Lost Causes stages a polemical intervention in the discourse that grounds queer civil rights in etiology -- that is, in the cause of homosexuality, whether choice, "recruitment," or biology. Reading etiology as a narrative form, political strategy, and hermeneutic method in American and British literature and popular culture, it argues that today's gay arguments for biological determinism accept their opponents' paranoia about what Rohy calls "homosexual reproduction"-that is, nonsexual forms of queer increase-preventing more complex ways of considering sexuality and causality. This study combines literary texts and psychoanalytic theory--two salient sources of etiological narratives in themselves -- to reconsider phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction: contagion in Borrowed Time, bad influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, trauma in The Night Watch, choice of identity in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and dangerous knowledge in The Well of Loneliness. These readings draw on Lacan's notion of retroactive causality to convert the question of what causes homosexuality into a question of what homosexuality causes as the constitutive outside of a heteronormative symbolic order. Ultimately, this study shows, queer communities and queer theory must embrace formerly shaming terms -- why should the increase of homosexuality be unthinkable? -- while retaining the critical sense of queerness as a non-identity, a permanent negativity.

Music- and style-centred youth cultures are now a familiar aspect of everyday life in countries as far apart around the globe as Nepal and Jamaica, Hong Kong and Israel, Denmark and Australia. This lucid and original text provides a lively and wide-ranging account of the relationship between popular music and youth culture within the context of debates about the spatial dimensions of identity. It begins with a clear and comprehensive survey, and critical evaluation, of the existing body of literature on youth culture and popular music developed by sociologists and cultural and media theorists. It then develops a fresh perspective on the ways in which popular music is appropriated as a cultural resource by young people, using as a springboard a series of original ethnographic studies of dance music, rap, bhangra and rock. Bennett's original research material is carefully contextualised within a wider international literature on youth styles, local spaces and popular music but it serves to illustrate graphically how styles of music and their attendant stylistic innovations are appropriated and `lived out' by young people in particular social spaces. Music, Bennett argues, is produced and consumed by young people in ways that both inform their sense of self and also serve to construct the social world in which their identities operate. With its comprehensive coverage of youth and music studies and its important new insights, Popular Music and Youth Culture is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in sociology, cultural studies, media studies and popular music studies. Dr ANDY BENNETT is lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has published articles on aspects of youth culture, popular music, local identity and music and ethnicity in a number of journals, including Sociological Review, Media Culture and Society and Popular Music. He is currently co-editing a book on guitar cultures.

In response to increased focus on the protection of intangible cultural heritage across the world, Music Endangerment offers a new practical approach to assessing, advocating, and assisting the sustainability of musical genres. Drawing upon relevant ethnomusicological research on globalization and musical diversity, musical change, music revivals, and ecological models for sustainability, author Catherine Grant systematically critiques strategies that are currently employed to support endangered musics. She then constructs a comparative framework between language and music, adapting and applying the measures of language endangerment as developed by UNESCO, in order to identify ways in which language maintenance might (and might not) illuminate new pathways to keeping these musics strong. Grant's work presents the first in-depth, standardized, replicable tool for gauging the level of vitality of music genres, providing an invaluable resource for the creation and maintenance of international cultural policy. It will enable those working in the field to effectively demonstrate the degree to which outside intervention could be of tangible benefit to communities whose musical practices are under threat. Significant for both its insight and its utility, Music Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing field of applied ethnomusicology, and will help secure the continued diversity of our global musical traditions.

In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists - including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace - to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body traces the history of the Cuban mulata and her association with hips, sensuality and popular dance. It examines how the mulata choreographs her racialised identity through her hips and enacts an embodied theory called hip(g)nosis. By focusing on her living and dancing body in order to flesh out the process of identity formation, this book makes a claim for how subaltern bodies negotiate a cultural identity that continues to mark their bodies on a daily basis. Combining literary and personal narratives with historical and theoretical accounts of Cuban popular dance history, religiosity and culture, this work investigates the power of embodied exchanges: bodies watching, looking, touching and dancing with one another. It sets up a genealogy of how the representations and venerations of the dancing mulata continue to circulate and participate in the volatile political and social economy of contemporary Cuba.

Essays and poems exploring the diverse range of the Arab American experience. This collection begins with stories of immigration and exile by following newcomers' attempts to assimilate into American society. Editors Ghassan Zeineddine, Nabeel Abraham, and Sally Howell have assembled emerging and established writers who examine notions of home, belonging, and citizenship from a wide array of communities, including cultural heritages originating from Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen. The strong pattern in Arab Detroit today is to oppose marginalization through avid participation in almost every form of American identity-making. This engaged stance is not a by-product of culture, but a new way of thinking about the US in relation to one's homeland. Hadha Baladuna ("this is our country") is the first work of creative nonfiction in the field of Arab American literature that focuses entirely on the Arab diaspora in Metro Detroit, an area with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US. Narratives move from a young Lebanese man in the early 1920s peddling his wares along country roads to an aspiring Iraqi-Lebanese poet who turns to the music of Tupac Shakur for inspiration. The anthology then pivots to experiences growing up Arab American in Detroit and Dearborn, capturing the cultural vibrancy of urban neighborhoods and dramatizing the complexity of what it means to be Arab, particularly from the vantage point of biracial writers. Included in these works is a fearless account of domestic and sexual abuse and a story of a woman who comes to terms with her queer identity in a community that is not entirely accepting. The volume also includes photographs from award-winning artist Rania Matar that present heterogenous images of Arab American women set against the arresting backdrop of Detroit. The anthology concludes with explorations of political activism dating back to the 1960s and Dearborn's shifting demographic landscape. Hadha Baladuna will shed light on the shifting position of Arab Americans in an era of escalating tension between the United States and the Arab region.

Most of our expereince is visual. We obtain most of our information and knowledge through sight, whether from reading books and newspapers, from watching television or from quickly glimpsing road signs. Many of our judgements and decisions, concerning where we live, what we shall drive and sit on and what we wear, are based on what places, cars, furniture and clothes look like. Much of our entertainment and recreation is visual, whether we visit art galleries, cinemas or read comics. This book concerns that visual experience. Why do we have the visual experiences we have? Why do the buildings, cars, products and advertisements we see look the way they do? How are we to explain the existence of different styles of paintings, different types of cars and different genres of film? How are we to explain the existence of different visual cultures? This book begins to answer these questions by explaining visual experience in terms of visual culture. The strengths and weaknesses of traditional means of analysing and explaining visual culture are examined and assessed. Using a wide range of historical and contemporary examples, it is argued that the groups which artists and designers form, the audiences and markets which they sell to, and the different social classes which are produced and reproduced by art and design are all part of the successful explanation and critical evaluation of visual culture.

Real Deceptions develops a new theory of realism through close consideration of myriad contemporary art, media, and cultural practices. Rather than focusing on transgressing deceptions which distort reality, the book argues that reality lies within the deceptions themselves. That is to say, realism's political potential emerges not by revealing deception but precisely by staging deceptions-particularly deceptions that imperil the very categories of true and false. In lieu of perceiving deception as an obstacle to truth, it shows how deception functions as the truth's necessary conduit. Categories invoked in realist works, such as trompe l'oeil, illusion, hypervirtuality, and simulation help to establish how realism can be seen as moving from the creation of mere epistemological uncertainty to radical ontologically-based indeterminacy. The book cultivates this schema by considering productive connections between insights from Jacques Lacan and Jacques Ranciere. Real Deceptions not only applies these theoretical frameworks to art and media examples, but also engages in the reverse move of using the "cases" to further the theories. This dual approach points to the ways in which efforts to produce realist representations often give rise to the destabilizing Real.

Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance offers new cutting edge essays focusing on Song and Dance as performative gestures that not only entertain but also act on audiences and performers. The chapters range across musical theatre, opera, theatre and other artistic practices, from Glee to Gardzienice, Beckett to Disney, Broadway to Turner Prize winning sound installation. The chapters draw together these diverse examples of vocality and physicality by exploring their affect rather than through considering them as texts. This book considers performativity in relation to Dramaturgy, Transition, Identity, Context, Practice, Community and finally, Writing. The book reveals how the texture of music theatre, containing as it does the gestures of song and dance, is performative in dense, interwoven, dialogical and paradoxical ways, partly caused by the intertextual and interdisciplinary energies of its make-up, partly by its active dynamism in performance. The book's contributors derive methodologies from many disciplines, seeking in many ways to resist and explode discrete discipline-based enquiry. They share methodologies and performance repertoires with discipline-based scholarship from theatre studies, musicology and cultural studies, but there are many other approaches and case studies which we also embrace. Together, they view these as neighboring voices whose dialogue enriches the study of contemporary music theatre.

The study of emotions and emotional displays has achieved a deserved prominence in recent classical scholarship. The emotions of the classical world can be plumbed to provide a valuable heuristic tool. Emotions can help us understand key issues of ancient ethics, ideological assumptions, and normative behaviors, but, more frequently than not, classical scholars have turned their attention to "social emotions" requiring practical decisions and ethical judgments in public and private gatherings. The emotion of disgust has been unwarrantedly neglected, even though it figures saliently in many literary genres, such as iambic poetry and comedy, historiography, and even tragedy and philosophy. This collection of seventeen essays by fifteen authors features the emotion of disgust as one cutting edge of the study of Greek and Roman antiquity. Individual contributions explore a wide range of topics. These include the semantics of the emotion both in Greek and Latin literature, its social uses as a means of marginalizing individuals or groups of individuals, such as politicians judged deviant or witches, its role in determining aesthetic judgments, and its potentialities as an elicitor of aesthetic pleasure. The papers also discuss the vocabulary and uses of disgust in life (Galli, actors, witches, homosexuals) and in many literary genres: ancient theater, oratory, satire, poetry, medicine, historiography, Hellenistic didactic and fable, and the Roman novel. The Introduction addresses key methodological issues concerning the nature of the emotion, its cognitive structure, and modern approaches to it. It also outlines the differences between ancient and modern disgust and emphasizes the appropriateness of "projective or second-level disgust" (vilification) as a means of marginalizing unwanted types of behavior and stigmatizing morally condemnable categories of individuals. The volume is addressed first to scholars who work in the field of classics, but, since texts involving disgust also exhibit significant cultural variation, the essays will attract the attention of scholars who work in a wide spectrum of disciplines, including history, social psychology, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies.

From the Great Game to the present, an international cultural and political biography of one of our most evocative, compelling, and poorly understood narratives of history. The Silk Road is rapidly becoming one of the key geocultural and geostrategic concepts of the twenty-first century. Yet, for much of the twentieth century the Silk Road received little attention, overshadowed by nationalism and its invented pasts, and a world dominated by conflict and Cold War standoffs. In The Silk Road, Tim Winter reveals the different paths this history of connected cultures took towards global fame, a century after the first evidence of contact between China and Europe was unearthed. He also reveals how this remarkably popular depiction of the past took hold as a platform for geopolitical ambition, a celebration of peace and cosmopolitan harmony, and created dreams of exploration and grand adventure. Winter further explores themes that reappear today as China seeks to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century. Known across the globe, the Silk Road is a concept fit for the modern world, and yet its significance and origins remain poorly understood and are the subject of much confusion. Pathbreaking in its analysis, this book presents an entirely new reading of this increasingly important concept, one that is likely to remain at the center of world affairs for decades to come.

Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for the modern conception of human rights. According to the Declaration, the rights of man are held to be universal, at all times and all places. But as recent crises around migrants and refugees have made obvious, this idea, sacred as it might be among human rights advocates, is exhausted. It's long past time to reconsider the principles on which Western economic and political norms rest. This book advocates for a tradition of political universality as an alternative to the juridical universalism of the Declaration. Insurgent universality isn't based on the idea that we all share some common humanity but, rather, on the democratic excess by which people disrupt and reject an existing political and economic order. Going beyond the constitutional armor of the representative state, it brings into play a plurality of powers to which citizens have access, not through the funnel of national citizenship but in daily political practice. We can look to recent history to see various experiments in cooperative and insurgent democracy: the Indignados in Spain, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and, going further back, the Paris Commune, the 1917 peasant revolts during the Russian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. This book argues that these movements belong to the common legacy of insurgent universality, which is characterized by alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed, hindered, and forgotten. Massimiliano Tomba examines these events to show what they could have been and what they can still be. As such he explores how their common legacy can be reactivated. Insurgent Universality analyzes the manifestos and declarations that came out of these experiments considering them as collective works of an alternative canon of political theory that challenges the great names of the Western pantheon of political thought and builds bridges between European and non-European political and social experiments.

'Beautifully written, sumptuously illustrated, constantly fascinating' The Times On 26 November 1922 Howard Carter first peered into the newly opened tomb of an ancient Egyptian boy-king. When asked if he could see anything, he replied: 'Yes, yes, wonderful things.' In Tutankhamun's Trumpet, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes a unique approach to that tomb and its contents. Instead of concentrating on the oft-told story of the discovery, or speculating on the brief life and politically fractious reign of the boy king, Wilkinson takes the objects buried with him as the source material for a wide-ranging, detailed portrait of ancient Egypt - its geography, history, culture and legacy. One hundred artefacts from the tomb, arranged in ten thematic groups, are allowed to speak again - not only for themselves, but as witnesses of the civilization that created them. Never before have the treasures of Tutankhamun been analysed and presented for what they can tell us about ancient Egyptian culture, its development, its remarkable flourishing, and its lasting impact. Filled with surprising insights, unusual details, vivid descriptions and, above all, remarkable objects, Tutankhamun's Trumpet will appeal to all lovers of history, archaeology, art and culture, as well as all those fascinated by the Egypt of the pharaohs. 'I've read many books on ancient Egypt, but I've never felt closer to its people' The Sunday Times

Music Downtown Eastside draws on two decades of research in one of North America's poorest urban areas to illustrate how human rights can be promoted through music. Harrison's examination of how gentrification, grant funding, and community organizations affect the success or failure of human rights-focused musical initiatives offers insights into the complex relationship between culture, poverty, and human rights that have global implications and applicability. The book takes the reader into popular music jams and music therapy sessions offered to the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. Harrison analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and musical moments where human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated. The book offers insights on the relationship between music and poverty, a social deprivation that diminishes capabilities and rights. It contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices and policy.

A Los Angeles Times columnist recounts her eighteen-month undercover stint as a man, a time during which she underwent considerable personal risks as she worked a sales job, joined a bowling league, frequented sex clubs, dated, and encountered firsthand the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. 'This captivating account will forever change the way you see men - and perhaps yourself.' -- Marie Claire An addictive, enthralling read? breathtaking. -- Viv Groskop, Observer Beautifully written? a brave and fascinating book. -- Christopher Hart, Sunday Times Funny, compelling and human. -- Sarah Vine, The Times Intelligent, articulate and perceptive... one of the most sympathetic renderings of masculinity you?re likely to read.-- Lionel Shriver, Guardian

This book takes a fresh look at the earliest Buddhism texts and offers various suggestions how the teachings in them had developed. Two themes predominate. Firstly, it argues that we cannot understand the Buddha unless we understand that he was debating with other religious teachers, notably brahmins. For example, he denied the existence of a 'soul'; but what exactly was he denying? Another chapter suggests that the canonical story of the Buddha's encounter with a brigand who wore a garland of his victims' fingers probably reflects an encounter with a form of ecstatic religion.;The other main theme concerns metaphor, allegory and literalism. By taking the words of the texts literally - despite the Buddha's warning not to - successive generations of his disciples created distinctions and developed doctrines far beyond his original intention. One chapter shows how this led to a scholastic categorisation of meditation. Failure to understand a basic metaphor also gave rise to the later argument between the Mahayana and the older tradition.;Perhaps most important of all, a combination of literalism with ignorance of the Buddha's allusions to brahminism led buddhists to forget that the B

In the early 1900s, the language of America was becoming colloquial English-the language of the businessman, manager, and professional. Since college and high school education were far from universal, many people turned to correspondence education-that era's distance learning-to learn the art of speaking and writing. By the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of Americans were sending coupons from newspapers and magazines to order Sherwin Cody's 100% Self-correcting Course in the English Language, a patented mail-order course in English that was taken by over 150,000 people.
Cody's ubiquitous signature advertisement, which ran for over forty years, promised a scientifically-tested invention that improved speaking and writing in just 15 minutes a day. Cody's ad explained that people are judged by their English, and he offered self-improvement and self-confidence through the mail.
In this book, linguist Edwin Battistella tells the story of Sherwin Cody and his famous English course, situating both the man and the course in early twentieth century cultural history. The author shows how Cody became a businessman-a writer, grammatical entrepreneur, and mass-marketer whose ads proclaimed "Good Money in Good English" and asked "Is Good English Worth 25 Cents to You?" His course, perhaps the most widely-advertised English education program in history, provides a unique window onto popular views of language and culture and their connection to American notions of success and failure. But Battistella shows Sherwin Cody was also part of a larger shift in attitudes. Using Cody's course as a reference point, he also looks at the self-improvement ethic reflected in such courses and products as theHarvard Classics, The Book of Etiquette, the Book-of-the-Month Club, the U.S. School of Music, and the Charles Atlas and Dale Carnegie courses to illustrate how culture became popular and how self-reliance evolved into self-improvement.

This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carre, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others. THIS BRAND NEW EDITION FEATURES A NEW INTRODUCTION BY MATT COLQUHOUN AND NEW AFTERWORD BY SIMON REYNOLDS.

This is the first study of May 68 in fiction and in film. It looks at the ways the events themselves were represented in narrative, evaluates the impact these crucial times had on French cultural and intellectual history, and offers readings of texts which were shaped by it. The chosen texts concentrate upon important features of May and its aftermath: the student rebellion, the workers strikes, the question of the intellectuals, sexuality, feminism, the political thriller, history, and textuality. Attention is paid to the context of the social and cultural history of the Fifth Republic, to Gaullism, and to the cultural politics of gauchisme. The book aims to show the importance of the interplay of real and imaginary in the text(s) of May, and the emphasis placed upon the problematic of writing and interpretation. It argues that re-reading the texts of May forces a reconsideration of the existing accounts of postwar cultural history. The texts of May reflect on social order, on rationality, logic, and modes of representation, and are this highly relevant to contemporary debates on modernity.

The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide examines how these cities' world-famous arts events have shaped and been shaped by their long-term interaction with their urban environments. While the Edinburgh International Festival and Adelaide Festival are long-established, prestigious events that champion artistic excellence, they are also accompanied by the two largest open-access fringe festivals in the world. It is this simultaneous staging of multiple events within Edinburgh's Summer Festivals and Adelaide's Mad March that generates the visibility and festive atmosphere popularly associated with both places. Drawing on perspectives from theatre studies and cultural geography, this book interrogates how the Festival City, as a place myth, has developed in the very different local contexts of Edinburgh and Adelaide, and how it is challenged by groups competing for the right to use and define public space. Each chapter examines a recent performative event in which festival debates and controversies spilled out beyond the festival space to activate the public sphere by intersecting with broader concerns and audiences. This book forges an interdisciplinary, comparative framework for festival studies to interrogate how festivals are embedded in the social and political fabric of cities and to assess the cultural impact of the festivalisation phenomenon.

The bestselling author of The Beauty Myth, Vagina and The End of America chronicles the struggles and eventual triumph of John Addington Symonds, a Victorian-era poet, biographer, and critic who penned what became a foundational text on our modern understanding of human sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ legal rights. In Outrages, Naomi Wolf chronicles the struggles and eventual triumph of John Addington Symonds, a Victorian-era poet, biographer, and critic who penned what became a foundational text on our modern understanding of human sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ legal rights, despite writing at a time when anything interpreted as homoerotic could be used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law. Wolf's book is extremely relevant today for what it has to say about the vital importance of freedom of speech and the courageous roles of publishers and booksellers in an era of growing calls for censorship and ever-escalating state violations of privacy. At a time when the American Library Association, the Guardian, and other observers document national and global efforts from censoring LGBTQ+ voices in libraries to using anti-trans and homophobic sentiments cynically to win elections, the story of how such hateful efforts evolved from the past, to reach down to us now, is more important than ever. Drawing on the work of a range of scholars of censorship and of LGBTQ+ legal history, Wolf depicts how state censorship, and state prosecution of same-sex sexuality, played out-decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde-shadowing the lives of people who risked in ever-changing, targeted ways scrutiny by the criminal justice system. She shows how legal persecutions of writers, and of men who loved men affected Symonds and his contemporaries, all the while, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was illicitly crossing the Atlantic and finding its way into the hands of readers who reveled in the American poet's celebration of freedom, democracy, and unfettered love. Inspired by Whitman, Symonds kept trying, stubbornly, to find a way to express his message-that love and sex between men were not 'morbid' and deviant, but natural and even ennobling. He wrote a strikingly honest secret memoir written in code to embed hidden messages-which he embargoed for a generation after his death - and wrote the essay A Problem in Modern Ethics that was secretly shared in his lifetime and is now rightfully understood as one of the first gay rights manifestos in the English language. Equal parts insightful historical critique and page-turning literary detective story, Wolf's Outrages is above all an uplifting testament to the triumph of romantic love.