From its earliest days, the cinema has enjoyed a special kinship with the railroad, a mutual attraction based on similar ways of handling speed, visual perception, and the promise of a journey. PARALLEL TRACKS is the first book to explore and explain this relationship in both historical and theoretical terms, blending film scholarship with railroad history. This highly original work reveals the profound impact that the railroad and the cinema have had on Western society and modern urban industrial culture. It will be eagerly received by those involved in film studies, American studies, feminist theory and the cultural study of modernity. It will also have appeal to general readers interested in silent films or in the history of the railroad.

The Age of New Waves examines the origins of the concept of the "new wave" in 1950s France and the proliferation of new waves in world cinema over the past three decades. The book suggests that youth, cities, and the construction of a global market have been the catalysts for the cinematic new waves of the past half century. It begins by describing the enthusiastic engagement between French nouvelle vague filmmakers and a globalizing American cinema and culture during the modernization of France after World War II. It then charts the growing and ultimately explosive disenchantment with the aftermath of that massive social, economic, and spatial transformation in the late 1960s. Subsequent chapters focus on films and visual culture from Taiwan and contemporary mainland China during the 1980s and 1990s, and they link the recent propagation of new waves on the international film festival circuit to the "economic miracles" and consumer revolutions accompanying the process of globalization. While it travels from France to East Asia, the book follows the transnational movement of a particular model of cinema organized around mise en scene-or the interaction of bodies, objects, and spaces within the frame-rather than montage or narrative. The "master shot" style of directors like Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Jia Zhangke has reinvented a crucial but overlooked tendency in new wave film, and this cinema of mise en scene has become a key aesthetic strategy for representing the changing relationships between people and the material world during the rise of a global market. The final chapter considers the interaction between two of the most global phenomena in recent film history-the transnational art cinema and Hollywood-and it searches for traces of an American New Wave.

Beyond Interdisciplinarity examines the broadening meaning of core concept across academic disciplines and other forms of knowledge. In this book, Associate Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity and internationally recognized scholar Julie Thompson Klein depicts the heterogeneity and boundary work of inter- and trans-disciplinarity in a conceptual framework based on an ecology of spatializing practices in transaction spaces, including trading zones and communities of practice. The book includes both "crossdisciplinary" work (encompassing multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary forms) as well as "cross-sector" work (spanning disciplines, fields, professions, government and industry, and communities). The first section of the book defines and explains boundary work, discourses of interdisciplinarity, and the nature of interdisciplinary fields. In the second section, Klein examines dynamics of working across disciplines, including communication, collaboration, and learning with concrete examples and lessons from research projects and programs that transcend traditional fields. The closing chapter examines reasons for failure and success then presents gateways to literature and other resources. Throughout the book, Klein emphasizes the roles of contextualization and historical change while factoring in the shifting relationship of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, ascendancy of transdisciplinarity, and intersections with other constructs including Mode 2 knowledge production, convergence, team science, and postdisciplinarity. The conceptual framework she provides also includes the role of boundary objects, agents, and organizations in brokering differences and creating for platforms for change. Klein further explains why translation, interlanguage, and a communication boundary space are vital to achieving intersubjectivity and collective identity. They foster not only pragmatics of negotiation and integration but also reflexivity, transactivity, and co-production of knowledge with stakeholders beyond the academy. Rhetorics of holism and synthesis compete with instrumentalities of problem solving and transgressive critiques. However, typical warrants today include complexity, contextualization, collaboration, and socially-robust knowledge. Crossing boundaries remains complex, but this book guides readers through the density of pertinent literature while expanding understandings of crossdisciplinary and cross-sector work.

Soon after 9/11, wild rumors began to spread: that Arab-Americans were celebrating publicly, that some people had been warned, that politicians knew all along.
The Global Grapevine reveals how--through our everyday thoughts and conversations, and the rumors we spread--we grapple with the new global world. Drawn from diverse sources, the book illuminates urban legends like the claim that a certain t-shirt with a Chinese pictogram brands the wearer as a prostitute, conspiracy theories such as the "9/11 Truth Movement," or stories of tourists infected with AIDS by locals. These rumors, the authors argue, reflect our anxieties and fears about contact with foreign cultures--how we believe foreign competition to be poisoning the domestic economy and foreign immigration to be eroding American values. Focusing on the threat posed by terrorism, the impact of immigration, the risks involved in international trade, and the dangers faced by naive tourism, the book provides a broad survey of the most widely circulated rumors and examines what these tales reveal about contemporary society.

Up until the end of World War II, academe in central Europe showed little interest in American culture. However, this rapidly changed as American culture became an increasingly inescapable part of everyday life in the postwar period. Drawing on a series of transatlantic encounters in the years following 1945, George Blaustein chronicles how issues like race, gender, and empire, as they relate to the United States, became areas of intense interest among members of the European academy. A major part of Blaustein's book revolves around the exchange of ideas that took place at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, founded in 1947. Through the period of occupation, the seminar hosted a who's-who of American and European intellectual life: figures like F. O. Matthiessen, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Alain Locke, and John Hope Franklin. In four concise chapters, Nightmare Envy and Other Stories explores how the ruin of postwar Europe led writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to understand America in new ways. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories will interest scholars in the fields of American Studies, postwar intellectual history, and cultural diplomacy.

In Landscape of the Now, author Kent De Spain takes readers on a deep journey into the underlying processes and structures of postmodern movement improvisation. Based on a series of interviews with master teachers who have developed unique approaches that are taught around the world - Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Nancy Stark Smith, Barbara Dilley, Anna Halprin, and Ruth Zaporah - this book offers the rare opportunity to find some clarity in what is often a complex and confusing experience. After more than 20 years of research, De Spain has created an extensive list of questions that explore issues that arise for the improviser in practice and performance as well as resources that influence movements and choices. Answers to these questions are placed side by side to create dialog and depth of understanding, and to see the range of possible approaches experienced improvisers might explore. In its nineteen chapters, Landscape of the Now delves into issues like the influence of an audience on an improviser's choices or how performers "track" and use their experience of the moment. The book also looks at the role of cognitive skills, memory, space, emotion, and the senses. One chapter offers a rare opportunity for an honest discussion of the role of various forms of spirituality in what is seen as a secular dance form. Whether read from cover to cover or pulled apart and explored a subject at a time, Landscape of the Now offers the reader a kind of map into the mysterious realm of human creativity, and the wisdom and experience of artists who have spent a lifetime exploring it.

Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and Jewish geisha girls, we find today's sexy Jewess in a host of reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque striptease, comedy television, ballet movies, and progressive porn to construct the 21st Century Jewish American woman through charisma and comic craft, in-your-face antics, and offensive charm. Her image redresses longstanding stereotypes of the hag, the Jewish mother, and Jewish American princess that have demeaned the Jewish woman as overly demanding, inappropriate, and unattractive across the 20th century, even as Jews assimilated into the American mainstream. But why does "sexy" work to update tropes of the Jewish woman? And how does sex link to humor in order for this update to work? Entangling questions of sexiness to race, gender, and class, The Case of the Sexy Jewess frames an embodied joke-work genre that is most often, but not always meant to be funny. In a contemporary period after the thrusts of assimilation and women's liberation movements, performances usher in new versions of old scripts with ranging consequences. At the core is the recuperative performance of identity through impersonation, and the question of its radical or conservative potential. Appropriating, re-appropriating, and mis-appropriating identity material within and beyond their midst, Sexy Jewess artists play up the failed logic of representation by mocking identity categories altogether. They act as comic chameleons, morphing between margin and center in countless number of charged caricatures. Embodying ethnic and gender positions as always already on the edge while ever more in the middle, contemporary Jewish female performers extend a comic tradition in new contexts, mobilizing progressive discourses from positions of newfound race and gender privilege.

The Conservative Party has been the dominant force in twentieth-century British politics. On its own or as the predominant partner in a coalition it has held power for more than sixty years since 1900. Despite this it has been the most neglected and misunderstood of all the main parties. This book is the first systematic attempt to survey the history and politics of the Conservative Party across the whole of the twentieth century from the `Khaki' election of 1900 to John Major's victory of 1992 and beyond. Traditional boundaries between history and political science have been ignored, with each of the authoritative team of contributors pursuing an important theme within three main areas; the composition and structure of the Party; its ideas, policies and actions in government; and its public image and sources of support in the country. The essays are based upon new research, in particular in the Conservative Party archives. Conservative Century will be essential reading for both students and specialists, and it offers a mine of fascinating information for anyone interested in British politics.

Crisis Cities blends critical theoretical insight with a historically grounded comparative study to examine the form, trajectory, and contradictions of redevelopment efforts following the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Based on years of research in the two cities, Gotham and Greenberg contend that New York and New Orleans have emerged as paradigmatic crisis cities, representing a free-market approach to post-disaster redevelopment that is increasingly dominant for crisis-stricken cities around the world. This approach, which Gotham and Greenberg term crisis driven urbanization, emphasizes the privatization of disaster aid and resources, the devolution of disaster recovery responsibilities to the local state, and the use of generous tax incentives to bolster revitalization. Crisis driven urbanization also involves global branding campaigns and public media events to repair a city's image for business and tourism, as well as internally-focused political campaigns and events that associate post-crisis political leaders and public-private partnerships with this revitalized urban image. By focusing on past and present conditions in New York and New Orleans, Gotham and Greenberg show how crises expose long-neglected injustices, underlying power structures, and social inequalities. In doing so, they reveal the impact of specific policy reforms, public-private actions, and socio-legal regulatory strategies on the creation and reproduction of risk and vulnerability to disasters. Crisis Cities questions the widespread narrative of resilience and reveals the uneven and contradictory effects of redevelopment activities in the two cities.

Democracy of Sound is the first book to examine music piracy in the United States from the dawn of sound recording to the rise of Napster and online file-sharing. It asks why Americans stopped thinking of copyright as a monopoly-a kind of necessary evil-and came to see intellectual property as sacrosanct and necessary for the prosperity of an "information economy." Recordings only became eligible for federal copyright in 1972, following years of struggle between pirates, musicians, songwriters, broadcasters, and record companies over the right to own sound. Beginning in the 1890s, the book follows the competing visions of Americans who proposed ways to keep obscure and noncommercial music in circulation, preserve out-of-print recordings from extinction, or simply make records more freely and cheaply available. Genteel jazz collectors swapped and copied rare records in the 1930s; radicals pitched piracy as a mortal threat to capitalism in the 1960s, while hip-hop DJs from the 1970s onwards reused and transformed sounds to create a freer and less regulated market for mixtapes. Each challenged the idea that sound could be owned by anyone. The conflict led to the contemporary stalemate between those who believe that "information wants to be free" and those who insist that economic prosperity depends on protecting intellectual property. The saga of piracy also shows how the dubbers, bootleggers, and tape traders forged new social networks that ultimately gave rise to the social media of the twenty first century. Democracy of Sound is a colorful story of people making law, resisting law, and imagining how law might shape the future of music, from the Victrola and pianola to iTunes and BitTorrent.

Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long been instrumental in establishing, maintaining, and challenging political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature of religious practice. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here, an interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each chapter, built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict, is multi-authored. The book's central question is: "When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?"

From the USA's Big 4 to Pele's Beautiful Game, sport is a major player in global cultural relations and commerce. Sport fuels the media, stimulates commerce, bolsters national identity, is informed by and in turn shapes global diplomacy and international relations, and celebrates the competitive (and often commodified) body. It provides drama and excitement for billions of the world's people. The atlas traces the emergence of sport in its modern forms, and features all established Olympic sports and sports recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) but not included in the Olympic programme, as well as sports with their own cultural and organizational base and commercial momentum. The profile and popularity of the selected sports are mapped, showing patterns of player recruitment and migration; financial flows; political uses and abuses of sport; media audiences and fan bases; and including colourful case-studies of the sportsmen and women who have emerged in the modern period as global celebrities and superstars.

In a change from the ubiquitous cup cakes and traditional cake books, The Global Bakery has gathered together over 60 recipes of cakes from all around the world in one volume. The amateur baker is taken on a journey across continents to Cote d'Ivoire (Soft Cake with Pineapple and Coconut), Libya (Semolina and Date Cake), Finland (Sour Cream Cake), Hungary (Chocolate Mousse Cake), Cambodia (Persimmon Cake), USA (Red Velvet Cake) and Hawaii (Guava Chiffon Cake) to name just a few. The recipes have been tested in a domestic kitchen by a highly enthusiastic cake baker and are presented in one beautifully photographed book. Accessible by even the most inexperienced cooks, this book also gives the opportunity for experienced cake bakers to learn new techniques while adding to their repertoire. The emphasis is on creating delicious cakes that are prepared using different combinations of flavours and ingredients. It includes recipes that are gluten free, as well as recipes for vegan and dairy-free cakes. All tastes are catered for - from quick and easy cakes that children will have fun creating and eating, to the more challenging but ultimately impressive cakes for a centrepiece or special occasion.

Lost Causes stages a polemical intervention in the discourse that grounds queer civil rights in etiology -- that is, in the cause of homosexuality, whether choice, "recruitment," or biology. Reading etiology as a narrative form, political strategy, and hermeneutic method in American and British literature and popular culture, it argues that today's gay arguments for biological determinism accept their opponents' paranoia about what Rohy calls "homosexual reproduction"-that is, nonsexual forms of queer increase-preventing more complex ways of considering sexuality and causality. This study combines literary texts and psychoanalytic theory--two salient sources of etiological narratives in themselves -- to reconsider phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction: contagion in Borrowed Time, bad influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, trauma in The Night Watch, choice of identity in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and dangerous knowledge in The Well of Loneliness. These readings draw on Lacan's notion of retroactive causality to convert the question of what causes homosexuality into a question of what homosexuality causes as the constitutive outside of a heteronormative symbolic order. Ultimately, this study shows, queer communities and queer theory must embrace formerly shaming terms -- why should the increase of homosexuality be unthinkable? -- while retaining the critical sense of queerness as a non-identity, a permanent negativity.

Music- and style-centred youth cultures are now a familiar aspect of everyday life in countries as far apart around the globe as Nepal and Jamaica, Hong Kong and Israel, Denmark and Australia. This lucid and original text provides a lively and wide-ranging account of the relationship between popular music and youth culture within the context of debates about the spatial dimensions of identity. It begins with a clear and comprehensive survey, and critical evaluation, of the existing body of literature on youth culture and popular music developed by sociologists and cultural and media theorists. It then develops a fresh perspective on the ways in which popular music is appropriated as a cultural resource by young people, using as a springboard a series of original ethnographic studies of dance music, rap, bhangra and rock. Bennett's original research material is carefully contextualised within a wider international literature on youth styles, local spaces and popular music but it serves to illustrate graphically how styles of music and their attendant stylistic innovations are appropriated and `lived out' by young people in particular social spaces. Music, Bennett argues, is produced and consumed by young people in ways that both inform their sense of self and also serve to construct the social world in which their identities operate. With its comprehensive coverage of youth and music studies and its important new insights, Popular Music and Youth Culture is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in sociology, cultural studies, media studies and popular music studies. Dr ANDY BENNETT is lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has published articles on aspects of youth culture, popular music, local identity and music and ethnicity in a number of journals, including Sociological Review, Media Culture and Society and Popular Music. He is currently co-editing a book on guitar cultures.

In response to increased focus on the protection of intangible cultural heritage across the world, Music Endangerment offers a new practical approach to assessing, advocating, and assisting the sustainability of musical genres. Drawing upon relevant ethnomusicological research on globalization and musical diversity, musical change, music revivals, and ecological models for sustainability, author Catherine Grant systematically critiques strategies that are currently employed to support endangered musics. She then constructs a comparative framework between language and music, adapting and applying the measures of language endangerment as developed by UNESCO, in order to identify ways in which language maintenance might (and might not) illuminate new pathways to keeping these musics strong. Grant's work presents the first in-depth, standardized, replicable tool for gauging the level of vitality of music genres, providing an invaluable resource for the creation and maintenance of international cultural policy. It will enable those working in the field to effectively demonstrate the degree to which outside intervention could be of tangible benefit to communities whose musical practices are under threat. Significant for both its insight and its utility, Music Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing field of applied ethnomusicology, and will help secure the continued diversity of our global musical traditions.

In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists - including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace - to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body traces the history of the Cuban mulata and her association with hips, sensuality and popular dance. It examines how the mulata choreographs her racialised identity through her hips and enacts an embodied theory called hip(g)nosis. By focusing on her living and dancing body in order to flesh out the process of identity formation, this book makes a claim for how subaltern bodies negotiate a cultural identity that continues to mark their bodies on a daily basis. Combining literary and personal narratives with historical and theoretical accounts of Cuban popular dance history, religiosity and culture, this work investigates the power of embodied exchanges: bodies watching, looking, touching and dancing with one another. It sets up a genealogy of how the representations and venerations of the dancing mulata continue to circulate and participate in the volatile political and social economy of contemporary Cuba.