In Dining with Madmen: Fat, Food, and the Environment in 1980s Horror, author Thomas Fahy explores America's preoccupation with body weight, processed foods, and pollution through the lens of horror. Conspicuous consumption may have communicated success in the eighties, but only if it did not become visible on the body. American society had come to view fatness as a horrifying transformation-it exposed the potential harm of junk food, gave life to the promises of workout and diet culture, and represented the country's worst consumer impulses, inviting questions about the personal and environmental consequences of excess. While changing into a vampire or a zombie often represented widespread fears about addiction and overeating, it also played into concerns about pollution. Ozone depletion, acid rain, and toxic waste already demonstrated the irrevocable harm being done to the planet. The horror genre-from A Nightmare on Elm Street to American Psycho-responded by presenting this damage as an urgent problem, and, through the sudden violence of killers, vampires, and zombies, it depicted the consequences of inaction as terrifying. Whether through Hannibal Lecter's cannibalism, a vampire's thirst for blood in The Queen of the Damned and The Lost Boys, or an overwhelming number of zombies in George Romero's Day of the Dead, 1980s horror uses out-of-control hunger to capture deep-seated concerns about the physical and material consequences of unchecked consumption. Its presentation of American appetites resonated powerfully for audiences preoccupied with body size, food choices, and pollution. And its use of bodily change, alongside the bloodlust of killers and the desolate landscapes of apocalyptic fiction, demanded a recognition of the potentially horrifying impact of consumerism on nature, society, and the self.

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.

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 Iranian group within the Indo-European language family consists of languages that were and are still spoken in Western and Central Asia, among which Persian, Balochi, Kurdish, Pashto, Shughni and Ossetic are the best known today and Avestan, Old and Middle Persian, Parthian, Bactrian, Khotanese, Sogdian and Choresmian in the past. This work aims to bridge the apparent gap in knowledge that exists between Indo-Europeanists and scholars of Iranian languages with regard to each other's fields. The present work gives a critical survey of all the verbs that may have existed in Proto-Iranian as deduced from the attested Iranian descendants and their archaic sister language, Sanskrit. This is accompanied by an analysis of the morphology and assessment of the provenance.

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.

In Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars, Rachel E. Dubrofsky explores the idea that popular media implicitly portrays whiteness as credible, trustworthy, familiar, and honest, and that this portrayal is normalized and ubiquitous. Whether on television, film, social media, or in the news, white people are constructed as believable and unrehearsed, from the way they talk to how they look and act. Dubrofsky argues that this way of making white people appear authentic is a strategy of whiteness, requiring attentiveness to the context of white supremacy in which the presentations unfold. The volume details how ideas about what is natural, good, and wholesome are reified in media, showing how these values are implicitly racialized. Additionally, the project details how white women are presented as particularly authentic when they seem to lose agency by expressing affect through emotional and bodily displays. The chapters examine a range of popular media-newspaper articles about Donald J. Trump, a selfie taken at Auschwitz, music videos by Miley Cyrus, the television series UnREAL, the infamous video of Amy Cooper calling the police on an innocent Black man, and the documentary Miss Americana-pinpointing patterns that cut across media to explore the implications for the larger culture in which they exist. At its heart, the book asks: Who gets to be authentic? And what are the implications?

Long caught between powerful neighbours, Ladakh is now a border region in the vast Indian nation state. In this detailed, anthropological study Fernanda Pirie traces the ways order has been created by, but also despite and in defiance of, the powerful external forces of religion, war, politics and wealth. Gradually a clear analysis unfolds of the subtle dynamics that have long characterised relations between local communities and centres of power and which can successfully be applied to the wider region. This exemplary study of conflict resolution brings to light the means by which small communities, both rural and urban, negotiate peace amidst the heterogeneous forces of modernity, while at the same time critically re-examining theories that over-emphasize the explanatory power of Buddhism. This rich ethnographic account of local practices fills a conspicuous gap in secondary literature on Tibetan law.

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.

Globalization is changing what citizens need to know and be able to do by interrupting the assumption that the actions of citizens only take place within national borders. If our neighborhoods and nations are affecting and being affected by the world, then our political consciousness must be worldminded. The outcomes of globalization have led educators to rethink what students need to learn and be able to do as citizens in a globally connected world. This volume focuses on research that examines how K-12 teachers and students are currently addressing the challenge of becoming citizens in a globally interconnected world. Although there is an extensive body of literature on citizenship education within national contexts and a growing literature on global education, this volume offers research on the work educators are doing across multiple countries to bring the two fields together to develop global citizens.

Existentialism is back Carpe diem - 'seize the day' - is one of the oldest pieces of life advice in Western history. But its true spirit has been hijacked by ad men and self-help gurus, reduced to the instant hit of one-click online shopping, or slogans like 'live in the now'. We need to reclaim it to make sense of our complex, confusing times. The last great expression of carpe diem was in the electrifying existential philosophy of the 1940s. Today it's an idea that challenges us to confront our mortality and live with greater passion and intention rather than scroll mindlessly on our phones or allow freedom to become a mere choice between brands. In Carpe Diem Regained, Roman Krznaric reinvents existentialism for our age of information and choice overload. An essential and empowering work of contemporary philosophy, the book unveils the surprising ways of seizing the day that humankind has discovered over the centuries, ones we urgently need to revive. Carpe diem is the Nexistentialism for our times.

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.

In The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy and Language, some of the finest Machiavellian scholars explore the Florentine's thought five hundred years after the composition of his masterpiece, The Prince. Their analysis, however, goes past The Prince, extending to Machiavelli's entire corpus and shining new light on his political, historical, and military works, with a special focus on their heritage in modern Marxist thought, the arena in which they reverberate most profoundly and originally. Rather than a neutral, comprehensive, and safe interpretation, this book offers a partial and even partisan reading of Machiavelli, the 16th-century thinker who continues to divide scholars and interpreters, forcing them to confront their responsibility as contemporary thinkers in a global society where Machiavelli's ideas and the issues they address still matter. Contributors are: Etienne Balibar, Banu Bargu, Jeremie Barthas, Thomas Berns, Alison Brown, Filippo Del Lucchese, Romain Descendre, Jean-Louis Fournel, Fabio Frosini, Giorgio Inglese, Mikko Lahtinen, Jacques Lezra, John P. McCormick, Warren Montag, Vittorio Morfino, Mohamed Moulfi, Gabriele Pedulla, Tania Rispoli, Peter D. Thomas, Sebastian Torres, Miguel Vatter, Stefano Visentin, Yves Winter, and Jean-Claude Zancarini.

In Postsocialist Conditions: Idea and History in China's "Independent Cinema," 1988-2008, WANG Xiaoping offers a comprehensive survey and trenchant critique of China's "Independent Cinema" by the sixth-generation auteurs. By showing the multi-valence of the postsocialist conditions in contemporary Chinese society, their films articulate a new cultural-political logic in postsocialist China, which is also the logic of the market in this era of neoliberal transformation, brought about by the forces of marketization since the late 1980s. The directors laudably show the spirits of humanism and the humanitarian concerns of the underclass, yet the shortage and repudiation of class analysis prohibits the artists from exploring the social contradictions and the cause of class restructuration.

This book is a valuable resource for teachers and other professionals who are looking for a proven way to increase cultural appreciation and awareness. New applications of the ABCs model of Cultural Understanding and Communication are presented and discussed in this new volume, based on studies done in the United States, and Canada and Europe. In this ground-breaking project, the authors describe how the ABCs model complicated and challenged and changed the cultural perceptions of those who participated in it, even those who were initially highly resistant to such possibilities. At the heart of the project is the exchange of narratives - life stories that give insight into the cultural worlds of selves and others. In addition to the narratives, other instruments including the Transcultural Competence Scale (TCC), provide further evidence of the positive impact of the ABCs on participants' receptivity toward cultural differences. In the TRANSABCs project, researchers from both sides of the Atlantic invited teacher candidates, students who will become workplace and other professionals to write an autobiography (A) of themselves from various cultural perspectives, a biography (B) of an individual who is culturally different from themselves along particular dimensions, and to use these documents to conduct cross-cultural comparisons (C) between themselves and the person they interviewed. Furthermore, candidates developed culturally responsive ideas for the school or the workplace (C). These exchanges and analyses produced epiphanies and insights that translated into specific actions to improve cultural understanding and communication in classrooms and workplaces. Educators and professionals can take from these examples to inspire their own personal journey toward greater cultural understanding and sensitivity.

Listen, Copy, Read: Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan endeavors to elucidate the mechanisms by which a growing number of men and women of all social strata became involved in acquiring knowledge and skills during the Tokugawa period. It offers an overview of the communication media and tools that teachers, booksellers, and authors elaborated to make such knowledge more accessible to a large audience. Schools, public lectures, private academies or hand-copied or printed manuals devoted to a great variety of topics, from epistolary etiquette or personal ethics to calculation, divination or painting, are here invoked to illustrate the vitality of Tokugawa Japan's 'knowledge market', and to show how popular learning relied on three types of activities: listening, copying and reading. With contributions by: W.J. Boot, Matthias Hayek, Annick Horiuchi, Michael Kinski, Koizumi Yoshinaga, Peter Kornicki, Machi Senjuro, Christophe Marquet, Markus Ruttermann, Tsujimoto Masashi, and Wakao Masaki.

Some 30 years ago, South Korea began a temporary worker program modeled after Japan, Europe and the U.S. Newly arrived migrants, framed as temporary populations, were expected to return to their countries of origin upon fulfilling their economic roles. However, many overstayed their visas to maximize their earning potential. In Organized Labor and Civil Society for Multiculturalism: A Solidarity Success Story from South Korea Joon K. Kim shows how South Korea's progressive labor unions and labor rights advocates spearheaded the labor rights struggles of new immigrant workers - a one-of-a-kind development. Such consistent advocacy efforts contributed to significant changes in broader immigration and naturalization policies, as the scope of such organizations' advocacy work quickly spread to other similarly situated populations, including marriage migrants, co-ethnic Koreans from China and Russia, North Korean defectors, and new asylum seekers and refugees from South Asia and Africa. Kim demonstrates the huge contribution such work made to the sudden and widespread use of the term damunhwa (literally meaning "multi-culture";) in South Korea over the last ten years in a country that has prided itself on its homogeneity. The relatively few incidents of anti-immigrant movements in South Korea can be attributed to the role of organized labor and civil society in structuring policies and discourses through their advocacy work since the early-1990s-a success story indeed. For its depth of rigorous original research Organized Labor and Civil Society for Multiculturalism is a must-read for researchers and students interested in ethnic studies and labor movements.