This book investigates the interplay between media, politics, religion, and culture in shaping Arabs' quest for more stable and democratic governance models in the aftermath of the "Arab Spring" uprisings. It focuses on online mediated public debates, specifically user comments on online Arab news sites, and their potential to re-engage citizens in politics. Contributors systematically explore and critique these online communities and spaces in the context of the Arab uprisings, with case studies, largely centered on Egypt, covering micro-bloggers, Islamic discourse online, Libyan nationalism on Facebook, and a computational assessment of online engagement, among other topics.

Cultural Memory, a subtle and comprehensive process of identity formation, promotion and transmission, is considered as a set of symbolic practices and protocols, with particular emphasis on repositories of memory and the institutionalized forms in which they are embodied. High and low culture as texts embedded in the texture of memory, as well as material culture as a communal receptacle and reservoir of memory are analysed in their historical contingency. Symbolic representations of accepted and counter history/ies, and the cultural nodes and mechanisms of the cultural imaginary are also issues of central interest. Twenty-six contributions tackle these topics from a theoretical and historical perspective and bring to the fore case studies illustrating the interdisciplinary agenda that underlies the volume. Contributors: Luis Manuel A.V. Bernardo, Lina Bolzoni, Peter Burke, Pia Brinzeu, Adina Ciugureanu, Thomas Docherty, Christoph Ehland, Herbert Grabes, Laszlo Gyapay, Donna Landry, Christoph Lehner, Gerald MacLean, Dragos Manea, Daniel Melo, Miroslawa Modrzewska, Rares Moldovan, C.W.R.D. Mosely, Petruta Naidut, Francesca Orestano, Maria Lucia G. Pallares-Burke, Andreea Paris, Leonor Santa Barbara, Hans-Peter Soeder, Jukka Tiusanen, Ludmila Volna, Ioana Zirra.

What is multiculturalism? The word is used everywhere, often without being clearly defined. The first collection of this scope, Mapping Multiculturalism offers cogent critiques of the term and its uses by leading scholars in sociology, history, literary criticism, popular culture studies, ethnic studies, and critical legal studies. The contributors look at current uses of the rubric "multicultural" and offer groundbreaking analyses of complex relationships between popular culture, political events, and intellectual trends. Featuring essays by authors, activists, artists, and theoreticians, Mapping Multiculturalism represents the entire range of multicultural studies today through essays that demarcate the cutting edge of contemporary cultural politics. Contributors: Norma Alarcon, U of California, Berkeley; Richard P. Appelbaum, U of California, Santa Barbara; Edna Bonacich, U of California, Riverside; Wendy Brown, U of California, Santa Cruz; Darryl B. Dickson-Carr, Florida State U; Antonia I. Castaneda, U of Texas, Austin; Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, U of California, Davis; Jon Cruz, U of California, Santa Barbara; Angela Y. Davis, U of California, Santa Cruz; Steve Fagin, U of California, San Diego; Rosa Linda Fregoso, U of California, Davis; Neil Gotanda, Western State U; M. Annette Jaimes Guerrero, San Francisco State U; Ramon Gutierrez, U of California, San Diego; Cynthia Hamilton, U of Rhode Island; George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego; Lisa Lowe, U of California, San Diego; Wahneema Lubiano, Princeton U; Michael Omi, U of California, Berkeley; Lourdes Portillo; Cedric Jo Robinson, U of California, Santa Barbara; Tricia Rose, New York U; Gregg Scott; Paul Smith, George Mason U; Renee Tajima; Patricia Zavella, U of California, Santa Cruz. Avery F. Gordon teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Christopher Newfield teaches English, also at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In the Kitchen insists that the preparation of food, whether imaginative, physical, or spatial, is central to a deeper understanding of early modern food cultures and practices. Devoted to the arts of cooking and medicine, early modern kitchens concentrated on producing, processing, and preserving materials necessary for nourishment and survival; yet they also fed social and economic networks and nurtured a sense of physical, spiritual, and political connection to surrounding lands and their cultures. The essays in this volume illuminate this expansive view of cooking and aspire to show how the kitchen's inner workings prove tightly, though often invisibly, interwoven with local, national, and, increasingly, global surroundings. Engaging with literary and historical methodologies, including close reading, recipe analysis, and perspectives on gender, class, race, and colonialism, we begin to develop a shared theoretical and practical language for the art of cooking that combines the physical with the intellectual, the local with the global, and the domestic with the political.

Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion presents the aesthetics of narrativity in religious contexts by approaching narrative acts as situated modes of engaging with reality, equally shaped by the immersive character of the stories told and the sensory qualities of their performances. Introducing narrative cultures as an integrative framework of analysis, the volume builds a bridge between classical content-based approaches to narrative sources and the aesthetic study of religions as constituted by sensory and mediated practices. Studying stories in conjunction with the role that performative acts of storytelling play in the cultivation of the senses, the contributors explore the efficacy of storytelling formats in narrative cultures from ancient times until today, in regions and cultures across the globe.

In "Ethnicity, Inc." anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Through a wide-ranging exploration of the changing relationship between culture and the market, they address a pressing question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity?

Their account begins in South Africa, with the incorporation of an ethno-business in venture capital by a group of traditional African chiefs. But their horizons are global: Native American casinos; Scotland's efforts to brand itself; a Zulu ethno-theme park named Shakaland; a world religion declared to be intellectual property; a chiefdom made into a global business by means of its platinum holdings; San "Bushmen" with patent rights potentially worth millions of dollars; nations acting as commercial enterprises; and the rapid growth of marketing firms that target specific ethnic populations are just some of the diverse examples that fall under the Comaroffs' incisive scrutiny. These phenomena range from the disturbing through the intriguing to the absurd. Through them, the Comaroffs trace the contradictory effects of neoliberalism as it transforms identities and social being across the globe.

"Ethnicity, Inc." is a penetrating account of the ways in which ethnic populations are remaking themselves in the image of the corporation--while corporations coopt ethnic practices to open up new markets and regimes of consumption. Intellectually rigorous but leavened with wit, this is a powerful, highly original portrayal of a new world being born in a tectonic collision of culture, capitalism, and identity.

This book explores a common but almost forgotten historical argument that positions the Kurds as powerless victims of the First World War (WW1). To this end, the book looks critically at the unfavourable political situations of the Kurds in the post-WW1 era, which began with the emergence of three new modern nation-states in the Middle East-Turkey, Iraq, and Syria-as well as related modernising events in Iran. It demonstrates the dire consequences of oppressive international and regional state policies against the Kurds, which led to mass displacement and forced migration of the Kurds from the 1920s on. The first part of the book sets out the context required to explain the historic and systematic sociopolitical marginalisation of the Kurds in the Middle Eastern region until the present day. In the second part, the book attempts to explain the formation of Kurdish diaspora communities in different European cities, and to describe their new and positive shifting position from victims in the Middle East to active citizens in Europe. This book examines Kurdish diaspora integration and identity in some major cities in Sweden, Finland and Germany, with a specific focus and an in-depth discussion on the negotiation of multiculturalism in London. This book uncovers the gaps in the existing literature, and critically highlights the dominance of policy- and politics-driven research in this field, thereby justifying the need for a more radical social constructivist approach by recognising flexible, multifaceted, and complex human cultural behaviours in different situations through the consideration of the lived experiences and by presenting more direct voices of members of the Kurdish diaspora in London, and by articulating the new and radical concept of Kurdish Londoner.

The Parlour and the Suburb challenges stereotypes about domesticity with a reevaluation of women's roles in the 'private' sphere. Classic accounts of modernity have generally ignored or marginalized women, relegating them to the private sphere of home, sexuality and personal relationships. This private sphere has been understood as a gendered space in which a non-modern femininity is opposed to the masculine world of politics, economics, urban life and the workplace. The author argues, however, that home and private life have been crucial spaces in which the interrelations of class and gender have been significant in the formation of modern feminine subjectivitiesFocusing on the first half of the twentieth century, The Parlour and the Suburb examines how women experienced and understood the home and private life in light of modernity. It explores the identities and self-definitions that domesticity inscribed and shows how these were central to women's sense of themselves as 'modern' individuals. The book draws on a range of cultural texts and practices to explore aspects of domestic modernity that have received little attention in most accounts of modern subjectivities. Topics covered include suburbia, consumption practices, domestic service and the wartime figure of the housewife. Texts examined include a range of women's magazines, George Orwell's Coming up for Air, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, BBC Home Service's 'Help for Housewives' and oral history narratives. 'In this persuasively argued book Giles discusses the highly gendered nature of the concept of modernity which has, to date, marginalized the domestic space and women's traditional role as 'homemakers'.'Stephanie Spencer, Literature & History

In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the "fantasy of identification"--the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society.

Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact.From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.

Behind the stereotype of a solitary meditator closing his eyes to the world, meditation always takes place in close interaction with the surrounding culture. Meditation and Culture: The Interplay of Practice and Context explores cases in which the relation between meditative practice and cultural context is particularly complex. The internationally-renowned contributors discuss practices that travel from one culture to another, or are surrounded by competing cultures. They explore cultures that bring together competing practices, or that are themselves mosaics of elements of different origins. They seek to answer the question: What is the relationship between meditation and culture? The effects of meditation may arise from its symbolic value within larger webs of cultural meaning, as in the contextual view that still dominates cultural and religious studies. They may also be psychobiological responses to the practice itself, the cultural context merely acting as a catalyst for processes originating in the body and mind of the practitioner. Meditation and Culture gives no single definitive explanation, but taken together, the different viewpoints presented point to the complexity of the relationship.

Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. "The Big Ratchet" is the story of how it happened, of the ratchets--the technologies and innovations, big and small--that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket.
The Big Ratchet itself came in the twentieth century, when a range of technologies--from fossil fuels to scientific plant breeding to nitrogen fertilizers--combined to nearly quadruple our population in a century, and to grow our food supply even faster. To some, these technologies are a sign of our greatness; to others, of our hubris. MacArthur fellow and Columbia University professor Ruth DeFries argues that the debate is the wrong one to have. Limits do exist, but every limit that has confronted us, we have surpassed. That cycle of crisis and growth is the story of our history; indeed, it is the essence of "The Big Ratchet." Understanding it will reveal not just how we reached this point in our history, but how we might survive it.

Donna Haraway analyses accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs (cybernetic components); showing how deeply cultural assumptions penetrate into allegedly value-neutral medical research.

Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century, princely courts dominated the Italian political scene. These courts were effervescent centers of cultural production. As such, they became a model for European monarchies who imported Italian courtly forma del vivere ('style of life') to legitimize their power and to define social status. This phenomenon included architecture and painting, theater and music, manners and aesthetics, and all the objects, behaviors and beliefs that contributed to homogenize European culture in the age of the Old Regime. It involved a hemorrhage of art and a continuous circulation of people, texts and symbols. The foundational material for this process was classicism and its purpose was political. This delineates a new geography and chronology of a truly European cultural history. It also provides the key traits for the European cultural identity.

Due to various social and political affairs, cultures around the world have become increasingly strict. However, throughout history, many civilizations have created extensive and long-term cultural links with different cultural groups; this network of interaction activated the acculturation phenomenon. From past to present, cultures actuated language, religion, nationality, and war mechanisms to protect themselves. However, these ideological mechanisms of civilizations could not stop the cultural encounters and coexistence. This editorial work brings together an analysis of the cultural encounters and coexistence phenomena from different scholarly approaches throughout history. The book will solidify indulgences of cultures through visual and material evidence and effectively add to the scientific environment. We live in an age where cultures have started to behave more harshly with each other; in order to activate a culture of tolerance, we must re-examine the coexistence of cultures using historical evidence materials. This book is ideal for all branches of the social sciences, from literature to architectural history.

The year 1998 represents the hundredth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico. Since that time, the "Puerto Rican archipelago" has come to extend from the island itself, up the Eastern seaboard, and as far west as California and Hawai'i. Puerto Rican Jam considers the issues unique to Puerto Rican culture and politics, issues often encapsulated in concerns about ethnicity, race, gender, and language. Discussions of Puerto Rican cultural politics usually fall into one of two categories, nationalist or colonialist. Puerto Rican Jam moves beyond this narrow dichotomy, elaborating alternatives to dominant postcolonial theories, and includes essays written from the perspectives of groups that are not usually represented, such as gays and lesbians, youth, blacks, and women. The essays propose different ways of conceptualizing the U.S.-Puerto Rican colonial relationship, thus opening new spaces for political, social, economic, and cultural agency for Puerto Ricans on both the island and the continent. Among the topics discussed are the limitations of nationalism as a transformative and democratizing political discourse, the contradictory impact of American colonialism, language politics, and the 1928 U.S. congressional hearings on women's suffrage in Puerto Rico. A groundbreaking contribution to the study of colonialism, Puerto Rican Jam represents an important engagement with issues raised by American expansionism in the Caribbean. Contributors: Jaime E. Benson-Arias, U of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez; Arlene Davila, Syracuse U; Chloe S. Georas, SUNY, Binghamton; Manuel Guzman, CUNY Graduate Center; Gladys M. Jimenez-Munoz, SUNY, Oneonta; Agustin Lao, SUNY, Binghamton; Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, U of Puerto Rico; Mariano Negron-Portillo, U of Puerto Rico; Jose Quiroga, George Washington U; Raquel Z. Rivera, CUNY Graduate Center; Alberto Sandoval Sanchez, Mount Holyoke College; Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles, SUNY, Binghamton. Frances Negron-Muntaner is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Rutgers University, as well as a poet and filmmaker. Ramon Grosfoguel is assistant professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

"Raising the Dead" is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through "the space of death" gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide.
Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other "minorities" in society is, like death, "almost unspeakable." She gives voice to--or raises--the dead through her examination of works such as the movie "Menace II Society, " Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved, " Leslie Marmon Silko's "Almanac of the Dead, " Randall Kenan's "A Visitation of Spirits, " and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.
"Raising the Dead" will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

While the end of the nineteenth century is often associated with the rise of objectivity and its ideal of a restrained observer, scientific experiments continued to create emotional, even theatrical, relationships between scientist and his subject. On Flinching focuses on moments in which scientific observers flinched from sudden noises, winced at the sight of an animal's pain or cringed when he was caught looking, as ways to consider a distinctive motif of passionate and gestured looking in the laboratory and beyond. It was not their laboratory machines who these scientific observers most closely resembled, but the self-consciously emotional theatrical audiences of the period. Tiffany Watt-Smith offers close readings of four experiments performed by the naturalist Charles Darwin, the physiologist David Ferrier, the neurologist Henry Head, and the psychologist Arthur Hurst. Bringing together flinching scientific observers with actors and spectators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century theatre, it places the history of scientific looking in its wider cultural context, arguing that even at the dawn of objectivity the techniques and problems of the stage continued to haunt scientific life. In turn, it suggests that by exploring the ways recoiling, shrinking and wincing becoming paradigmatic spectatorial gestures in this period, we can understand the ways Victorians thought about looking as itself an emotional and gestured performance.

For businesses to remain competitive, managers must continuously update their leadership methods. By attempting to learn from foreign experiences and approaches, managers can gain significant value in cross-cultural comparisons in the business realm. Examining Cultural Influences on Leadership Styles and Learning From Chinese Approaches to Management: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an informative scholarly reference source that examines the cultural aspects of management styles and techniques. Highlighting relevant topics such as leadership development, value systems, validity tests, and organizational communication, this publication will benefit all academicians, professionals, practitioners, managers, and business owners that are interested in discovering a more inclusive way to hone their leadership skillsets.

Far more than a building of brick and mortar, the prison relies upon gruesome stories circulated as commercial media to legitimize its institutional reproduction. Perhaps no medium has done more in recent years to both produce and intervene in such stories than television. This unapologetically interdisciplinary work presents a series of investigations into some of the most influential and innovative treatments of American mass incarceration to hit our screens in recent decades. Looking beyond celebratory accolades, Lee A. Flamand argues that we cannot understand the eagerness of influential programs such as OZ, The Wire, Orange Is the New Black, 13th, and Queen Sugar to integrate the sensibilities of prison ethnography, urban sociology, identity politics activism, and even Black feminist theory into their narrative structures without understanding how such critical postures relate to the cultural aspirations and commercial goals of a quickly evolving TV industry and the most deeply ingrained continuities of American storytelling practices.

What Movies Teach about Race: Exceptionalism, Erasure, & Entitlement reveals the way that media frames in entertainment content persuade audiences to see themselves and others through a prescriptive lens that favors whiteness. These media representations threaten democracy as conglomeration and convergence concentrate the media's global influence in the hands of a few corporations. By linking film's political economy with the movie content in the most influential films, this critical discourse study uncovers the socially-shared cognitive structures that the movie industry passes down from one generation to another. Roslyn M. Satchel encourages media literacy and proposes an entertainment media cascading network activation theory that uncovers racialized rhetoric in media content that cyclically begins in historic ideologies, influences elite discourse, embeds in media systems, produces media frames and representations, shapes public opinion, and then is recycled and perpetuated generationally.

Rooted in feminist ethnography and decolonial feminist theory, this book explores the subjectivity of Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli prisons, as shaped by resistance. Ashjan Ajour examines how these prisoners use their bodies in anti-colonial resistance; what determines this mode of radical struggle; the meanings they ascribe to their actions; and how they constitute their subjectivity while undergoing extreme bodily pain and starvation. These hunger strikes, which embody decolonisation and liberation politics, frame the post-Oslo period in the wake of the decline of the national struggle against settler-colonialism and the fragmentation of the Palestinian movement. Providing narrative and analytical insights into embodied resistance and tracing the formation of revolutionary subjectivity, the book sheds light on the participants' views of the hunger strike, as they move beyond customary understandings of the political into the realm of the 'spiritualisation' of struggle. Drawing on Foucault's conception of the technologies of the self, Fanon's writings on anti-colonial violence, and Badiou's militant philosophy, Ajour problematises these concepts from the vantage point of the Palestinian hunger strike.