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.

Superman rose from popular culture - comic books, newspaper strips, radio, television, novels, and movies - but people have so embraced the character that he has now become part of folklore. This transition from popular to folk culture signals the importance of Superman to fans and to a larger American populace. Superman's story has become a myth dramatizing identity, morality, and politics. Many studies have examined the ways in which folklore has provided inspiration for other forms of culture, especially literature and cinema. In Superman in Myth and Folklore, Daniel Peretti explores the meaning of folklore inspired by popular culture, focusing not on the Man of Steel's origins but on the culture he has helped create. Superman provides a way to approach fundamental questions of human nature, a means of exploring humanity's relationship with divinity, an exemplar for debate about the type of hero society needs, and an articulation of the tension between the individual and the community. Through examinations of tattoos, humor, costuming, and festivals, Peretti portrays Superman as a corporate-owned intellectual property and a model for behavior, a means for expression and performance of individual identity, and the focal point for disparate members of fan communities. As fans apply Superman stories to their lives, they elevate him to a mythical status. Peretti focuses on the way these fans have internalized various aspects of the character. In doing so, he delves into the meaning of Superman and his place in American culture and demonstrates the character's staying power.

Over the last four decades, Dr. Vito Tanzi traveled frequently to Latin America in his professional capacity as an economist working for the International Monetary Fund and for other international organizations. During many trips, he observed ongoing economic and political developments, but, was also fascinated by the culture, history, and beauty of the region.

He believes that books written about Latin America don't often convey the vitality, beauty, and diversity of the region. Therefore, he decided to write a book based upon his own observations and memories from his travels and work in several countries of Latin America. The Charm of Latin America transcends economics and provides a more complete and lively portrait of these countries bursting with humanity. He captures cultural, visual, economic, and some of the historical aspects of Latin America. Entertaining and informative, the book covers five important countries: Brazil, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. Whether taken along on a trip to the region, or, simply enjoyed in the comfort of one's own house, The Charm of Latin America will bring the beauty and culture of this beautiful region to life

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.

Since its inception in 1974, Southeast Asian Affairs (SEAA) has been an indispensable annual reference for generations of policy-makers, scholars, analysts, journalists, and others. Succinctly written by regional and international experts, SEAA illuminates significant issues and events of the previous year in each of the Southeast Asian nations and the region as a whole. Southeast Asian Affairs 2008 provides an informed and readable analysis of the events and developments in the region in 2007. In the regional section, the first two articles provide the political and economic overview of Southeast Asia. They are followed by an article on India's geopolitics and Southeast Asia, and two articles on ASEAN. Eleven country reviews as well as four country-specific thematic chapters follow, delving into domestic political, economic, security, and social developments during 2007 and their implications for countries in the region and beyond.

The concept of ethnic, racial, and gender humor is as sensitive a subject today as it has ever been; and yet at no time in the past have we had such a quantity of this humor circulating throughout society. We can see the power of such content manifested continually in our culture's films and stand-up comedy routines, as well as on popular TV sitcoms, where Jewish, black, Asian, Hispanic, and gay characters and topics have seemingly become essential to comic scenarios. Though such humor is often cruel, it can also be a source of pride and play among minorities, women, and gays. Leon Rappoport's incisive account takes an in-depth look at ethnic, racial, and gender humor, and shows that despite the polarization that is often apparent in the debates such humor evokes, the most important melting pot in this country may be the one that we enter when we share a laugh at ourselves. This timely work displays ethnic, racial, and gender humor in both its aspects: as an aggressive instrument of prejudice and as a powerful defense against it. Rappoport explores the origins and implications of the various slurs, stereotypes, and obscenities that are typical of this double-edged form of modern comedy, as well as the ways in which irony has been employed by minority figures as a weapon against oppression. Broad in scope and lively in style, Rappoport's volume is enhanced by illustrative jokes and comedy routines, and should keep readers engaged, entertained, and provoked throughout.

Through extended readings of the works of P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Fanny Fern, Bonnie Carr O'Neill shows how celebrity culture authorizes audiences to evaluate public figures on personal terms and in so doing reallocates moral, intellectual, and affective authority and widens the public sphere. O'Neill examines how celebrity culture creates a context in which citizens regard one another as public figures while elevating individual public figures to an unprecedented personal fame. Although this new publicity fosters nationalism, it also imbues public life with personal feeling and transforms the public sphere into a site of divisive, emotionally intense debate. Further, O'Neill analyzes how celebrity culture's scrutiny of the lives and personalities of public figures collapses distinctions between the public and private spheres and, as a consequence, challenges assumptions about the self and personhood. Celebrity culture intensifies the complex emotions and debates surrounding already-fraught questions of national belonging and democratic participation even as, for some, it provides a means of redefining personhood and cultural identity. O'Neill offers a new critical approach within the growing scholarship on celebrity studies by exploring the relationship between the emergence of celebrity culture and civic discourse. Her careful readings unravel the complexities of a form of publicity that fosters both mass consumption and cultural criticism.

The Director-General of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura, writes in the Foreword to this book: ""The present study by James Page provides a timely exposition of what might be argued to be a philosophy of peace education. It provides an overview of different philosophical approaches, and from diverse culture perspectives, of peace education throughout the world. As such it offers an important addition to the emerging literature on peace education and the culture of peace, as well as an important commentary on the peace mission of UNESCO."" CONTENTS: Acknowledgments. Preface. Foreword. 1 The Problem of Peace Education. 2 Virtue Ethics and Peace Education. 3 Consequentialist Ethics and Peace Education. 4 Conservative Political Ethics and Peace Education. 5 Aesthetic Ethics and Peace Education. 6 The Ethics of Care and Peace Education. 7 Conclusions. 8 Abbreviations. Citation Method. References. Name Index. Subject Index.

"Mediterranean Diasporas" looks at the relationship between displacement and circulation of ideas within and from the Mediterranean basin. In bringing together leading historians of ideas and nationalism working on Southern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa for the first time, it builds bridges across national historiographies, raises a number of comparative questions and unveils unexplored intellectual connections and ideological formulations.As the book shows, in the so-called age of nationalism, the idea of the nation state was by no means dominant, as displaced intellectuals and migrant communities developed notions of double national affiliations. By adopting the Mediterranean as a framework of analysis, the contributors offer a fresh contribution to the growing field of transnational and global intellectual history, revising the genealogy of 19th-century nationalism, and reveal new perspectives on the intellectual dynamics of the age of revolutions. This book puts the Mediterranean space back into a broader transnational context, and as such will be of interest to anyone studying or researching the region, as well as anyone with an interest in the history of nationalism and the global circulation of ideas.

While a number of recent works have linked magical realism to postcolonial trauma, this book expands the trauma-theory-based analysis of magical realism. Borrowing from the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, the study adapts his concept of chronotope to that of shock chronotope in order to describe unstable time-spaces marked by extreme events. Besides trauma theory, contemporary theories of representation formulated by Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj i ek, among others, corroborate specific literary analyses of magical realist novels by Caribbean, North American, and European authors. The study discusses a series of concepts, such as "spectacle" and "hyperreality," in order to create an analogy between the hyperreal, a spectacle without origins, and magical realism, a representation of events without a history, or a recreation of an absence that first needs to be acknowledged before it can be assigned any meaning. Magical realist hyperreality is meant to be a reconstruction of events that were "missed" in the first place because of their traumatic nature. While the magical realist hyperreal might not explain the unspeakable event, if only to avoid the risk of an amoral rationalization, it makes the ineffable be vicariously felt and re-experienced. This study establishes a somewhat unorthodox nexus between magical realist writing (viewed primarily as a postmodern literary phenomenon) and trauma (understood both as an individual and as an often invisible cultural dominant), and proposes the concept of "traumatic imagination" as an analytical tool to be applied to literary texts struggling to represent the unpresentable and to reconstruct extreme events whose forgetting has proven just as unbearable as their remembering. The traumatic imagination defines the empathy-driven consciousness that enables authors and readers to act out and/or work through trauma by means of magical realist images. Corroborated by elements of trauma theory, postcolonial studies, narrative theory, and contemporary theories of representation, the work posits that the traumatic imagination is an essential part of the creative process that turns traumatic memories into narratives. Magical realism lends traumatic events an expression that traditional realism could not, seemingly because the magical realist writing mode and the traumatized subject share the same ontological ground: being part of a reality that is constantly escaping witnessing through telling. Over more than half a century now, magical realism has demonstrated its versatility by affecting literary productions belonging to various cultural spaces and representing different histories of violence. This book examines novels by traumatized and vicariously traumatized authors who make extensive use of fantastic/magical elements in order to represent slavery, postcolonialism, the Holocaust, and war. The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction is an important book for magical realism- and trauma theory-based critical collections.

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.

This book brings together an international group of scholars who chart and analyze the ways in which comic book history and new forms of graphic narrative have negotiated the aesthetic, social, political, economic, and cultural interactions that reach across national borders in an increasingly interconnected and globalizing world. Exploring the tendencies of graphic narratives - from popular comic book serials and graphic novels to manga - to cross national and cultural boundaries, Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives addresses a previously marginalized area in comics studies. By placing graphic narratives in the global flow of cultural production and reception, the book investigates controversial representations of transnational politics, examines transnational adaptations of superhero characters, and maps many of the translations and transformations that have come to shape contemporary comics culture on a global scale.

This work is a fascinating guide to one of Latin America's most stable and progressive nations, examining the country's development, unique features, and the challenges Costa Ricans face in the 21st century. Costa Rica: A Global Studies Handbook offers readers an authoritative tour of a remarkable country, tracing its historical development from pre-Colombian inhabitants and Spanish colonization through rising prosperity in the mid-19th century to current struggles to define itself economically and politically. Costa Rica combines narrative chapters on the nation's history and the current state of its political, social, and cultural institutions with alphabetically organized entries covering important people, places, and events in its development. Throughout, the authors, drawing on extensive research and their own experiences, highlight the many ways Costa Rica is different from its neighbors, as well as the challenges the country faces in the 21st century's globalized world. Provides a chronology of key events in the evolution of the nation of Costa Rica from early signs of civilization over three thousand years ago through colonization and independence to the present Includes political and geographical maps with photographs of natural attractions, tropical animals and plants, and the nation's people