Best of
Cultural-Studies

2004

The Cultural Politics of Emotion


Sara Ahmed - 2004
    Of interest to readers in gender studies and cultural studies, the psychology and sociology of emotions, and phenomenology and psychoanalysis, The Cultural Politics of the Emotions offers new ways of thinking about our inner and our outer lives.

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence


Judith Butler - 2004
    In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo


Ned Sublette - 2004
    It offers a behind-the-scenes examination of music from a Cuban point of view, unearthing surprising, provocative connections and making the case that Cuba was fundamental to the evolution of music in the New World. The ways in which the music of black slaves transformed 16th-century Europe, how the claves appeared, and how Cuban music influenced ragtime, jazz, and rhythm and blues are revealed. Music lovers will follow this journey from Andalucía, the Congo, the Calabar, Dahomey, and Yorubaland via Cuba to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, New York, and Miami. The music is placed in a historical context that considers the complexities of the slave trade; Cuba's relationship to the United States; its revolutionary political traditions; the music of Santería, Palo, Abakuá, and Vodú; and much more.

Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class


Michelle TeaLis Goldschmidt - 2004
    It was these concerns that prompted indie icon Michelle Tea--whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts--to collect these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can’t go home to the suburbs when their assignment is over. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from stealing and selling blood to make ends meet, to "jumping" class, how if time equals money then being poor means waiting, surviving and returning to the ghetto and how feminine identity is shaped by poverty. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Diane Di Prima, Terri Griffith, Daisy Hernández, Frances Varian, Tara Hardy, Shawna Kenney, Siobhan Brooks, Terri Ryan, and more.

Vice DOs & DON'Ts: 10 Years of Vice Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques


Suroosh Alvi - 2004
    From the creators of the runaway cult magazine sensation and arbiter of all that is cool comes the ultimate visual guide on how to be - and not to be - a modern urban hipster.

Frank Stitt's Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill


Frank Stitt - 2004
    W. Apple, Jr., of The New York Times credits third-generation Alabamian Frank Stitt with turning Birmingham into a "sophisticated, easygoing showplace of enticing, southern-accented cooking." His southern peers think his cooking may have a more profound sense of place than any of theirs. His food is rustic and homey, but sophisticated in method. Now, Alabama's favorite son has written a long-awaited cookbook that features his enticing Provençal-influenced southern food. More than 150 recipes range from the traditional--Spicy Green Tomato and Peach Relish, Spoonbread, and Pickled Shrimp--to the inspired--Slow-Roasted Black Grouper with Ham and Pumpkin Pirlau and Pork Loin with Corn Pudding and Grilled Eggplant. Desserts such as Bourbon Panna Cotta and Sweet Potato Tart with Coconut Crust and Pecan Streusel elevate the best of the South for cooks everywhere.

Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book


Gerard Jones - 2004
    "This history of the birth of superhero comics highlights three pivotal figures. The story begins early in the last century, on the Lower East Side, where Harry Donenfeld rises from the streets to become the king of the 'smooshes'-soft-core magazines with titles like French Humor and Hot Tales. Later, two high school friends in Cleveland, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, become avid fans of 'scientifiction,' the new kind of literature promoted by their favorite pulp magazines. The disparate worlds of the wise guy and the geeks collide in 1938, and the result is Action Comics #1, the debut of Superman. For Donenfeld, the comics were a way to sidestep the censors. For Shuster and Siegel, they were both a calling and an eventual source of misery: the pair waged a lifelong campaign for credit and appropriate compensation." -The New Yorker

Belonging: A Culture of Place


bell hooks - 2004
    Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began--her old Kentucky home. hooks has written provocatively about race, gender, and class; and in this book she turns her attention to focus on issues of land and land ownership. Reflecting on the fact that 90% of all black people lived in the agrarian South before mass migration to northern cities in the early 1900s, she writes about black farmers, about black folks who have been committed both in the past and in the present to local food production, to being organic, and to finding solace in nature. Naturally, it would be impossible to contemplate these issues without thinking about the politics of race and class. Reflecting on the racism that continues to find expression in the world of real estate, she writes about segregation in housing and economic racialized zoning. In these critical essays, hooks finds surprising connections that link the environment and sustainability to the politics of race and class that reach far beyond Kentucky.With characteristic insight and honesty, Belonging offers a remarkable vision of a world where all people--wherever they may call home--can live fully and well, where everyone can belong.

Shirley, Goodness & Mercy: A Childhood in Africa


Chris van Wyk - 2004
    Instead, it is a delightful account of one boy's special relationship with the relatives, friends and neighbors—often decidedly quirky—who made up his community, and of the important coping role laughter and humor played during the years he spent in bleak, dusty townships. Chris van Wyk has created a truly remarkable record of life in the black community at once informative and vastly entertaining.

Faces of Africa


Carol Beckwith - 2004
    Drawn from their work over the past thirty years, this book is an inclusive look at the people and cultures from across this broad continent.With their unique eye for Africa and its inhabitants, Beckwith and Fisher have brought forth a masterpiece in the genre—and a moving, personal tribute to some of the most beautiful people on Earth.

Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System


Duncan Kennedy - 2004
    This controversial booklet was reviewed in several major law journals--unprecedented for a self-published work--and influenced a generation of law students and teachers. In this well-known critique, Duncan Kennedy argues that legal education reinforces class, race, and gender inequality in our society. However, Kennedy proposes a radical egalitarian alternative vision of what legal education should become, and a strategy, starting from the anarchist idea of workplace organizing, for struggle in that direction. Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy is comprehensive, covering everything about law school from the first day to moot court to job placement to life after law school. Kennedy's book remains one of the most cited works on American legal education.The visually striking original text is reprinted here, making it available to a new generation. The text is buttressed by commentaries by five prominent legal scholars who consider its meaning for today, as well as by an introduction and afterword by the author that describes the context in which Kennedy wrote the book, including a brief history of critical legal studies.

Conversations with Durito: The Story of Durito and the Defeat of Neo-Liberalism


Subcomandante Marcos - 2004
    Latino/Latina studies. The Durito stories are some of the most literary and complex Zapatista communiques. Their narratives combine political critique, satire, historical debate, literary seduction, and poetry, and regularly change register from elevated theoretical language to popular Mexican word play or albures, indigenous and foreign languages, archaic and peninsular Spanish, and CalAA (a hybrid language spoken along the U.S.-Mexico border). While other Marcos collections have excerpted these stories from the communiques in which they originally appeared, Conversations With Durito contextualizes each one within the original communique, presenting them not simply as stories, but as documents of particular moments in the Zapatista struggle. To further this understanding, the communiquA a�As are supplemented with a lengthy historical overview, brief introductions to each story, integrated footnotes and bibliographic resources, all adding critical political, historical, and cultu

Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture


Philip Cornwel-Smith - 2004
    From floral truck bolts and taxi altars to buffalo cart furniture and drinks in a bags, the same exquisite care, craft and improvisation resounds through home and street, bar and wardrobe. Never colonised, Thai culture retains nuanced ancient meaning in the most mundane things. The days are colour coded, lucky numbers dictate prices, window grilles become guardian angels, tattoos entrance the wearer. Philip scoured each region to show how indigenous wisdom both adapts to the present and customises imports, applying Roman architecture to shophouses, morphing rock into festive farm music, turning the Japanese motor-rickshaw into the tuk-tuk. Colour-saturated illustrations help you navigate various social traits, whether white-faced hi-so matrons or Red Bullswilling workers wearing coins in their ear. This is Thai culture as it has never been shown before.

The Plot Thickens... Harry Potter Investigated by Fans for Fans


Galadriel Waters - 2004
    Now, Wizarding World Press takes that one step further by collecting the best pieces from 50 budding authors, ages 7 to 47 -- and representing 9 countries -- from the most popular Harry Potter fan site, MuggleNet.com. Sure to spark lively debate among Harry Potter sleuths and fans, these essays are as entertaining as they are thought-provoking.

Miracle Detective


Randall Sullivan - 2004
    After being met with skepticism from the local parish, the Catholic diocese officially placed the matter "under investigation." Investigative journalist Randall Sullivan wanted to know how exactly one might conduct the official inquiry into such an incident and set off to interview "the miracle detectives." These were the theologians, historians, and postulators from the Sacred Congregation of the Causes for Saints who were charged by the Vatican with testing the miraculous and judging the holy. What Sullivan didn't know was that his own investigation would lead from Vatican City in Rome to the tiny village of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where six visionaries have been receiving apparitions of the Virgin Mary. These raptures have been the subject of more medical and scientific examination than any other purported supernatural event ever recorded. An examination of the longest-running Marian apparitions in history, and the author's own faith and beliefs as he himself becomes a miracle detective, are at the heart of Randall Sullivan's stunning new book, The Miracle Detective.

Men's Adventure Magazines


Max Allan Collins - 2004
    Hefty comprehensive guide to postwar American men's adventure magazines; includes descriptions of history, culture and artistry of the magazines of the 1950s-1970s.

Fun with Our Family


William S. Gray - 2004
    This time, meet Mike, twin sisters Pam and Penny, and their parents. Two families mean twice the laughs and twice the fun. Beginning readers will love the way each chapter is an individual story, and parents and educators will appreciate the way this format encourages young readers? progression.

Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties


Brittany A. Daley - 2004
    And so the emphasis in this first-rate celebration is on the covers, with hundreds reproduced in what looks like accurate (i.e., soul-shocking) color.”—Publishers Weekly

Hypermodern Times


Gilles Lipovetsky - 2004
    But there are now signs - argues Gilles Lipovetsky, one of the most original social thinkers in France today - that we've entered a new phase of 'hypermodernity', characterized by hyper-consumption and the hypermodern individual. Hyperconsumption is a consumption which absorbs and integrates more and more spheres of social life and which encourages individuals to consume for their own personal pleasure rather than to enhance their social status. Hypermodernity is a society characterized by movement, fluidity and flexibility, distanced more than ever from the great structuring principles of modernity. And the hypermodern individual, while oriented towards pleasure and hedonism, is also filled with the kind of tension and anxiety that comes from living in a world which has been stripped of tradition and which faces an uncertain future. Individuals are gnawed by anxiety; fear has superimposed itself on their pleasures, and anguish on their liberation. Everything worries and alarms them, and there are no longer any beliefs systems to which they can turn for assurance. These are hypermodern times.

No Man's River


Farley Mowat - 2004
    This book chronicles his life among Metis trappers and native people as they struggle to eke out a living in a brutal environment. In the spring of 1947, putting the death and devastation of WWII behind him, Mowat joined a scientific expedition. In the remote reaches of Manitoba, he witnessed an Eskimo population ravaged by starvation and disease brought about by the white man. In his efforts to provide the natives with some of the assistance that the government failed to provide, Mowat set out on an arduous journey that collided with one of nature's most arresting phenomena -- the migration of the Arctic's caribou herds. Mowat was based at Windy Post with a Metis trapper and two Ihalmiut children. A young girl, known as Rita, is painted with special vividness -- checking the trap lines with the men, riding atop a sled, smoking a tiny pipe. Farley returns to the North two decades later and discovers the tragic fate that befell her. Combining his exquisite portraits with awe-inspiring passages on the power of nature, No Man's River is another riveting memoir from one of North America's most beloved writers.

The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons


Abe Ignacio - 2004
    Asian & Asian American Studies. Filipino American Studies. Co-authored by Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio. THE FORBIDDEN BOOK uses over 200 political cartoons from 1898 to 1906 to chronicle a little known war between the United States and the Philippines. The war saw the deployment of 126,000 U.S. troops, lasted more than 15 years and killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos beginning in February 1899.The book's title comes from a 1900 Chicago Chronicle cartoon of the same name showing then-President William McKinley putting a lock on a book titled "True History of the War in the Philippines." Today, very few Americans know about the brutal suppression of Philippine independence or the anti-war movement led at that time by the likes of writer Mark Twain, peace activist Jane Addams, journalist Joseph Pulitzer, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, labor leader Samuel Gompers, and Moorfield Storey, first president of the NAACP.The book reveals how the public was misled in the days leading to the war, shows illustrations of U.S. soldiers using the infamous "water cure" torture (today referred to as "waterboarding"), and describes a highly publicized court martial of soldiers who had killed prisoners of war. The election of 1900 pitted a pro-war Republican president against an anti-war Democratic candidate. In 1902, the Republican president declared a premature "mission accomplished" as the war was beginning to expand to the southern Philippines. The book shows political cartoons glorifying manifest destiny, demonizing the leader of the Filipino resistance President Emilio Aguinaldo, and portraying Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Hawaiians, Chamorros, and other colonials as dark-skinned savages in need of civilization. These images were used to justify a war at a time when three African Americans on average were lynched every week across the south and when the Supreme Court approved the "separate but equal" doctrine.More than a century later, the U.S.- Philippine War remains hidden from the vast majority of Americans. The late historian Howard Zinn noted, "THE FORBIDDEN BOOK brings that shameful episode in our history out in the open... The book deserves wide circulation."

Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place


Nirmal Puwar - 2004
    The spaces they come to occupy are not empty or neutral, but are imbued with history and meaning. This groundbreaking book interrogates the pernicious, subtle but nonetheless widely held view that certain bodies are naturally entitled to certain spaces, while others are not. How are positions of authority racialized and gendered? How do people manage their femininity and/or blackness while in a predominantly white male context? How do spaces become naturalized or normalized, and what does it mean when they are disrupted? Engaging with a range of material from a variety of institutions, Space Invaders is a timely contribution to wide-reaching debates on race, gender and space. It is the first book to articulate the full complexity of diversity in organizations.

Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving


Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore - 2004
    Twenty-six stories illuminate the reality of growing up in fear, struggling to rebuild lives damaged by sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse. The book explores how abuse turns queer survivors-male, female, and transgendered-into healers, heartbreakers, and homicidal maniacs, presenting brilliant stories that sear and soar. Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving addresses all forms of abuse head-on, representing a cross-section of queer survivors in terms of race, class, ethnicity, education, origin, sexuality, and gender. Contributors use their own life experiences to create a book that takes back control from well-meaning "outsiders," as they recount the daily struggle to overcome the damage done to their minds, bodies, and spirits in a world that denies their gender, sexual, and social identities. From the editor: "Dangerous Families consists entirely of writing by survivors of childhood abuse. That's right-no therapists analyzing our plight, no talk-show hosts exploiting us-just survivors, exploring our complicated, frightening, and fulfilling lives. These stories dispense with the usual technique of carefully massaging the reader's fragile worldview before plunging this unsuspecting innocent into a world of horror. They go right to the horror, the beauty, and the joy, often throwing the reader off-guard, revealing layers of meaning before the reader can step back." Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving is an anthology of 26 true stories of growing up queer in families that magnify the horrors of the outside world instead of offering protection. The book is an essential read for therapists, caseworkers, cultural studies specialists, and anyone struggling to survive childhood

Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop


Imani Perry - 2004
    A scholar and a fan, Perry considers the art, politics, and culture of hip hop through an analysis of song lyrics, the words of the prophets of the hood. Recognizing prevailing characterizations of hip hop as a transnational musical form, Perry advances a powerful argument that hip hop is first and foremost black American music. At the same time, she contends that many studies have shortchanged the aesthetic value of rap by attributing its form and content primarily to socioeconomic factors. Her innovative analysis revels in the artistry of hip hop, revealing it as an art of innovation, not deprivation.Perry offers detailed readings of the lyrics of many hip hop artists, including Ice Cube, Public Enemy, De La Soul, krs-One, OutKast, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Tupac Shakur, Lil’ Kim, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Method Man, and Lauryn Hill. She focuses on the cultural foundations of the music and on the form and narrative features of the songs—the call and response, the reliance on the break, the use of metaphor, and the recurring figures of the trickster and the outlaw. Perry also provides complex considerations of hip hop’s association with crime, violence, and misogyny. She shows that while its message may be disconcerting, rap often expresses brilliant insights about existence in a society mired in difficult racial and gender politics. Hip hop, she suggests, airs a much wider, more troubling range of black experience than was projected during the civil rights era. It provides a unique public space where the sacred and the profane impulses within African American culture unite.

Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China’s One-Child Policy


Vanessa L. Fong - 2004
    What are these children like? What are their values, goals, and interests? What kinds of relationships do they have with their families? This is the first in-depth study to analyze what it is like to grow up as the state-appointed vanguard of modernization. Based on surveys and ethnographic research in China, where the author lived with teenage only children and observed their homes and classrooms for 27 months between 1997 and 2002, the book explores the social, economic, and psychological consequences of the government's decision to accelerate the fertility transition.Only Hope shows how the one-child policy has largely succeeded in its goals, but with unintended consequences. Only children are expected to be the primary providers of support and care for their retired parents, grandparents, and parents-in-law, and only a very lucrative position will allow them to provide for so many dependents. Many only children aspire to elite status even though few can attain it, and such aspirations lead to increased stress and competition, as well as intense parental involvement.

The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely


Elizabeth Grosz - 2004
    Arguing that theories of temporality have significant and underappreciated relevance to the social dimensions of science and the political dimensions of struggle, Grosz engages key theoretical concerns related to the reality of time. She explores the effect of time on the organization of matter and on the emergence and development of biological life. Considering how the relentless forward movement of time might be conceived in political and social terms, she begins to formulate a model of time that incorporates the future and its capacity to supersede and transform the past and present.Grosz develops her argument by juxtaposing the work of three major figures in Western thought: Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson. She reveals that in theorizing time as an active, positive phenomenon with its own characteristics and specific effects, each of these thinkers had a profound effect on contemporary understandings of the body in relation to time. She shows how their allied concepts of life, evolution, and becoming are manifest in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray. Throughout The Nick of Time, Grosz emphasizes the political and cultural imperative to fundamentally rethink time: the more clearly we understand our temporal location as beings straddling the past and the future without the security of a stable and abiding present, the more transformation becomes conceivable.

The Gothic


David Punter - 2004
     Provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies. Explains the origins and development of the term Gothic. Explores the evolution of the Gothic in both literary and non-literary forms, including art, architecture and film. Features authoritative readings of key works, ranging from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Considers recurrent concerns of the Gothic such as persecution and paranoia, key motifs such as the haunted castle, and figures such as the vampire and the monster. Includes a chronology of key Gothic texts, including fiction and film from the 1760s to the present day, and a comprehensive bibliography.

The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics


Aviva Chomsky - 2004
    The Cuba Reader multiplies perspectives on the nation many times over, presenting more than one hundred selections about Cuba’s history, culture, and politics. Beginning with the first written account of the island, penned by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the selections assembled here track Cuban history from the colonial period through the ascendancy of Fidel Castro to the present.The Cuba Reader combines songs, paintings, photographs, poems, short stories, speeches, cartoons, government reports and proclamations, and pieces by historians, journalists, and others. Most of these are by Cubans, and many appear for the first time in English. The writings and speeches of José Martí, Fernando Ortiz, Fidel Castro, Alejo Carpentier, Che Guevera, and Reinaldo Arenas appear alongside the testimonies of slaves, prostitutes, doctors, travelers, and activists. Some selections examine health, education, Catholicism, and santería; others celebrate Cuba’s vibrant dance, music, film, and literary cultures. The pieces are grouped into chronological sections. Each section and individual selection is preceded by a brief introduction by the editors.The volume presents a number of pieces about twentieth-century Cuba, including the events leading up to and following Castro’s January 1959 announcement of revolution. It provides a look at Cuba in relation to the rest of the world: the effect of its revolution on Latin America and the Caribbean, its alliance with the Soviet Union from the 1960s until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, and its tumultuous relationship with the United States. The Cuba Reader also describes life in the periodo especial following the cutoff of Soviet aid and the tightening of the U.S. embargo.For students, travelers, and all those who want to know more about the island nation just ninety miles south of Florida, The Cuba Reader is an invaluable introduction.

Alexandria: City of Memory


Michael Haag - 2004
    Drawing on diaries, letters, and interviews, Michael Haag recovers the lost life of the city, its cosmopolitan inhabitants, and its literary characters.Located on the coast of Africa yet rich in historical associations with Western civilization, Alexandria was home to an exotic variety of people whose cosmopolitan families had long been rooted in the commerce and the culture of the entire Mediterranean world.Alexandria famously excited the imaginations of writers, and Haag folds intimate accounts of E. M. Forster, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, and Lawrence Durrell into the story of its inhabitants. He recounts the city’s experience of the two world wars and explores the communities that gave Alexandria its unique flavor: the Greek, the Italian, and the Jewish. The book deftly harnesses the sexual and emotional charge of cosmopolitan life in this extraordinary city, and highlights the social and political changes over the decades that finally led to Nasser’s Egypt.

The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier


Richard G. Wilkinson - 2004
    Richard Wilkinson, a pioneering social scientist, addresses the growing feeling--so common in the United States--that modern societies, despite their material success, are social failures. The Impact of Inequality explains why inequality has such devastating effects on the quality and length of our lives.Wilkinson shows that inequality leads to stress, stress creates sickness on the individual and mass level, and overall society suffers widespread unhappiness and high levels of violence, depression, and mistrust across the social spectrum. The evidence he presents is incontrovertible: social and political equality are essential to improve life for everyone. Wilkinson argues that even small reductions in inequality can make an important difference--for, as this book explains, social relations are always built on material foundations.

Cold Steel: The Art of Fencing with the Sabre


Alfred Hutton - 2004
    In addition to his lectures about ancient weapons and his demonstrations of their use, Hutton created this 1889 classic, a continuing source of instruction and enlightenment to modern readers.The techniques associated with the sabre differ markedly from those of the épeé and the rapier. This study offers both technical and historical views of the art of the sabre. It begins with a look at the weapon's construction and its grip, followed by explanations of a variety of different strokes and parries as well as methods of combining attack and defense. Additional topics include approaches suitable for left-handed fencers, ceremonial aspects of the art, and contrasts between the sabre, the bayonet, and the French sword. Descriptions of associated weapons cover the great stick and the constable's truncheon, and the book concludes with considerations of the short sword-bayonet, or dagger. Fifty-five illustrations demonstrate how to hold the sabre, how to parry and guard, seizure, and numerous other aspects of the art of fencing with a sabre.

Once Bitten: An Unofficial Guide to the World of Angel


Nikki Stafford - 2004
    The world of the television series "Angel" is celebrated and discussed in this companion guide to the intelligent, thought-provoking spin-off of cult favorite "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." 16 color illustrations; b&w photos throughout.

Gangsta Rap Coloring Book


Aye Jay - 2004
    Break out the crayons, 'cause it gangsta rap coloring time! 48 pages of line drawings of Gangsta rappers, done with the thick black line we all remember from the coloring books of our youth. The juxtaposition of the outlaw image of the rappers with the childlike innocence of a coloring book makes for an instant laugh.

Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry


Evan Wolfson - 2004
    It is the work of one of the most influential attorneys in America, who has dedicated his life to the protection of individuals' rights and our Constitution's commitment to equal justice under the law. Above all, it is a clear, straightforward book that brings into sharp focus the very human significance of the right to marry in America—not just for some couples, but for all. Why is the word marriage so important? Will marriage for same-sex couples hurt the "sanctity" of the institution? How can people of different faiths reconcile their beliefs with the idea of marriage for same-sex couples? How will allowing gay couples to marry affect children? In this quietly powerful volume, the most authoritative and fairly articulated book on the subject, Wolfson demonstrates why the right to marry is important—indeed necessary—for all couples and for America's promise of equality.

Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy


Nikhil Pal Singh - 2004
    Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle.It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and others, as well as movement activists like Malcolm X and Black Panthers, that vital new ideas emerged and circulated. Their most important achievement was to create and sustain a vibrant, black public sphere broadly critical of U.S. social, political, and civic inequality.Finding racism hidden within the universalizing tones of reform-minded liberalism at home and global democratic imperatives abroad, race radicals alienated many who saw them as dangerous and separatist. Few wanted to hear their message then, or even now, and yet, as Singh argues, their passionate skepticism about the limits of U.S. democracy remains as indispensable to a meaningful reconstruction of racial equality and universal political ideals today as it ever was.

The Trout Pool Paradox: The American Lives of Three Rivers


George Black - 2004
    Nowhere has this been more true than in an area not far from New York City where three Connecticut rivers, the Housatonic, the Shepaug, and the Naugatuck, have hosted an emblematic procession of industry, from the first woolen mills and iron foundries to the brass and rubber factories and hydroelectric plants of the twentieth century. Despite three hundred years of development, stretches of these rivers still thrive, offering great trout fishing and a postcard-perfect New England landscape. The Trout Pool Paradox unravels a conundrum: why does the Naugatuck River teeter on the edge of extinction, while in a parallel valley just a few miles away, the Shepaug appears to flow in a pristine state? Probing this puzzle takes George Black deep into the complex ecology of rivers and into the heart of the human communities on their banks. Presenting intimately detailed stories of early industrialists, nineteenth-century naturalists, and contemporary river stewards and their adversaries, The Trout Pool Paradox throws brilliant light on our dynamic relationship with nature and on the conflicting demands we will make on our waterways in a postindustrial age.

DPM - Disruptive Pattern Material


Hardy Blechman - 2004
    Divided into two books totaling 944 pages, DPM offers comprehensive coverage of this multifaceted and highly engaging subject. It contains more than 5,000 images by the world's leading nature, military and fashion photographers. It includes a comprehensive guide to the camouflage patterns issued to soldiers of 107 nations around the world and documents the rise of camouflage outside the armed forces - its use by anti-war protestors in the 1960s, further exploration by modern artists, and reinvention within areas such as fashion, architecture, music, film and sport. Depictions of camo-clad cultural icons such as David Beckham, Robert De Niro, U2, Notorious B.I.G., Ali G, Neneh Cherry and Joe Strummer illustrate the theme. Rescuing camouflage from its unhappy associations with war and conflict, this book emphasizes its natural beauty. It is the modern reference guide for both the novice and the seasoned camoufleur.

Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society


Richard Stivers - 2004
    In this incisive and controversial book, Richard Stivers rejects the recent emphasis on genetic explanations of psychological problems, arguing that the very organization of technological societies is behind the pervasive experience of loneliness. The extreme rationality that governs our institutions and organizations results in abstract and impersonal relationships in much of daily life. Moreover, as common meaning is gradually eroded, our connections to others become vague and tenuous. Our ensuing fear and loneliness, however, can be masked by an outgoing, extroverted personality. In its extreme form, loneliness assumes pathological dimensions in neurosis and schizophrenia. Stivers maintains that even here the causes remain social. The various forms of neuroses and psychoses follow the key contradictions of a technological society. For instance, narcissism and depression reflect the tension between power and meaninglessness that characterizes modern societies. Stivers demonstrates that there is a continuum from the normal "technological personality" through the various neuroses to full-blown schizophrenia. He argues that all forms of loneliness emanate from the same cause; they likewise share a common dynamic despite their differences. Loneliness, in its many manifestations, seems to be the price we must pay for living in the modern world. Yet nurturing family, friend, and community ties can mitigate its culturally and psychologically disorganizing power. This book is a clarion call for a renewal of moral awareness and custom to combat the fragmentation and depersonalization of our technological civilization.

Ho'oulu: Our Time of Becoming: Collected Early Writings Of Manulani Meyer


Meleanna Meyer - 2004
    Manu Meyer, a Harvard educated, University of Hawai'i at Hilo professor of Education. With the publication of this book, Manu leaves Western construct behind and embraces Native Hawaiian and indigenous education and life models. Ho'oulu gathers her writings and ruminations on transforming information to knowledge, facts to metaphor, and sensation to contemplation. Her collected writings culminate in an unedited version of her doctoral thesis Native Hawaiian Epistemology: Contemporary Narratives.

Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture


Vivian Sobchack - 2004
    Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all "had our eyes done"; why we are "moved" by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of "making sense" requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.

Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large


Carolyn Cooper - 2004
    This high-energy raggamuffin music is often dissed by old-school roots reggae fans as a raucous degeneration of classic Jamaican popular music. In this provocative study of dancehall culture Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, offers a sympathetic account of the philosophy of a wide range of dancehall DJs: Shabba Ranks, Lady Saw, Ninjaman, Capleton, Buju Banton, Anthony B, Apache Indian. She demonstrates the ways in which the language of dancehall culture, often devalued as mere 'noise,' articulates a complex understanding of the border clashes that characterise Jamaican society. Cooper also analyses the sound clashes that erupt in the movement of Jamaican dancehall culture across national borders.

Finding the Way; From Prussia to a Prairie Homestead


Alfred Wellnitz - 2004
    As the son of a landless peasant family this represented a great opportunity and he decides to immigrate to AmericaKarl meets Heinrich Schlicter while crossing the Atlantic and with little money between them after landing in Baltimore, the two team up. They take menial jobs to pay for food and shelter and to accumulate funds needed to work their way west where land can be homesteaded.Karl and Heinrich first move to Chicago to work in the meat packing industry where Karl strives to accumulate enough money to fund his homestead plans. They find the meat packing work and living conditions oppressive and the compensation inadequate. They move onto the north woods of Wisconsin and work as lumberjacks for two winters. After Karl finally accumulates the funds needed to fulfill his plans, Heinrich convinces Karl to join him in the 1876 Black Hill’s gold rush.The Black Hills adventure includes deadly encounters with Indians, a lively existence in a lawless Deadwood and Karl falling in love with a mixed blood Indian woman. After two years in the Black Hills and seven years of pursuing his dream, Karl, with the woman he loves, and Heinrich set out on a four hundred mile horseback ride to homestead fertile virgin prairie near the eastern edge of the Dakota Territory.

To Be an Artist


Maya Ajmera - 2004
    Beautiful photographs and lyrical text highlight the many ways art can bring us together.A portion of the proceeds help support community-based projects benefiting children around the world.

The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies


Chris Barker - 2004
    Taken together, the definitions provide a effective overview of the field′ - Stuart Allan, Reader in Cultural Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol `Any student wishing to acquaint her or himself with the field of cultural studies will find this an enormously useful book′ - Joke Hermes, Editor, European Journal of Cultural Studies and Lecturer in Television Studies, University of Amsterdam Containing over 200 entries on key concepts and theorists, the Dictionary provides an unparalled guide to the terrain of cultural studies. The definitions are authoritative, stimulating and written in an accessible style. There are up-to-date entries on new concepts and innovative approaches.An ideal teaching and research resource, the Dicitionary can also be used as a companion to Chris Barker′s highly successful Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (Second Edition, SAGE, 2003) and in conjunction with his Making Sense of Cultural Studies (SAGE, 2002)

Global Assemblages


Aihwa Ong - 2004
     Offers a ground-breaking approach to central debates about globalization with chapters written by leading scholars from across the social sciences. Examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics or values. Investigates these phenomena from the perspective of the "anthropological" problems they pose. Covers a broad range of geographical areas: Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and Europe. Grapples with a number of empirical problems of popular and academic interest -- from the organ trade, to accountancy, to pharmaceutical research, to neoliberal reform.

Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America


Jonathan Rauch - 2004
    As liberals and conservatives mobilize around this issue, no one has come forward with a more compelling, comprehensive, and readable case for gay marriage than Jonathan Rauch. In this book, he puts forward a clear and honest manifesto explaining why gay marriage is important—even crucial—to the health of marriage in America today, grounding his argument in commonsense, mainstream values and confronting social conservatives on their own turf. Marriage, he observes, is more than a bond between individuals; it also links them to the community at large. Excluding some people from the prospect of marriage not only is harmful to them but also is corrosive of the institution itself.Gay marriage, he shows, is a "win-win-win" for strengthening the bonds that tie us together and for remaining true to our national heritage of fairness and humaneness toward all.

Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context


Carol Vernallis - 2004
    Carol Vernallis describes how musical, visual and verbal codes work together in music video and reveals modes of representing race, class, gender, and sexuality that characterize the music video form.

The Cost of Choice: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion


Erika Bachiochi - 2004
    Wade, the conflict over abortion has not abated. While "pro-choice" forces increasingly concede the central "pro-life" claim - that abortion is a morally portentous act - they still insist that the well-being of women depends absolutely on a legal right to abortion. The twelve essays in The Cost of Choice all by women active in the public square, argue that legal abortion has in fact harmed women - socially, medically, psychologically and culturally.Law professor Elizabeth Schiltz describes the unsettling reactions she faced for "choosing" to give birth to a child with Down Syndrome. Dr. Angel Lanfranchi, co-founder of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, offers evidence supporting a link between induced abortion and increased risk of breast cancer. Psychiatrist Joanne Angelo tells how abortion has affected women she has treated.With essays by imminent women such as Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities at Emory University, The Cost of Choice shows another side of feminism and captures the complexity of a divisive social issue.

Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought


Alys Eve Weinbaum - 2004
    Alys Eve Weinbaum demonstrates how these ideologies were founded in large part on what she calls “the race/reproduction bind”––the notion that race is something that is biologically reproduced. In revealing the centrality of ideas about women’s reproductive capacity to modernity’s intellectual foundations, Weinbaum highlights the role that these ideas have played in naturalizing oppression. She argues that attention to how the race/reproduction bind is perpetuated across national and disciplinary boundaries is a necessary part of efforts to combat racism.Gracefully traversing a wide range of discourses––including literature, evolutionary theory, early anthropology, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis––Weinbaum traces a genealogy of the race/reproduction bind within key intellectual formations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She examines two major theorists of genealogical thinking—Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault—and unearths the unacknowledged ways their formulations link race and reproduction. She explores notions of kinship and the replication of racial difference that run through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work; Marxist thinking based on Friedrich Engel’s The Origin of the Family; Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection; and Sigmund Freud’s early studies on hysteria. She also describes W. E. B. Du Bois’s efforts to transcend ideas about the reproduction of race that underwrite citizenship and belonging within the United States. In a coda, Weinbaum brings the foregoing analysis to bear on recent genomic and biotechnological innovations.

Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers


Nancy McCampbell Grace - 2004
    Although they have often been eclipsed by the men of the Beat Generation, the women's contributions to Beat literature are considerable.Covering writers from the beginning of the movement in the 1950s and extending to the present, this book features interviews with nine of the best-known women Beat writers, including Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Brenda Frazer (Bonnie Bremser), Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman, and the critic Ann Charters. Each is presented by a biographical essay that details her literary or scholarly accomplishments.In these recent interviews the nine writers recall their lives in Beat bohemia and discuss their artistic practices. Nancy M. Grace outlines the goals and revelations of the interviews, and introduces the community of female Beat writers created in their conversations with the authors.Although they have not received attention equal to the men, women Beat writers rebelled against mainstream roles for young women and were exuberant participants in creating the Beat scene. Mapping their unique identities in the Beat movement, Ronna C. Johnson shows how their poetry, fiction, and memoirs broke the male rule that defined Beat women as silent bohemian "chicks" rather than artistic peers.Breaking the Rule of Cool combines the interviews with literary criticism and biography to illustrate the vivacity and intensity of women Beat writers, and argues that American literature was revitalized as much by the women's work as by that of their male counterparts.Nancy M. Grace, a professor of English at the College of Wooster, is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Literature, the Beat Scene, and the Artful Dodge.Ronna C. Johnson, a lecturer in English and American Studies at Tufts University, has been published in College Literature, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the Poetry Project Newsletter. Johnson and Grace are the editors of and contributors to Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation.

It's a Wonderful Christmas: The Best of the Holidays 1940-1965


Susan Waggoner - 2004
    Celebrating Christmas is so often about nostalgia. With a nod and a wink to the days of Christmas past, It's a Wonderful Christmas presents classic images of the Yuletide icons of mid-20th-century America.Bubbler lights and glow-in-the-dark icicles. Catalogues crammed with toys. Norad bulletins tracking Rudolph's red nose through the nighttime sky. Along with hundreds of such quintessentially American illustrations, author Susan Waggoner stocking-stuffs her lively text with fascinating bits of information, lore, and lists. Wonder what the all-time most popular Christmas song is? How the tradition of the department store Santa got started? The answers are here. Loaded with images of vintage Christmas cards, wrapping paper, magazine ads, Lionel toy trains, and more, all in full color, this charming book will appeal to anyone who associates Christmas with home movies, "The Chipmunk Song," and Santa relaxing with an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola.

Easy Tapas: Spanish Snacks to Serve with Drinks


Julz Beresford - 2004
    - 30 easy-to-make recipes for this popular Spanish bar food- Delicious recipes for hot and cold tapas, all captured in full color by photographer Peter Cassidy

The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the Human Potential Movement: The First Twenty Years


Walter Truett Anderson - 2004
    . . a complex story, but a sequential one nonetheless, with feuds and psychic shoot-outs, games of capture the flag and smell the roses." --Arthur Hough, San Francisco Chronicle"Upstart Spring tells Esalen's riveting, unfinished story - even-handedly, entertainingly, with sympathy, and yet holding little back." --David Toolan, Commonwealth"An absolute delight: brimming with juicy gossip, and as carefully crafted as a page-turner novel. And it has substance, the gift of a therapist who also happens to be a cultural historian with a good eye for the telling meta-detail." --Sandy McDonald, New Age Journal"Walt Anderson has the requisite experience, humor, and affection (if not detachment, since Esalen teaches, indeed proves, that detachment is a universal impossibility) to carry off a wonderful account." --Stewart Brand, Co-Evolution Quarterly"A wonderful read, consistently entertaining on several levels." --Michael Rossman, Associate for Humanistic Psychology Newsletter"A superb wrap-up of a notable influence on our popular culture." --Rita Fink, Pacific Sun

Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The Globe Study of 62 Societies


Robert J. House - 2004
    GLOBE is a long-term program designed to conceptualize, operationalize, test, and validate a cross-level integrated theory of the relationship between culture and societal, organizational, and leadership effectiveness. A team of 160 scholars worked together since 1994 to study societal culture, organizational culture, and attributes of effective leadership in 62 cultures. Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies reports the findings of the first two phases of GLOBE. The book is primarily based on the results of the survey of over 17,000 middle managers in three industries: banking, food processing, and telecommunications, as well as archival measures of country economic prosperity and the physical and psychological well-being of the cultures studied.

Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt


Eugenia Paulicelli - 2004
    Yet Italian fashion also has a dark history that has not previously been explored. The Fascism of 1930's Italy dominated more than just politics--it spilled over into modes of dress. Fashion under Fascism is the first book to consider this link in detail. Fashion often functions as a tacit means of making a social statement, but under Mussolini it vividly reflected political tyranny. Paulicelli explores the subtle yet sinister changes to the seemingly innocuous practices of everyday dress and shows why they were such a concern for the state. Importantly, she also demonstrates how these developments impacted on the global dominance of Italian fashion today. This fascinating book includes interviews with major designers, such as Fernanda Gattinoni and Micol Fontana, and sheds new light on the complicated relationship between style and politics.

Cheerleader: Ready? Okay!


Elissa Stein - 2004
    Yes we do!And that's not all they've got. How about those pleated skirts. Those matching sweaters. The pom-poms, megaphones, and spirit sticks -- cheerleaders really do have it all. And here to prove it is Cheerleader, a peppy tribute to the glory and pageantry of cheerleading. Positively packed with all things cheer-related, Cheerleader harks back to the days when entire communities swarmed the stands to witness the game-day spectacle with cheerleaders at the forefront -- pinnacles of perk and poise. Featuring over 100 vintage images, chapters on cheerleading's history, fashion, and cult status, and sections on boy cheerleaders, mascots, and majorettes, this colorful compendium shows that school spirit will always be at the height of fashion. Ready? Okay!

Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil


Edward E. Telles - 2004
    North American scholars of race relations frequently turn to Brazil for comparisons, since its history has many key similarities to that of the United States. Brazilians have commonly compared themselves with North Americans, and have traditionally argued that race relations in Brazil are far more harmonious because the country encourages race mixture rather than formal or informal segregation.More recently, however, scholars have challenged this national myth, seeking to show that race relations are characterized by exclusion, not inclusion, and that fair-skinned Brazilians continue to be privileged and hold a disproportionate share of wealth and power.In this sociological and demographic study, Edward Telles seeks to understand the reality of race in Brazil and how well it squares with these traditional and revisionist views of race relations. He shows that both schools have it partly right--that there is far more miscegenation in Brazil than in the United States--but that exclusion remains a serious problem. He blends his demographic analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, history, and political theory to try to understand the enigma of Brazilian race relations--how inclusiveness can coexist with exclusiveness.The book also seeks to understand some of the political pathologies of buying too readily into unexamined ideas about race relations. In the end, Telles contends, the traditional myth that Brazil had harmonious race relations compared with the United States encouraged the government to do almost nothing to address its shortcomings.

The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity


Shalini Puri - 2004
    It uncovers the logics according to which some forms of hybridity are enshrined and others disavowed in the Caribbean imagination and in the disciplinary imagination of postcolonial studies. Exploring cultural formations ranging from mestizaje and creolization to mulatto and dougla aesthetics, from literature to music, theater, Hosay, and carnival, it examines the sources of the appeal of cultural hybridity for both nationalist and postnationalist agendas. The first book-length study to offer an explicitly comparative account of cultural hybridity in the postcolonial arena, The Caribbean Postcolonial is a forceful argument for historicizing theory. It intervenes in key debates around popular agency and cultural resistance, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an era of globalization.

Creeping Flesh 2


David Kerekes - 2004
    Features overviews of Triad movies, Cheerleader films of the seventies, the Australian "Wizard of Oz," Children's TV horror, a major interview with the director of "They Call Her One Eye"-cut by 22 minutes and a main inspiration for "Kill Bill"-and much more. Reviews, news, interviews.

To a Young Jazz Musician: Letters from the Road


Wynton Marsalis - 2004
    He writes that having humility is a way to continue to grow, to listen, and to learn; that patience is necessary for developing both technical proficiency and your own art rather than an imitation of someone else’s; and that rules are indispensable because “freedom lives in structure.” He offers lessons learned from his years as a performer and from his great forebears Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and others; he explores the art of swing; he discusses why it is important to run toward your issues, not away; and he talks about what to do when your integrity runs up against the lack thereof in others and in our culture. He poetically expresses our need for healers: “All of it tracks back to how you heal your culture, one patient at a time, beginning with yourself.”This is a unique book, in which a great artist offers his personal thoughts, both on jazz and on how to live a better, more original, productive, and meaningful life. To a Young Jazz Musician is sure to be treasured by readers young and old, musicians, lovers of music, and anyone interested in being mentored by one of America’s most influential, generous, and talented artists.From the Hardcover edition.

Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide


Alexander Laban Hinton - 2004
    Its toll is staggering: well over 100 million dead worldwide. Why Did They Kill? is one of the first anthropological attempts to analyze the origins of genocide. In it, Alexander Hinton focuses on the devastation that took place in Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979 under the Khmer Rouge in order to explore why mass murder happens and what motivates perpetrators to kill. Basing his analysis on years of investigative work in Cambodia, Hinton finds parallels between the Khmer Rouge and the Nazi regimes. Policies in Cambodia resulted in the deaths of over 1.7 million of that country's 8 million inhabitants—almost a quarter of the population--who perished from starvation, overwork, illness, malnutrition, and execution. Hinton considers this violence in light of a number of dynamics, including the ways in which difference is manufactured, how identity and meaning are constructed, and how emotionally resonant forms of cultural knowledge are incorporated into genocidal ideologies.

Letters to the Valley: A Harvest of Memories


David Mas Masumoto - 2004
    In these beautifully illustrated letters that originally appeared in the Fresno Bee, Masumoto--a peach and grape farmer in California's San Joaquin Valley--shares his deep concerns about dealing with change and trying to preserve and protect a way of life.

Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity


Leo Bersani - 2004
    Or if not proposed, then shown, visually, by stranger and more powerful means than narrative or argument.

SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film


Robert A. Beuka - 2004
    Or is it? To judge by the depiction of suburbia in prominent works of American fiction and film, the suburbs are also home to dysfunctional families, broken communities, and widespread misery. Clearly, despite the continued popularity of the suburbs as a place to live, the prevailing image of suburbia has changed markedly since the days of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. In this book, Robert Beuka argues that in order to begin to understand our conflicted relationship toward the suburbs, we need to understand how suburbia has come to be defined through its representation in the popular media and arts. SuburbiaNation looks carefully at the suburban landscape through the lens of fiction and of film, and Beuka weaves together such classics as It's a Wonderful Life, The Stepford Wives, The Great Gatsby, The Swimmer, The Graduate, and House Party to discuss the suburb and its significance in American culture.

"After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement


Cheryl Clark - 2004
    Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on.  She argues that whether black women poets of the time were writing from within the movement or writing against it, virtually all were responding to it. Using the trope of "Mecca," she explores the ways in which these writers were turning away from white, western society to create a new literacy of blackness.  Provocatively written, this book is an important contribution to the fields of African American literary studies and feminist theory.

Knowing the East


Paul Claudel - 2004
    The poet, playwright, and literary critic entered the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a diplomat to China and Japan while in his mid-twenties. He spent 18 years between 1895 and 1927 as a tireless observer of both countries' nature, customs, and art. One result is this beautifully-written volume of 61 prose poems Claudel composed over the course of a decade. They have been artfully translated from the French by poet and scholar James Lawler.Lawler provides the most crisp and accurate translation now available of Claudel's work, which was first collected in a single volume and published in France in 1907. Included are notes on the poems as well as a biographical note on the poet. Lawler presents the author as a gifted observer who discovered himself in his experience of the East. Claudel felt that, without realizing it, he had been destined to encounter this exotic new world. There are countries we accept, he wrote, that we marry and straightaway adopt as we do a woman, as if they had been made for us and we for them.Informed in part by a religious epiphany that Claudel experienced in his youth, Knowing the East reflects the author's passion for the natural and spiritual worlds. He writes of topics as diverse as coconut palms, banyans, Japanese pines; the Yang-tse; Confucian, Buddhist, and Shinto temples and tombs; hermitages, festivals for the dead, rice-harvests and torrential rain. Filled with resonant images, Knowing the East is a feast for the senses--and a book to be savored again and again.-- "Library Journal"

Dark Designs and Visual Culture


Michele Wallace - 2004
    Since then, Wallace has produced an extraordinary body of journalism and criticism engaging with popular culture and gender and racial politics. This collection brings together more than fifty of the articles she has written over the past fifteen years. Included alongside many of her best-known pieces are previously unpublished essays as well as interviews conducted with Wallace about her work. Dark Designs and Visual Culture charts the development of a singular, pathbreaking black feminist consciousness.Beginning with a new introduction in which Wallace reflects on her life and career, this volume includes other autobiographical essays; articles focused on popular culture, the arts, and literary theory; and explorations of issues in black visual culture. Wallace discusses growing up in Harlem; how she dealt with the media attention and criticism she received for Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, which was published when she was just twenty-seven years old; and her relationship with her family, especially her mother, the well-known artist Faith Ringgold. The many articles devoted to black visual culture range from the historical tragedy of the Hottentot Venus, an African woman displayed as a curiosity in nineteenth-century Europe, to films that sexualize the black body—such as Watermelon Woman, Gone with the Wind, and Paris Is Burning. Whether writing about the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, rap music, the Million Man March, Toshi Reagon, multiculturalism, Marlon Riggs, or a nativity play in Bedford Stuyvesant, Wallace is a bold, incisive critic. Dark Designs and Visual Culture brings the scope of her career and thought into sharp focus.

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War


Jeanette Keith - 2004
    Some failed to register for the draft, while others deserted after being inducted. In the countryside, armed bands of deserters defied local authorities; capturing them required the dispatch of federal troops into three southern states.Jeanette Keith traces southern draft resistance to several sources, including whites' long-term political opposition to militarism, southern blacks' reluctance to serve a nation that refused to respect their rights, the peace witness of southern churches, and, above all, anger at class bias in federal conscription policies. Keith shows how draft dodgers' success in avoiding service resulted from the failure of southern states to create effective mechanisms for identifying and classifying individuals. Lacking local-level data on draft evaders, the federal government used agencies of surveillance both to find reluctant conscripts and to squelch antiwar dissent in rural areas.Drawing upon rarely used local draft board reports, Selective Service archives, Bureau of Investigation reports, and southern political leaders' constituent files, Keith offers new insights into rural southern politics and society as well as the growing power of the nation-state in early twentieth-century America.

Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance


Pascale Aebischer - 2004
    Aebischer demonstrates how bodies virtually absent from playtexts and critical discussion (due to silence, disability, marginalization, racial otherness or death) can be prominent in performance, where their representation reflects the cultural and political climate of the production.

Hélène Cixous: Live Theory


Ian Blyth - 2004
    The book opens with an overview of the key features of Cixous' theory of "écriture féminine" (feminine writing). The various manifestations of "écriture féminine" are then explored in chapters on Cixous' fictional and theatrical writing, her philosophical essays, and her intensely personal approach to literary criticism. The book concludes with a new, lively and wide-ranging interview with Hélène Cixous in which she discusses her influences and inspirations, and her thoughts on the nature of writing and the need for an ethical relationship with the world. Also offering a survey of the many English translations of Cixous' work, this book is an indispensable introduction to Cixous' work for students of literature, philosophy, cultural and gender studies.

Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser's Berlin


Benjamin Carter Hett - 2004
    In vivid prose, Benjamin Hett examines daily movement through the Berlin criminal courts and the lawyers, judges, jurors, thieves, pimps, and murderers who inhabited this world.Drawing on previously untapped sources, including court records, pamphlet literature, and pulp novels, Hett examines how the law reflected the broader urban culture and politics of a rapidly changing city. In this book, German criminal law looks very different from conventional narratives of a rigid, static system with authoritarian continuities traceable from Bismarck to Hitler. From the murder trial of Anna and Hermann Heinze in 1891 to the surprising treatment of the notorious Captain of Koepenick in 1906, Hett illuminates a transformation in the criminal justice system that unleashed a culture war fought over issues of permissiveness versus discipline, the boundaries of public discussion of crime and sexuality, and the role of gender in the courts.Trained in both the law and history, Hett offers a uniquely valuable perspective on the dynamic intersections of law and society, and presents an impressive new view of early twentieth-century German history.

Food Culture in the Near East, Middle East, and North Africa


Peter Heine - 2004
    The major monotheistic religions developed in the Middle East, and students and other readers will learn how religious strictures on food and drink continue to play an important role in eating habits there today for Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Most of the population in the regions is Arab, and therefore the emphasis in this volume is mainly on the Arab Muslim food cultures. The impact of colonialism, globalization, and modernization of the foodways is also discussed in the topical chapters.This thorough overview provides huge insight into the lives of everyday people in the regions through their food culture. One chapter describes the major foodstuffs and how they are used. Another discusses gender roles and cooking, the use of cookbooks, and details the typical kitchen and its contents, from appliances to utensils. A chapter on typical meals shows the daily rituals of the various peoples. The Eating Out chapter provides a fascinating look at the workings and decor of small, traditional restaurants, the popularity of picnics, and more. Next, food in the context of religious holidays and life-cycle celebrations is discussed. Finally, traditional folk and modern beliefs about diet and health round out the coverage.

Dobu: Ethics of Exchange on a Massim Island, Papua New Guinea


Susanne Kuhling - 2004
    Annotat

The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives


Eleanor Ty - 2004
    In various ways, Asian North Americans negotiate daily with 'birthmarks, ' their shared physical features marking them legally, socially, and culturally as visible outsiders, and paradoxically, as invisible to mainstream history and culture.Ty argues that writers such as Denise Chong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Wayson Choy recast the marks of their bodies and challenge common perceptions of difference based on the sights, smells, dress, and other characteristics of their hyphenated lives. Others, like filmmaker Mina Shum and writers Bienvenido Santos and Hiromi Goto, challenge the means by which Asian North American subjects are represented and constructed in the media and in everyday language. Through close readings grounded in the socio-historical context of each work, Ty studies the techniques of various authors and filmmakers in their meeting of the gaze of dominant culture and their response to the assumptions and meanings commonly associated with Orientalized, visible bodies.

Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh


Karmen MacKendrick - 2004
    Each is strange enough on its own; this book asks what sense we might make of them together. Words reach out. Hands pick up books; eyes or fingertips scan text. But just where, if at all, do words and bodies touch?In a trio of paired chapters, each juxtaposing an illustrative story or case study to a theoretical exploration, MacKendrick examines three somatic figures of speech: the touch, the fold, and the cut. In the first pairing, resurrection stories in the Gospel of John are set against a chapter on touch, which draws on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to argue that touch is, paradoxically, the most lasting of the sensory modes in which the resurrected body is presented.T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday is then paired with a Deleuzean meditation on the fold. The final pair of chapters examines the sacred heart, an extraordinarily popular Catholic devotional image with an intriguing set of devotees-medieval mystics, sweet old ladies, and tattooed punks-in light of theoretical work of Foucault on the idea of inscribed bodies, of the cut.Theologically and philosophically sophisticated, indeed masterly, the book never loses its ground in real, specific bodily experience, performing both at the highest levels of abstraction and at the most quotidian levels of everyday life.

Planetary Gardens: The Landscape Architecture of Gilles Cl�ment


Rocca Alessandro - 2004
    As a trained gardener, he places our current knowledge of plant utilization and ecology in the service of the planetary garden, in which plant species from a tremendous variety of cultures are collected, composed, and carefully overseen in their development by the landscape designer. Cl�ment has taken this approach, which was developed for private gardens, and worked with celebrated architects - most recently, Jean Nouvel - to apply it in his large city parks, including Parc Citro�n, the park at the Grande Arche de La D�fense, and the museum park at the Mus�e du Quai Branly in Paris. The high artistic caliber of his designs is attested by exhibitions and installations at the Canadian Centre for Architecture CCA in Montreal and the Centre Pompidou, where they stand beside the work of Daniel Buren, Nan Goldin, and others. Gilles Cl�ment has been presenting his contribution to landscape architecture for decades in more than thirty publications and numerous lectures throughout the world. This is the first comprehensive English-language monograph on his work.

Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play


Mimi Sheller - 2004
    This fascinating book analyzes tourist performances such as walking, shopping, sunbathing, photographing, eating and clubbing, and studies why, and indeed how, some places become global centres whilst others don't. Arranged in four distinct parts, it considers:* Performing Paradise * Performances of Global Heritage * Remaking Playful Places * New Playful PlacesIncorporating a wide array of empirical research and innovative international case studies, it illuminates this phenomenon: from Eco-tourism on the beach to shopping in Hong Kong, from the making of 'Cool Reykjavik' to tourism in high-rise suburbs in Paris, and from Inca heritage to medical tourism.Edited by two world authorities in tourism studies, this revealing book deploys a range of theories related to the 'mobility turn' in the social sciences in order to analyze the contingent and networked nature of how places are stabilized as fit for playful performances. Well-written and researched, with coherent analysis and presentation, this book will appeal to academics, students and those interested in the complex character of global change.

Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, And Sexuality In The Early Republic


Philip Barnard - 2004
    literary and cultural history. Brown’s prose fiction, periodical writings, historiography, and pamphlets take part in the full range of political, literary, scientific, and other debates that form the cultural landscape of the first decades of the American republic from 1790 to 1810. Scholarship in the twentieth century developed a general understanding of Brown as an ambitious novelist but only began to explore the full extent of his writings and the issues they raise.Revising Charles Brockden Brown explores the writer as a key figure for understanding the cultural politics of this crucial era of U.S. and Atlantic history. Using contemporary critical models drawn from history, interdisciplinary cultural studies, postcolonial studies, gender and queer theory, and other areas, the essays in this collection bring Brown studies into the twenty-first century, synthesizing and extending the implications of the upsurge in Brown scholarship that has occurred over the last twenty years. These essays explore Brown in his own right and as a window onto the social dynamics of the early republic, as a participant in and commentator on the tumultuous conflicts and transformations of this postrevolutionary moment. These studies focus on the period’s political and ideological discourses in “Revolution and Republican Communities,” address questions concerning the construction of subjectivity and gender in “Gender and Sexuality,” and explore the later development of Brown’s intellectual origins in the radical enlightenment in the “Cultural Politics of the Later Years.”Contributors: Philip Barnard, Martin Brückner, Bruce Burgett, Michelle Burnham, Sean X. Goudie, Mark L. Kamrath, Robert S. Levine, Stephen Shapiro, Frank Shuffelton, Julia Stern, Fredrika J. Teute, W. M. Verhoeven, and Ed WhitePhilip Barnard teaches in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. He writes on American literature and cultural theory and has translated and edited work by such figures as Victor Séjour, Philippe Sollers, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Mark L. Kamrath teaches early American literature in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. He is author of a forthcoming book on Brown’s historical writing, and co-editor of a collection of essays on eighteenth-century American periodicals. Stephen Shapiro teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. He writes on American literature and cultural materialism and is preparing a book-length study on Brown, ideology, and the Atlantic world-system.

A Will of Their Own: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Working Children


Manfred Liebel - 2004
    It can take on widely differing forms and can harm children, but also benefit them. This book's approach is distinctive: it endeavors to understand working children, and their ways of living and acting, from their own perspective. It is interested in the children's own experiences and hopes, especially their attempts to speak out in public and to fight together against exploitation and discrimination. It shows that children frequently see and evaluate their work differently from adults, and that measures directed against children's work are not always in the interests of the children. It argues for a new, subject-oriented approach in dealing with children's work, which takes account of socio-cultural contexts, both in theory and practice.

Native Universe: Voices of Indian America


Clifford E. Trafzer - 2004
    More than 300 full-color illustrations depict the artistry and culture of our hemisphere’s diverse indigenous peoples. With its insightful, firsthand prose, the book is a reminder that the ancient philosophies and folkways are just as valuable and relevant in today’s world as they were generations ago.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis


Sarah Nuttall - 2004
    By placing the city of Johannesburg—the preeminent metropolis of the African continent and a city facing a complicated legacy of racial strife and wealth accumulation—at the heart of new critical urban theory, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis broadens discussions of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and urban renewal to include Africa. The issue brings Johannesburg into direct dialogue with other world cities, creating a space for the interrogation and investigation of the metropolis in a properly global sense.Contributors to this issue—a mix of scholars, urban planners, and artists, many of whom hail from South Africa—reveal Johannesburg to be a polycentric and international city that has developed its own cosmopolitan culture. In a detailed study of three streets in the modern precinct of Melrose Arch, one essay shows how the thoroughly commodified and marketed Johannesburg cityscape has shaped the cultural sensitivities, aesthetics, and urban subjectivities of its inhabitants, at times even overriding the historical memory of apartheid. Another essay, focusing on the emergence of a new urban culture, examines how the city itself becomes a crucial site for the remixing and reassembling of racial identities. By tracking the movement of people with AIDS to various locations in the city to seek relief and treatment, another essay reveals an urban geography very different from what is seen from the highways. Finally, through interviews and commentaries, journalists, artists, and architects of Johannesburg offer reflections on the geography and shifting culture of the city and its townships, on the complicated relationship between Johannesburg and other African cities, and on the search for an architectural style that adequately expresses the complexity of this cosmopolitan city.Contributors. Lindsay Bremner, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Rodney Place, AbdouMaliq Simone, Michael Watts

And It Don't Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years


Raquel Cepeda - 2004
    This shift was triggered by the release of the Sugarhill Gang's single, Rapper's Delight. Not only did it usher rap music into the mainstream's consciousness, it brought us the word "hip-hop." And It Don't Stop, edited by the award winning journalist Raquel Cepeda, with a foreword from Nelson George is a collection of the best articles the hip-hop generation has produced. It captures the indelible moments in hip-hop's history since 1979 and will be the centerpiece of the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration. This book epitomizes the media's response by taking the reader on an engaging and critical journey, including the very first pieces written about hip-hop for publications like The Village Voice--controversial articles that created rifts between church and state, the artist and journalist, and articles that recorded the rise and tragic fall of the art form's appointed heroes, such as Tupac Shakur, Eazy-E, and the Notorious B.I.G. The list of contributors includes Toure, Kevin Powell, dream hampton, Harry Allen, Cheo Hodari Coker, Greg Tate, Bill Adler, Hilton Als, Danyel Smith, and Joan Morgan.

LIVE: Art and Performance


Adrian Heathfield - 2004
    No longer at the margins of cultural production and recognition, performance is now a common occurrence in major art institutions. Here, leading artists and thinkers assess the relevance of live art and its impact within the visual arts and the broader cultural sphere. Hugo Glendinning’s stunning color photographs of performance events are combined with essays examining the political, philosophical, and cultural resonances of the work of a diverse range of live artists, both historical and contemporary. Accessible, critically astute, and expansive, Live is an indispensable resource.

Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis


Christopher Breward - 2004
    City life and fashion have always been intertwined, but nowhere has this relationship been more excitingly expressed than on the streets of London. Fashioning London looks at the manner in which particular styles of dress became associated with this leading international city, ultimately challenging the dominance of Paris, Milan and New York. From the pleasure gardens and coffee houses of the eighteenth century, through Victorian extremes of poverty and conspicuous pleasure-driven consumption, to the explosions of subcultural taste that define the capital today, Londoners have constantly offered an idiosyncratic reading of fashionability that has profoundly influenced the nature of style elsewhere. Drawing on a range of sources, including paintings, street photography, maps, tourist guides, literature, stage, and press representations, Fashioning London paints a vivid and definitive portrait of London's iconoclastic style.

Panic Attacks


Robert E. Bartholomew - 2004
    Examining the ability of the media to whip up a panic and our tendency to fall victim to mass delusion and hysteria, this title discusses America's "kissing bug" scare of 1899; Seattle's atomic fallout fiasco of 1954; the phantom slasher of Taipei in 1956; Belgium's recent Coca-Cola poisoning scare and the "mad gasser" of Mattoon, and more.