Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.

aRough Writing is much more than a fascinating account of the little-known relationship between an American president and the immigrant authors whose work he promoted in the service of a new national narrative. Meticulously researched and lucidly written, Rough Writing enables us to see a vital period in American literature through new eyes.a
--Laura Browder, author of "Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities"

As the United States struggled to absorb a massive influx of ethnically diverse immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, the question of who and what an American is took on urgent intensity. It seemed more critical than ever to establish a definition by which Americanness could be established, transmitted, maintained, and judged. Americans of all stripes sought to articulate and enforce their visions of the nationas past, present, and future; central to these attempts was President Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt fully recognized the narrative component of American identity, and he called upon authors of diverse European backgrounds including Israel Zangwill, Jacob Riis, Elizabeth Stern, and Finley Peter Dunne to promote the nation in popular written form. With the swell and shift in immigration, he realized that a more encompassing national literature was needed to aexpress and guide the soul of the nation.a Rough Writing examines the surprising place and implications of the immigrant and of ethnic writing in Rooseveltas America and American literature.

When a devastating earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12, 2010, the world reacted with a collective, yet distant, horror. For "Cincinnati Enquirer" reporter Mark Curnutte, hearing the news provoked a far more visceral response. Curnutte had grown to love Haiti and its people as only someone who had lived with Haiti's families could.

"A Promise in Haiti" is Curnutte's story of his time, spanning the last decade, living among several families in Gonaives, a city of 200,000 people a hundred kilometers north of Port-au-Prince. He began traveling to Haiti as a volunteer with the aid organization Hands Together, eventually building trust and credibility with many Haitians. Curnutte introduces the reader to the Cenecharles family, strained by entrenched unemployment and the need to continually travel for work. He is invited into the home of the Henrisma family, and is forced to reconcile journalistic detachment with basic compassion as he contributes financially to help them. The reader is confronted with a complicated, conflicted written and photographic record of a worldview that evolves right on the page. As a reporter, Curnutte found parallels between the lives he encountered in Gonaives and the world of the Great Depression recounted in James Agee and Walker Evans's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." Agee and Evans loom large as a challenge and inspiration to Curnutte.

The result is equal parts homage to that historic chronicle, on-the-ground reporting, and introspective narrative on the lessons Gonaives taught Curnutte about his own life and family. In late February 2010, Curnutte went back to Haiti on assignment, but conditions made it impossible for him to return to Gonaives. The resulting frustration provoked a meditation on the monumental challenges that face Haiti -- and on the destructive cycle of international attention that constantly moves on to "The Next Big Story."

This book provides a fascinating, up-to-date overview of the social, cultural, economic, and political landscapes of Tanzania. In Culture and Customs of Tanzania, author Kefa M. Otiso presents an approachable basic overview of the country's key characteristics, covering topics such as Tanzania's land, peoples, languages, education system, resources, occupations, economy, government, and history. This recent addition to Greenwood's Culture and Customs of Africa series also contains chapters that portray the culture and social customs of Tanzania, such as the country's religion and worldview; literature, film, and media; art, architecture, and housing; cuisine and traditional dress; gender roles, marriage, family structures, and lifestyle; and music, dance, and drama. Describes historical events from the late 1800s to the present day Provides several maps depicting Tanzania's location in Africa, major physical features, administrative units, urban areas, ethnic groups, and population distribution Contains an interdisciplinary bibliography of sources in the areas of geography, history, anthropology, and popular culture Includes a glossary of key terms, places, cities, ethnic groups, and personalities

This collection opens the geospatiality of "Asia" into an environmental framework called "Oceania" and pushes this complex regional multiplicity towards modes of trans-local solidarity, planetary consciousness, multi-sited decentering, and world belonging. At the transdisciplinary core of this "worlding" process lies the multiple spatial and temporal dynamics of an environmental eco-poetics, articulated via thinking and creating both with and beyond the Pacific and Asia imaginary.

Throughout its history Nicaragua has been plagued by corruption, social and racial inequality, civil unrest, and foreign interference. Yet despite being the second poorest nation in South America, Nicaragua maintains a rich and vibrant culture that reflects its strong Catholic devotion, diverse indigenous roots, and overwhelming zest for life. Culture and Customs of Nicaragua introduces students and general readers to Nicaragua's unique blend of religious and traditional holidays, so numerous that the country is said to be in a constant state of celebration; its growing film industry; its many styles of dance, the popular "street theatre" open to all bystanders; important contributions to Spanish literature, local cuisines, architecture, social norms, and more. Readers learn what it is like to live in one of Latin America's most disillusioned countries but also discover the passionate culture that defines and sustains the Nicaraguan people.

Mirrors are mesmerizing. The rhetorical figure that represents a mirror is called a "chiasmus," a pattern derived from the Greek letter X (Chi). This pattern applies to sentences such as one does not live to eat; one eats to live. It is found in myths, plays, poems, biblical songs, short stories, novels, epics. Numerous studies have dealt with repetition, difference, and Narcissism in the fields of literature, music, and art. But mirror structures, "per se," have not received systematic notice. This book analyses mirror imagery, scenes, and characters in French prose texts, in chronological order, from the 17th to the 20th centuries. It does so in light of literal, metaphoric, and rhetorical structures. Works analysed in the traditional French canon, written by such writers as Laclos, Lafayette, and Balzac, are extended by studies of texts composed by Barbey d Aurevilly, Georges Rodenbach, Jean Lorrain, and Pieyre de Mandiargues. This work appeals to readers interested in linguistics, French history, psychology, art, and material culture. It invites analyses of historical and ideological contexts, rhetorical strategies, symmetry and asymmetry. Ovid s "Narcissus" and "Alice in Wonderland" are paradigms for the study of micro and macro-structures. Analyses of mirrors as cultural artefacts are significant to Lowrie s "sight seeing."

This book is a captivating and authoritative introduction to Brazil-its history, the evolution of its society and culture, and the staggering variety of peoples and landscapes within its borders. Brazil: A Global Studies Handbook provides an easy-to-access, multifaceted introduction to the world's fifth largest nation-a staggeringly diverse region, socially and geographically, that remains relatively unknown even as it becomes increasingly important on the world stage. Brazil offers an expert chronological narrative summary of over five centuries of South America's largest country-from the days of early Portuguese exploration to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's reelection. In addition, it provides a richly informative section of alphabetically organized entries covering important Brazilian people, places, and events. For readers both new to Brazil or researching specific aspects of its unique history, complex politics, heavyweight economy, and vibrant culture, this is the volume with which to begin. Includes maps of the early division of South America, modern Brazil's regions and states, and comparative views of Brazil's size to that of Europe as well as photographs of slave conditions, early transportation of coffee, famous leaders, indigenous peoples, the Amazon rainforest, and more Provides a glossary of terms from Brazil's history to contemporary times, defining terms such as estado novo, bureaucratic authoritarianism, Tropicalismo, and Capoeira

The Long Life invites the reader to range widely from the writings of Plato through to recent philosophical work by Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams, and others, and from Shakespeare's King Lear through works by Thomas Mann, Balzac, Dickens, Beckett, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, to more recent writing by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee.
Helen Small argues that if we want to understand old age, we have to think more fundamentally about what it means to be a person, to have a life, to have (or lead) a good life, to be part of a just society. What did Plato mean when he suggested that old age was the best place from which to practice philosophy - or Thomas Mann when he defined old age as the best time to be a writer - and were they right? If we think, as Aristotle did, that a good life requires the active pursuit of virtue, how will our view of later life be affected? If we think that lives and persons are unified, much as stories are said to be unified, how will our thinking about old age differ from that of someone who thinks that lives and/or persons can be strongly discontinuous? In a just society, what constitutes a fair distribution of limited resources between the young and the old? How, if at all, should recent developments in the theory of evolutionary senescence alter our thinking about what it means to grow old?
This is a groundbreaking book, deep as well as broad, and likely to alter the way in which we talk about one of the great social concerns of our time - the growing numbers of those living to be old, and the growing proportion of the old to the young.

Patrick Barr-Melej here illuminates modern Chilean history with an unprecedented chronicle and reassessment of the sixties and seventies. During a period of tremendous political and social strife that saw the election of a Marxist president followed by the terror of a military coup in 1973, a youth-driven, transnationally connected counterculture smashed onto the scene. Contributing to a surging historiography of the era's Latin American counterculture, Barr-Melej draws on media and firsthand interviews in documenting the intertwining of youth and counterculture with discourses rooted in class and party politics. Focusing on ""hippismo"" and an esoteric movement called Poder Joven, Barr-Melej challenges a number of prevailing assumptions about culture, politics, and the Left under Salvador Allende's ""Chilean Road to Socialism."" While countercultural attitudes toward recreational drug use, gender roles and sexuality, rock music, and consumerism influenced many youths on the Left, the preponderance of leftist leaders shared a more conservative cultural sensibility. This exposed, Barr-Melej argues, a degree of intergenerational dissonance within leftist ranks. And while the allure of new and heterodox cultural values and practices among young people grew, an array of constituencies from the Left to the Right berated counterculture in national media, speeches, schools, and other settings. This public discourse of contempt ultimately contributed to the fierce repression of nonconformist youth culture following the coup.

Winner of the 2013 John Hope Franklin Book Prize presented by the American Studies Association A necessary read that demonstrates the ways in which certain people are devalued without attention to social contexts Social Death tackles one of the core paradoxes of social justice struggles and scholarship-that the battle to end oppression shares the moral grammar that structures exploitation and sanctions state violence. Lisa Marie Cacho forcefully argues that the demands for personhood for those who, in the eyes of society, have little value, depend on capitalist and heteropatriarchal measures of worth. With poignant case studies, Cacho illustrates that our very understanding of personhood is premised upon the unchallenged devaluation of criminalized populations of color. Hence, the reliance of rights-based politics on notions of who is and is not a deserving member of society inadvertently replicates the logic that creates and normalizes states of social and literal death. Her understanding of inalienable rights and personhood provides us the much-needed comparative analytical and ethical tools to understand the racialized and nationalized tensions between racial groups. Driven by a radical, relentless critique, Social Death challenges us to imagine a heretofore "unthinkable" politics and ethics that do not rest on neoliberal arguments about worth, but rather emerge from the insurgent experiences of those negated persons who do not live by the norms that determine the productive, patriotic, law abiding, and family-oriented subject.

At a time when Iran is represented in the French media as a rogue state obsessed with its nuclear programme, and whilst France is portrayed in the Iranian media as a decadent and imperialist country, this book examines the ways in which these representations and stereotypes are shared, nuanced, or overcome beyond the sphere of the fourth estate. Here, Laetitia Nanquette examines the functions, processes and mechanisms of stereotyping and imagining the 'Other' that have pervaded the literary traditions of France and Iran when writing about each other. Orientalism versus Occidentalism explores the extent to which orientalism and occidentalism have each influenced and are in turn perpetuated in the texts of both French and Iranian authors. And conversely, it also looks at the consequences of attempts by authors to distance themselves from these two discourses. After both using and questioning the dichotomy of orientalism and occidentalism, Nanquette details how France and Iran represent each other in the contemporary period through their narrative literature in prose, by listing and classifying all the ways in which they do so. She examines the image of the Other in the works of writers such as Goli Taraqi, Bernard Ollivier and Marjane Satrapi. In order to explore this, Nanquette draws upon a broad range of literary genres such as the historical novel, travel writing and autobiography. This exploration of the literary traditions of the relationship between France and Iran is used to shed light on the cultural history of Franco-Iranian relations and on contemporary socio-political realities. With themes that feed into popular debates about the nature of orientalism and occidentalism, and how the two interact, this book will be vital for researchers of Middle Eastern literature and its relationship with writings from the West, as well as those working on the cultures of the Middle East.

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 Keywords for Southern Studies, editors Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson have compiled an eclectic collection of new essays that address the fluidity of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. The essays are structured around critical terms pertinent both to the field and to modern life in general. The nonbinary, nontraditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refutes standard binary thinking-First World/Third World, self/other, for instance-that postcolonial studies revealed as a flawed rhetorical structure for analyzing empire. Instead, Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that begins with southern studies but extends beyond.

This volume highlights humour's crucial role in shaping historical re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian humour's politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film, webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective socio-political critique, dispensing symbolic justice, but also risks recycling the past's invidious ideologies under the politically correct guise of comic debunking, even to the point of negating laughter itself. "This rich and innovative collection invites us to reflect on the complex and various deployments of humour in neo-Victorian texts, where its consumers may wish at times that they could swallow back the laughter a scene or event provokes. It covers a range of approaches to humour utilised by neo-Victorian writers, dramatists, graphic novelists and filmmakers - including the deliberately and pompously unfunny, the traumatic, the absurd, the ribald, and the frankly distasteful - producing a richly satisfying anthology of innovative readings of 'canonical' neo-Victorian texts as well as those which are potential generic outliers. The collection explores what is funny in the neo-Victorian and who we are laughing at - the Victorians, as we like to imagine them, or ourselves, in ways we rarely acknowledge? This is a celebration of the parodic playfulness of a wide range of texts, from fiction to fashion, whilst offering a trenchant critique of the politics of postmodern laughter that will appeal to those working in adaptation studies, gender and queer studies, as well as literary and cultural studies more generally." - Prof. Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia

"Profane Challenge and Orthodox Response in Dostoevsky s" Crime and Punishment presents for the first time an examination of this great novel as a work aimed at winning back target readers, young contemporary radicals, from Utilitarianism, nihilism, and Utopian Socialism. Dostoevsky framed the battle in the context of the Orthodox Church and oral tradition versus the West. He relied on knowledge of the Gospels as text "received orally," forcing readers to react emotionally, not rationally, and thus undermining the very basis of his opponents arguments. Dostoevsky saves Raskol nikov, underscoring the inadequacy of rational thought and reminding his readers of a heritage discarded at their peril. This volume should be of special interest to secondary and university students, as well as to readers interested in literature, particularly, in Russian literature, and Dostoevsky.

SBT/A 19 features selected papers from the Borderless Beckett / Beckett sans frontieres Symposium held in Tokyo at Waseda University in 2006. The essays penned by eminent and young scholars from around the world examine the many ways Beckett's art crosses borders: coupling reality and dream, life and death, as in Japanese Noh drama, or transgressing distinctions between limits and limitlessness; humans, animals, virtual bodies, and stones; French and English; words and silence; and the received frameworks of philosophy and aesthetics. The highlight of the volume is the contribution by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, the special guest of the Symposium. His article entitled "Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett" introduces a variety of novel approaches to Beckett, ranging from a comparative analysis of his work and Melville's Moby Dick to a biographical observation concerning Beckett's application for a lectureship at a South African university. Other highlights include innovative essays by the plenary speakers and panelists - Enoch Brater, Mary Bryden, Bruno Clement, Steven Connor, S. E. Gontarski, Evelyne Grossman, and Angela Moorjani - and an illuminating section on Beckett's television dramas. The Borderless Beckett volume renews our awareness of the admirable quality and wide range of approaches that characterize Beckett studies.

The French Revolution of 1789 altered the face of power and the institutions it inhabited in France, and the aftershocks of this seismic change rippled throughout the nineteenth century. With power changing hands between monarchy, empires and republics in quick succession, the nature of power, both personal and political, and institutions, both real and metaphorical, was constantly being redefined, argued over and fought for. This volume provides innovative analyses of nineteenth-century power relations in France across a series of interlinked spheres: artistic, literary, cultural, political, scientific and topographical. Its seventeen chapters trace the direct impact of politics and the shifting power of regimes on the creative arts, and explore power relations in a wide range of contexts including novels, sculpture, painting, education, religion, science, museums and exhibitions across a wide geographical area from Paris to the provinces, southern France and the colonies. The contributors, all experts in their fields, assess the evolving relationship between institutions and power in nineteenth-century France, exploring how the nation debates its past, negotiates its present and, as the foundation of the Third Republic ushers in a period of relative stability, sets about creating its common future.

"Genres of Modernity" maps the conjunctures of critical theory and literary production in contemporary India. The volume situates a sample of representative novels in the discursive environment of the ongoing critical debate on modernity in India, and offers for the first time a rigorous attempt to hold together the stimulating impulses of postcolonial theory, subaltern studies and the boom of Indian fiction in English. In opposition to the entrenched narrative of modernity as a single, universally valid formation originating in the West, the theoretical and literary texts under discussion engage in a shared project of refiguring the present as a site of heterogeneous genres of modernity. The book traces these figurative efforts with particular attention to the treatment of two privileged metonymies of modernity: the issues of "time" and "home" in Indian fiction. Combining close readings of literary texts from Salman Rushdie to Kiran Nagarkar with a wide range of philosophical, sociological and historiographic reflections, "Genres of Modernity" is of interest not only for students of postcolonial literatures but for academics in the fields of Cultural Studies at large.

This book investigates whether, how and where the cultural milieu of European societies has changed as a result of the socio-economics crisis. To do so, it adopts a psycho-cultural approach, which views the cultural milieu as a set of meanings, placing the generalized image social actors have of themselves, the world, events and their relationships in the context of the socio-political and institutional environment, including policies. By analyzing the changes in cultural milieu and social identity, the book develops strategic and methodological guidelines for the design of post-crisis policies, providing a concept of how the cultural dynamics are associated with certain individual characteristics and specific socio-economic phenomena.