much to the chagrin of other South Asians.Following the long engagement of American culture with South Asia, Prashad traces India's effect on thinkers like Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau, Ravi Shankar's influence on John Coltrane, and such essential issues as race versus caste and the connection between antiracism activism and anticolonial resistance. The Karma of Brown Folk locates the birth of the model minority myth, placing it firmly in the context of reaction to the struggle for Black Liberation. Prashad reclaims the long history of black and South Asian solidarity, discussing joint struggles in the U.S., the Caribbean, South Africa, and elsewhere, and exposes how these powerful moments of alliance faded from historical memory and were replaced by Indian support for antiblack racism.Ultimately, Prashad writes not just about South Asians in America but about America itself, in the tradition of Tocqueville, Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others. He explores the place of collective struggle and multiracial alliances in the transformation of self and community--in short, how Americans define themselves.Vijay Prashad is assistant professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk about Life in the Segregated South


William Henry Chafe - 2000
    Newly relevant today as Americans reckon with the legacies of slavery and strive for racial equality, Remembering Jim Crow provides vivid, compelling accounts by men and women from all walks of life, who tell how their day-to-day lives were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression."A shivering dose of reality and inspiring stories of everyday resistance" (Library Journal), Remembering Jim Crow is a testament to how Black Southerners fought back against the system, raising children, building churches and schools, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. Collectively, these narratives illuminate individual and community survival and tell a powerful story of the American past that is crucial for us to remember as we grapple with Jim Crow's legacies in the present.

Methodology of the Oppressed


Chela Sandoval - 2000
    Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity.What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics.Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.

The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life


Michael Warner - 2000
    In place of sexual status quo, Warner offers a vision of true sexual autonomy that will forever change the way we think about sex, shame, and identity.

Brush Fires in the Social Landscape


David Wojnarowicz - 2000
    Flaring with immediacy and unbridled intensity, David Wojnarowicz's work embraces and illuminates the repressed, the unspeakable, and the intolerable. This collection of Wojnarowicz's paintings, photographs, and writings also includes essays by Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Fran Lebowitz, and Karen Finley, among others.

Memory, History, Forgetting


Paul Ricœur - 2000
    Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.“His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel


Jean Kilbourne - 2000
    But as Jean Kilbourne points out in this fascinating and shocking expose, the dreamlike promise of advertising always leaves us hungry for more. We can never be satisfied, because the products we love cannot love us back."When was the last time you felt this comfortable in a relationship?"; An ad for sneakers."You can love it without getting your heart broken."; An ad for a car."Until I find a real man, I'll settle for a real smoke."; A woman in a cigarette ad.Drawing upon her knowledge of psychology, media, and women's issues, Kilbourne offers nothing less than a new understanding of a ubiquitous phenomenon in our culture. The average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements a day and watches three years' worth of television ads over the course of a lifetime. Kilbourne paints a gripping portrait of how this barrage of advertising drastically affects young people, especially girls, by offering false promises of rebellion, connection, and control. She also offers a surprising analysis of the way advertising creates and then feeds an addictive mentality that often continues throughout adulthood.

The Artist's Body


Tracey Warr - 2000
    Bound or beaten, naked or painted, still or spasmodic: the artist lives his or her art publicly in performance or privately in video and photography; these records form the Works section. Amelia Jones's survey examines the most significant works in the context of social history and Tracey Warr's selection of documents combines writings by artists, critics and philosophers.

Shorter Views


Samuel R. Delany - 2000
    Delany brings his remarkable intellectual powers to bear on a wide range of topics. Whether he is exploring the deeply felt issues of identity, race, and sexuality, untangling the intricacies of literary theory, or the writing process itself, Delany is one of the most lucid and insightful writers of our time. These essays cluster around topics related to queer theory on the one hand, and on the other, questions concerning the paraliterary genres: science fiction, pornography, comics, and more. Readers new to Delany's work will find this collection of shorter pieces an especially good introduction, while those already familiar with his writing will appreciate having these essays between two covers for the first time.

Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs


Scott Merrillees - 2000
    Containing more than 150 old photographs of great historical value, maps and anecdotes about the buildings captured in these images, the book takes us on a nostalgic journey back to the 19th century.The book, the result of eight years of research, shows us glimpses of people, the state of technological development, the thriving economic life, the social setting, and then landscape and aura of the place now known as Jakarta. This book features a great many archival images that have never been published before.The appendices contain articles and illustrations on the photographers of 19th-century Batavia, mainly Woodbury and Page, J. A. Meessen and the Netherlands Topographical Bureau, as well as notes on the text and a bibliography. Large format, richly illustrated in colour.

Parallax


Steven Holl - 2000
    Holl reveals his working methods in this book, part treatise, part manifesto, and part, as Holl writes, "liner notes" to fifteen of his projects. Parallax traces Holl's ideas on topics as diverse as the "chemistry of matter" and the "pressure of light," and shows how they emerge in his architectural work: "criss-crossing" at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, "duration" in the Palazzo del Cinema in Venice, "correlational programming" in the Makuhari housing in Japan. The result is a book that provides a personal tour of the work of one of the world's most esteemed architects. Parallax is designed by Michael Rock of the award-winning design firm 2x4.

See No Evil : Banned Films and Video Controversy


David Kerekes - 2000
    The eagerly awaited follow-up to Kerekes & Slater's acclaimed "Killing for Culture, See No Evil "is an exhaustive and startling overview of Britain's video nasty' culture which chronicles the phenomenal rise of video technology, concern for the children', the clampdown of the Video Recordings Act (1984), and video's alleged associations with criminal activity."See No Evil "contains studies of film-induced' murder cases (Columbine and Michael Rambo' Ryan), interviews with the video underground' (bootleggers and dealers), plus detailed and insightful commentary on contentious movies in both Britain and the US.

Healing the Culture: A Commonsense Philosophy of Happiness, Freedom and the Life Issues


Robert J. Spitzer - 2000
    The tremendous positive response he has received inspired him to start the Life Principles Institute. This book is one of the key resources used for this program.This work effectively draws out the connections between personal attitudes toward happiness and the meaning of life, and the larger cultural issues such as freedom and human rights. Relying on the wisdom of the ages and respecting the human persons' unique capacity for rational analysis, this work offers definitions of the key cultural terms affecting life issues, including Happiness, Success, Love, Suffering, Quality of Life, Ethics, Freedom, Personhood, Human Rights and the Common Good.

Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture


Kendall R. Phillips - 2000
    Partly because horror continues to evolve radically--every time the genre is deemed dead, it seems to come up with another twist--it has been one of the most often-dissected genres. Here, author Kendall Phillips selects ten of the most popular and influential horror films--including Dracula, Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, The Silence of the Lambs, and Scream, each of which has become a film landmark and spawned countless imitators, and all having implications that transcend their cinematic influence and achievement. By tracing the production history, contemporary audience response, and lasting cultural influence of each picture, Phillips offers a unique new approach to thinking about the popular attraction to horror films, and the ways in which they reflect both cultural and individual fears. Though stylistically and thematically very different, all of these movies have scared millions of eager moviegoers. This book tries to figure out why.

Deep Memory Exuberant Hope


Walter Brueggemann - 2000
    These studies on a variety of biblical texts focus deftly on reading, listening to, and proclaiming the gospel in a broken, fragmented, and "post-Christendom" world. Brueggemann explores how these traditions have the potential to continually resonate in our contemporary communities and individual lives.

Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas Foreword by Paula Gunn Allen Third Printing


Barbara A. Mann - 2000
    Gantowisas means more than simply �woman� - gantowisas is �woman acting in her official capacity� as fire-keeping woman, faith-keeping woman, gift-giving woman; leader, counselor, judge; Mother of the People. This is the light in which the reader will find her in Iroquoian Women. Barbara Alice Mann draws upon worthy sources, be they early or modern, oral or written, to present a Native American point of view that insists upon accuracy, not only in raw reporting, but also in analysis. Iroquoian Women is the first book-length study to regard Iroquoian women as central and indispensable to Iroquoian studies.

Handa's Hen


Eileen Browne - 2000
    Every morning, she feeds Mondi her breakfast, but this morning Mondi hasn't come for her food. So Handa and her friend Akeyo begin to hunt for Mondi. While searching, they find all sorts of other animals.

Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway


Nick Mansfield - 2000
    Where does my sense of self come from? Does it arise spontaneously or is it created by the media or society?This concern with the self, with our subjectivity, is now our main point of reference in Western societies. How has it come to be so important, and what are the different ways in which we can approach an understanding of the self? Nick Mansfield explores how our notions of subjectivity have developed over the past century. Analyzing the work of key modern and postmodern theorists such as Freud, Foucault, Nietzsche, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, and Haraway, he shows how subjectivity is central to debates in contemporary culture, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, postmodernism, and technology.

The Shadow of Imana


Véronique Tadjo - 2000
    Starting with the premise that what happened in Rwanda concerns us all, The Shadow of Imana is a reminder that humankind the world over is capable of genocide.

Cutting Through Fear


Tsultrim Allione - 2000
    Yet, within the oldest teachings of Tibetan Buddhism lies a rich but hidden legacy of a teacher who was a powerful woman and legendary spiritual leader.On her first ever audio publication, Tsultrim Allione -- one of contemporary Buddhism's most experienced teachers -- draws from the spiritual transmissions of an 11th century Tibetan yogini that holds a special promise for anyone who has experienced difficult and even paralyzing emotions. Based on the traditional Tibetan visualization technique chod (literally "to cut"), this approach is adapted specifically for our times. This four-step solution for encountering, nurturing, and dissolving the delusion of difficult emotions is a timeless teaching -- which is still used in Tibet to treat mental and physical illness and as a path to enlightenment.We all encounter the "monsters" of fear, anger, and other difficult emotions in our lives, too often as a daily event. Now we have a rare and useful tool to stop fighting against them, and instead liberate them on the spot, with Cutting Through Fear.

A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century


Ben Shephard - 2000
    It reaches back to the moment when the technologies of modern warfare and the disciplines of psychological medicine first confronted each other on the Western Front, and traces their uneasy relationship through the eras of shell-shock, combat fatigue, and post-traumatic stress disorder.At once absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, A War of Nerves weaves together the literary, medical, and military lore to give us a fascinating history of war neuroses and their treatment, from the World Wars through Vietnam and up to the Gulf War. Ben Shephard answers recurring questions about the effects of war. Why do some men crack and others not? Are the limits of resistance determined by character, heredity, upbringing, ideology, or simple biochemistry?Military psychiatry has long been shrouded in misconception, and haunted by the competing demands of battle and of recovery. Now, for the first time, we have a definitive history of this vital art and science, which illuminates the bumpy efforts to understand the ravages of war on the human mind, and points towards the true lessons to be learned from treating the aftermath of war.

La Divine Comtesse: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione


Pierre Apraxine - 2000
    These photographs contributed to her legend during her lifetime and were prized by collectors after her death. This book presents an extraordinary collection of the most remarkable of these photographs.The portraits, which number around 400 and are now scattered in public and private collections around the world, are here itemized and analyzed for the first time. The authors take great care to place them in their social and cultural context.

Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities


Mark McLelland - 2000
    In so doing, it touches on a number of important issues, including whether there can be a universal 'gay identity' and whether or not strategies developed for increasing gay and lesbian visibility in western countries are appropriate to the social situation in Japan

Harpo Speaks...About New York


Harpo Marx - 2000
    For a kid on the streets in 1902, every day demanded wit and improvisation. Beyond the door of the tenement at 179 East 93rd Street lay rival gangs, lucky breaks, failed hustles. While his mother, Minnie, was occupied elsewhere—planning her unruly brood’s ultimate destiny—Harpo roamed the streets doing what any self-respecting second-grade dropout would: grabbing the family’s one left-foot skate and heading to Central Park, preparing for the bonfires of a Tammany election night, and hopping on the El to watch “the Gods in Valhalla—which is to say, the New York Giants in the Polo Grounds.” With an unforgettable cast of characters, and set against turn-of-the-century Manhattan, Harpo Speaks . . . About New York overflows with the optimism and sweetness of the kid who, on the off-chance that “Sandy Claus” just might remember him, never forgot to hang his stocking in the airshaft on Christmas Eve.

Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales


Stephen Knight - 2000
    In this text the figure of Robin Hood can be viewed in historical perspective, from the early accounts in the chronicles through the ballads, plays and romances that grew around his fame and impressed him on our fictional and historical imaginations.

Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking


Walter D. Mignolo - 2000
    In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practice in the social sciences and area studies. He introduces the crucial notion of colonial difference into study of the modern colonial world. He also traces the emergence of new forms of knowledge, which he calls border thinking.Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of border gnosis, or what is known from the perspective of an empire's borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to dominate, and thus limit, understanding.The book is divided into three parts: the first chapter deals with epistemology and postcoloniality; the next three chapters deal with the geopolitics of knowledge; the last three deal with the languages and cultures of scholarship. Here the author reintroduces the analysis of civilization from the perspective of globalization and argues that, rather than one civilizing process dominated by the West, the continually emerging subaltern voices break down the dichotomies characteristic of any cultural imperialism. By underscoring the fractures between globalization and mundializacion, Mignolo shows the locations of emerging border epistemologies, and of post-occidental reason.In a new preface that discusses Local Histories/Global Designs as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic


Norman Hallendy - 2000
    Built from whatever stones are at hand, each one is unique. Inuksuit are among the oldest and most important objects placed by humans upon the vast Arctic landscape and have become a familiar symbol of the Inuit and of their homeland.In Norman Hallendy's 40 years of travel throughout the Arctic, he has developed lasting friendships with a number of Inuit elders. Through them, he learned that inuksuit are a nuanced, complex, and vital form of communication. Some are navigational or directional aids, while others offer hunting information or indicate caches of food or supplies. Some were practical helpers that assisted in hunting caribou or luring geese. Other similar stone structures were objects of veneration, indicating places of power or the abode of spirits.Although most inuksuit appear singly, sometimes they are arranged in sequences spanning great distances or are grouped to mark a specific place. Others define the ghostly geography of the spiritual landscape.Hallendy's 52 dramatic color photographs of many different kinds of inuksuit and objects of veneration capture not only a sense of wonder and power but reveal a hauntingly beautiful landscape that few of us will ever see.

Thomas Ashley-Farrand's Healing Mantras


Thomas Ashley-Farrand - 2000
    Extraordinary? Yes. Yet this is precisely what happened to the yogis of India when they first created the science of mantras, or "sacred sound formulas," over 4,000 years ago. Now, with Thomas Ashley-Farrand's Healing Mantras, listeners have access to 45 of these authentic chants to dispel fear, remove hidden obstacles, and attract abundance in every arena of life - from vocational and financial concerns to intimate relationships and artistic pursuits. Thomas Ashley-Farrand - one of the most respected authorities on mantras in the English language - demonstrates how to pronounce each of these powerful formulas with perfect precision, which is a key to their effectiveness. During a lunch break, at home, or while driving - Thomas Ashley-Farrand's Healing Mantras is an affordable and practical way to begin using this ancient science of sound anywhere and anytime. Includes a comprehensive, 23-page study guide on the theory and application of mantra practice. Thomas Ashley-Farrand ... is one of the foremost authorities of Vedic and Buddhist Sanskrit mantras in the West. He is the author of Healing Mantras.

Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland, Masculinity, and Homosexuality


Micha Ramakers - 2000
    It is work whose erotic and emotional power remains unabated to this day. Lavishly illustrated with drawings and photographs, Dirty Pictures is a lively and entertaining book encompassing the rise of the gay movement, the world of fine art, and the function (and the functioning) of pornography. For the millions of fans of Tom's work throughout the world, as well as readers unfamiliar with his work, this study brings uncommon insight into Tom of Finland's decidedly uncommon work.

The Black Feminist Reader


Joy James - 2000
    Organized into two parts, Literary Theory and Social and Political Theory, this Reader explores issues of community, identity, justice, and the marginalization of African American and Caribbean women in literature, society, and political movements.

The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion


Brendan O'Malley - 2000
    The island remains split in two, policed by the United Nations. Henry Kissinger claimed he could do nothing to stop this because of the Watergate crisis. The Cyprus Conspiracy provides crucial evidence that this was no failure of American foreign policy, revealing for the first time the explosive strategic reasons why Washington had to divide the island.

The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy


Lingua Franca - 2000
    The essay quoted hip theorists like Jacques Lacan, Donna Haraway, and Gilles Deleuze. The prose was thick with the jargon of poststructuralism. And the point the essay tried to make was counterintuitive: gravity, Sokal argued, was a fiction that society had agreed upon, and science needed to be liberated from its ideological blinders. When Sokal revealed in the pages of Lingua Franca that he had written the article as a parody, the story hit the front page of the New York Times. It set off a national debate still raging today: Are scholars in the humanities trapped in a jargon-ridden Wonderland? Are scientists deluded in thinking their work is objective? Are literature professors suffering from science envy? Was Sokal's joke funny? Was the Enlightenment such a bad thing after all? And isn't it a little bit true that the meaning of gravity is contingent upon your cultural perspective?Collected here for the first time are Sokal's original essay on "quantum gravity," his essay revealing the hoax, the newspaper articles that broke the story, and the angry op-eds, letters, and e-mail exchanges sparked by the hoax from intellectuals across the country, including Stanley Fish, George F. Will, Michael Bérubé, and Katha Pollitt. Also included are extended essays in which a wide range of scholars ponder the long-term lessons of the hoax.

Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television, 1930s to the Present


Steven Capsuto - 2000
    Splashed against the tumultuous backdrop of the McCarthy witch hunts, Stonewall and the gay liberation movement, the birth of the 700 Club and the religious right, the outbreak of AIDS and the arrival of in-your-face queer activism, this chatty, authoritative broadcast history tells the stories of such notorious and noteworthy moments as- 1947: Radio gays--A bitchy fashion photographer throws fits at the drop of a designer hat on the adaptation of Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark- 1967s: Monkey business--The Monkees flick limp wrists while caroling "Don we now our gay apparel" for a Christmas special- 1974: Pepper in the wound--A notorious Police Woman episode depicts a gang of deadly lesbians who rob, torture, and murder senior citizens- 1977: Wash your mouth out--Billy Crystal portrays Jodie Dallas on Soap, the first hit series with a gay character in a central role- 1991: L.A. Law breaks 'em--Amanda Donohoe and Michelle Greene share a two-second kiss . . . and start a storm of controversy- 2000: The last laugh--Featuring not one but two gay male characters, Will & Grace skyrockets to the top of the ratings chartsFrom mocking banter between Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on '50s radio to a historic peck between women on '90s television, from the stereotyping of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals as sissies and psychopaths to their widespread acceptance as real people, Alternate Channels is a compulsively readable chronicle of lesbian, gay, and bisexual images in the media--packed with unthinkable shows, bizarre personalities, unlikely heroes, and some of the strangest protests ever staged in the name of civil rights.

Dharma Rain


Stephanie Kaza - 2000
    Sources and contributors include Basho, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gary Snyder, Chögyam Trungpa, Gretel Ehrlich, Peter Mathiessen, Helen Tworkov (editor of Tricycle), and Philip Glass.

Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris


Robin Walz - 2000
    The provocative nature of this insolent mass culture resonated with the intellectual and political preoccupations of the surrealists, as Robin Walz demonstrates in this fascinating study. Pulp Surrealism weaves an interpretative history of the intersection between mass print culture and surrealism, re-evaluating both our understanding of mass culture in early twentieth-century Paris and the revolutionary aims of the surrealist movement.Pulp Surrealism presents four case studies, each exploring the out-of the-way and impertinent elements which inspired the surrealists. Walz discusses Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris, one of the great surrealist novels of Paris. He goes on to consider the popular series of Fantômes crime novels; the Parisan press coverage of the arrest, trial, and execution of mass-murderer Landru; and the surrealist inquiry "Is Suicide a Solution?", which Walz juxtaposes with reprints of actual suicide faits divers (sensationalist newspaper blurbs).Although surrealist interest in sensationalist popular culture eventually waned, this exploration of mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which surrealism emerged ultimately calls into question assumptions about the avant-garde origins of modernism itself.

No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative


Edgar S. Cahn - 2000
    Softcover. Co-Production is a bold, pragmatic strategy for change agents who seek to shape the future, convert failing social programs into catalysts for social justice, enlist "Throw-Away People" as partners in a shared mission, and create the world we want for our children.

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West


Susan Buck-Morss - 2000
    The dream of the twentieth century was the construction of mass utopia. As the century closes, this dream is being left behind; the belief that industrial modernization can bring about the good society by overcoming material scarcity for all has been challenged by the disintegration of European socialism, capitalist restructuring, and ecological constraints. The larger social vision has given way to private dreams of material happiness and to political cynicism.Developing the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept, Susan Buck-Morss attempts to come to terms with mass dreamworlds at the moment of their passing. She shows how dreamworlds became dangerous when their energy was used by the structures of power as an instrument of force against the masses. Stressing the similarities between the East and West and using the end of the Cold War as her point of departure, she examines both extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.The book is in four parts. Dreamworlds of Democracy asks whether collective sovereignty can ever be democratic. Dreamworlds of History calls for a rethinking of revolution by political and artistic avant-gardes. Dreamworlds of Mass Culture explores the affinities between mass culture's socialist and capitalist forms. An Afterward places the book in the historical context of the author's collaboration with a group of Moscow philosophers and artists over the past two tumultuous decades. The book is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narratives rescue historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion and challenge common conceptions of what this century was all about.

Major Problems in African American History: Volume II: From Freedom to "Freedom Now," 1865 - 1990s


Thomas C. Holt - 2000
    The book presents a carefully selected group of readings organized to allow students to evaluate primary sources, test the interpretations of distinguished historians, and draw their own conclusions.

Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement


Rowan Williams - 2000
    He considers areas such as images of childhood, our awkwardness at speaking about community, our unwillingness to think seriously about remorse, and our devastating lack of vocabulary for the growth and nurture of the self through time. This timely book by a master of contemporary Christian thought sketches out a renewed language for the soul.

Monsters From The Id: The Rise Of Horror In Fiction And Film


E. Michael Jones - 2000
    The avenging monster, a mainstay of horror, emerged from the sexual dissolution of the French Revolution (Frankenstein) and thrived in the syphilitic underworld of Victorian England (Dracula). From Nosferatu and Psycho to Alien and Interview with the Vampire, the twentieth century has spawned new monsters of unprecedented horror. -- What is the connection between sex and horror? -- Why are vampires and nameless or faceless monsters so common in horror? -- Why do we need horror -- yet fail to understand it?

Mad, Bad and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema


Christopher Frayling - 2000
    Moreau to Doc Brown in Back to the Future, the scientist has been a puzzling, fascinating, and threatening presence in popular culture. From films we have learned that scientists are either evil maniacal geniuses or bumbling saviors of society. Mad, Bad and Dangerous? puts this dichotomy to the test, offering a wholly engaging yet not uncritical history of the cinematic portrayal of scientists. Christopher Frayling traces the genealogy of the scientist in film, showing how the scientist has often embodied the predominant anxieties of a particular historical moment. The fear of nuclear holocaust in the 1950s gave rise to a rash of radioactive-mutant horror movies, while the possible dangers of cloning and biotechnology in the 1990s manifested themselves in Jurassic Park. During these eras, the scientist's actions have been viewed through a lens of fascination and fear. In the past few decades, with increased public awareness of environmental issues and of the impact of technology on nature, the scientist has been transformed once again—into a villainous agent of money-hungry corporate powers. Mad, Bad and Dangerous? also examines biographical depictions of actual scientists, illuminating how they are often portrayed as social misfits willing to sacrifice everything to the interests of science. Drawing on such classic and familiar films as Frankenstein, Metropolis, and The Wizard of Oz, Frayling brings social and film history together to paint a much larger picture of the evolving value of science and technology to society. A fascinating study of American culture and film, Mad, Bad and Dangerous? resurrects the scientists of late night movies and drive-in theaters and gives them new life as cultural talismans.

Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature


Amritjit Singh - 2000
    To think transnationally about literature, history, and culture requires a study of the evolution of hybrid identities within nation-states and diasporic identities across national boundaries.Studies addressing issues of race, ethnicity, and empire in U.S. culture have provided some of the most innova-tive and controversial contributions to recent scholarship. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature represents a new chapter in the emerging dialogues about the importance of borders on a global scale.This book collects nineteen essays written in the 1990s in this emergent field by both well established and up-and-coming scholars. Almost all the essays have been either especially written for this volume or revised for inclusion here.These essays are accessible, well-focused resources for college and university students and their teachers, displaying both historical depth and theoretical finesse as they attempt close and lively readings. The anthology includes more than one discussion of each literary tradition associated with major racial or ethnic communities. Such a gathering of diverse, complementary, and often competing viewpoints provides a good introduction to the cultural differences and commonalities that comprise the United States today.The volume opens with two essays by the editors: first, a survey of the ideas in the individual pieces, and, second, a long essay that places current debates in U.S. ethnicity and race studies within both the history of American studies as a whole and recent developments in postcolonial theory.Amritjit Singh, a professor of English and African American studies at Rhode Island College, is coeditor of Conversations with Ralph Ellison and Conversations with Ishmael Reed (both from University Press of Mississippi). Peter Schmidt, a professor of English at Swarthmore College, is the author of The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty's Short Fiction (University Press of Mississippi).

Culture in Practice: Selected Essays


Marshall Sahlins - 2000
    More than a compilation, this book unfolds as an intellectual autobiography. Sahlins's reportage and reflections on the anti-war movement in 1964 and 1965 mark the intellectual development from earlier general studies of culture, economy, and human nature to the more historical and globally aware works on indigenous peoples, especially Pacific Islanders.Throughout these essays, Sahlins also engages the cultural specificity of the West, developing a critical account of the distinctive ways that we act in and understand the world. Culture in Practice includes a play / review of Robert Ardrey's sociobiology, essays on "native" consumption patterns of food and clothes in America and the West, explorations of how two thousand years of Western cosmology have affected our understanding of others, and ethnohistorical accounts of how cultural orders of Europeans and Pacific Islanders structured the historical experiences of both.Throughout this range of scholarly inquiries and critical commentaries, Sahlins offers his own way of thinking about the anthropological project. To transcend our native categories in order to understand how other peoples have been able historically to construct their own modes of existence -- even now, in the era of globalization -- is the great challenge of contemporary anthropology.

The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain


Andrew Wawn - 2000
    It explores the ways in which the terms 'Viking' and 'Viking Age', both unknown in 1800, were invented, explored and popularised during thenineteenth century. The material examined - published and unpublished - includes novels, poems, plays, lectures, reviews, secondary school textbooks, saga-stead travelogues, private correspondence, art and music, as well as dictionaries, grammars and scholarly editions of eddas and sagas. In the cast of characters Sir Walter Scott, William Morris, Edward Elgar and Rudyard Kipling appear alongside long-forgotten amateur enthusiasts from Lerwick to the Isleof Wight. We follow the pursuit of Viking-related archaeology, dialectology, folklore, philology, runology and mythology. We see the old north used to legitimise many concepts and causes - from buccaneering mercantilism and imperial expansion to jury trial and women's rights. In drawing this wide range of materials together, Andrew Wawn presents a comprehensive and colourful account of the construction and translation of the Viking Age in Queen Victoria'sBritain.ANDREW WAWN is Professor of Anglo-Icelandic Studies at the University of Leeds.

Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred


Mette Marie Bryld - 2000
    The authors analyse contemporary categorizations of ‘human self‘ versus ‘wild other‘ through three twentieth century icons that best illustrate ambivalent ideas about self and other: spaceships,horoscopes and dolphins.The book includes interviews with astrologers, wilderness guides, dolphin trainers and academic staff of space agencies from both Russia and the US.The interviews highlight some interesting differences between these two cultures in ideas both about gender and about self/other boundaries. The authors also look at representations of the space race in film and science fiction in both cultures, as well as New Age and other texts on dolphins, astrology and space travel.Cosmodolphins shows how all three icons partly reproduce and partly alter the earlier, colonial self/other dichotomy of woman, native and nature against the ‘civilized‘ technologically masterful male self. We see how a particular icon of the wild - the dolphin - is elevated to mythological status, how a secularized society looks for spiritual fulfilment in the `beyond‘ - astrology - and in its own technological advances - space travel.Theoretically innovative, this book represents an alternative approach to ecofeminist themes linking them up with studies of new technocultures and cyborgs. It forms an excellent exemplar of feminist cultural studies.

On Black Men


David Marriott - 2000
    From national dreams to media fantasies, there is a persistent imagining of what black men must be. This book explores the legacy of that role, particularly its violent effect on how black men have learned to see themselves and one another. David Marriott draws upon popular culture, ranging from lynching photographs to current Hollywood film, as well as the ideas of key thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and John Edgar Wideman, to reveal a vicious pantomime of unvarying reification and compulsive fascination, of whites looking at themselves through images of black desolation, and of blacks dispossessed by that process.

Undomesticated Ground


Stacy Alaimo - 2000
    Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to distance themselves from nature. In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo issues a bold call to reclaim nature as feminist space. Her analysis of a remarkable range of feminist writings--as well as of popular journalism, visual arts, television, and film--powerfully demonstrates that nature has been and continues to be an essential concept for feminist theory and practice.Alaimo urges feminist theorists to rethink the concept of nature by probing the vastly different meanings that it carries. She discusses its significance for Americans engaged in social and political struggles from, for example, the Indian Wars of the early nineteenth century, to the birth control movement in the 1920s, to contemporary battles against racism and heterosexism. Reading works by Catherine Sedgwick, Mary Austin, Emma Goldman, Nella Larson, Donna Haraway, Toni Morrison, and others, Alaimo finds that some of these writers strategically invoke nature for feminist purposes while others cast nature as a postmodern agent of resistance in the service of both environmentalism and the women's movement.By examining the importance of nature within literary and political texts, this book greatly expands the parameters of the nature writing genre and establishes nature as a crucial site for the cultural work of feminism.

Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype & Spin


Os Guinness - 2000
    At best, truth is considered relative. At worst, it's a matter of human convention. But, as Os Guinness points out in this book, truth is a vital requirement for freedom and a good life. Time for Truth urges readers to seek the truth, speak the truth, and live the truth. Guinness shows that becoming free and truthful people is the deepest secret of integrity and the highest form of taking responsibility for ourselves and our lives. Now in paperback, this engaging book will interest Os Guinness fans, thoughtful readers, and those concerned with moral, political, and cultural issues.

Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II


Joshua B. Freeman - 2000
    Largely through the efforts of its working class and the dynamic labor movement it built, New York City became the envied model of liberal America and the scourge of conservatives everywhere: cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, work in small businesses and factories that had good wages and benefits, affordable public housing, and healthcare for all.Working-Class New York is an "engrossing" (Dissent) account of the birth of that ideal and the way it came crashing down. In what Publishers Weekly calls "absorbing and beautifully detailed history", historian Joshua Freeman shows how the anticommunist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealists, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt another crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city's wealthy elite made a frenzied grab for power.A grand work of cultural and social history, Working-Class New York is a moving chronicle of a dream that died but may yet rise again.

The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory


Hans Blumenberg - 2000
    A Thracian servant girl laughs, amused that he sought to understand what was above him when he was not mindful of what was right in front of him.Variants of this story recur in texts by Diogenes Laertius, Church Fathers Tertullian and Eusebius, medieval and Renaissance-era preachers, Enlightenment figures Voltaire, Montaigne, Bacon, and Kant, and later in works by Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Blumenberg's own colleagues. Some of these philosophers sympathize with Thales' ambitions while others chastise his negligence. Blumenberg sees the story as a highly sought substitute for our missing knowledge of the earliest historical events that would fit the label “theory.” By retelling the anecdote, philosophers reveal their distinctive values regarding absorption in curiosity, philosophy's past, and the demand that theorists abide by sanctioned methods and procedures.In this work and others, Blumenberg demonstrates that philosophers' most beloved images and anecdotes have become indispensable to philosophy as metaphors; that is, as representations whose meanings remain indefinite and invite frequent reinterpretation.

The Language of the Land: Living Among the Hadzabe in Africa


James Stephenson - 2000
    He had visited these people several times previously and with every trip his fascination with them deepened, for the Hadzabe are the last hunters and gatherers still living a traditional life in Africa.At the age of 27, Stephenson intended to spend the year living among the Hadzabe, and, more importantly, living their life, hunting what they hunted, eating what they ate, participating in their dances and ceremonies, consulting with their medicine men and learning their myths and dreams.Armed only with his camera, his art supplies and the open-hearted courage of youth, he set out to visit with a people who have changed little since the Stone Age. He wanted to glimpse the world as they perceived it and learn the wisdom they had wrestled from the land. This account of his adventure and what he learned is travel writing at its best, reminiscent of the books of Peter Beard and Bruce Chatwin.

Beyond the Valley of the Gift Police


Jello Biafra - 2000
    The targets—from Bill Clinton to experts—are all there. The humor is wicked, and the information is spot-on as ever. Wit and wisdom. Essential. Three CD set.“Whew—a lot of information to wade through. Consider this almost an audio book, a dissemination of plenty of scary data. Biafra details his encounters with the forces of evil, those who would censor, turn the country into a theocracy, and those in power who are already robbing us blind. (Suburban Voice)

Visual Culture and the Holocaust


Barbie Zelizer - 2000
    From Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary project Shoah, to Art Spiegelman's Maus, the visual domain has emerged as a fruitful venue for representing those horrible times.Visual Culture and the Holocaust takes that domain as its focus. It considers the increasing number of works that claim to give us access to the Holocaust, asking for whom these images are intended and how effective they are at promoting remembrance and understanding. Barbie Zelizer has gathered essays from a group of internationally renowned scholars representing a broad range of disciplines to consider both the traditional and the unconventional ways in which the Holocaust has been visually represented. In addressing film, painting, photography, museum exhibits, television, the Internet, and the body itself as venues for these representations, the essays explore the abilities of these different genres to testify to the tragedy, particularly in relation to the horrific historical fact they seek to translate.Visual Culture and the Holocaust substantially enhances what we know of the visual representation of the Holocaust. An introduction by the editor provides an important historical and theoretical overview of these efforts as well as a context in which these accomplishments may be understood.

The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture


Dee E. Andrews - 2000
    Placing Methodism's rise in the ideological context of the American Revolution and the complex social setting of the greater Middle Atlantic where it was first introduced, Dee Andrews argues that this new religion provided an alternative to the exclusionary politics of Revolutionary America. With its call to missionary preaching, its enthusiastic revivals, and its prolific religious societies, Methodism competed with republicanism for a place at the center of American culture.Based on rare archival sources and a wealth of Wesleyan literature, this book examines all aspects of the early movement. From Methodism's Wesleyan beginnings to the prominence of women in local societies, the construction of African Methodism, the diverse social profile of Methodist men, and contests over the movement's future, Andrews charts Methodism's metamorphosis from a British missionary organization to a fully Americanized church. Weaving together narrative and analysis, Andrews explains Methodism's extraordinary popular appeal in rich and compelling new detail.

China and Glass in America, 1880-1980: From Table Top to TV Tray


Charles L. Venable - 2000
    Illustrated with over 200 photographs of glass and ceramic objects, this book takes a comprehensive look at modern tableware used in American homes, focusing on its cultural and business history, as well as its design.

The Dark Age Of Greece: An Archaeological Survey Of The Eleventh To The Eighth Centuries Bc


A.M. Snodgrass - 2000
    The author argues that this era was in truth a dark age, from the perspective both of scholarship and the people who lived through it conscious of lost skills and departed glories. The recession was caused, he demonstrates, not by external factors but by aprocess of internal collapse.

Education Is Politics: Critical Teaching Across Differences, Postsecondary a Tribute to the Life and Work of Paulo Freire


Ira Shor - 2000
    more than twenty-five years ago. This volume illuminates the recent work of teacher-scholars who take critical pedagogy one step further, demonstrating new ways to connect their fields to classroom practice.The third in a series of essays devoted to the memory of Paulo Freire, Education Is Politics, Postsecondary focuses on the college classroom, representing views from a range of disciplines. You'll discover critical pedagogy in classrooms devoted to the media, AIDS education, women's studies, disability studies, technology, statistics, and sociology, to name a few. You'll read hands-on reports from teachers who successfully experimented with innovative approaches to teaching. You'll read essays written by some important names in education and some noted Freirean innovators as well as lesser-known scholars whose work deserves wider reading. Although these educators work in different fields and in different classrooms, they have much in common. They have discovered that critical teaching begins with challenges to the status quo. They recognize that through critical pedagogy, we can invite students to question the way things are and imagine alternatives.This volume will be indispensable in college courses that focus on issues of race, class, and gender in education. It will be just as valuable to adult basic educators, community and worker educators, and teacher trainers.

Moral Geographies: Ethics in a World of Difference


David G. Smith - 2000
    It considers questions that have haunted the past, are subjects of controversy in the present, and which affect the future. Does distance diminish responsibility? Should we interfere with the lives of those we do not know? Is there a distinction between private and public space? Which values and morals, if any, are absolute, and which cultural, communal or personal? And are universal rights consistent with respect for difference? David Smith shows how these questions play themselves out in politics, planning, development, social and personal relations, the exploitation of resources, and competition for territory. After introducing the essential elements of moral philosophy from Plato to postmodernism, he examines the moral significance of concepts of landscape, location and place, proximity, distance and community, space and territory, justice, and nature. He is concerned above all with the morality people practice, to see how this varies according to geographical context, and to assess the inevitability of its outcomes. His argument is seamlessly interwoven with everyday observation and vividly described case studies: the latter include genocide and rescue during the Holocaust, the conflicts over space between Israeland Palestine and within Israel itself, and the social tensions and aspirations in post-apartheid South Africa. The meaning, possibility and limits of social justice lie at the heart of the book. That geographical context is vital to the understanding of moral practice and ethical theory is its central proposition. The book is clearly and engagingly written. The author has a student readership in mind, but his book will appeal widely to geographers and others involved in planning, development, politics, social theory, and the analysis of the contemporary world.

Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show


Ann Anderson - 2000
    Combining elements of the circus, theater, vaudeville, and good old-fashioned entrepreneurship, the showmen of the American medicine show sold tonics, ointments, pills, extracts and a host of other wonder-cures, guaranteed to cure what ails you. While the cures were seldom miraculous, the medicine show was an important part of American culture and of performance history. Harry Houdini, Buster Keaton, and P.T. Barnum all took a turn upon the medicine show stage. This study of the medicine show phenomenon surveys nineteenth century popular entertainment and provides insight into the ways in which show business, advertising, and medicine manufacture developed in concert. The colorful world of the medicine show, with its Wild West shows, pie-eating contests, clowns, and menageries, is fully explored. Photographs of performers and of the fascinating handbills and posters used to promote the medicine show are included.

Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies


Jan Assmann - 2000
    Building on Maurice Halbwachs's idea that memory, like language, is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one, he argues that memory has a cultural dimension too. He develops a persuasive view of the life of the past in such surface phenomena as codes, religious rites and festivals, and canonical texts on the one hand, and in the Freudian psychodrama of repressing and resurrecting the past on the other. Whereas the current fad for oral history inevitably focuses on the actual memories of the last century or so, Assmann presents a commanding view of culture extending over five thousand years. He focuses on cultural memory from the Egyptians, Babylonians, and the Osage Indians down to recent controversies about memorializing the Holocaust in Germany and the role of memory in the current disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity


Sharon Patricia Holland - 2000
    Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through “the space of death” gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide. Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other “minorities” in society is, like death, “almost unspeakable.” She gives voice to—or raises—the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

Theory of Bloom


Tiqqun - 2000
    Worker, housewife, professional, student, citizen, all of the roles are but masks, donned and rarely removed. The Bloom must remain positive while wearing these masks, ignoring its own power and sovereignty. -Review of The Theory of BloomThis short book lays bare our social isolation and the conceptually simple (yet practically difficult) solution to it. This is a foundational text of Tiqqun's thought, and this version is the translation by Robert Hurley (translator of Anti-Oedipus and multiple books by Foucault, Bataille, and Deleuze).

The Jameson Reader


Fredric Jameson - 2000
    This book brings together key essays and excerpts from the broad spectrum of Frederic Jameson's writings, providing an accessible introduction to the intricacies of his thought and uncovering new and exciting aspects of his work.

The City Cultures Reader


Malcolm Miles - 2000
    By presenting the very best of classic and contemporary writing on the culture of cities, The City Cultures Reader provides an accessible overview of the diverse material on the interface between cities and culture.The extensively revised and updated second edition now features fifty generous writings (of which thirty-eight are new) organised into ten parts which explore themes such as: what is a city?; what is culture?; symbolic economies; the culture industry; culture and technologies; everyday lives; contesting identity; boundaries and transgressions; utopias and dystopias; and possible urban futures.Designed to aid student understanding, this new edition now features extensive introductory sections that define both the city and culture. Part introductions outline the major themes, whilst introductions to the individual writings explain their interest and significance to wider debates. Annotated further reading is also provided at the end of each part.

The Idea of Race


Robert Bernasconi - 2000
    A general Introduction gives an overview of the readings. Headnotes introduce each selection. Includes suggested further readings.

The Best of Sudhir Dar


Sudhir Dar - 2000
    This volume brings together his personal favourites from cartoons published in different newspapers and magazines including the Hindustan Times, the Pioneer, the Delhi Times and Outlook. Sharp, satirical and witty, the collection shows the ace cartoonist at his devastating best.

Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence


Karim H. Karim - 2000
    TABLE OF CONTENTSAcknowledgmentsPrefaceIntroductionChapter 1: VIOLENCE AND THE MEDIAChapter 2: JIHADChapter 3: ORIENTALIST IMAGINARIESChapter 4: ASSASSINS, KIDNAPPERS, HOSTAGESChapter 5: THE RITES OF REPORTING A HIJACKINGChapter 6: DISPATCHES FROM THE HOLY LANDChapter 7: CONSTRUCTING A POST-SOVIET THREATChapter 8: RETURNING TO A MILLENNIAL STRUGGLEChapter 9: COVERING CONFLICTS IN FORMER COMMUNIST TERRITORIESChapter 10: TOWARDS INFORMED AND CONSCIENTIOUS REPORTINGIndexList of Illustrations, Tables and Figures1: Islam depicted as destabilizing the world2: "Islamic" threats in journalistic discourses3: Media clichs about Islamic resurgence4: Portraying Christians as victims of Muslims5: Narratives about warring Muslims6: Constructing Islam as post-Cold War Other7: The Gulf War as a morality play8: Seeking peace through warTables1: The Allies and their enemies2: Use of the jihad model in coverage of the 1992 Khojaly massacre

"Defects": Engendering the Modern Body


Helen Elizabeth Deutsch - 2000
    Women, declared a mid-eighteenth-century vindication, have been regarded since Aristotle as deformed amphibious things, "neither more or less than Monsters" (Beauty's Triumph 1758). This alliance of monstrosity with misogyny, along with the definition of sexual difference as aberration, is the starting point for this volume's investigation of monstrosity's cultural work in the eighteenth century and its simultaneous mapping and troubling of the range of differences.This collection investigates the conceptual and geographical mapping of early modern and Enlightenment ideas of monstrosity onto a range of differences that contested established categories. The essays consider the representations and material dimensions of phenomena as diverse as femininity and disfigurement, the material imagination and monstrous birth, ugliness as an aesthetic category, deafness and theories of sign language, and the exotic, racialized deformed. Collectively, they demonstrate that the emergence of sexual difference is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of a category of the human that is imagined and deformed, monstrous, and ugly. Contributors include Barbara Benedict, Jill Campbell, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Lennard Davis, Helen Deutsch, Robert Jones, Cora Kaplan, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Felicity Nussbaum, Stephen Pender, and Joel Reed.Helen Deutsch is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture. Felicity Nussbaum is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narrative.

Subject to Identity: Knowledge, Sexuality, and Academic Practices in Higher Education


Susan Talburt - 2000
    Drawing on poststructural theories, the text takes readers beyond constructions of lesbian faculty that rely on identity, voices, and visibility to consider the construction and shifting meanings of academic research, teaching, and collegial relations in practice. Talburt depicts the complicated relations of knowledge, identity, and sexuality as interrelated terms whose meanings are constructed as contingent possibilities. This book challenges us to rethink policy and practice, identity and difference, and knowledge and ignorance as lived and created in constantly shifting networks of relation.

Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany: Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witness


Susan A. Crane - 2000
    Susan A. Crane argues that the ever-more-elaborate preservation of the historical may actually reduce the likelihood that history can be experienced with the freshness and individuality characteristic of the early collectors and preservationists. Her book is both a study of the emergence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany of a distinctively modern conception of historical consciousness, and a meditation on what was lost as historical thought became institutionalized and professionalized. Public forms of remembering the past which are familiar today, such as historical museums and historical preservation, have surprisingly recent origins. In Germany, caring about the past took on these distinctively new forms after the Napoleonic wars. The Brothers Grimm gathered fairy tales and documented the origins of the German language. Historical preservationists collected documents and artifacts and organized the conservation of cathedrals and other historic buildings. Collectors formed historical societies and created Germany's historical museums. No single national consciousness emerged; instead, many groups used similar means to make different claims about what it meant to have a German past.Although individuals were responsible for stimulating new interest in the past, they chose to band together in voluntary associations to promote collective awareness of German history. In doing so, however, they clashed with academic and political interests and lost control over the very artifacts, collections, and buildings they had saved from ruin. Examining the letters and publications of the amateur collectors, Crane shows how historical consciousness came to be represented in collective terms--whether regional or national--and in effect robbed everyone of the capacity to experience history individually and spontaneously.

Dreamtoons


Jesse Reklaw - 2000
    It features the best of a weekly comic strip illustrating dreams that real people from all over the world have sent to artist Jesse Reklaw. Reklaw takes written descriptions of dreams and turns them into three or four cartoon panels. The result is a surreal excursion into the underworld of the psyche—just for the fun of it. These concise, hilarious little stories are strangely familiar, showing that whatever our external differences, at night we were all united in the absurd world of dreams, where we can quietly and safely go insane.

Noir Fiction: Dark Highways


Paul Duncan - 2000
    Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. The literary style of noir both influenced and was influenced by its cinematic equivalent, film noir. Both document the adventures of hard-boiled detectives and double-crossing dames, and often feature a backdrop of corruption and ambiguity and twisted storylines that leave the characters confused and adrift. As well as the quintessential noir authors James M. Cain and James Ellroy, you can read about such lesser known British innovators as Gerald Kersh and Derek Raymond, both of whom have written landmark novels in the development of noir fiction. As well as having an introductory overview, 9 of the most significant authors in the history of noir fiction are profiled in depth. Additionally, there's a handy reference section for readers who want to know more.

The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism


Lawrence Coupe - 2000
    It offers a complete guide to the growing area of 'ecocriticism' and a wealth of material on green issues from the romantic period to the present. Included are extracts from today's leading ecocritics and figures from the past who pioneered a green approach to literature and culture. This Reader sets the agenda for Green Studies and encourages a reassessment of development of criticism and offers readers a radical view of its future.

Feminism and Pornography


Drucilla Cornell - 2000
    In an effort to move away from the divisive frameworks in feminist disputes over pornography, this volume seeks to understand what pornography means to those who consume it, fight against it, and work within it. By opening up a space for divergent points of view to address the complexity of sexual material, this book seeks to forge solidarity among academics, activists, and sex workers from diverse social and political contexts. Feminism and Pornography explores a wide range of contentious issues, including how the meaning of pornography is shaped by changing historical and political realities; the role law should play, if any, in the sex industry; whether union organizing can change the working conditions in the sex industry; and how sexually explicit literature, videos, art, and music can promote sexual freedom. Contributors include such influential writers as Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Catherine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin.

Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music


Georgina Born - 2000
    Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind. The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant examples, among them musical modernism's idealizing or ambivalent relations with popular, ethnic, and non-Western music; exoticism and orientalism in the experimental music tradition; the representation of others in Hollywood film music; music's role in the formation and contestation of collective identities, with reference to Jewish and Turkish popular music; and issues of representation and difference in jazz, world music, hip hop, and electronic dance music.Written by leading scholars from disciplines including historical musicology, sociology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and film studies, the essays provide unprecedented insights into how cultural identities and differences are constructed in music.

Transmitting Culture


Régis Debray - 2000
    Transmitting Culture examines the difference between communication and transmission and argues that ideas and their legacies should be rethought not in terms of communication from sender to receiver but of mediation by the vectors and messengers of meaning. Transmitting Culture stresses the technologies and institutions long overlooked by philosophy and the human sciences in the study of symbols and signs throughout the history of civilizations.

A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller


Harold Scheub - 2000
     Scheub offers an unprecedented collection of 400 stories, arranged alphabetically, that touch on virtually every aspect of religious belief. Here are gods and goddesses, epic heroes and divine tricksters, along with epics of the world's origins, the struggle between the human and the divine, and much more. Scheub covers the entire continent, from the mouth of the Nile to the shores of the Cape of Good Hope, including North African as well as sub-Saharan cultures. Here, for example, is the tale of Abu Zayd (from the Bani Hilal of Tunisia), an epic hero who battles a jinni; and here too is a myth of how the moon and the toad created the first man and woman, from the Soko of Congo. Scheub not only retells each story, but provides information about the respective belief system, the main characters, and related stories or variants. Perhaps most important, Scheub emphasizes the role of mythmaker as storyteller--as a performer for an audience. He explores various techniques, from the rhythmic movements of a Zulu mythmaker's hands to the way a storyteller will play on the familiar context of other myths within her cultural context. In A Dictionary of African Mythology, Harold Scheub has constructed an invaluable bridge to the richly diverse oral cultures of Africa. In this magnificent collection, he not only provides hundreds of fascinating myths, but recaptures their cultural contexts--in which story and storyteller, tradition and performance, all merge.

Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City


Claire Jean Kim - 2000
    This work investigates the most prolonged period of such conflict - the Flatbush Boycott of 1990, when Black nationalist and Haitian activists led a boycott and picketing campaign against two Korean-owned produce stores.

World Spectators


Kaja Silverman - 2000
    It is, essentially, an essay on what could be called “world love,” the possibility and necessity for psychic survival of a profound and vital erotic investment by a human being in the cosmic surround. Here, the author takes her cue from Freud’s assertion that the “loss of reality” associated with psychosis is a function of a disturbance not in the capacity to reason or perceive, but rather in the capacity for world love, the libidinal and semiotic circuity by means of which such love actualizes itself.In an implicit challenge to poststructuralist thought, the author claims that this love is always in response to a call issued by the world—that the world has, as it were, a vocation: its beauty ought to be seen. We must think of our own being-in-the world as a response to a primordial calling out to respond to this beauty. We are, the author suggests, at the very core of our being, summoned to what she terms world spectatorship.Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenological elaboration of care as the being distinctive of human being and the primarily Lacanian conceptualization of the language of desire specific to each human subject, this metapsychology of love attempts to integrate issues in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual culture, art history, and literary and film studies.

Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall


Lawrence Grossberg - 2000
    His early work on the media, his influential use of Gramsci in understanding Britain in the late 1970s, his analysis of Thatcherism, and his work on race and new ethnicities, have helped to make universities places where ideas and social commitment to change can co-exist.