Book picks similar to
Japan's Diversity Dilemmas: Ethnicity, Citizenship, and Education by Soo im Lee
japan
science-social
sociology
economics
The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
Mark McGurl - 2009
McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and even more important how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature.McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison.Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, "The Program Era" becomes a meditation on systematic creativity, an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university.An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, "The Program Era" will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
Steven Shapin - 1985
Does the story of Roundheads and Restoration have something to do with the origins of experimental sci-ence? Schaffer and Shapin believed it does.Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.
The Abolition of Work
Bob Black - 1985
Here, a reprinting of the seminal underground essay by Bob Black.
Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life
Fernand Braudel - 1979
Like everything he writes, it is new, stimulating and sparkles like champagne.Braudel's technique, it has been said, is that of a pointilliste. Myriads of separate details, sharp glimpses of reality experienced by real people, are seen miraculously to orchestrate themselves into broad rhythms that underlie and transcend the excitements and struggles of particular periods. Braudel sees the past as we see the present — only in a longer perspective and over a wider field.The perspective is that of the possible, of the actual material limitations to human life in any given time or place. It is the every¬day, the habitual — the obvious that is so obvious it has hitherto been neglected by historians — that Braudel claims for a new and vast and enriching province of history. Food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and, above all, the growth of towns, that powerful agent of social and economic development, are described in all the richness and complexity of real life.The intensely visual quality of Braudel's understanding of history is brought into sharper focus by the remarkable series of illustrations that of themselves would make this book incomparableFERNAND BRAUDEL was born in 1902, received a degree in history in 1923, and subsequently taught in Algeria, Paris and Sao Paulo. He spent five years as a prisoner of war in Germany, during which time he wrote his grand thesis, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, which was published in 1949. In 1946 he became a member of the editorial board of Annates, the famous journal founded by Marc Bloch and Lucian Febvre, whom he succeeded at the College de France in 1949. He has been a member of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and since 1962 has been chief administrator of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. Professor Braudel holds honorary doctor¬ates from universities all over the world.Jacket painting: Detail from Breughel the Elder's The Fall of Icarus, from the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. (Giraudon)"Braudel deserves a Nobel Prize. . . . [This is] the most remarkable picture of human life in the centuries before the human condition was radically changed by the growth of industry that has yet been presented. A book of great originality, a masterpiece."—J. H. Plumb, The Washington Post"Braudel's books enthrall. ... He is brilliant in demonstrating how most history is written on the backs of most people."—John Leonard, The New York Times"Even a preliminary glance at The Structures of Everyday Life shows a book that has no obvious compeer either in scope of reference or level of accessibility to the general reader. ... Its broad authority remains deeply impressive."—Richard Holmes, Harper's"Here is vast erudition, beautifully arranged, presented with grace of style, with humility before life's complexity and warm humanist feeling. Braudel's subject is nothing less than every¬day life all over the world before the industrial revolution.... He succeeds triumphantly in his first purpose: 'if not to see everything, at least to locate everything, and on the requisite world scale.'"—Angus Calder, The Standard"On neither side of the Atlantic does there live a man or woman with so much knowledge of the past as Braudel, or with a greater sense of its aptness to the intellectual occasion in hand....You can't pick up this big fat book without having your attention transfixed by something or other, if only the great gallery of pictures. They are a masterpiece in themselves."—Peter Laslett, The Guardian"This new book is unarguably a brilliant survey of demog¬raphy, urbanisation, transport, technology, food, clothing, housing, money and business, social classes, state power and international trade in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries."—Theodore Zeldin, The Listener-----By examining in detail the material life of preindustrial peoples around the world, Fernand Braudel significantly changed the way historians view their subject. Volume I describes food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and the growth of towns.
The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart
Ruth Behar - 1997
She proposes an anthropology that is lived and written in a personal voice. She does so in the hope that it will lead us toward greater depth of understanding and feeling, not only in contemporary anthropology, but in all acts of witnessing.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Satoshi Nakamoto - 2011
Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of a P2P network to check for double-spending.https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Beautiful Fighting Girl
Tamaki Saitō - 2011
Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society.In Beautiful Fighting Girl, Saito Tamaki offers a far more sophisticated and convincing interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. For Saito, the beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku (obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, Saito understands the otaku’s ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated world—a logical outcome of the media they consume.Featuring extensive interviews with Japanese and American otaku, a comprehensive genealogy of the beautiful fighting girl, and an analysis of the American outsider artist Henry Darger, whose baroque imagination Saito sees as an important antecedent of otaku culture, Beautiful Fighting Girl was hugely influential when first published in Japan, and it remains a key text in the study of manga, anime, and otaku culture. Now available in English for the first time, this book will spark new debates about the role played by desire in the production and consumption of popular culture.
Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology
Mary Douglas - 1970
Each person treats his body as an image of society and Mary Douglas examines the varieties of ritual and symbolic expression and the patterns of social ritual in which they are embodied.Natural Symbols is a book about religion, and less directly, about style. It concerns our own society at least as much as any other, and it has stimulated new insights into religious and political movements and has provoked re-appraisals of current progressive orthodoxies in many fields.
The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo
Saskia Sassen - 1991
What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.
Night-Vision: Illuminating War & Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain
Butch Lee - 2000
hegemony, and the need for a revolutionary movement of the oppressed to overthrow it all.From Night-Vision: "The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as drastic, as disorienting a change as was the original european colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart & restructuring the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race, not nation, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to have. Now you have outcast groups as diverse as the Aryan Nation and the Queer Nation and the Hip Hop Nation publicly rejecting the right of the u.s. government to rule them. All the building blocks of human culture—race, gender, nation, and especially class—are being transformed under great pressure to embody the spirit of this neo-colonial age."
Democracy for the Few
Michael Parenti - 1974
DEMOCRACY FOR THE FEW is a provocative interpretation of American Government that you have likely not been exposed to in elementary school, high school, or other college courses, and certainly not in the mass media. This textbook shows how democracy is repeatedly violated by corporate oligopolies, but how popular forces have fought back and occasionally made gains in spite of the system. By focusing on the relationship between economic power and political power, discussing actual government practices and policies, conspiracies, propaganda, fraud, secrecy and other ploys of government and politics, this book stands apart in its analysis of how US Government works.
Dragon Fighter: One Woman's Epic Struggle for Peace with China
Rebiya Kadeer - 2007
Their culture is filled with music, dance, family, and love of tradition passed down by storytelling through the ages.For millennia, they have survived clashes in the shadow of China, Russia, and Central Asia. Rebiya Kadeer’s courage, intellect, morality, and sacrifice give hope to the nearly eleven million Uyghurs worldwide on whose behalf she speaks as an indomitable world leader for the freedom of her people and the sovereignty of her nation.Her life story is one of legends: as a refugee child, as a poor housewife, as a multimillionaire, as a high official in China’s National People’s Congress, as a political prisoner in solitary confinement for two of nearly six years in jail, and now as a political dissident living in Washington, DC, exiled from her own land.
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
Douglas S. Massey - 1993
It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies. In some urban areas the degree of black segregation is so intense and occurs in so many dimensions simultaneously that it amounts to "hypersegregation."The authors demonstrate that this systematic segregation of African Americans leads inexorably to the creation of underclass communities during periods of economic downturn. Under conditions of extreme segregation, any increase in the overall rate of black poverty yields a marked increase in the geographic concentration of indigence and the deterioration of social and economic conditions in black communities.As ghetto residents adapt to this increasingly harsh environment under a climate of racial isolation, they evolve attitudes, behaviors, and practices that further marginalize their neighborhoods and undermine their chances of success in mainstream American society. This book is a sober challenge to those who argue that race is of declining significance in the United States today.
The Anatomy of Dependence
Takeo Doi - 1973
Takeo Doi to explore and define an area of the psyche which has previously received little attention. The resulting essay, The Anatomy of Dependence, is one of the most penetrating analyses of the Japanese mind ever written, as well as an important original contribution to psychology which transcends the boundaries of cultures and nations.Published in Japan as Amae no Kozo (The Structure of Amae), Dr. Doi's work is focused upon the word "amae" (indulgence) and its related vocabulary. Expressive of an emotion central to the Japanese experience, "amae" refers to the indulging, passive love which surrounds and supports the individual in a group, whether family, neighborhood, or the world at large. Considering the lack of such words in Western languages, Dr. Doi suggests inherent differences between the two cultures-contrasting the ideal of self-reliance with those of interdependence and the indulgence of weaknesses. Yet, he finds that Western audiences have no difficulty in recognizing and identifying with the emotions he describes, and are even searching for a way to express this need.While there is no doubt that the concept of "amae" is more developed in Japan and the feelings it engenders more profound, Dr. Doi's work is widely recognized as having a universal application. This translation of his most important essay has now been long welcomed as a major contribution-not only as an insight into the Japanese mind, but into the minds of men everywhere.
Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America
Roberto G. Gonzales - 2015
I have grown up but I feel like I’m moving backward. And I can’t do anything about it.” –Esperanza Over two million of the nation’s eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.