Exploring the roles of Muslim guards and guides in Jewish cemeteries in Morocco, Cory Thomas Pechan Driver suggests that these custodians use performances of ritual and caring acts for Jewish graves for multiple reasons. Imazighen [Berbers] stress their close ties with Jews in order to create a moral self intentionally set apart from the mono-ethically Arab and mono-religiously Muslim Morocco. Other subjects, and particularly women, use their ties with Jewish sites to harness power and prestige in their communities. Others still may care for these grave sites to express grief for a close Jewish friend or adoptive family. In examining these motives, Driver not only documents the flow of material and spiritual capital across religious lines, but also moves beyond Muslim memory of the past on the one hand and Jewish dread of the future on the other to think about the Muslim/Jewish present in Morocco.

An in-depth examination of the different forms of privilege perpetuating inequality within American society In this era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, inequality is at the forefront of American thought like never before. Yet many of the systems of privilege upholding the status quo remain unchanged. Many Americans who advocate a merit-based, race-free worldview do not acknowledge the systems of privilege which benefit them. Men remain at the top of the gender wage gap and white people are five times less likely to be stopped by police than their Black neighbors. White families can build lives using social and financial inheritances that have been denied to Black Americans and immigrants for centuries. Individual chapters focus on language, the workplace, the implications of comparing racism and sexism, race-based housing privilege, the dream of diversity and the cycle of exclusion, the rule of law and invisible systems of privilege, and the power of law to transform society. Twenty-five years since its first publication, Privilege Revealed is more relevant than ever. With a new preface and substantive foreword, this book offers readers important insight into the inequalities still pervading American society and encourages us all to confront our own relationship to these too often invisible privileges.

Complete ready reference covering Chinese history, economics, politics, culture, and prevalent social problems ... a "must-have" addition to any global studies collection. Throughout its imperial golden ages, China was the world's most developed nation, home to advanced technologies, a robust economy, and thriving cities. Its thousands of years of cultural and artistic achievements combined with its vastness and ethnic complexity have made China both fascinating and forbidding for those encountering it for the first time. This new volume offers readers a concise, single-stop introduction to Chinese history, culture, economics, politics, and social issues. As they trace China's history from the creation stories of ancient Chinese myths to the Communist upheaval of the 20th century, readers will learn how the country has changed-and not changed-from early to modern times, and what life throughout China is like today. Chronology of key historical developments, which details the most important people, places, and events A directory of business, cultural, government, and tourist organizations to help facilitate further research and study

Thomas Paine is a legendary Anglo-American political icon: a passionate, plain-speaking, relentlessly controversial, revolutionary campaigner, whose writings captured the zeitgeist of the two most significant political events of the eighteenth century, the American and French Revolutions. Though widely acknowledged by historians as one of the most important and influential pamphleteers, rhetoricians, polemicists and political actors of his age, the philosophical content of his writing has nevertheless been almost entirely ignored. This book takes Paine's political philosophy seriously. It explores his views concerning a number of perennial issues in modern political thought including the grounds for, and limits to, political obligation; the nature of representative democracy; the justification for private property ownership; international relations; and the relationship between secular liberalism and religion. It shows that Paine offers a historically and philosophically distinct account of liberalism and a theory of human rights that is a progenitor of our own.

This collection examines the ways in which religion and literature are capable of renewing what the eminent German philosopher Jurgen Habermas refers to as 'the public sphere'. The essays range from close commentaries on particular texts ( King Lear, The Brothers Karamazov, 'Bartleby the Scrivener') to surveys of the careers of selected writers who have entered the public sphere (Elizabeth Gaskell, W.H. Auden, Raymond Carver, Sherman Alexie), to historical and theoretical examinations of various national and international public spheres.

This book is a meticulous argument for the contemporary value of Marx's democratic theory as an interpretive key for the postmodernism debates. Landry uses the works of Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard to represent the poststructuralist camp and the writings of Habermas to represent the rationalist camp. Viable social critique, argues Landry, mediates between pure social constructivist and pure realist metaphysics. Postmodernism, although critical of Marx, aided the broader project of critical social theory, particularly Marx's critique of social-material contexts of oppression. Indeed, significant positive affiliations among Marx, Habermas, and the poststructuralists are found in their commitment to criticizing ideological aspects of bourgeois Enlightenment rationality and modernity.

Landry employs a fruitful tension strategy as seeking rapprochement among the modern and postmodern positions on hotly debated contemporary issues such as subjectivity, criticism, and the nature of reason. Marxism continues to provide critical tools for articulating productive conflict within the postmodernism debates, advancing of strategies of critique beyond identity politics toward a more self-reflective ideological discussion of the multiple axes of power and oppression in political struggles over democracy. In this unique study, complex philosophical issues are described lucidly and their relevance for today is established compellingly.

Immigrants and their American-born children represent about one quarter of the United States population. Drawing on rich, in-depth ethnographic research, the fascinating case studies in Across Generations examine the intricacies of relations between the generations in a broad range of immigrant groups--from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa--and give a sense of what everyday life is like in immigrant families.

Moving beyond the cliche of the children of immigrants engaging in pitched battles against tradition-bound parents from the old country, these vivid essays offer a nuanced view that brings out the ties that bind the generations as well as the tensions that divide them. Tackling key issues like parental discipline, marriage choices, educational and occupational expectations, legal status, and transnational family ties, Across Generations brings crucial insights to our understanding of the United States as a nation of immigrants.

Contributors: Leisy Abrego, JoAnn D'Alisera, Joanna Dreby, Yen Le Espiritu, Greta Gilbertson, Nazli Kibria, Cecilia Menjivar, Jennifer E. Sykes, Mary C. Waters, and Min Zhou."

In this book various scholars explore the material in science and science education and its role in scientific practice, such as those practices that are key to the curriculum focuses of science education programs in a number of countries. As a construct, culture can be understood as material and social practice. This definition is useful for informing researchers' nuanced explorations of the nature of science and inclusive decisions about the practice of science education (Sewell, 1999). As fields of material social practice and worlds of meaning, cultures are contradictory, contested, and weakly bounded. The notion of culture as material social practices leads researchers to accept that material practice is as important as conceptual development (social practice). However, in education and science education there is a tendency to ignore material practice and to focus on social practice with language as the arbiter of such social practice. Often material practice, such as those associated with scientific instruments and other apparatus, is ignored with instruments understood as "inscription devices", conduits for language rather than sources of material culture in which scientists share "material other than words" (Baird, 2004, p. 7) when they communicate new knowledge and realities. While we do not ignore the role of language in science, we agree with Barad (2003) that perhaps language has too much power and with that power there seems a concomitant loss of interest in exploring how matter and machines (instruments) contribute to both ontology and epistemology in science and science education.

The evidence of death and dying has been removed from the everyday lives of most Westerners. Yet we constantly live with the awareness of our vulnerability as mortals. Drawing on a range of genres, bands and artists, Mortality and Music examines the ways in which popular music has responded to our awareness of the inevitability of death and the anxiety it can evoke. Exploring bereavement, depression, suicide, violence, gore, and fans' responses to the deaths of musicians, it argues for the social and cultural significance of popular music's treatment of mortality and the apparent absurdity of existence.

Traditionally sight has been the only sense with a ticket to enter the museum. The same is true of histories of art, in which artworks are often presented as purely visual objects. In The Museum of the Senses Constance Classen offers a new way of approaching the history of art through the senses, revealing how people used to handle, smell and even taste collection pieces. Topics range from the tactile power of relics to the sensuous allure of cabinets of curiosities, and from the feel of a Rembrandt to the scent of Monet's garden. The book concludes with a discussion of how contemporary museums are stimulating the senses through interactive and multimedia displays. Classen, a leading authority on the cultural history of the senses, has produced a fascinating study of sensual and emotional responses to artefacts from the middle ages to the present. The Museum of the Senses is an important read for anyone interested in the history of art as well as for students and researchers in cultural studies and museum studies.

This book charts the growth of the Indonesian nationalistic musical genre of lagu seriosa in relation to the archipelago's history in the 1950s and 1960s, examining how folk songs were implemented as a valuable tool for promoting government propaganda. The author reveals how the genre was shaped to fit state ideologies and agendas in the Sukarno and Soeharto eras. It also reveals the very significant role played by Radio Republik Indonesia in the genre's development and dissemination. Little research has been done to investigate how Indonesian music contributed to nation-building during Indonesia's immediate post-colonial period. Emulating the European art song, the genre was adapted to compose songs with the purpose of promoting a strengthened collective Indonesian identity, fostered by a group of musicians who functioned as gatekeepers, monitoring and devising various mechanisms for songs to conform to the propagandistic needs of the Indonesian government at the time. The result was the development of classical style of singing and the cultivation of a patriotic collection of music during the Guided Democracy period (1959-1965), which peaked at the height of the Konfrontasi (1963-1966). Lagu seriosa lost popularity as popular music infiltrated Indonesia in the 1970s, but it remains an iconic yet understudied aspect of the nationalistic agenda in Indonesia. The case studies of selected songs reflected continuity and change in musical style and over time. This book is of interest to scholars studying the intersection between history, politics, identity, arts and cultural studies in Indonesia. It is also of interest to researchers investigating the role of music in identity formation and nation-building more widely.

This text addresses the Philippines' historical and contemporary reproductive politics, offering a timely insight into the rich reproductive lives of Filipinos. It critically explores stories of sexuality, religiosity, and reproductive livelihoods during the immediate aftermath of the passing of the 'Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act' of 2012 after more than fifteen years of opposition by the Philippine Catholic Church. Commonly called the "RH Law", it aims to provide public access to reproductive and family planning services for Filipino women and men, especially those from poorer communities who often experience unwanted pregnancies, complications from illegal abortions, and exacerbated economic hardship. This book explores the intimate and urban after-effects of globalization, and how they shape the "reproductive dilemmas" of Filipinos in Metropolitan "Metro" Manila. It constructs a balanced portrait of the country's reproductive politics within Metro Manila's rapidly changing terrains, showing how "reproductive dilemmas" are produced within a context that is at once fraught by conservative religious discourse and also rapidly globalizing, and where aspects of intimate lives have become both transnational and fragmented.

This book explores how the rise of widely available digital technology impacts the way music is produced, distributed, promoted, and consumed, with a specific focus on the changing relationship between artists and audiences. Through in-depth interviewing, focus group interviewing, and discourse analysis, this study demonstrates how digital technology has created a closer, more collaborative, fluid, and multidimensional relationship between artist and audience. Artists and audiences are simultaneously engaged with music through technology-and technology through music-while negotiating personal and social aspects of their musical lives. In light of consistent, active engagement, rising co-production, and collaborative community experience, this book argues we might do better to think of the audience as accomplices to the artist.

Alerting readers to a body of recent work that has gone under-examined, Tania Modleski redraws in Old Wives' Tales the perimeter of popular culture. A critical analysis of films such as "The Ballad of Little Jo, The Piano" and "Dogfight, Old Wives' Tales" also takes up performance, autobiographical experience, and contemporary social issues to illustrate how women's genres mediate between us and reality. Modelski examines the changes occurring in traditional women's genres, such as romances and melodrama, and explores the phenomenon of female authors and performers who "cross-dress"--women, that is, who are moving into male genres and staking out territory declared off-limits by men and by many feminists.

In the wake of the 2008-2009 economic recession, this revealing work offers a psychological explanation of how we as a nation grapple with self-control and how we can develop a new and healthier generation. As J.R. Slosar shows in this urgent, sometimes startling volume, the nation's fast-and-loose approach to money was in fact a symptom of a more widespread pattern of excessive behavior. In The Culture of Excess: How America Lost Self-Control and Why We Need to Redefine Success, Slosar portrays an America where the drive to succeed and the fear of missing out manifested itself not only in self-entitled corporate fraud, but in everything from sharp rises in obesity and cosmetic medical procedures to equally troubling increases in eating disorders, panic attacks, and outbreaks of uncontrollable rage. The Culture of Excess is the first book to assess the impact of economic and social factors on the nation's psychological well-being. Narcissism, productive narcissism, psychopathy, rigidity and self destruction, perfectionism, the illusion of success, and identity achievement all come into play as Slosar diagnoses the psychological drivers behind this indulgent age, offering his prescription for helping "Generation Me" become "Generation We." Numerous vignettes and case studies illustrate the major themes of the book Dozens of research citations at the end of each chapter An extensive bibliography referencing 75 professional journals and 48 books A comprehensive index

In an emergency, statesmen concentrate power and suspend citizens" rights. These emergency powers are ubiquitous in the crisis government of liberal democracies, but their nature and justification is poorly understood. Based on a pluralist conception of political ethics and political power, this book shows how we can avoid the dangers and confusions inherent in the norm/exception approach that dominates both historical and contemporary debate. The book shows how liberal values need never - indeed must never - be suspended, even in times of urgency. Only then can accountability remain a live possibility. But at the same time, emergency powers can sometimes be justified with reference to extra-liberal norms that also operate in times of normalcy. By emphasizing the continuity between times of normalcy and emergency, the book illuminates the norms of crisis government, broadening our understanding of liberal democratic government and of political ethics in the process.

This book is dedicated to the research of the "pleasure phenomenon" as the most important factor in individual and socio-cultural development. In a society of mass consumption, pleasure-having turned into a commodity and a means of manipulation-defines civilizational development. The authors theorize that the pursuit of pleasure can destroy one's self, culture, and environment. The recent rapid technological expansion has turned pleasure into a societal challenge. This study emphasizes the necessity of intrinsic transformation of marketing in the 21st Century which would shift the focus from seeking pleasure to controlling desires in a way that would benefit self, society, and the world.

Jean Baudrillard's work on how contemporary society is dominated by the mass media has become extraordinarily influential. He is notorious for arguing that there is no real world, only simulations which have altered what events mean, and that only violent symbolic exchange can prevent the world becoming a total simulation. An ideal introduction to this most singular cultural critic and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard: live theory offers a comprehensive, critical account of Baudrillard's unsettling, visionary and often prescient work. Baudrillard's relation to a range of theorists as diverse as Nietzsche, Marx, McLuhan, Foucault and Lyotard is explained, and the impact of his thought on contemporary politics, popular culture and art is analyzed. Finally, in the new interview included here, Baudrillard outlines his own position and responds to his critics.

American Women's Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic vision of American Gothic by analyzing the various sectional or regional attempts to Gothicize what is most claustrophobic or peculiar about local history. Since women writers were often relegated to inferior status, it is especially compelling to look at women from the Gothic perspective. The regionalist Gothic develops along the line of difference and not unity-thus emphasizing regional peculiarities or a sense of superiority in terms of regional history, natural landscapes, immigrant customs, folk tales, or idiosyncratic ways. The essays study the uncanny or the haunting quality of "the commonplace," as Hawthorne would have it in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables, in regionalist Gothic fiction by a wide range of women writers between ca. 1850 and 1930. This collection seeks to examine how/if the regionalist perspective is small, limited, and stultifying and leads to Gothic moments, or whether the intersection between local and national leads to a clash that is jarring and Gothic in nature.

This book examines the impacts of tourism-led transformations on the industrial historical waterfront at Darling Harbour and The Rocks in Sydney, Australia in the context of urban restructuring and deindustrialisation. The book also offers an extended reflection on the paradoxes between tourism and heritage. This discussion is not a new concept. However, this book critically explores the significance of the industrial heritage assets of these areas and the implications of the transformation procedures. Although Darling Harbour and The Rocks have generally been considered success stories of transformation with mixed touristic, recreational, residential and commercial activities, this book examines and evaluates how industrial history and heritage values have been affected. It demonstrates that tourism/leisure-led developments create urban landscapes in which cultural identity and historical assets are sacrificed and/or reinvented.

This book illustrates how diasporic media can re-create conflict by transporting conflict dynamics and manifesting them back in to diaspora communities. Media, Diaspora and Conflict demonstrates a previously overlooked complexity in diasporic media by using the Somali conflict as a case study to indicate how the media explores conflict in respective homelands, in addition to revealing its participatory role in transnationalising conflicts. By illustrating the familiar narratives associated with diasporic media and utilising a combination of Somali websites and television, focus groups with diaspora community members and interviews with journalists and producers, the potentials and restrictions of diasporic media and how it relates to homelands in conflict are explored.

Skateboarders are an increasingly common feature of the urban environment - recent estimates total 40 million world-wide. We are all aware of their often extraordinary talent and manoeuvres on the city streets. This book is the first detailed study of the urban phenomenon of skateboarding. It looks at skateboarding history from the surf-beaches of California in the 1950s, through the purpose-built skateparks of the 1970s, to the street-skating of the present day and shows how skateboarders experience and understand the city through their sport. Dismissive of authority and convention, skateboarders suggest that the city is not just a place for working and shopping but a true pleasure-ground, a place where the human body, emotions and energy can be expressed to the full.
The huge skateboarding subculture that revolves around graphically-designed clothes and boards, music, slang and moves provides a rich resource for exploring issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and the family. As the author demonstrates, street-style skateboarding, especially characteristic of recent decades, conducts a performative critique of architecture, the city and capitalism. Anyone interested in the history and sociology of sport, urban geography or architecture will find this book riveting.

Although many studies have been done of individual authors, at present few works exist which compare different immigrant literatures from the past and present. This work draws broad conclusions about the changes in American attitudes toward immigration and diverse cultures that are reflected in the literature. This book examines the representation of the immigrant experience in North American literature. Most of the chapters discuss the portrayal of particular ethnic groups by specific authors during a century of American and Canadian history. One essay highlights controversies among recent writers and critics concerning how their cultures should be portrayed, and the introductory and concluding essays provide historical, cultural, and literary contexts for a comparative approach to North American immigrant literature.

The expert contributors expose the reader to a variety of immigrant experiences in the literature of past and present, experiences in which the characters attempt to reconcile their ancestral heritage with that of their adopted land. Variations of three basic stances can be found in these works: the essentialist, rejecting the values of the dominant culture and resisting assimilation; the assimilationist, embracing the attitudes and behaviors of the new culture; and the hybridist, incorporating the old and new. The book additionally explores such topics as race, class, and gender, as well as the intergenerational conflict found in much immigrant literature.

Originally published in France and long sought in English translation, Jean-Paul Gabilliet's "Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books" documents the rise and development of the American comic book industry from the 1930s to the present. The book intertwines aesthetic issues and critical biographies with the concerns of production, distribution, and audience reception, making it one of the few interdisciplinary studies of the art form. A thorough introduction by translators and comics scholars Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen brings the book up to date with explorations of the latest innovations, particularly the graphic novel.

The book is organized into three sections: a concise history of the evolution of the comic book form in America; an overview of the distribution and consumption of American comic books, detailing specific controversies such as the creation of the Comics Code in the mid-1950s; and the problematic legitimization of the form that has occurred recently within the academy and in popular discourse.

Viewing comic books from a variety of theoretical lenses, Gabilliet shows how seemingly disparate issues--creation, production, and reception--are in fact connected in ways that are not necessarily true of other art forms. Analyzing examples from a variety of genres, this book provides a thorough landmark overview of American comic books that sheds new light on this versatile art form.

"Question of Method in Cultural Studies" brings together a group of scholars from across the social sciences and humanities to consider one of the most vexing issues confronting the proverbial 'anti-discipline' of cultural studies.

Covers such topics as the media, feminism, and politics
Identifies what methods have prevailed in the interdisciplinary pursuit of cultural studies
Examines the relationship between cultural studies and traditional disciplines, the politics of knowledge, and spatial and temporal models
Probes the possibility of method in explicit terms for scholars and students in media, communications, sociology and allied fields.