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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > General
The preamble to the post-apartheid South African constitution states that 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity' and promises to 'lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law' and to 'improve the quality of life of all citizens'. This would seem to commit the South African government to, amongst other things, the implementation of policies aimed at fostering a common sense of South African national identity, at societal dev- opment and at reducing of levels of social inequality. However, in the period of more than a decade that has now elapsed since the end of apartheid, there has been widespread discontent with regard to the degree of progress made in connection with the realisation of these constitutional aspirations. The 'limits to liberation' in the post-apartheid era has been a theme of much recent research in the ?elds of sociology and political theory (e. g. Luckham, 1998; Robins, 2005a). Linguists have also paid considerable attention to the South African situation with the realisation that many of the factors that have prevented, and are continuing to prevent, effective progress towards the achievement of these constitutional goals are linguistic in their origin.
What makes an Italian film Italian, a French film French? Are Hollywood films really American? This study reveals how centralization, common language and narrative convention express the cultural heritages within the national cinemas of nine countries (China, Finland, France, India, Iran, Italy, Mexico, Ukraine, and the United States). The goal is to bring critical theory and artistic expression back into equilibrium with a method that demonstrates how popular cinema truly can explain the world, ""one country at a time.
This volume revisits the notions of Orientalism, Occidentalism and, to a certain extent, Reverse Orientalism/Occidentalism in the 21st century, adopting post-modern, constructionist and potentially non-essentialising approaches. The representations of the 'cultural Other' in education, literature and the arts are examined by scholars working in Australia, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and the USA. Vinyl compilations, TV series, novels, institutional discourses and surveys, amongst others, are examined so as to better understand how people construct their identity in relation to an imagined and idealised Other. This book will appeal to all researchers and students interested in cultural identity and stereotypes of the 'East' and the 'West', in particular in the fields of academic mobility, cultural studies, intercultural education, postcolonial literature and media studies.
Little has been written about the potato's Italian history. This book examines the important role it has played in Italy's social, cultural and economic history. Italy, like the rest of Europe, owes a lot to the 'Columbian exchange'. As a result of this process, in addition to potatoes, Europe acquired maize, tomatoes and most types of beans. All are basic elements of European diet and cookery today. The international importance of the potato today as the world's most cultivated vegetable highlights its place in the Columbian exchange. While the history of the potato in the United States, Ireland, Britain and other parts of northern Europe is quite well known, little is known about the slow rise and eventual fall of the potato in Italy. This book aims to fill that gap, arguing why the potato's 'Italian' history is important. It is both a social and cultural history of the potato in Italy and a history of agriculture in marginal areas. David Gentilcore examines the developing presence of the potato in elite and peasant culture, its place in the difficult mountain environment, in family recipe notebooks and kitchen accounts, in travellers' descriptions, agronomical treatises, cookery books, and in Italian literature.
In economics, business, and government policy, innovation policy requires the creation of new approaches based on insight in what happens in innovation processes, on the micro level of people, firms and interaction between them. In innovation policy it should also be recognized that innovation entails a whole range of activities beyond R&D, such as entrepreneurship, design, commercialization, organization, collaboration and the diffusion of knowledge and innovations . This edited volume explores the roles of individuals and organizations involved in the creation and application of innovations. Covering topics as diverse as the macro-economic importance of innovation, theories of knowledge and learning, entrepreneurship, education and research, organizational innovation, networks and regional innovation systems, Micro-Foundations for Innovation Policy provides critical insights into the development of innovation policy.
From the twins Osugi and Peeco to longstanding icon Miwa Akihiro, Claire Maree traces the figure of the Japanese queerqueen, showing how a diversity of gender identifications, sexual orientations, and discursive styles are commodified and packaged together to form this character. Representations of gay men's speech have changed in tandem with gender norms, increasingly crossing over into popular media via the body of the "authentic" gay male up to and including the current "LGBT boom" in Japan. In this context, queerqueen demonstrates how commercial practices of recording, transcribing, and editing spoken interactions and use of on-screen text encode queerqueen speech as inherently excessive and in need of containment. Tackling questions of authenticity, self-censorship, and the restrictions of heteronormativity within this perception of queer excess, Maree shows how queerqueen styles reproduce stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to the business of mainstream entertainment.
What ought the political role of the intellectual to be? What challenges does the post-structuralist project present for Marxist accounts of the intellectual? What is the relationship between the university and the wider society of which it is part? This text, which includes important contributions from authors such as Warren Montag and Sean Sayers, considers different attempts by Marxist and post-Marxist writers to theorize these and other important related questions.
Volume 22 explores the complex relationships between gender and food in a variety of locations and time periods using a range of research methods. Authors show that gender inequality and men's dominance are implicit or explicit, and that in times of both stability and change, the burden of many if not most aspects of food production and provisioning falls upon women and is an integral part of the care work they perform. Food is shown to be related to societal structures of power, resources and labor markets, as well as households, bodies and emotions. Health, well-being and sustainability emerge as major tropes in the economic and geographic north and south from the arctic to the equator and places between. Western cultural trends regarding specialized diets as they relate to health and illness are examined from a gender lens as is children's nutrition worldwide. Gender inequality as it affects the struggle for access to land, the affordability of food, and its nutritional value is identified as a major social policy issue.
From the commemoration of September 11 to the Holocaust memorial in
Berlin to the 2004 unveiling of the National World War II Memorial
in Washington D.C., recent decades have witnessed a substantial
increase in the number of new public memorials built in both Europe
and the United States. This volume considers the contemporary
explosion of public commemoration in terms of changed cultural and
social practices of mourning, memory, and public feeling. Positing
memorials as the physical and visual embodiment of our affective
responses to loss, Erika Doss focuses especially on the memorial
ephemera of flowers, candles, balloons, and cards placed at sites
of tragic death in order to better comprehend how grief is mediated
in contemporary commemorative cultures.
First published in 2002, Marek Haltof's seminal volume was the first comprehensive English-language study of Polish cinema, providing a much-needed survey of one of Europe's most distinguished-yet unjustly neglected-film cultures. Since then, seismic changes have reshaped Polish society, European politics, and the global film industry. This thoroughly revised and updated edition takes stock of these dramatic shifts to provide an essential account of Polish cinema from the nineteenth century to today, covering such renowned figures as Kieslowski, Skolimowski, and Wajda along with vastly expanded coverage of documentaries, animation, and television, all set against the backdrop of an ever-more transnational film culture.
." . . this volume has much to offer readers interested in science and technology and constructs of the body, expecially the 'normal' body."--"Disabilities Studies Quarterly" Hand in hand with such health crises as HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, and the resurgence of tuberculosis has come an explosion of scientific and medical technologies. As technology documents illness with ever greater precision and clarity, the knowledge and vocabulary of patients is being similarly expanded by activists, consumer advocates, and artists working with new electronic technologies. Into this breach steps The Visible Woman, collecting professional, academic, and lay viewpoints on gender and the role of visual and textual representation in contemporary health and science. From fetal photography and mammography to mental retardation and chronic fatigue syndrome, The Visible Woman reveals how identities are constructed in medical research and public health initiatives, as well as in popular press accounts of health. New ways of seeing the body, through medical imaging, plastic and sexual surgery, and services for people with disabilities, are all informed, the book argues, by a broader cultural fascination with visuality and media. Emphasizing the authors' first-hand experiences as medical practitioners, activists, scholars, and patients, The Visible Woman breaks with more established approaches that cast patients as passive objects of medical inquiry, and medical professionals as perpetrators of institutional exploitation in the name of the public good. Asking what it means to be on both ends of the microscope, The Visible Woman highlights the complex perspectives of medical and scientificpractitioners who themselves exist both inside and outside their workplaces and professional identities. The contributors are Michael BA(c)rubA(c), Lisa Cartwright, Stacie A. Colwell, Richard Cone, Anne Eckman, Valerie Hartouni, Janet Lyon, Emily Martin, Gaye Naismith, Mark Rose, Ella Shohat, Vivian Sobchack, Carol Stabile, Sandy Stone, and Paula A. Treichler.
The history of women's involvement in politics has focused most heavily on electoral politics, but throughout the twentieth century a far wider range of women has engaged in political activity when they found it increasingly challenging to feed their families and balance their household ledgers. The Politics of the Pantry examines the rise and fall of the American housewife as a political constituency group. It examines how working- and middle-class housewives' relationship with the state evolved over the course of the century. Shifting the focus away from the workplace as a site of protest, it looks to the homefront as a starting point for protest in the public sphere. Emily Twarog has selected key moments when working- and middle-class women used consumer actions to embrace their socially ascribed roles as mothers and wives to demand economic stability for their families and communities. These include the Depression-era meat boycott of 1935, the consumer coalitions of the New Deal, and the wave of consumer protests between 1965 and 1973. She frames her narrative around the lives of several key labor and consumer activists and their organizations in both urban and suburban areas - Detroit, greater Chicago, Long Island, and Los Angeles. This geographic and chronological span allows for a national story from the progressive politics of the New Deal to the election of Ronald Reagan and the emergence of the conservative right. With a focus on food consumption rather than production, the book looks closely at the ways in food - specifically meat - was used by women as a political tool. These women both challenged and embraced the social and economic order, rather than simply being an oppositional force. And the domestic politics they engaged in, Twarog argues, were not simply the feminine version of labor activism nor auxiliary to the masculine solidarity of unions. Exploring the intersections of labor, community, home, and the market, POLITICS OF THE PANTRY makes a strong case for the connection of the domestic sphere and the formation of women's political and class identity in America.
This book undertakes a psychotropic analysis of texts that deal with the violence of drug trafficking and interdiction, especially in Mexico. While most critics of so-called narcoculture have either focused on an aesthetic "sobriety" in these works or discounted them altogether as exploitative and unworthy of serious attention, Drugs, Violence, and Latin America illuminates how such work may reflect and intervene in global networks of intoxication. Theorizing a "dialectics of intoxication" that illustrates how psychotropy may either solidify or destabilize the self and its relationship to the other, it proposes that these tendencies influence human behavior in distinct ways and are leveraged for social control within both licit and illicit economies. A consideration of a countercultural genealogy in Latin America provides a contrastive psychotropic context for contemporary novels that exposes links between narcoviolence and consumerism, challenging our addictions of thought and feeling about ourselves and our relationships to drugs and narco-violence.
This book is a collection of diverse essays by scholars, policy-makers and creative practitioners who explore the burgeoning field of cultural measurement and its political implications. Offering critical histories and creative frameworks, it presents new approaches to accounting for culture in local, national and international contexts.
The notion of citizenship is complex; it can be at once an identity; a set of rights, privileges, and responsibilities; an elevated and exclusionary status, a relationship between individual and state, and more. In recent decades citizenship has attracted interdisciplinary attention, particularly with the transnational growth of Western capitalism. Yet citizenship's relationship to gender has gone relatively unexplored--despite the globally pervasive denial of citizenship to women, historically and in many places, ongoing today. This highly interdisciplinary volume explores the political and cultural dimensions of citizenship and their relevance to women and gender. Containing essays by a well-known group of scholars, including Iris Marion Young, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nussbaum, and Sandra Bartky, this book examines the conceptual issues and strategies at play in the feminist quest to give women full citizenship status. The contributors take a fresh look at the issues, going beyond conventional critiques, and examine problems in the political and social arrangements, practices, and conditions that diminish women's citizenship in various parts of the world.
In the wake of the elegant master theories of Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Georges Dumezil, and Claude Levi-Strauss, how are mythology and the comparative study of religion to be understood? In Myth and Method, a leading team of scholars assesses the current state of the study of myth and explores the possibilities for charting a methodological middle course between the comparative and the contextual issues raised in the last ten years. In confronting these tension, they provide an outline of the most troubling questions in the field and offer a variety of responses to them.
Shakespeare has long been identified as Britain's 'national poet', but his extensive role in the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad confirmed his expanded status as a modern global icon. From his prominent positioning in the London Olympic Games' Opening Ceremony, Closing Ceremony and Paralympic Opening Ceremony (which reached global audiences of an estimated one billion), to his major presence in the official cultural programme surrounding the Olympic Games (including the Royal Shakespeare Company's World Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre's 'Globe to Globe' Festival and the BBC's Shakespeare Unlocked Season), Shakespeare played a significant role in the way the UK presented itself both to its own citizens and to the world. This collection examines the different cultural forces at play in the construction, use and reception of Shakespeare during the 2012 'Olympic Moment', exploring what his surprisingly persistent presence in the UK's Olympic festivities says about the relationship between culture, politics and identity in twenty-first-century British and global life.Through a series of chapters that cut across major Shakespearean events staged and broadcast during this unique year, the collection offers a comprehensive analysis of Shakespeare's positioning as both a symbol of British cultural achievement and a powerful form of cultural currency in an increasingly globalized world. Each chapter in the collection takes a single-word concept as its starting point (e.g. Celebration, Multiculturalism, Nation), developing it critically through an analysis of a cluster of key Shakespearean performances and events. These key terms serve as indications of the overarching theoretical interests of the collection while also allowing writers scope to discuss the most pertinent and culturally complex case studies in detail.
New media is becoming integral to our lives. But for how long can we refer to emerging media as new in this fast-moving digital age? What makes it 'new'? And what problems do interactive media create for us, as cultural beings? This book investigates the culture and context of new media. Exploring and critiquing debates drawn from media and cultural theory, Fuery clearly explores and defines the concepts of new media and interactivity. With a clear and structured approach, the book questions existing ideas about digital culture and explains the problems that emerging technologies can present to our culture, from issues of surveillance and power to the digitalisation of the body. In particular, the book includes: * a variety of perspectives and approaches to the idea of the 'new' * consideration and evaluation of work from key media theorists, from Foucault to Bourdieu * relevant and innovative examples that bring the complexities of new media to life * a glossary for quick reference and explanation of complex concepts New Media: Culture and Image interrogates the key concepts, models and approaches surrounding the formation and evolution of new media. It will encourage all students of Cultural Studies and Media Studies to question and reconsider their ideas about media and cultural theory.
The idea of public support for the arts is being challenged. Multiculturalism has been proposed as a worthy and necessary goal of public arts policy; whether or not it should be is explored for the first time in this book. Issues of cultural pluralism, the relations of art and culture, justice and affirmative action, and artistic value are presented as essential points of debate in making decisions concerning public support of the arts. This book will be of interest to professionals and teachers in the arts, public policy, arts management, and education. Its focus on multiculturalism and its analysis of basic concepts related to timely issues of public arts policy make it a unique contribution.
The fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook, Kanz al-fawa'id fi tanwi' al-mawa'id, is a treasure trove of 830 recipes of dishes, digestives, refreshing beverages, and more. Here, for the first time, it has been meticulously translated into English and supplemented with a comprehensive introduction, glossary, illustrations, and twenty-two modern adaptations of its recipes.
Most human bodies have two arms, two legs, hands, feet, a head. Yet the body, as we perceive it, is ultimately a cultural construct defined by the values and meanings each individual, and each culture, ascribes to it. Beyond its corporeal realities, the implications of the body-how we adorn, alter, heal, and please it-are potentially endless, limited only by the manner in which we frame it. Revealing how the human body has served as as metaphor for social process, the anthology unveils the body as intrinsically configured by politics, gender, racial categories, fears of pollution, and commercial forces which exploit and regulate it. Historical snapshots of American bodies over the past two and a half centuries, the essays in this volume cover such diverse subjects as sailor tattoos, maritime cannibalism in the early 1800's, birth control, rest cures for neurasthenia, and, more recently, anorexia, boxing, cyberpunk, and plastic surgery. Drawing from history, literary and cultural studies, and film studies, American bodies is an eclectic, stimulating collection that will challenge many fundamental beliefs about our physical form.
"A vivid analysis of how many Latin Americans have crafted
alternative modes of understanding sexuality." From its sweaty beats to the pulsating music on the streets, Latin/o America is perceived in the United States as the land of heat, the toy store for Western sex. It is the territory of magical fantasy and of revolutionary threat, where topography is the travel guide of desire, directing imperial voyeurs to the exhibition of the flesh. Jose Quiroga flips the stereotype upside down: he shows how Latin/o American lesbians and gay men have consistently eschewed notions of sexual identity for a politics of intervention. In Tropics of Desire, Quiroga reads hesitant Mexican poets as sex-positive voices, he questions how outing and identity politics can fall prey to the manipulations of the state, and explores how invisibility has been used as a tactical tool in opposition to the universal imperative to come out. Drawing on diverse cultural examples such as the performance of bolero and salsa, film, literature, and correspondence, and influenced by masters like Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and a rich tradition of Latin American stylists, Quiroga argues for a politics that denies biological determinism and cannibalizes cultural stereotypes for the sake of political action.
This book provides a lively and authoritative history of British sport in an era of dramatic changes for both players and fans. Beginning at a time when sport was still largely a male preserve and professional footballers were paid as manual workers, the authors trace developments to the present day through the decline of amateurism, the rise of a celebrity sporting culture, the increasing intervention of government and the role of sport, especially football, as an expression of civic and national identity. The book examines a wide range of major sports and includes discussion of the contribution of women and ethnic minorities to sport in Britain. A central theme is the role of the media in shaping British sport in the second half of the twentieth century. This book offers new perspectives on a major aspect of British social life, setting the great performances and personalities of post-war sport in the context of the changing social history of the nation.
Contrary to popular perceptions, cultural heritage is not given, but constantly in the making: a construction subject to dynamic processes of (re)inventing culture within particular social formations and bound to particular forms of mediation. Yet the appeal of cultural heritage often rests on its denial of being a fabrication, its promise to provide an essential ground to social-cultural identities. Taking this paradoxical feature as a point of departure, and anchoring the discussion to two heuristic concepts-the "politics of authentication" and "aesthetics of persuasion"-the chapters herein explore how this tension is central to the dynamics of heritage formation worldwide.
Far too often in the ?eld of archeology, the wheel of understanding and insight has a narrow focus that fails to recognize critical studies. Crucial information rega- ing pivotal archeological investigations at a variety of sites worldwide is extremely dif?cult, if not impossible, to obtain. The majority of archeological analysis and reporting, at best, has limited publication. The majority of archeological reports are rarely seen and when published are often only in obscure or out-of-print journals - the reports are almost as hard to ?nd as the archeological sites themselves. There is a desperate need to pull seminal archeological writings together into single issue or thematic volumes. It is the int- tion of this series, When the Land Meets the Sea, to address this problem as it relates to archeological work that encompasses both terrestrial and underwater archeology on a single site or on a collection of related sites. For example, despite the fact that we know that bays and waterways structured historic settlement, there is a lack of archeological literature that looks at both the nautical and terrestrial signatures of watersheds in?uence on historic culture. |
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