Given what we know about climate change, should we still be raising and eating cattle? And how do we weigh the cultural and economic value of cattle against their environmental impact? This engaging book brings history, science, economics and popular culture together in a timely discussion about whether current practices can be justified in a period of rapid climate change.

Journalist Gregory Mthembu-Salter first encountered South Africa’s love of cattle during his own lobola negotiations. The book traces his personal journey through kraals, rangelands and feedlots across South Africa to find out more about the national hunger for cattle. He takes a broad sweep – drawing on such diverse sources as politicians involved in land reform, history, braai-side interviews with cattle farmers and abattoir owners, conversations with his mother-in-law, and analysis of cutting-edge science.

Mthembu-Salter suggests that perhaps 'cattle can remain wanted and treasured … more as living assets, kept in modest numbers on land where crops will not thrive, whose beef is eaten rarely – and, when it is, is savoured.'

The #1 New York Times and top ten Sunday Times bestseller

'I love this book . . . reading it will actually change not just how you see strangers, but how you look at yourself, the news - the world. Reading this book changed me' Oprah Winfrey

The highly anticipated new book from Malcolm Gladwell, international bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath

The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger's motives?

Through a series of encounters and misunderstandings - from history, psychology and infamous legal cases - Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have disastrous consequences.

No one challenges our shared assumptions like Malcolm Gladwell. Here he uses stories of deceit and fatal errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown, inviting us to rethink our thinking in these troubled times.

Returning to the family homestead in the Eastern Cape for the holidays, and worried that your city ways and less than perfect knowledge of Xhosa culture will get you a wagging finger in the face from ooMalume – the uncles?

No need to fret. Don’t Upset ooMalume! captures the essence of Xhosa heritage and culture, and explores different aspects of village life. It covers a range of topics, from major Xhosa life ceremonies and traditional clothing, to the significance of uronta (the rondavel) and ubuhlanti (the kraal). Not forgetting the importance of traditional food, the author describes popular dishes, edible forage and even medicinal plants.

This book was born from writer and agriculturalist Hombakazi Mercy Nqandeka’s concern that aspects of Xhosa heritage will be lost to future generations. By interweaving her guide to Xhosa culture with stories from her daily life at Mqele and Bulungula villages, and lessons taught to her by her mother and her late grandmothers, she hopes to help reconnect Xhosa people to their roots.

What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? Yuval Noah Harari challenges everything we know about being human in the perfect read for these unprecedented times.

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us.

In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we’re going.

‘I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species’ Bill Gates

‘Interesting and provocative… It gives you a sense of how briefly we’ve been on this Earth’ Barack Obama

For seventy years, Queen Elizabeth has ruled over an institution and a family. She has been constant in her desire to provide a steady presence and to be a trustworthy steward of the British people and the Commonwealth. In the face of her uncle's abdication, in the uncertainty of the Blitz, and in the tentative exposure of her family and private life to the public via the press, Elizabeth has become synonymous with the crown.

But times change. Recent years have brought grief and turmoil to the House of Windsor, and even as England prepares to celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, there are calls for a changing of the guard.

In The New Royals, journalist Katie Nicholl provides a nuanced look at Elizabeth's remarkable and unrivalled reign, with new stories from Palace courtiers and aides, documentarians, and family members. She examines Charles and Camilla's decades in waiting and beyond-where "The Firm" is headed as William and Kate present the modern faces of an ancient institution. In the wake of Harry and Meghan leaving the Royal Family and Andrew's spectacular fall from grace, the royal family must reckon with its history, the light and the dark, in order to chart a course for Britain beyond its Queen and to show that it is an institution capable of leadership in an ever changing modern world.

How do Muslims fit into South Africa’s well-known narrative of colonialism, apartheid and postapartheid?

South Africa is infamous for apartheid, but the country’s foundation was laid by 176 years of slavery from 1658 to 1834, which formed a crucible of war, genocide and systemic sexual violence that continues to haunt the country today. Enslaved people from East Africa, India and South East Asia, many of whom were Muslim, would eventually constitute the majority of the population of the Cape Colony, the first of the colonial territories that would eventually form South Africa.

Drawing on an extensive popular and official archive, Regarding Muslims analyses the role of Muslims from South Africa’s founding moments to the contemporary period and points to the resonance of these discussions beyond South Africa. It argues that the 350-year archive of images documenting the presence of Muslims in South Africa is central to understanding the formation of concepts of race, sexuality and belonging.

In contrast to the themes of extremism and alienation that dominate Western portrayals of Muslims, Regarding Muslims explores an extensive repertoire of picturesque Muslim figures in South African popular culture, which oscillates with more disquieting images that occasionally burst into prominence during moments of crisis. This pattern is illustrated through analyses of etymology, popular culture, visual art, jokes, bodily practices, oral narratives and literature. The book ends with the complex vision of Islam conveyed in the postapartheid period.

Khamr: The Makings Of A Waterslams is a true story that maps the author’s experience of living with an alcoholic father and the direct conflict of having to perform a Muslim life that taught him that nearly everything he called home was forbidden.

A detailed account from his childhood to early adulthood, Jamil F. Khan lays bare the experience of living in a so-called middle-class Coloured home in a neighbourhood called Bernadino Heights in Kraaifontein, a suburb to the north of Cape Town. His memories are overwhelmed by the constant discord that was created by the chaos and dysfunction of his alcoholic home and a co-dependent relationship with his mother, while trying to manage the daily routine of his parents keeping up appearances and him maintaining scholastic excellence.

Khan’s memories are clear and detailed, which in turn is complemented by his scholarly thinking and analysis of those memories. He interrogates the intersections of Islam, Colouredness and the hypocrisy of respectability as well as the effect perceived class status has on these social realities in simple yet incisive language, giving the reader more than just a memoir of pain and suffering.

Khan says about his debut book: "This is not a story for the romanticisation of pain and perseverance, although it tells of overcoming many difficulties. It is a critique of secret violence in faith communities and families, and the hypocrisy that has damaged so many people still looking for a place and way to voice their trauma. This is a critique of the value placed on ritual and culture at the expense of human life and well-being, and the far-reaching consequences of systems of oppression dressed up as tradition."

What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

‘Miskien issit omdat poverty my define en nie die racial politics vannie land ie.’

Wit issie ’n colour nie is ’n versameling verhale oor grootword en die lewe in die buitewyke van die Kaapse Vlakte. Dit dek identiteit, rassepolitiek, sosio- ekonomiese kwessies en bruin kultuur, en bevraagteken die Suid-Afrika waarin ons ons bevind. Dit is gevul met galgehumor, rou eerlikheid en hartverskeurende vertellings van pogings om die lewe op die Vlakte te navigeer. Hierdie versameling is diep persoonlik en ’n ontstellend waar weergawe van die lewe aan die ander kant van die spoor, geskryf in Kaapse Afrikaans.

It is impossible to talk about 20th century comedy without discussing George Carlin.

Named the 2nd greatest standup of the 20th century by both Comedy Central and Rolling Stone, Carlin garnered multiple gold records, 4 Grammys, 6 Emmy nominations, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He was the first host of SNL, appeared on the Tonight Show some 130 times, and acted in beloved films like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Dogma. Dubbed "the dean of counterculture comedians," George Carlin was an American icon.

A perfect introduction for new fans and a worthy addition to the collections of old fans, The Best of Carlin showcases the longevity, range, and - above all - hilarity of the master. Filled with thoughts, musings, questions, lists, beliefs, curiosities, monologues, assertions, assumptions, and other delicious verbal ordeals, it is drop-dead funny tour through Carlin's mind.

More than ten years after his death, Carlin's characteristically ironic takes on life's annoying universal truths remain thoughtful, fearless, and somehow more relevant than ever.

From its beginnings as an alternative and dissident form of dance training in the 1960s, Somatics emerged at the end of the twentieth century as one of the most popular and widespread regimens used to educate dancers. It is now found in dance curricula worldwide, helping to shape the look and sensibilities of both dancers and choreographers and thereby influencing much of the dance we see onstage worldwide. One of the first books to examine Somatics in detail and to analyse how and what it teaches in the dance studio, The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training considers how dancers discover and assimilate new ways of moving and also larger cultural values associated with those movements. The book traces the history of Somatics, and it also details how Somatics developed in different locales, engaging with local politics and dance histories so as to develop a distinctive pedagogy that nonetheless shared fundamental concepts with other national and regional contexts. In so doing it shows how dance training can inculcate an embodied politics by guiding and shaping the experience of bodily sensation, constructing forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summoning bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout, the author focuses on the concept of the natural body and the importance of a natural way of moving as central to the claims that Somatics makes concerning its efficacy and legitimacy.

An intra-ethnic study of Latina/o fiction written in the United States from the early 1990s to the present, Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope. This literature constitutes a new sub-genre of Latina/o fiction, which the author calls the Latina/o dictatorship novel. The book illuminates Latina/os' central contributions to the literary history of the dictatorship novel by analyzing how Latina/o writers with national origin roots in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America imaginatively represent authoritarianism. The novels collectively generate what Harford Vargas terms a "Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary" that positions authoritarianism on a continuum of domination alongside imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarization. Focusing on novels by writers such as Junot Diaz, Hector Tobar, Cristina Garcia, Salvador Plascencia, and Francisco Goldman, the book reveals how Latina/o dictatorship novels foreground more ubiquitous modes of oppression to indict Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism, and structural discrimination in the U.S., as well as repressive hierarchies of power in general. Harford Vargas simultaneously utilizes formalist analysis to investigate how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques such as footnotes, focalization, emplotment, and metafiction to depict dictatorial structures and relations. In building on narrative theories of character, plot, temporality, and perspective, Harford Vargas explores how the Latina/o dictatorship novel stages power dynamics. Forms of Dictatorship thus queries the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form-that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can reproduce and resist repressive power.

In the Handbook of Culture and Memory, Brady Wagoner and his team of international contributors explore how memory is deeply entwined with social relationships, stories in film and literature, group history, ritual practices, material artifacts, and a host of other cultural devices. Culture is seen as the medium through which people live and make meaning of their lives. In this book, analyses focus on the mutual constitution of people's memories and the social-cultural worlds to which they belong. The complex relationship between culture and memory is explored in: the concept of memory and its relation to evolution, neurology and history; life course changes in memory from its development in childhood to its decline in old age; and the national and transnational organization of collective memory and identity through narratives propagated in political discourse, the classroom, and the media.

Eternity is a unique kind of existence that is supposed to belong to the most real being or beings. It is an existence that is not shaken by the common wear and tear of time. Over the two and half millennia history of Western philosophy we find various conceptions of eternity, yet one sharp distinction between two notions of eternity seems to run throughout this long history: eternity as timeless existence, as opposed to eternity as existence in all times. Both kinds of existence stand in sharp contrast to the coming in and out of existence of ordinary beings, like hippos, humans, and toothbrushes: were these eternally-timeless, for example, a hippo could not eat, a human could not think or laugh, and a toothbrush would be of no use. Were a hippo an eternal-everlasting creature, it would not have to bother itself with nutrition in order to extend its existence. Everlasting human beings might appear similar to us, but their mental life and patterns of behavior would most likely be very different from ours. The distinction between eternity as timelessness and eternity as everlastingness goes back to ancient philosophy, to the works of Plato and Aristotle, and even to the fragments of Parmenides' philosophical poem. In the twentieth century, it seemed to go out of favor, though one could consider as eternalists those proponents of realism in philosophy of mathematics, and those of timeless propositions in philosophy of language (i.e., propositions that are said to exist independently of the uttered sentences that convey their thought-content). However, recent developments in contemporary physics and its philosophy have provided an impetus to revive notions of eternity due to the view that time and duration might have no place in the most fundamental ontology. The importance of eternity is not limited to strictly philosophical discussions. It is a notion that also has an important role in traditional Biblical interpretation. The Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name of God considered to be most sacred, is derived from the Hebrew verb for being, and as a result has been traditionally interpreted as denoting eternal existence (in either one of the two senses of eternity). Hence, Calvin translates the Tetragrammaton as 'l'Eternel', and Mendelssohn as 'das ewige Wesen' or 'der Ewige'. Eternity also plays a central role in contemporary South American fiction, especially in the works of J.L. Borges. The representation of eternity poses a major challenge to both literature and arts (just think about the difficulty of representing eternity in music, a thoroughly temporal art). The current volume aims at providing a history of the philosophy of eternity surrounded by a series of short essays, or reflections, on the role of eternity and its representation in literature, religion, language, liturgy, science, and music. Thus, our aim is to provide a history of philosophy as a discipline that is in constant commerce with various other domains of human inquisition and exploration.

Unruly Media argues that we're on the crest of a new international, intermedial style in which sonic and visual parameters become heightened and accelerated. This audiovisual turn, driven by digital technologies and socioeconomic changes, calls for new forms of attention. Post-classical cinema, with its multi-plot narratives and flashy style, fragments under the influence of audiovisual numbers and music-video-like sync. Music video, after migrating to the web, becomes more than a way of selling songs. YouTube's brief and low-res clips encompass many forms, and foreground reiteration, graphic values and affective intensity. All three of these media are riven by one another: a trajectory from YouTube through music video to the new digital cinema reveals structural commonalities, especially in the realms of rhythm, texture and form. Music video, YouTube, and postclassical cinema remain undertheorized. This is the first book to account for the current audiovisual landscape across medium and platform-to try to characterize the audiovisual swirl. Unruly Media includes both new theoretical models and readings of numerous current multimedia works. It also includes several chapters devoted to the oeuvre of highly popular directors, their films, commercials and music videos. Unruly Media argues that attending equally to soundtrack and image can show how these media work, and the ways they both mirror and shape our modern experience.

During the heyday of Cold War cultural politics, state-sponsored performances of classical and popular music were central to the diplomatic agendas of the United States and the Soviet Union, while states on the periphery of the conflict often used state-funded performances to articulate their position in the polarized global network. In Albania in particular, the postwar government invested heavily in public performances, effectively creating a new genre of popular music: the wildly popular light music. In Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania, author Nicholas Tochka traces an aural history of Albania's government through a close examination of the development and reception of light music as it has long been broadcast at an annual song competition, Radio-Television Albania's Festival of Song. Drawing on a wide range of archival resources and over forty interviews with composers, lyricists, singers, and bureaucrats, Tochka describes how popular music became integral to governmental projects to improve society-and a major concern for both state-socialist and post-socialist regimes between 1945 and the present. Tochka's narrative begins in the immediate postwar period, arguing that state officials saw light music as a modernizing agent that would cultivate a cosmopolitan, rational populace. Interweaving archival research with ethnographic interviews, author Nicholas Tochka argues that modern political orders do not simply render social life visible, but also audible. As the Cold War thawed and communist states fell, the post-socialist government turned again to light music, now hoping that these musicians could help shape Albania into a capitalist, "European" state. Incorporating insights from ethnomusicology, governmental studies, and post-socialist studies, Audible States presents an original perspective on music and government that reveals the fluid, pervasive, but ultimately limited nature of state power in the modern world. Tochka's project represents a nascent entry in a growing area of study in music scholarship that focuses on post-soviet Europe and popular musics. A remarkably researched and engagingly written study, Audible States is a foundational text in this area and will be of great interest for music scholars and graduate students interested in popular music, sound studies, and politics of the Cold War.

Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity.
Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski Jenkins begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century's end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.
A persuasively argued and richly textured monograph on eighteenth-century English culture, A Taste for China will interest scholars of cultural history, thing theory, and East-West relations.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood studios and record companies churned out films, albums, music videos and promotional materials that sought to recapture, revise, and re-imagine the 1950s. Breaking from the dominant wisdom that casts the trend as wholly defined by Ronald Reagan's politics or the rise of postmodernism, Back to the Fifties reveals how Fifties nostalgia from 1973 to 1988 was utilized by a range of audiences for diverse and often competing agendas. Films from American Graffiti to Hairspray and popular music from Sha Na Na to Michael Jackson shaped-and was shaped by-the complex social, political and cultural conditions of the Reagan Era. By closely examining the ways that "the Fifties" were remade and recalled, Back to the Fifties explores how cultural memory is shaped for a generation of teenagers trained by popular culture to rewind, record, recycle and replay.

Stress. Everyone is talking about it, suffering from it, trying desperately to manage it-now more than ever. From 1970 to 1980, 2,326 academic articles appeared with the word "stress" in the title. In the decade between 2000 and 2010 that number jumped to 21,750. Has life become ten times more stressful, or is it the stress concept itself that has grown exponentially over the past 40 years? In One Nation Under Stress, Dana Becker argues that our national infatuation with the therapeutic culture has created a middle-class moral imperative to manage the tensions of daily life by turning inward, ignoring the social and political realities that underlie those tensions. Becker shows that although stress is often associated with conditions over which people have little control- workplace policies unfavorable to family life, increasing economic inequality, war in the age of terrorism-the stress concept focuses most of our attention on how individuals react to stress. A proliferation of self-help books and dire medical warnings about the negative effects of stress on our physical and emotional health all place the responsibility for alleviating stress-though yoga, deep breathing, better diet, etc.-squarely on the individual. The stress concept has come of age in a period of tectonic social and political shifts. Nevertheless, we persist in the all-American belief that we can meet these changes by re-engineering ourselves rather than tackling the root causes of stress. Examining both research and popular representations of stress in cultural terms, Becker traces the evolution of the social uses of the stress concept as it has been transformed into an all-purpose vehicle for defining, expressing, and containing middle-class anxieties about upheavals in American society.

Music and tourism, both integral to the culture and livelihood of the circum-Caribbean region, have until recently been approached from disparate disciplinary perspectives. Scholars who specialize in tourism studies typically focus on issues such as economic policy, sustainability, and political implications; music scholars are more likely to concentrate on questions of identity, authenticity, neo-colonialism, and appropriation. Although the insights generated by these paths of scholarship have long been essential to study of the region, Sun, Sea, and Sound turns its attention to the dynamics and interrelationships between tourism and music throughout the region. Editors Timothy Rommen and Daniel T. Neely bring together a group of leading scholars from the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, mobility studies, and history to develop and explore a framework - termed music touristics - that considers music in relation to the wide range of tourist experiences that have developed in the region. Over the course of eleven chapters, the authors delve into an array of issues including the ways in which countries such as Jamaica and Cuba have used music to distinguish themselves within the international tourism industry, the tourism surrounding music festivals in St. Lucia and New Orleans, the intersections between music and sex tourism in Brazil, and spirituality tourism in Cuba. An indispensable resource for the study of music and tourism in global perspective, Sun, Sea, and Sound is essential reading for scholars and students across disciplines interested in the Caribbean region.

Covering significant historical and cultural moments, public figures and celebrities, art and entertainment, and technology that influenced life during the decade, this book documents the 1950s through the lens of popular culture. On the surface, the 1950s was a time of post-war prosperity and abundance. However, in spite of a relaxation of immigration policies, the "good life" in the 50s was mainly confined to white non-ethnic Americans. A new Cold War with the Soviet Union intended to contain the threat of Communism, and the resulting red scare tinged the experience of all U.S. citizens during the decade. This book examines the key trends, people, and movements of the 1950s and inspects them within a larger cultural and social context. By highlighting controversies in the decade, readers will gain a better understanding of the social values and thinking of the time. The examination of the individuals who influenced American culture in the 1950s enables students to gauge the tension between established norms of conformity and those figures that used pop culture as a broad avenue for change-either intentionally, or by accident. Presents a balanced perspective on the decade that debunks the popular myth that the 1950s was uniformly a happy, carefree time of wholesome fun and "the good old days" Documents the suburban transformation that drastically changed American society Provides data that shows television viewing statistics and viewer ratings that helps readers see the influence of television media in the 1950s Includes a section that explores how the changes within the 1950s have a legacy that continue to affect our current cultural climate

John Calvin's American Legacy explores the ways Calvin and the Calvinist tradition have influenced American life. Though there are books that trace the role Calvin and Calvinism have played in the national narrative, they tend to focus, as books, on particular topics and time periods. This work, divided into three sections, is the first to present studies that, taken together, represent the breadth of Calvinism's impact in the United States. In addition, each section moves chronologically, ranging from colonial times to the twenty-first century. After a brief introduction focused on the life of Calvin and some of the problems involved in how he is viewed and studied, the volume moves into the first section - "Calvin, Calvinism, and American Society " - which looks at the economics of the Colonial period, Calvin and the American identity, and the evidence for Calvin's influence on American democracy. The book's second section examines theology, addressing the relationship between Jonathan Edwards's church practice and Calvin's, the Calvinist theological tradition in the nineteenth century, how Calvin came to be understood in the historiography of Williston Walker and Perry Miller, and Calvin's influence on some of the theologies of the twentieth century. The third section, "John Calvin, Calvinism, and American Letters,looks at Calvinism's influence on such writers as Samson Occom, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Max Weber, Mark Twain, and John Updike. Altogether, this volume demonstrates the wide-ranging impact of Calvin's thinking throughout American history and society.

The term "emerging media " responds to the "big data " now available as a result of the larger role digital media play in everyday life, as well as the notion of "emergence " that has grown across the architecture of science and technology over the last two decades with increasing imbrication. The permeation of everyday life by emerging media is evident, ubiquitous, and destined to accelerate. No longer are images, institutions, social networks, thoughts, acts of communication, emotions and speech-the "media " by means of which we express ourselves in daily life-linked to clearly demarcated, stable entities and contexts. Instead, the loci of meaning within which these occur shift and evolve quickly, emerging in far-reaching ways we are only beginning to learn and bring about. This volume's purpose is to develop, broaden and spark future philosophical discussion of emerging media and their ways of shaping and reshaping the habitus within which everyday lives are to be understood. Drawing from the history of philosophy ideas of influential thinkers in the past, intellectual path makers on the contemporary scene offer new philosophical perspectives, laying the groundwork for future work in philosophy and in media studies. On diverse topics such as identity, agency, reality, mentality, time, aesthetics, representation, consciousness, materiality, emergence, and human nature, the questions addressed here consider the extent to which philosophy should or should not take us to be facing a fundamental transformation.

At a moment when the term "Democracy " is evoked to express inchoate aspirations for peace and social change or particular governmental systems that may or may not benefit more than a select minority of the population, this book examines attempts from ancient Mesopotemia to the democratic movements of the early twenty-first century to sustain and improve their own lives and those of outsiders who have migrated into territory they regard as their own. Democratic activists have formed organizations to regulate the distribution of water, to restore the environment, and to assure that they and their children will have a future. They have organized their relations with deities and those who held secular power, and they have created particular institutions that they hoped would help them shape a good, free, and creative life for themselves and those who follow. They have also created laws and representative bodies to serve their needs on a regular basis and have written about the difficulties those they have elected to office have maintaining their ties to those who brought them to power in the first place. Since early times, proponents of direct or participatory democracy have come into conflict with the leaders of representative institutions that claim singular power over democracy. Patriots of one form or another have tried to reclaim the initiative to define what democracy should mean and who should manage it. Frequently people in small communities, trade unions, repressed, exploited, or denigrated racial, religious, political, or sexual groups have marched forward using the language of democracy to find space for themselves and their ideas at the center of political life. Sometimes they have re-interpreted the old laws, and sometimes they have formulated new laws and institutions in order to gain greater opportunities to debate the major issues of their time. Whatever conclusions they come to, they are only temporary since changing times require new solutions, assuring that democracy can only survive as a continuous process. As such and as a system of beliefs, democracy has many flaws. But looking cross-culturally and trans-historically, it still seems like democracy still holds promise for improving the lives of all the world's people.

Initially branching out of the European contradance tradition, the danzon first emerged as a distinct form of music and dance among black performers in nineteenth-century Cuba. By the early twentieth-century, it had exploded in popularity throughout the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean basin. A fundamentally hybrid music and dance complex, it reflects the fusion of European and African elements and had a strong influence on the development of later Latin dance traditions as well as early jazz in New Orleans. Danzon: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance studies the emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, and historical and contemporary significance of this music and dance phenomenon.
Co-authors Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore take an ethnomusicological, historical, and critical approach to the processes of appropriation of the danzon in new contexts, its changing meanings over time, and its relationship to other musical forms. Delving into its long history of controversial popularization, stylistic development, glorification, decay, and rebirth in a continuous transnational dialogue between Cuba and Mexico as well as New Orleans, the authors explore the production, consumption, and transformation of this Afro-diasporic performance complex in relation to global and local ideological discourses. By focusing on interactions across this entire region as well as specific local scenes, Madrid and Moore underscore the extent of cultural movement and exchange within the Americas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and are thereby able to analyze the danzon, the dance scenes it has generated, and the various discourses of identification surrounding it as elements in broader regional processes. Danzon is a significant addition to the literature on Latin American music, dance, and expressive culture; it is essential reading for scholars, students, and fans of this music alike."