So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies is a bold reappraisal of the outsized role fossil fuels have played in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable in North America. Following stories of hydrocarbon harm that lay the groundwork for environmental science and policy, this book brings into clear focus the dialectic between the negative ecologies of fossil fuels and the ongoing discovery of the environment. Exploring iconic sites of the oil economy, ranging from leaky Caribbean refineries to deepwater oil spills, from the petrochemical fallout of plastics manufacturing to the extractive frontiers of Canada, Negative Ecologies documents the upheavals, injuries, and disasters that have long accompanied fossil fuels and the manner in which our solutions have often been less about confronting the cause than managing the effects. This history of our present promises to re-situate scholarly understandings of fossil fuels and renovate environmental critique today. David Bond challenges us to consider what forms of critical engagement may now be needed to both confront the deleterious properties of fossil fuels and envision ways of living beyond them.

The English translation of this bestselling graphic novel tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets in Bangkok, as he decides to leave the city and return to his native village. Through reflections on contemporary Bangkok and flashbacks to his past, Nok reconstructs a journey through the slums of migrant workers, the rice fields of Isaan, the tourist villages of Ko Pha Ngan, and the Red Shirt protests of 2010. Based on a decade of anthropological research, The King of Bangkok is a story of migration to the city, distant families in the countryside, economic development eroding the land, and violent political protest. Ultimately, it is a story about contemporary Thailand and how the waves of history lift, engulf, and crash against ordinary people.

What has been the significance of sport for the European avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century? From an international and interdisciplinary perspective we show the extent to which avant-garde art and culture was shaped by the dynamic encounter with modern sports. Our focus lies on avant-garde artists, groups, movements and institutions across Europe (including Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Purism, Expressionism, Dada, the Bauhaus, Constructivism in Central and Eastern Europe), thereby unfolding the diversity of avant-garde responses to modern sports. The book in front of you includes fascinating readings in the fields of aesthetics, visual cultures, cultural history and politics and highlights why specific kinds of sport such as cycling, boxing and football became important for avant-garde movements and artists.

Founded in 1961, Studia Hibernica is devoted to the study of the Irish language and its literature, Irish history and archaeology, Irish folklore and place names, and related subjects. Its aim is to present the research of scholars in these fields of Irish studies and so to bring them within easy reach of each other and the wider public. It endeavours to provide in each issue a proportion of articles, such as surveys of periods or theme in history or literature, which will be of general interest. A long review section is a special feature of the journal and all new publications within its scope are there reviewed by competent authorities.

The Cultural Political Economy of the Construction Industry in Turkey analyses the growth of the popularity of the 'Justice and Development Party' (official acronym: AK Parti or AKP) of Turkey's president Erdogan, through the lens of the construction sector. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the question of hegemony and the electoral success of the AKP - despite frequent economic downturns and ferocious political conflicts including a coup d'etat attempt and rekindled armed struggles. In this book, Ismail Doga Karatepe critically examines the AKP's ability to satisfy the needs and wishes of different social classes and groups. By taking the construction sector as an example, the book analyses these in the context of the changes in the urban landscape of modern Turkey.

What kinds of pleasure do we take from writing and reading? What authority has the writer over a text? What are the limits of language's ability to communicate ideas and emotions? Moreover, what are the political limitations of these questions? The work of the French cultural critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915-80) poses these questions, and has become influential in doing so, but the precise nature of that influence is often taken for granted. This is nowhere more true than in poetry, where Barthes' concerns about pleasure and origin are assumed to be relevant, but this has seldom been closely examined. This innovative study traces the engagement with Barthes by poets writing in English, beginning in the early 1970s with one of Barthes' earliest Anglophone poet readers, Scottish poet-theorist Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75). It goes on to examine the American poets who published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other small but influential journals of the period, and other writers who engaged with Barthes later, considering his writings' relevance to love and grief and their treatment in poetry. Finally, it surveys those writers who rejected Barthes' theory, and explores why this was. The first study to bring Barthes and poetry into such close contact, this important book illuminates both subjects with a deep contemplation of Barthes' work and a range of experimental poetries.

This reference work covers the cuisine and foodways of India in all their diversity and complexity, including regions, personalities, street foods, communities and topics that have been often neglected. The book starts with an overview essay situating the Great Indian Table in relation to its geography, history and agriculture, followed by alphabetically organized entries. The entries, which are between 150 and 1,500 words long, combine facts with history, anecdotes, and legends. They are supplemented by longer entries on key topics such as regional cuisines, spice mixtures, food and medicine, rites of passages, cooking methods, rice, sweets, tea, drinks (alcoholic and soft) and the Indian diaspora. This comprehensive volume illuminates contemporary Indian cooking and cuisine in tradition and practice.

The political responsibility of artists in a globalized society is debated in this collection of articles by authors from Africa, Australia, South America, Europe, and Scandinavia. Bemoaning the competition for tourist dollars among the world's great cities and the commodification of cultural artifacts, these artists propose real and imagined places where art might resist capitalism, such as failed urban developments, among refugees, and in rural outposts.

The Angel and the Cholent: Food Representation from the Israel Folktale Archives by Idit Pintel-Ginsberg, translated into English for the first time from Hebrew, analyzes how food and foodways are the major agents generating the plots of several significant folktales. The tales were chosen from the Israel Folktales Archives' (IFA) extensive collection of twenty-five thousand tales. In looking at the subject of food through the lens of the folktale, we are invited to consider these tales both as a reflection of society and as an art form that discloses hidden hopes and often subversive meanings. The Angel and the Cholent presents thirty folktales from seventeen different ethnicities and is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 considers food and taste-tales included here focus on the pleasure derived by food consumption and its reasonable limits. The tales in Chapter 2 are concerned with food and gender, highlighting the various and intricate ways food is used to emphasize gender functions in society, the struggle between the sexes, and the love and lust demonstrated through food preparations and its consumption. Chapter 3 examines food and class with tales that reflect on how sharing food to support those in need is a universal social act considered a ""mitzvah"" (a Jewish religious obligation), but it can also become an unspoken burden for the providers. Chapter 4 deals with food and kashrut-the tales included in this chapter expose the various challenges of ""keeping kosher,"" mainly the heavy financial burden it causes and the social price paid by the inability of sharing meals with non-Jews. Finally, Chapter 5 explores food and sacred time, with tales that convey the tension and stress caused by finding and cooking specific foods required for holiday feasts, the Shabbat and other sacred times. The tales themselves can be appreciated for their literary quality, humor, and profound wisdom. Readers, scholars, and students interested in folkloristic and anthropological foodway studies or Jewish cultural studies will delight in these tales and find the editorial commentary illuminating.

In African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, Catherine F. Botha brings together original research on the body in African cultures, specifically interrogating the possibilities of the contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa. The innovative contributions that consider the somaesthetic dimensions of experience in the context of Africa (centred broadly around the themes of politics, feminisms, and cultures) reflect a diversity of perspectives and positions. The book is a first of its kind in gathering together novel and focused analyses of the body as conceived of from an African perspective.

Communication plays a critical role in enhancing social, cultural, and business relations. Research on media, language, and cultural studies is fundamental in a globalized world because it illuminates the experiences of various populations. There is a need to develop effective communication strategies that will be able to address both health and cultural issues globally. Dialectical Perspectives on Media, Health, and Culture in Modern Africa is a collection of innovative research on the impact of media and especially new media on health and culture. While highlighting topics including civic engagement, gender stereotypes, and interpersonal communication, this book is ideally designed for university students, multinational organizations, diplomats, expatriates, and academicians seeking current research on how media, health, and culture can be appropriated to overcome the challenges that plague the world today.

European Perceptions of China and Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative is a collection of fourteen essays on the way China is perceived in Europe today. These perceptions - and they are multiple - are particularly important to the People's Republic of China as the country grapples with its increasingly prominent role on the international stage, and equally important to Europe as it attempts to come to terms with the technological, social and economic advances of the Belt and Road Initiative. The authors are, on the whole, senior academics specializing in such topics as International Relations and Security, Public Diplomacy, Media and Cultural Studies, and Philosophy and Religion from more than a dozen different European countries and are involved in various international projects focussed on Europe-China relations.

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

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.

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.

Galician audio/visual culture has experienced an unprecedented period of growth following the process of political and cultural devolution in post-Franco Spain. This creative explosion has occurred in a productive dialogue with global currents and with considerable projection beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the nation and the state, but these seismic changes are only beginning to be the subject of attention of cultural and media studies. This book examines contemporary audio/visual production in Galicia as privileged channels through which modern Galician cultural identities have been imagined, constructed and consumed, both at home and abroad. The cultural redefinition of Galicia in the global age is explored through different media texts (popular music, cinema, video) which cross established boundaries and deterritorialise new border zones where tradition and modernity dissolve, generating creative tensions between the urban and the rural, the local and the global, the real and the imagined. The book aims for the deperipheralization and deterritorialization of the Galician cultural map by overcoming long-established hegemonic exclusions, whether based on language, discipline, genre, gender, origins, or territorial demarcation, while aiming to disjoint the center/periphery dichotomy that has relegated Galician culture to the margins. In essence, it is an attempt to resituate Galicia and Galician studies out of the periphery and open them to the world.