The present book examines the cultural diversities of the Northeast region in India. The chapters cover various aspects of cultural forms and practices of the communities. It serves as a bridge between vanishing cultural forms and their commodification, on the one hand, and their cultural ritual origins, evolution and significance in identity formation, on the other. The book analyses the continuity of cultural forms, their plural embodied representations associated with people's belief systems and their reinventions under globalisation. Further, the book underlines historical forces such as colonialism and religious conversion that transformed socio-cultural practices. Yet some of the pre-colonial, ritual-performative traditions hold on. Theoretically rich in analysis, this book presents a balanced view of the region's historical, ethnic-folk and socio-cultural aspects. The book is invaluable to students and researchers in cultural studies, anthropology, folklore, history and literature. It is also helpful for those critical readers engaged in research and interested in Northeast cultural forms and practices.

Tourism shapes popular fantasies of adventure, structures urban and natural space, creates knowledge around difference, and demands an array of occupations servicing the insatiable needs of those who travel for leisure. Even as migrants and refugees have become targets of ire from far-right parties, international tourism has grown worldwide. This issue posits a radical approach to the study of tourism, highlighting how tourism as a paradigmatic modern encounter bleeds into diplomacy, militarism, and empire building. Contributors investigate, among other topics, how the United States has used tourism in Latin America as a tool of interventionist foreign policy, how Bethlehem's Manger Square has become a contested space between Palestinians and the Israeli state, how Spain's economy increasingly relies on northern European tourists, and how the US military's Cold War-era guidebooks attempted to convert soldiers stationed abroad into "ambassadors of goodwill." Contributors. Ryvka Barnard, Daniel Bender, Julio Capo Jr., Rustem Ertug Altinay, Steven Fabian, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Max Holleran, Rebecca J. Kinney, Scott Laderman, Katrina Phillips, Mark Rice, Jason Ruiz, Daniel Walkowitz, Kim Warren

This book delves into the public character of public theology from the sites of subalternity, the excluded Dalit (non) public in the Indian public sphere. Raj Bharat Patta employs a decolonial methodology and explores the topic in three parts: First, he engages with 'theological contexts,' by mapping global and Indian public theologies and critically analysing them. Next, he discusses 'theological companions,' and explains 'theological subalternity' and 'subaltern public' as companions for a subaltern public theology for India. Finally, Patta explains 'theological contours' by discussing subaltern liturgy as a theological account of the subaltern public and explores a subaltern public theology for India.

This book looks at the cultural, political and economic conditions of British Euroscepticism. Focusing on eight British dystopian novels, published in the years before the decisive In/Out-Referendum, and taking into account cultural, political and economic contexts, Lisa Bischoff shows how the novels' stance towards the integration project range from slight criticism to outright hostility. The wide availability of the novels, and the prominence of both its authors and readers, among which are political figures David Cameron, Nigel Farage and Daniel Hannan, amplify the power of literary Euroscepticism. Drawing on cultural studies, literature and social science, British Novels and the European Union reveals the many facets of British Euroscepticism.

Since Iran's 1979 Revolution, the imperative to create and protect the inner purity of family and nation in the face of outside spiritual corruption has been a driving force in national politics. Through extensive fieldwork, Rose Wellman examines how Basiji families, as members of Iran's voluntary paramilitary organization, are encountering, enacting, and challenging this imperative. Her ethnography reveals how families and state elites are employing blood, food, and prayer in commemorations for martyrs in Islamic national rituals to create citizens who embody familial piety, purity, and closeness to God. Feeding Iran provides a rare and humanistic account of religion and family life in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic that examines how home life and everyday piety are linked to state power.

This unique ethnographic investigation examines the role that fashion plays in the production of the contemporary Indian luxury aesthetic. Tracking luxury Indian fashion from its production in village craft workshops via upmarket design studios to fashion soirees, Kuldova investigates the Indian luxury fashion market's dependence on the production of thousands of artisans all over India, revealing a complex system of hierarchies and exploitation. In recent years, contemporary Indian design has dismissed the influence of the West and has focused on the opulent heritage luxury of the maharajas, Gulf monarchies and the Mughal Empire. Luxury Indian Fashion argues that the desire for a luxury aesthetic has become a significant force in the attempt to define contemporary Indian society. From the cultivation of erotic capital in businesswomen's dress to a discussion of masculinity and muscular neo-royals to staged designer funerals, Luxury Indian Fashion analyzes the production, consumption and aesthetics of luxury and power in India. Luxury Indian Fashion is essential reading for students of fashion history and theory, anthropology and visual culture.

This book traces the cultural transformation of nostalgia on the Chinese screen over the past three decades. It explores how filmmakers from different generations have engaged politically with China's rapidly changing post-socialist society as it has been formed through three mutually constitutive frameworks: political discourse, popular culture and state-led media commercialisation. The book offers a new, critical model for understanding relationships between filmmakers, industry and the State.

Before her death in 2001, Naomi Schor was a leading scholar in feminist and critical theory and a founding coeditor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. This issue takes as its starting point Schor's book Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995), in which she discussed her attraction to the "bad objects" the academy had overlooked or ignored: universalism, essentialism, and feminism. Underpinning these bad objects was her mourning of the literary, a sense that her work-and feminist theory more generally-had departed from the textual readings in which they were grounded. Schor's question at the time was "Will a new feminist literary criticism arise that will take literariness seriously while maintaining its vital ideological edge?" The contributors take literariness-the "bad object" of this issue-seriously. They do not necessarily engage in debates about reading, theorize new formalisms, or thematize language; rather, they invigorate and unsettle the reading experience, investigating the relationship between language and meaning. Contributors. Lee Edelman, Frances Ferguson, Peggy Kamuf, Ramsey McGlazer, Thangam Ravindranathan, Denise Riley, Ellen Rooney, Elizabeth Weed

This book provides a novel approach to the understanding and realization of the values of art. It argues that art has often been instrumentalized for state-building, to promote social inclusion of diversity, or for economic purposes such as growth or innovation. To counteract that, the authors study the values that artists and audiences seek to realize in the social practices around the arts. They develop the concept of cultural civil society to analyze how art is practiced and values are realized in creative circles and co-creative communities of spectators, illustrated with case-studies about hip-hop, Venetian art collectives, dance festivals, science-fiction fandom, and a queer museum. The authors provide a four-stage scheme that illustrates how values are realized in a process of value orientation, imagination, realization, and evaluation. The book relies on an interdisciplinary approach rooted in economics and sociology of the arts, with an appreciation for broader social theories. It integrates these disciplines in a pragmatic approach based on the work of John Dewey and more recent neo-pragmatist work to recover the critical and constructive role that cultural civil society plays in a plural and democratic society. The authors conclude with a new perspective on cultural policy, centered around state neutrality towards the arts and aimed at creating a legal and social framework in which social practices around the arts can flourish and co-exist peacefully.

What is the ocean's role in human and planetary history? How have writers, sailors, painters, scientists, historians, and philosophers from across time and space poetically envisioned the oceans and depicted human entanglements with the sea? In order to answer these questions, Soren Frank covers an impressive range of material in A Poetic History of the Oceans: Greek, Roman and Biblical texts, an Icelandic Saga, Shakespearean drama, Jens Munk's logbook, 19th century-writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Jonas Lie, and Joseph Conrad as well as their 20th and 21st century-heirs like J. G. Ballard, Jens Bjorneboe, and Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen. A Poetic History of the Oceans promotes what Frank labels an amphibian comparative literature and mobilises recent theoretical concepts and methodological developments in Blue Humanities, Blue Ecology, and New Materialism to shed new light on well-known texts and introduce readers to important, but lesser-known Scandinavian literary engagements with the sea.

Although beauty, in the pre-modern Arab world, was enjoyed and promoted almost everywhere, Islam does not possess a general theory on aesthetics or a systematic theory of the arts. This is a study of the Arabic discourse on beauty. The author had to search for her evidence in written statements from a wide variety of sources, such as the Qur'an, legal, religious and Sufi texts, chronicles, biographies, belle-lettres, literary criticism, and scientific, geographic and philosophical literature. The result is a compendium of references to beauty in chapters on the Religious Approach, Secular Beauty and Love, Music and Belle-Lettres, and the Visual Arts. This approach is informative and provocative. For the generalist, it provides comparative material for an understanding of the early Arab cultural context. For the specialist, it raises questions of sponsorship and purpose.

Substantial research has been put forth calling for the field of social studies education to engage in work dealing with the influence of race and racism within education and society (Branch, 2003; Chandler, 2015; Chandler & Hawley, 2017; Husband, 2010; King & Chandler, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2003; Ooka Pang, Rivera & Gillette, 1998). Previous contributions have examined the presence and influence of race/ism within the field of social studies teaching and research (e.g. Chandler, 2015, Chandler & Hawley, 2017; Ladson- Billings, 2003; Woyshner & Bohan, 2012). In order to challenge the presence of racism within social studies, research must attend to the control that whiteness and white supremacy maintain within the field. This edited volume builds from these previous works to take on whiteness and white supremacy directly in social studies education. In Marking the "Invisible", editors assemble original contributions from scholars working to expose whiteness and disrupt white supremacy in the field of social studies education. We argue for an articulation of whiteness within the field of social studies education in pursuit of directly challenging its influences on teaching, learning, and research. Across 27 chapters, authors call out the strategies deployed by white supremacy and acknowledge the depths by which it is used to control, manipulate, confine, and define identities, communities, citizenships, and historical narratives. This edited volume promotes the reshaping of social studies education to: support the histories, experiences, and lives of Students and Teachers of Color, challenge settler colonialism and color-evasiveness, develop racial literacy, and promote justice-oriented teaching and learning.

Up in Arms provides an illustrative and timely window onto the ways in which guns shape people's lives and social relations in Texas. With a long history of myth, lore, and imaginaries attached to gun carrying, the Lone Star State exemplifies how various groups of people at different historical moments make sense of gun culture in light of legislation, political agendas, and community building. Beyond gun rights, restrictions, or the actual functions of firearms, the book demonstrates how the gun question itself becomes loaded with symbolic firepower, making or breaking assumptions about identities, behavior, and belief systems. Contributors include: Benita Heiskanen, Albion M. Butters, Pekka M. Kolehmainen, Laura Hernandez-Ehrisman, Lotta Kahkoenen, Mila Seppala, and Juha A. Vuori.

This book offers an outside-in look at American cultural peculiarities that helps Americans, see ourselves as others see us -and vice versa. "American Cultural Baggage" lets both Americans and the rest of the world in on things most Americans don't know, about themselves and their values and how those things are perceived by others. Americans will learn of the impression they make, while others will gain insight into the curious tribal values of Americans.

In pre-Revolutionary War America, libraries were member-driven collections for the elite; it was not until 1790 that Benjamin Franklin helped to establish the first public lending library. Throughout the subsequent centuries the library has evolved, but always remained central to the cultural life of the nation. Thomas R. Schiff 's photographs trace the history of the library through aesthetic and style while featuring legendary architects such as Charles F. McKim; Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge; and I. M. Pei. The Library Book beautifully captures the shifting architectural styles and missions of the library in sweeping 360-degree panoramas-from the very earliest American libraries to the modernist masterpieces of Louis I. Kahn and others. In his introductory essay, acclaimed author and library lover Alberto Manguel considers the story of the library in America, its evolving architecture and cultural role, and how the American model reflects the archetypal idea of the universal library. Including brief descriptions of each unique library, this book brings bibliophiles into one hundred libraries across the nation.

Between 1933 and 1938, Eric Voegelin published four books that brought him into increasingly open opposition to the Hitler regime in Germany. As a result, he was forced to leave Austria in 1938, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo as he fled to Switzerland and later to the United States. Twenty years later, he was invited to return to Germany as director of the new Institute of Political Science at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.

In 1964, Voegelin gave a series of memorable lectures on what he considered "the central German experiential problem" of his time: Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reasons for it, and its consequences for post-Nazi Germany. For Voegelin, these issues demanded a scrutiny of the mentality of individual Germans and of the order of German society during and after the Nazi period. "Hitler and the Germans" offers Voegelin's most extensive and detailed critique of the Hitler era.

While most of the lectures deal with what Voegelin called Germany's "descent into the depths" of the moral and spiritual abyss of Nazism and its aftermath, they also point toward a restoration of order. His lecture "The Greatness of Max Weber" shows how Weber, while affected by the culture within which Hitler came to power, had already gone beyond it through his anguished recovery of the experience of transcendence.

"Hitler and the Germans" provides a profound alternative approach to the topic of the individual German's entanglement in the Hitler regime and its continuing implications. This comprehensive critique of the Nazi period has yet to be matched.

Controversial poetry played a crucial role in dealing with religious, political, and scholarly conflicts from 1400 until 1625. This volume analyses roles and functions of Latin, Italian, Dutch, German, Scots, and Hungarian poetry in specific historical controversies. A media theory of poetical impact is proposed by Franz-Josef Holznagel and Dieuwke van der Poel. Levente Selaf, Philipp Steinkamp, and Guillaume van Gemert examine the genres sung in wars, and in rulers' controversies. Judith Kessler, Dirk Coigneau, Juliette Groenland, and Regina Toepfer analyse how female and male rhetoricians and humanists use verse in religious, municipal, and educational conflicts. Signe Rotter-Broman, Samuel Pakucs Willcocks, and Alasdair A. MacDonald explain how reception strategies can shape cultural and political identities. Controversial Poetry 1400-1625 diskutiert den entscheidenden Einfluss von Controversial Poetry, Kontrovers-Dichtung, in Konflikten zwischen 1400 und 1625. Dafur werden die Rollen und Funktionen lateinischer, italienischer, niederlandischer, deutscher, schottischer und ungarischer Dichtung in konkreten historischen Kontroversen analysiert. Eine Medientheorie der Beeinflussung durch Dichtung entwerfen Franz-Josef Holznagel and Dieuwke van der Poel. Levente Selaf, Philipp Steinkamp, and Guillaume van Gemert untersuchen verschiedene Gattungen gesungener Politik in Kriegen und Auseinandersetzungen von Herrschern. Judith Kessler, Dirk Coigneau, Juliette Groenland und Regina Toepfer analysieren, wie weibliche und mannliche rederijkers und Humanisten Verse in konfessionellen, stadtischen und Bildungs-Konflikten verwenden. Signe Rotter-Broman, Samuel Pakucs Willcocks und Alasdair MacDonald erklaren, wie Rezeptions-Strategien kulturelle und politische Identitaten gestalten koennen.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Venice, many of the world's great cities were built on wetlands and swamps. Cities and Wetlands is the first book to explore the literary and cultural histories of these cities and their relationships to their environments and buried histories. Developing a ground-breaking new mode of psychoanalytic ecology and surveying a wide range of major cities in North America and Europe, ecocritic and activist Rod Giblett shows how the wetland origins of these cities haunt their later literature and culture and might prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human culture and the environment. Cities covered include: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Hamburg, London, New Orleans, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Venice and Washington.

Self-reflection is fundamental for human thinking on many levels. Philosophy has described the mind's capacity to observe itself as a core element of human existence. Political and social sciences have shown how modern democracies depend on society's ability to critically reflect on their own values and practices. And literature of all ages has proven self-reflexivity to be a crucial trait of cultural production. This volume provides the first diachronic panorama of genres, forms, and functions of literary self-reflection and their connections with social, political and philosophical discourses from the 17th century to the present. Far beyond the usual focus on postmodernist opacity, these contributions present a rich tradition of critical transparency: Literary texts that show us what is behind and beyond them.