This is an exploration into how a certain plant became a global commodity, creating fortunes and despair, bringing people together and tearing them apart, playing a starring role in the awakening of the modern world.

Transcending the widespread concerns about deteriorating moral values in American society, this collection focuses on the common values of American society. Through the perspectives of philosophers, historians, political scientists, theologians, anthropologists, economists, and scientists, this book examines American social values and discusses how they are applied in current areas of public interest.

American democratic ideals are not simply rooted in the conventional structural and institutional elements of a democracy, such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. American democracy, in fact, could not survive without a strong basis of social values that support community, tolerance, and cooperation. Since social values form the common bonds of society, and may not be supported by individual members, they are determined through a complex cultural, legal, and political process, as one of the contributors points out.

The contributors to this book were assembled from a variety of disciplines and professions to examine social values and analyze their application in specific areas of current controversy. Through the perspectives of philosophy, anthropology, history, economics, political science, biomedical ethics, and religion, these discussions cover not only disciplinary perspectives but cover topics such as the environment, intergenerational interaction, social welfare policies, gender, and genetic engineering.

Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid's most repressive years. In "At Home with Apartheid, " Rebecca Ginsburg provides an intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of Johannesburg's middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods during the height of apartheid (c. 1960-1975) and incorporates recent scholarship on gender, the home, and family.

More subtly but no less significantly than factory floors, squatter camps, prisons, and courtrooms, the homes of white South Africans were sites of important contests between white privilege and black aspiration. Subtle negotiations within the domestic sphere between white, mostly female, householders and their black domestic workers, also primarily women, played out over and around this space. These seemingly mundane, private conflicts were part of larger contemporary struggles between whites and blacks over territory and power.

Ginsburg gives special attention to the distinct social and racial geographies produced by the workers' detached living quarters, designed by builders and architects as landscape complements to the main houses. Ranch houses, Italianate villas, modernist cubes, and Victorian bungalows filled Johannesburg's suburbs. What distinguished these neighborhoods from their precedents in the United States or the United Kingdom was the presence of the ubiquitous back rooms and of the African women who inhabited them in these otherwise exclusively white areas.

The author conducted more than seventy-five personal interviews for this book, an approach that sets it apart from other architectural histories. In addition to these oral accounts, Ginsburg draws from plans, drawings, and onsite analysis of the physical properties themselves. While the issues addressed span the disciplines of South African and architectural history, feminist studies, material culture studies, and psychology, the book's strong narrative, powerful oral histories, and compelling subject matter bring the neighborhoods and residents it examines vividly to life.

This volume presents a comparative framework in which to study the history of publishing and reading in Europe and North America during the eighteenth century. The chapters are written by leading French and American specialists in publishing during the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary eras. The book synthesizes current knowledge in the field and advances scholarship, particularly with respect to copyright legislation. It skillfully integrates the history of publishing during this period with the larger field of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural history. The chapters are grouped in four sections devoted to publishing as a profession, publishing and the law, readership, and the collection and use of materials. Each broad area is addressed by both specialists from France and America to create a comparative context. The chapters address more particular topics from the perspectives of social, economic, and cultural history; literary criticism; law; and library history. The comparative framework yields new insights into the political cultures of eighteenth-century France and America and into the relationship of print media and political culture.

"Lovrenovic's talents lie not in the enumeration of historical facts, but in constructing (or discovering) a narrative to the evolving idea of Bosnia."
--"Slavic and European Journal"

While the contemporary political history of Bosnia has been played out on television for international audiences, the complicated cultural basis for recent historical events remains largely unknown. Why did Bosnians who spoke the same language fracture along religious and ethnic lines? Is there a distinct Bosnian nation and Bosnian culture? What does it mean to be Bosnian if one is Serbian or Croatian? And what does the future hold for artistic and intellectual life in Bosnia?

In Bosnia: A Cultural History, Ivan Lovrenovic provides a complex and detailed account of Bosnian history from a unique and often overlooked perspective. Focusing on the changes in religious, cultural, and ethnic influences from Paleolithic times to the present, Lovrenovic's analysis probes deep into the Bosnian past and helps to enlighten the reader as to the present and potential future of this troubled land.

The evolution of the Bosnian Church distinct from the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, the role of Islam and Judaism, religious and secular architecture, ancient and modern prose and poetry, music, radio, film and television are all discussed to offer a comprehensive portrait of Bosnian culture.

Art and Architecture in Ladakh shows how the region's cultural development has been influenced by its location across the great communications routes linking India with Tibet and Central Asia. Edited by Erberto Lo Bue and John Bray, the collection contains 17 research papers by experienced international art historians and architectural conservationists, as well as emerging scholars from Ladakh itself. Their topics range widely over time, from prehistoric rock art to mediaeval Buddhist stupas and wall paintings, as well as early modern castle architecture, the inter-regional trade in silk brocades, and the challenges of 21st century conservation. Taken together, these studies complement each other to provide a detailed view of Ladakh's varied cultural inheritance in the light of the latest research. Contributors include: Monisha Ahmed, Marjo Alafouzo, Andre Alexander, Chiara Bellini, Kristin Blancke, John Bray, Laurianne Bruneau, Andreas Catanese, Philip Denwood, Quentin Devers, Phuntsog Dorjay, Hubert Feiglstorfer, John Harrison, Neil and Kath Howard, Gerald Kozicz, Erberto Lo Bue, Filippo Lunardo, Kacho Mumtaz Ali Khan, Heinrich Poell, Tashi Ldawa Thsangspa and Martin Vernier.

The fifth and final volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the almost thirteen months during which her attention at first was firmly set on a last chance medical cure, then finally on something very different--if death came to seem inevitable, how should one behave in the time that remained, so one could truly say one lived?
Mansfield's biographers, like her friends, have wondered at the seemingly extraordinary decision to ditch conventional medicine, for the bizarre choice of Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau. These letters show the clarity of mind and will that led to that decision, the courage and distress in making it, and the gaiety even once it was made. She went against what her education, her husband, and most of her friends would regard as reasonable, as she opted to spend her last months with Russian emigres and a strange assortment of Gurdjieff disciples (which she was not). But Fontainebleau give her the space and the incentive to shake free from the intellectualism that she thought the malaise of her time, as she worked at kitchen chores, took in the details of farm life, tried to learn Russian, and attempted to reach total honesty with herself. "If I were allowed one simple cry to God," she wrote in one of her last letters, "that cry would be I want to be REAL."

TV cookery shows hosted by celebrity chefs. Meal prep kitchens. Online grocers and restaurant review sites. Competitive eating contests, carnivals and fairs, and junk food websites and blogs. What do all of them have in common? According to authors Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, they each serve as productive sites for understanding the role of culinary capital in shaping individual and group identities in contemporary culture.Beyond providing sustenance, food and food practices play an important social role, offering status to individuals who conform to their culture's culinary norms and expectations while also providing a means of resisting them. "Culinary Capital" analyzes this phenomenon in action across the landscape of contemporary culture. The authors examine how each of the sites listed above promises viewers and consumers status through the acquisition of culinary capital and, as they do so, intersect with a range of cultural values and ideologies, particularly those of gender and economic class.

This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hena Maes-Jelinek (1929-2008), a pioneering postcolonial scholar who was a professor at the University of Liege, in Belgium. Along with a few moving and affectionate pieces retracing the life and career of this remarkable and deeply human intellectual figure, the collection contains poems, short fiction, and metafiction. The bulk of the book consists of contributions on various areas of postcolonial literature, including the work of Wilson Harris, the ground-breaking writer to whom Hena Maes-Jelinek devoted much of her career. Other writers treated include Ben Okri, Leone Ross, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Patrick White, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Dan Jacobson, Joseph Conrad, and Eslanda Goode Robeson. Caryl Phillips revisits his earlier reflections on the 'European tribe'. There are wide-ranging essays analysing consanguineous authors, on such topics as Caribbean treatments of the Jewish Diaspora, Swiss-Caribbean authors, the contemporary Australian short story and the Asian connection, and 'habitation' in Australian fiction, as well as a searching examination of the socio-political fallout from the scandal of Australia's 'Stolen Generations'. Contributors are: Gordon Collier, Tim Cribb, Fred D'Aguiar, Geoffrey V. Davis, Jeanne Delbaere, Marc Delrez, Jean-Pierre Durix, Wilson Harris, Dominique Hecq, Marie Herbillon, Louis James, Karen King-Aribisala, Benedicte Ledent, Christine Levecq, Alecia McKenzie, Carine Mardorossian, Peter H. Marsden, Alistair Niven, Annalisa Oboe, Britta Olinder, Christine Pagnoulle, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Scott, Stephanos Stephanides, Klaus Stuckert, Peter O. Stummer, Petra Tournay-Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Cynthia vanden Driesen, Janet Wilson.

Capoeira is a unique music-dance-sport-play activity created by African slaves, and Candomble is a hybrid religion combining Catholic and African beliefs and practices. And while there are numerous books on Candomble and kindred Afro-American religions, none of them effectively combines Candomble and Capoeira. Actually, Capoeira and Candomble are closely tied to one another. Together, they make up a coherent form of life in Brazil within the current process of globalization about which there has been much ballyhoo, eulogies, and condemnation. This study involves the author's practice of and reflections on the arts of Capoeira and Candomble; it culminates in the idea of an ""other logic,"" an alternative culture ""logic,"" about which much lip service is being paid in academic circles, with little to no concrete details. This book, consequently, is one of a kind insofar as it bears on the interdependency of two Afro-Brazilian practices while grounding them in a theoretical framework and at the same time interrelating them with topics of great concern in the initial years of a new millennium: post-colonial and diaspora studies.

Drawing upon international case studies, and building upon Iain J.M. Robertson?'s work on ?'heritage from below?', After Heritage sheds critical light on heritage-making and heritagescapes that are, more frequently than not, located in virtual, less conspicuous and more everyday spaces. The book considers the highly personal, often ephemeral, individual ?- vis-a-vis collective -? experiences of (in)formal ways the past has been folded into contemporary societies. In doing so, it unravels the merits of examining more intimate materializations of heritage not only as a check against, but also complementary to, what Laurajanne Smith refers to as ?'Authorized Heritage Discourses?'. It also argues against the tendency to romanticize the fleeting and largely obscured means through which alternative forms of heritage-making are produced, performed and patronized. Ultimately, this book provides a clarion call to reinsert the individual and the transient into collective heritage processes. Researchers in human and cultural geography, heritage studies and tourism studies will find this strong contribution to the developing field of Critical Heritage Studies an insightful read. Policy makers and heritage practitioners will also develop a deeper understanding of how heritage practices may benefit from the '?heritage from below?' approach. Contributors include: A. Aceska, R. Carter-White, M. Cook, D. Drozdzewski, J. Gillen, C. Minca, H. Muzaini, M. Ormond, A.E. Potter, I.J.M. Robertson, J. Tyner

The notion of 'landlines' intimates communication, and is a fairly safe bet as far as most of the writing offered here, critical and creative, is concerned. In a way, of course, the metaphor is a rearguard action, and blows up in one's face, as it were, suggesting as it does a system of telephonic communication that is no longer typical of Africa, which is at the forefront of cellphone culture. On the more positive side, it is hoped that 'landlines' evoke traditional values, permitting the endorsement of communicative standards that are higher than those fostered by the 'etherial' chaos of cyberspace. The essays included are overwhelmingly concerned with Nigeria (productive power-house of the continent), covering such writers as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Vincent Egbuson, Buchi Emecheta, D.O. Fagunwa, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Femi Osofisan (two articles), Wole Soyinka, and Ahmed Yerima. The Nigerian novel (four articles) is roughly matched by studies of Nigerian dramatists (five articles). Also offered are three essays on fiction from outside Nigeria, by Alexander McCall Smith (Botswana), J.M. Coetzee (South Africa), and Marie NDiaye (France), and a treatment of the poetry of Jack Mapanje (Malawi). A further, wide-ranging essay, on cityscapes, discusses novels from Cameroon, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Kenya, as well as paintings from Equatorial Guinea and public placarding in Accra. Social awareness, a firm sense of history and traditional culture, the contemporary challenges of gender and identity-politics, and the perennial theme of endemic corruption are themes that underpin all of the contributions to Matatu 47. Matatu has traditionally fostered the publication of creative writing, and the present issue is no exception, featuring as it does poetry from Trinidad, a play from Nigeria, and short stories from Burundi, Ghana, and Nigeria. The volume closes with in-depth reviews of books on Yoruba proverbs, Chinua Achebe, and transnational literature. Contributors are: E.B. Adeleke, Tony E. Afejuku, Sophia Akhuemokhan, Niyi Akingbe, Sunday Victor Akwu, Felix Ayoh'Omidire, Dele Bamidele, Gilbert Braspenning, Clare Counihan, Jane Duran, Summer Edward, Pelumi Folajimi, Fausat M. Ibrahim, Isaiah U. Ilo, Ayodele S. Jegede, Mahrukh Khan, Adele King, Adebayo Mosobalaje, Dorothy Odartey-Wellington, H. Oby Okolocha, Harry Olufunwa, Owojecho Omoha, Wumi Raji, Marie-Therese Toyi, Flora A. Trebi-Ollennu, Kenneth Usongo, and Lendzemo Constantine Yuka.

Selected proceedings from the 6th International Conference on Culture and Communication, held at Temple U., 1986. The eight sections cover language and politics; sociolinguistics; performance as cultural reflection; sales, promotion, and organization; technology in its social context; mass media and

This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, "The Poetics and Politics of the Desert" investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

Perhaps more than in any other period in modern history, our globalized present is characterized by a constant interaction of, and exposure to, different peoples, regions, ways of life, traditions, languages, and cultures. Cross-boundary communication today comes in various shapes: as mutual exchange, open dialogue, enforced process, misunderstanding, or even violent conflict. In this situation, 'translation' has become an inevitable requirement in order to ease the flow of disinterested and unbiased cultural communication. The contributors to this collection approach the subject of the 'translation of cultures' from various angles. Translation refers, of course, to the rendering of texts from one language into another and the shift between languages under precolonial (retelling/transcreation), colonial (domestication), and postcolonial (multilingual trafficking) conditions. It is also concerned with the (in-)adequacy of the Western translation concept of equivalence, the problem of the (un)translatability of cultures, and new postcolonial approaches (representation through translation). Translation here is used as a broader term covering the interaction of cultures, the transfer of cultural experience, the concern with cultural borders, the articulation of liminal experience, and intercultural understanding.

The American Left has produced a rich and varied cultural tradition that was largely suppressed during the Cold War but whose influence on the larger society has always been significant. Much of this tradition found its expression in film and despite the suppression of overtly leftist content in most Hollywood films, there is still a substantial amount of leftist material in American movies. Booker's study gives the attention to the films of the American Left that they have long deserved by examining the full range of their history. Such well known directors as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, William Wellman, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone, and John Sayles often showed leftist inclinations in their work. Other films associated with the American Left have been produced in a number of modes and subgenres, including war films, historical films, detective films, and science fiction. Some of these directors have offered overt criticisms of capitalism in films dealing with labor and business. This reference book thoroughly explores leftist elements in American films.

The book begins with a brief historical survey of the development of this important cultural phenomenon. It then provides detailed entries for more than 260 films associated with the American Left. The entries are arranged chronologically, so that the reader may trace the cinematic representation of the American Left across time. The entries include not only plot summaries, but also critical examinations of the political content and implications of the films. Included are discussions of such classic works as "Citizen Kane" and "The Grapes of Wrath, " along with considerations of more recent films, such as "Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, " and "Men with Guns." Two appendixes and index provide alphabetical access to the entries. The individual entries provide brief bibliographical citations, while the volume closes with a bibliography.

Architecture and Control makes a collective critical intervention into the relationship between architecture, including virtual architectures, and practices of control since the turn of the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. Authors from the fields of architectural theory, literature, film and cultural studies come together here with visual artists to explore the contested sites at which, in the present day, attempts at gaining control give rise to architectures of control as well as the potential for architectures of resistance. Together, these contributions make clear how a variety of post-2000 architectures enable control to be established, all the while observing how certain architectures and infrastructures allow for alternative, progressive modes of control, and even modes of the unforeseen and the uncontrolled, to arise. Contributors are: Pablo Bustinduy, Rafael Dernbach, Alexander R. Galloway, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Maria Finn, Runa Johannessen, Natalie Koerner, Michael Krause, Samantha Martin-McAuliffe, Lorna Muir, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Anne Elisabeth Sejten and Joey Whitfield

Business is the religion of the contemporary world. We now live in a business culture, in which business plays the major role in determining how we encounter and interpret the world around us. So argues John Deeks in a provocative book that highlights the influence of business on culture and traces the increasingly dominant role that business has played in shaping social and cultural experience. The book's general thesis is that the focus of business activity has broadened to encompass not only the traditional exploitation of resources and the manufacture of artifacts, but also the exploitation and manufacture of language, images, symbols and consciousness--- the very substance of the idea of culture. It argues that in the contemporary world, the dividing line between commerce and culture is becoming increasingly blurred and that business practices and values now dominate the material, intellectual and spiritual life of the community.

The book is structured around the idea of an extended business culture. This provides the focal points for an analysis of cultural developments related to the activities and values of the world of business. These focal points are: the development of the market economy; the control of technology; the manipulation of language, images and symbols; the shaping of consciousness; and the transmission of ideology. The book's general thesis is illustrated by an eclectic and entertaining range of material drawn from economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, art, biography, literature, film, theater, television, technology, and computer science--- material drawn together by the common thread of business. By utilizing literary, dramatic and visual texts together with material on entrepreneurship and business management, the author looks at the world of business imaginatively as well as analytically--- an approach that reinforces his ideas about the relationship among business, society and culture. The book will be of particular value to those with an interest in business and social and cultural issues, and to business teachers and students. It will provide ideal supplemental reading for courses on Business and Society.

In this book Henry A. Giroux passionately argues that education and critical pedagogy are needed now more than ever to combat injustices in our society caused by fake news, toxic masculinity, racism, consumerism and white nationalism. At the heart of the book is the idea that pedagogy has the power to create narratives of desire, values, identity, and agency at time when these narratives are being manipulated to promote right wing populism and emerging global fascist politics. The book expands on the notion of the plague as not only a medical crisis but also a crisis of politics, ethics, education, and democracy itself. The chapters cover a range topics beginning with historical perspectives on fascism and moving on to issues of social atomization, depoliticization, neoliberal pedagogy, the scourge of staggering inequality, populism, and pandemic pedagogy. The book concludes with a call for educators to make education central to politics, develop a discourse of critique and possibility, reclaim the vision of a radical democracy, and embrace their role as powerful agents of change.

In the White Mutiny of 1859-61--the largest revolt the British army ever faced--European troops operating on behalf of the East India Company rebelled against their transfer to the service of the Queen of England. Through an analysis of the White Mutiny, Peter Stanley provides a portrait of emerging working-class consciousness among the troops and reveals how the British army, the preeminent icon of English imperialism, first maintained, then lost, control over a vast and generally hostile sub-continent.

In cantonment offices in Meerut and Calcutta, we find unimpaired the class distinctions and aspirations of contemporary Britain. Penetrating the hidden worlds of the barrack room and the officers' mess, White Mutiny demonstrates the intimate relationship between the military and the social history of British culture in India, and how awareness of each can enrich the other.

The Vietnam War was one of the most painful and divisive events in American history. The conflict, which ultimately took the lives of 58,000 Americans and more than three million Vietnamese, became a subject of bitter and impassioned debate. The most dramatic--and frequently the most enduring--efforts to define and articulate America's ill-fated involvement in Vietnam emerged from popular culture. American journalists, novelists, playwrights, poets, songwriters, and filmmakers--many of them eyewitnesses--have created powerful, heartfelt works documenting their thoughts and beliefs about the war. By examining those works, this book provides readers with a fascinating resource that explores America's ongoing struggle to assess the war and its legacies.

This encyclopedia includes 44 essays, each providing detailed information on an important film, song, or literary work about Vietnam. Each essay provides insights into the Vietnam-era experiences and views of the work's primary creative force, historical background on issues or events addressed in the work, discussion of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the work, and sources for further information. This book also includes an appendix listing of more than 275 films, songs, and literary works dealing with the war.

In the years since World War II, commercial television has become the most powerful force in American culture. It is also the quintessential example of postmodernist culture. This book studies how "The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner, Twin Peaks," and "The X-Files" display many of the central characteristics that critics and theorists have associated with postmodernism, including fragmentation of narratives and characters, multiplicity in style and genre, and the collapse of traditional categorical boundaries of all kinds. The author labels these series strange TV since they challenge the conventions of television programming, thus producing a form of cognitive estrangement that potentially encourages audiences to question received ideas.

Despite their challenges to the conventions of commercial television, however, these series pose no real threat to the capitalist order. In fact, the very characteristics that identify these series as postmodern are also central characteristics of capitalism itself, especially in its late consumerist phase. An examination of these series within the context of postmodernism thus confirms Fredric Jameson's thesis that postmodernism is a reflection of the cultural logic of late capitalism. At the same time, these series do point toward the potential of television as a genuinely innovative medium that promises to produce genuinely new forms of cultural expression in the future.

ReAction gives a scientist's and artist's response to the dark and bright sides of chemistry found in 140 films, most of them contemporary Hollywood feature films but also a few documentaries, shorts, silents, and international films.
Even though there are some examples of screen chemistry between the actors and of behind-the-scenes special effects, this book is really about the chemistry when it is part of the narrative. It is about the dualities of Dr. Jekyll vs. inventor chemists, the invisible man vs. forensic chemists, chemical weapons vs. classroom chemistry, chemical companies that knowingly pollute the environment vs. altruistic research chemists trying to make the world a better place to live, and, finally, about people who choose to experiment with mind-altering drugs vs. the drug discovery process.
Little did Jekyll know when he brought the Hyde formula to his lips that his personality split would provide the central metaphor that would come to describe chemistry in the movies. This book explores the two movie faces of this supposedly neutral science. Watching films with chemical eyes, Dr. Jekyll is recast as a chemist engaged in psychopharmaceutical research but who becomes addicted to his own formula. He is balanced by the often wacky inventor chemists who make their discoveries by trial-and-error.