Though America experienced an increase in a native-born population and an emerging African-American identity throughout the nineteenth century, African culture did not necessarily dissipate with each passing decade. Archer examines the slave narratives of four key members of the abolitionist movement-Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Tubman and Harriet Jacobs-revealing how these highly visible proponents of the antislavery cause were able to creatively engage and at times overcome the cultural biases of their listening and reading audiences. When engaged in public sphere discourses, these individuals were not, as some scholars have suggested, inclined to accept unconditionally stereotypical constructions of their own identities. Rather they were quite skillful in negotiating between their affinity with antislavery Christianity and their own intimate involvement with slave circle dance and improvisational song, burial rites, conjuration, divination, folk medicinal practices, African dialects and African inspired festivals. The authors emerge as more complex figures than scholars have imagined. Their political views, though sometimes moderate, often reflected a strong desire to strike a fierce blow at the core of the slavocracy.

This book examines the transformations in form, genre, and content of contemporary Chinese print media. It describes and analyses the role of post-reform social stratification in the media, focusing particularly on how the changing practices and institutions of the industry correspond to and accelerate the emergence of a relatively affluent urban leisure-reading market. It argues that this reinvention of Chinese print media vis-a-vis the creation of a post-socialist taste (class) culture is an essential part of the cultural and affective transformations in contemporary Chinese society, and demonstrates how the reinvention of such taste culture effectively creates, through new kinds of reading materials and carefully demarcated target audiences, a middle-class civility that serves as the locus of the new niche media market.

Since the victory of the 1949 revolution the incumbency of the Chinese Communist Party has been characterized by an almost relentless struggle to legitimize its monopoly on political power. During the Mao era, attempts to derive legitimacy focused primarily on mass participation in political affairs, a blend of Marxist and nationalist ideology, and the charismatic authority of Mao Zedong. The dramatic failure of the Cultural Revolution forced the post-Mao leadership to discard these discredited paradigms of legitimacy and move towards an almost exclusively performance based concept founded on market economic reform. The reforms during the 1980s generated a number of unwelcome but inevitable side effects such as official corruption, high unemployment and significant socio-economic inequality. These factors culminated ultimately in the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and throughout China. Since Tiananmen the party has sought to diversify the basis of its legitimacy by adhering more closely to constitutional procedures in decision making and, to a certain extent, by reinventing itself as a conservative nationalist party. This probing study of post-communist revolution Chinese politics sets out to discover if there is a plausible alternative to the electoral mode or if legitimacy is the exclusive domain of the multi-party system.

Winning the Vietnam War proved easier than winning the peace. Since 1975, the reunited country has faced the problem of how a poorer, planned economy in which state ownership and control could successfully absorb a more advanced, capitalist economy. In addition, the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War heralded a new age in Vietnam's internal and external relations. Vietnam traces developments since the end of the Vietnam War, including recent economic reforms, the politics of the Communist Party, and the re-establishment of relations with the United States. It gives a comprehensive and informative overview of the current political and economic situation in Vietnam today.

Culture now has a prominent place on the urban policy and re-profiling agendas of cities around the world. City-based cultural planning emphasising creativity in all its guises has emerged as a significant local policy initiative, while the notion of the 'creative city' has become an urban imaging cliche. The proliferation of local blueprints for cultural planning/creative cities has been remarkable, while supra-state bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO are also fostering the use of culture in strategies to revive cities and urban economies and to brand places as 'different'. Cities of Culture highlights significant trends in cultural planning since its inception, revealing and analysing key discourses and influential (globally-circulating) manifestos and processes, as well as their interpretation and implementation in specific places. With reference to examples drawn from Europe, Australia, Asia and North America, Cities of Culture provides insights into the application of urban cultural strategies in different local, national and international contexts, highlighting regularities, tensions and intersections as well as core underpinning assumptions. This book explores the now-pervasive expectation that cultural planning is capable of achieving a wide range of social, economic, urban and creative outcomes. It will be of interest for students and scholars of urban sociology, urban studies, cultural policy studies and human geography.

We are increasingly realizing that, as a result of technological developments and globalization, problems are becoming so complex that they can only be solved through cooperation between scientists from different disciplines. Healthcare, climate change, food security, globalization, and quality of life are just a few examples of issues that require scientists to work across disciplines. In many cases, extra-academic stakeholders must be involved in order to arrive at robust solutions. Young academics are being called on to step beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines to contribute to addressing fundamental, often societal problems. As a result of these developments, an interdisciplinary approach is becoming increasingly necessary and popular in higher education. Students need to learn more about how to integrate and apply knowledge, methods, and skills from different fields. The crucial step of integration within interdisciplinary research is treated extensively in this textbook, which contains a comprehensive 'interdisciplinary integration toolbox'. In addition, students must learn to collaborate in teams. An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Research serves as a systematic manual to guide students through this interdisciplinary research process.

The traditional assumption today about race is that it is not political; that it has no political content and is a matter of individual beliefs and attitudes. In Race and the Politics of the Exception, Utz McKnight argues that race is in fact political and defines how it functions as a politics in the United States. McKnight organizes his book into three sections, beginning with a theoretical section about racial politics in the United States. Using theorists such as Benjamin, Agamben, and Schmitt, McKnight discusses how the idea of racial communities went from being constituted through the idea of racial sovereignty and a politics of the exception that defined blacks as the internal enemy, to being constitutionally defined through the institutions of racial equal opportunity. In the second section, McKnight further develops his critical race theory by exploring in more detail the social use of race today. The election of President Obama has brought the politics of racial equality to a critical point. In spite of a very powerful set of political tools to define it as a thing of the past, race matters. In the final section, McKnight engages with important African American fiction from each of the three major periods of racial politics in the US. Earlier descriptions of political theory are used throughout these analyses to refine the argument for a new critical politics of race. Scholars of political theory, identity politics, African American studies, and American Studies will find this work ground-breaking and relevant.

Many of us accept as uncontroversial the belief that the world is comprised of detached and disparate products, all of which are reducible to certain substances. Of those things that are alive, we acknowledge that some have agency while others, such as humans, have more advanced qualities such as consciousness, reason and intentionality. So deeply-seated is this metaphysical belief, along with the related distinctions we draw between subject/object, mind/body and nature/culture that many of us tacitly assume past groups approached and apprehended the world in a similar fashion. "Relational Archaeologies" questions how such a view of human beings, 'other-than-human' creatures and things affects our reconstruction of past beliefs and practices. It proceeds from the position that, in many cases, past societies understood their place in the world as positional rather than categorical, as persons bound up in reticular arrangements with similar and not so similar forms regardless of their substantive qualities. "Relational Archaeologies "explores this idea by emphasizing how humans, animals and things come to exist by virtue of the dynamic and fluid processes of connection and transaction. In highlighting various counter-Modern notions of what it means 'to be' and how these can be teased apart using archaeological materials, contributors provide a range of approaches from primarily theoretical/historicized treatments of the topic to practical applications or case studies from the Americas, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Focusing on the art and literary form of manga, this volume examines the intercultural exchanges that have shaped manga during the twentieth century and how manga's culturalization is related to its globalization. Through contributions from leading scholars in the fields of comics and Japanese culture, it describes "manga culture" in two ways: as a fundamentally hybrid culture comprised of both subcultures and transcultures, and as an aesthetic culture which has eluded modernist notions of art, originality, and authorship. The latter is demonstrated in a special focus on the best-selling manga franchise, NARUTO.

This book is a comparative analysis of the medieval Sunni historiography of the caliphate of Uthman b. Affan and the revolt against him. By comparing treatments of Uthman in pietistic literature and universal chronicles, the work traces the gradual silencing of more critical accounts in favor of those that portray Uthman as a saintly companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Through a comparative analysis of authors between genres and time periods, this book shows how authors were able to convey their personal perspectives on important religio-political tensions that emerged through the revolt against Uthman, namely the tension between Sunnis and Shiis, religious and political authority and appeals to maintain stability and unity vs. appeals for greater justice. This last debate, which in many ways began with the revolt against Uthman, has been repeated most recently in the Arab Spring. This work therefore provides readers with helpful historical context for important contemporary debates.

An initial chapter on the history of Islamic philosophy sets the stage for sixteen articles on issues across the three traditions. The goal is to see the Islamic tradition in its own richness and complexity as the context of most Jewish intellectual work.

In Plato's Laws is the earliest surviving fully developed cosmological argument. His influence on the philosophy of religion is wide ranging and this book examines both that and the influence of religion on Plato. Central to Plato's thought is the theory of forms, which holds that there exists a realm of forms, perfect ideals of which things in this world are but imperfect copies. In this book, originally published in 1959, Feibleman finds two diverse strands in Plato's philosophy: an idealism centered upon the Forms denying full ontological status to the realm of becoming, and a moderate realism granting actuality equal reality with Forms. For each strand Plato developed a conception of religion: a supernatural one derived from Orphism, and a naturalistic religion revering the traditional Olympian deities.

This book provides new perspectives on recent Asian dynamism which go beyond the mainstream views, by attempting to situate the recent economic expansion within a broader analysis of capitalist accumulation and the various processes that it generates both within and across economies. The contributions in the book include analyses of recent growth patterns in both China and India; assessments of the sustainability of such growth and potential constraints and pitfalls; the role of international finance in affecting both national and international growth and employment patterns; the factors determining particular accumulation strategies and the results of these strategies. These forces within the two economies of China and India are situated within a broader assessment of the impacts on the world economy, by identifying long run tendencies in international capitalism and changing patterns of uneven development. Specific issues emerging within the Asian region are identified, including not just the relations between the three large Asian economies, but also the wider geopolitical implications as well as the political economy of these changes. This book therefore provides a more comprehensive examination of the longer run dynamics of the global capitalist system in which these economies are necessarily destined to play more significant roles in future.

Britain's relationship with the Gulf region remains one of the few unexplored episodes in the study of British decolonization. The decision, announced in 1968, to leave the Gulf within three years represented an explicit recognition by Britain that its 'East of Suez' role was at an end. This book examines the decision-making process which underpinned this reversal and considers the interaction between British decision-making, and local responses and initiatives, in shaping the modern Gulf. Using sources previously unavailable to scholars, Britain's Revival and Fall in the Gulf is a valuable addition to the studies on the modern Gulf.

This book investigates the forced migration of the Delawares in the United States and the Yaquis in Mexico, focusing primarily on the impact removal from tribal lands had on the (ethnic) identity of these two indigenous societies. It analyzes Native responses to colonial and state policies to determine the practical options that each group had in dealing with the states in which they lived. Haake convincingly argues that both nation-states aimed at the destruction of the Native American societies within their borders. This exemplary comparative, transnational study clearly demonstrates that the legacy of these attitudes and policies are readily apparent in both countries today. This book should appeal to a wide variety of academic disciplines in which diversity and minority political representation assume significance.

Winner of the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Textbook / Primer How did you decide what to wear today? Did you base your selection on comfort or style? Did you want to blend in or stand out — or was it just the cleanest outfit available? We each make these decisions every day, reflecting how we view ourselves and impacting how others see us. Our choices matter — not just to us personally, but also to the magazine editors, brand ambassadors and trend forecasters who make a living by selling to us. Communicating Fashion introduces key concepts from the intersecting worlds of fashion and communication studies to connect how we all use clothing to express ourselves and how media systems support that process. In doing so, Myles Ethan Lascity explores social, cultural and ethical issues through the work of fashion journalism, brand promotions and the growing role of online influencers as well as the impact of film, television and art on self-image and expression. Key topics: - Advertising, Branding and Fashion Retail - Clothing, Art and Cultural Significance - Clothing as Group and Cultural Norms - Clothing, Identity and Interpersonal Communication - Fashion News and Tastemaking - Fashion, Social Media and Influencers - Meaning within the Fashion System - On-screen Clothing

In the past fifty years, the experience of the Chinese economy has continually challenged the assumptions of laissez-faire economics. It has sustained a strong growth rate, changed the structure of international economic relationships and has become critical to many multinational corporations. Now, it appears to be on the verge of becoming a new economic superpower. Addressing the structure and dynamics of the Chinese economy, Satyananda J. Gabriel examines in-depth the connection between growth and the particular version of Marxism that has been adopted by the Communist Party of China. One of the most comprehensive analyses of the contemporary Chinese economy, this book covers industry and agriculture, rural and urban enterprises, labour power and financial markets, and the process of integrating the Chinese domestic economy into global capitalism. Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision identifies the current transition in China as a historic passage from state feudalism to state capitalism that will significantly alter both the internal political and economic dynamics of China and the global political economy.

Presenting original work and new thinking on a wide range of important issues, the book explores the current state of globalization, competition and growth in China. China has produced an economic miracle since the late 1970s in its transition from a planned to a market economy. This remarkable economic performance was brought about by an open-door policy and gradual integration with the world economy, culminating in China's admission into the World Trade Organisation in 2001. Studies included in this book focus on issues such as foreign direct investment, international trade, reforms in the financial sector, the development of rural township and village enterprises, the investment strategies of multinational corporations, and economic growth.

Although the Chinese economy is growing at a very high rate, there are massive social dislocations arising as a result of economic restructuring. Though the scale of the problem is huge, very few studies have examined the changes in income inequality in the late 1990s due to a lack of data on household incomes. Based on extensive original research, this book redresses this imbalance, examining the issue of unemployment and the problems it has brought for the people of China. Investigating the market outcomes in post-reform urban China, the book focuses on the relationships between unemployment, inequality, and poverty. In addition, the authors provide an analysis on the emerging urban labour market and its stratified structure, job mobility, profit sharing, and the role of social capital. Empirical analysis is supported by rich data from nationally representative urban household and rural migrant surveys, providing the latest picture of the widening inequality in Chinese urban society.

This is an impressive work that traces the relationship between the Soviet Union and Turkey on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and the Turkish Communist Party on the other, from the consolidation of the communist regime in Moscow until its fall. The book considers how 'Soviet Eastern Policy' was formed, how it changed over time, what the Soviet leaders hoped to gain in Turkey, and what impact Soviet policy had on the development of the Turkish communist movement. It is a valuable resource for students and scholars with an interest in Russian and Soviet poltics and international relations.

The phenomenon of filial piety is fundamental to our understanding of Chinese culture, and this excellent collection of essays explores its role in various areas of life throughout history. Often regarded as the key to preserving Chinese tradition and identity, its potentially vast impact on government and the development of Chinese culture makes it extremely relevant, and although invariably virtuous in its promotion of social cohesion, its ideas are often controversial. A broad range of topics are discussed chronologically including Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism, making it essential reading for those studying Chinese culture, religion and philosophy. This is a multi-disciplinary survey that combines historical studies with philosophical analysis from an international team of respected contributors.

This book moves away from the common belief that Japan's international relations are firmly the preserve of the national government in Japan's highly centralised political system. Examining examples of subnational governments (SNGs) across Japan the book uncovers a significant and generally unrecognised development in Japanese politics: SNGs are ever more dynamic international actors as national borders 'weaken' across the world. Exploring what Japanese SNGs do, where they do it, and why, the book considers the implications of these factors for Japan's international relations and domestic politics. By bringing to light the scope and consequences of the international actions of Japan's SNGs, this book provides a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the country's foreign policy, at a time when it is pursuing a broader and more active profile in international affairs.

During the 1970s, dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn dominated Western perceptions of the USSR, but were then quickly forgotten, as Gorbachev's reformers monopolised the spotlight. This book restores the dissidents to their rightful place in Russian history. Using a vast array of samizdat and published sources, it shows how ideas formulated in the dissident milieu clashed with the original programme of perestroika, and shaped the course of democratisation in post-Soviet Russia. Some of these ideas - such the dissidents' preoccupation with glasnost and legality, and their critique of revolutionary violence - became part of the agenda of Russia's democratic movement. But this book also demonstrates that dissidents played a crucial role in the rise of the new Russian radical nationalism. Both the friends and foes of Russian democracy have a dissident lineage.

In 1991 Taiwan held its first fully democratic election. This first single volume of party politics in Taiwan analyzes the evolution of party competition in the country, looking at how Taiwan's parties have adjusted to their new multi-party election environment. It features key chapters on: the development of party politics in Taiwan the impact of party change on social welfare, corruption and national identity party politics in the DPP era. Including interviews with high-ranking Taiwanese politicians and material on the 2004 Presidential election, this important work brings the literature up-to-date. It provides a valuable resource for scholars of Chinese and Taiwanese politics and a welcome addition to the field of regime transition and democratization.

Rapid economic growth in the world's most populous nation is leading to widespread soil erosion, desertification, deforestation and the depletion of vital natural resources. The scale and severity of environmental problems in China now threaten the economic and social foundations of its modernization. Using case studies, Morton analyzes the relationship between international and local responses to environmental problems in China, challenging the prevailing wisdom that weak compliance is the only constraint upon local environmental management in China. It advances two interrelated discussions: first, it constructs a conceptual framework for understanding the key dimensions of environmental capacity. This is broadly defined to encompass the financial, institutional, technological and social aspects of environmental management. Second, the book presents the results of an empirical inquiry into the implementation of donor-funded environmental projects in both China's poorer and relatively developed regions. By drawing upon extensive fieldwork, it seeks to explain how, and under what conditions, international donors can strengthen China's environmental capacity, especially at the local level. It will be of interest to those studying Chinese politics, environmental studies and international relations.