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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies
Essays and poems exploring the diverse range of the Arab American
experience. This collection begins with stories of immigration and
exile by following newcomers' attempts to assimilate into American
society. Editors Ghassan Zeineddine, Nabeel Abraham, and Sally
Howell have assembled emerging and established writers who examine
notions of home, belonging, and citizenship from a wide array of
communities, including cultural heritages originating from Lebanon,
Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen. The strong pattern in Arab Detroit
today is to oppose marginalization through avid participation in
almost every form of American identity-making. This engaged stance
is not a by-product of culture, but a new way of thinking about the
US in relation to one's homeland. Hadha Baladuna ("this is our
country") is the first work of creative nonfiction in the field of
Arab American literature that focuses entirely on the Arab diaspora
in Metro Detroit, an area with the highest concentration of Arab
Americans in the US. Narratives move from a young Lebanese man in
the early 1920s peddling his wares along country roads to an
aspiring Iraqi-Lebanese poet who turns to the music of Tupac Shakur
for inspiration. The anthology then pivots to experiences growing
up Arab American in Detroit and Dearborn, capturing the cultural
vibrancy of urban neighborhoods and dramatizing the complexity of
what it means to be Arab, particularly from the vantage point of
biracial writers. Included in these works is a fearless account of
domestic and sexual abuse and a story of a woman who comes to terms
with her queer identity in a community that is not entirely
accepting. The volume also includes photographs from award-winning
artist Rania Matar that present heterogenous images of Arab
American women set against the arresting backdrop of Detroit. The
anthology concludes with explorations of political activism dating
back to the 1960s and Dearborn's shifting demographic landscape.
Hadha Baladuna will shed light on the shifting position of Arab
Americans in an era of escalating tension between the United States
and the Arab region.
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.
Most of our expereince is visual. We obtain most of our information
and knowledge through sight, whether from reading books and
newspapers, from watching television or from quickly glimpsing road
signs. Many of our judgements and decisions, concerning where we
live, what we shall drive and sit on and what we wear, are based on
what places, cars, furniture and clothes look like. Much of our
entertainment and recreation is visual, whether we visit art
galleries, cinemas or read comics. This book concerns that visual
experience. Why do we have the visual experiences we have? Why do
the buildings, cars, products and advertisements we see look the
way they do? How are we to explain the existence of different
styles of paintings, different types of cars and different genres
of film? How are we to explain the existence of different visual
cultures? This book begins to answer these questions by explaining
visual experience in terms of visual culture. The strengths and
weaknesses of traditional means of analysing and explaining visual
culture are examined and assessed. Using a wide range of historical
and contemporary examples, it is argued that the groups which
artists and designers form, the audiences and markets which they
sell to, and the different social classes which are produced and
reproduced by art and design are all part of the successful
explanation and critical evaluation of visual culture.
From Louis Brandeis to Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas, the
nomination of federal judges has generated intense political
conflict. With the coming retirement of one or more Supreme Court
Justices--and threats to filibuster lower court judges--the
selection process is likely to be, once again, the center of
red-hot partisan debate.
In Advice and Consent, two leading legal scholars, Lee Epstein and
Jeffrey A. Segal, offer a brief, illuminating Baedeker to this
highly important procedure, discussing everything from
constitutional background, to crucial differences in the nomination
of judges and justices, to the role of the Judiciary Committee in
vetting nominees. Epstein and Segal shed light on the role played
by the media, by the American Bar Association, and by special
interest groups (whose efforts helped defeat Judge Bork). Though it
is often assumed that political clashes over nominees are a new
phenomenon, the authors argue that the appointment of justices and
judges has always been a highly contentious process--one largely
driven by ideological and partisan concerns. The reader discovers
how presidents and the senate have tried to remake the bench,
ranging from FDR's controversial "court packing" scheme to the
Senate's creation in 1978 of 35 new appellate and 117 district
court judgeships, allowing the Democrats to shape the judiciary for
years. The authors conclude with possible "reforms," from the
so-called nuclear option, whereby a majority of the Senate could
vote to prohibit filibusters, to the even more dramatic suggestion
that Congress eliminate a judge's life tenure either by term limits
or compulsory retirement.
With key appointments looming on the horizon, Adviceand Consent
provides everything concerned citizens need to know to understand
the partisan rows that surround the judicial nominating process.
The African Union's Agenda 2063 is ambitious. It advocates for,
among others: equitable and people-centred growth and development;
eradication of poverty; creation of infrastructure and provision of
public goods and services; empowerment of women and youth;
promotion of peace and security, and the strengthening of
democratic states, and creating participatory and accountable
governance institutions. New African Thinkers: Agenda Africa, 2063
presents the thinking of emerging scholars on these critical issues
- those on whose shoulders the responsibility rests for taking this
agenda forward. The book will be an essential reference for
researchers and educators who are interested in Africa's
developmental path as designed in the Agenda 2063.
Real Deceptions develops a new theory of realism through close
consideration of myriad contemporary art, media, and cultural
practices. Rather than focusing on transgressing deceptions which
distort reality, the book argues that reality lies within the
deceptions themselves. That is to say, realism's political
potential emerges not by revealing deception but precisely by
staging deceptions-particularly deceptions that imperil the very
categories of true and false. In lieu of perceiving deception as an
obstacle to truth, it shows how deception functions as the truth's
necessary conduit. Categories invoked in realist works, such as
trompe l'oeil, illusion, hypervirtuality, and simulation help to
establish how realism can be seen as moving from the creation of
mere epistemological uncertainty to radical ontologically-based
indeterminacy. The book cultivates this schema by considering
productive connections between insights from Jacques Lacan and
Jacques Ranciere. Real Deceptions not only applies these
theoretical frameworks to art and media examples, but also engages
in the reverse move of using the "cases" to further the theories.
This dual approach points to the ways in which efforts to produce
realist representations often give rise to the destabilizing Real.
Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance
offers new cutting edge essays focusing on Song and Dance as
performative gestures that not only entertain but also act on
audiences and performers. The chapters range across musical
theatre, opera, theatre and other artistic practices, from Glee to
Gardzienice, Beckett to Disney, Broadway to Turner Prize winning
sound installation. The chapters draw together these diverse
examples of vocality and physicality by exploring their affect
rather than through considering them as texts. This book considers
performativity in relation to Dramaturgy, Transition, Identity,
Context, Practice, Community and finally, Writing. The book reveals
how the texture of music theatre, containing as it does the
gestures of song and dance, is performative in dense, interwoven,
dialogical and paradoxical ways, partly caused by the intertextual
and interdisciplinary energies of its make-up, partly by its active
dynamism in performance. The book's contributors derive
methodologies from many disciplines, seeking in many ways to resist
and explode discrete discipline-based enquiry. They share
methodologies and performance repertoires with discipline-based
scholarship from theatre studies, musicology and cultural studies,
but there are many other approaches and case studies which we also
embrace. Together, they view these as neighboring voices whose
dialogue enriches the study of contemporary music theatre.
Is globalization making our world more equal, or less? Proponents
of globalization argue that it is helping and that in a competitive
world, no one can afford to discriminate except on the basis of
skills. Opponents counter that globalization does nothing but
provide a meritocratic patina on a consistently unequal
distribution of opportunity. Yet, despite the often deafening
volume of the debate, there is surprisingly little empirical work
available on the extent to which the process of globalization over
the past quarter century has had any effect on discrimination.
Tackling this challenge, Discrimination in an Unequal World
explores the relationship between discrimination and unequal
outcomes in the appropriate geographical and historical context.
Noting how each society tends to see its particular version of
discrimination as universal and obvious, the editors expand their
set of cases to include a broad variety of social relations and
practices. However, since methods differ and are often designed for
particular national circumstances, they set the much more ambitious
and practical goal of establishing a base with which different
forms of discrimination across the world can be compared. Deriving
from a broad array of methods, including statistical analyses,
role-playing games, and audit studies, the book draws many
important lessons on the new means by which the world creates
social hierarchies, the democratization of inequality, and the
disappearance of traditional categories.
The study of emotions and emotional displays has achieved a
deserved prominence in recent classical scholarship. The emotions
of the classical world can be plumbed to provide a valuable
heuristic tool. Emotions can help us understand key issues of
ancient ethics, ideological assumptions, and normative behaviors,
but, more frequently than not, classical scholars have turned their
attention to "social emotions" requiring practical decisions and
ethical judgments in public and private gatherings. The emotion of
disgust has been unwarrantedly neglected, even though it figures
saliently in many literary genres, such as iambic poetry and
comedy, historiography, and even tragedy and philosophy. This
collection of seventeen essays by fifteen authors features the
emotion of disgust as one cutting edge of the study of Greek and
Roman antiquity. Individual contributions explore a wide range of
topics. These include the semantics of the emotion both in Greek
and Latin literature, its social uses as a means of marginalizing
individuals or groups of individuals, such as politicians judged
deviant or witches, its role in determining aesthetic judgments,
and its potentialities as an elicitor of aesthetic pleasure. The
papers also discuss the vocabulary and uses of disgust in life
(Galli, actors, witches, homosexuals) and in many literary genres:
ancient theater, oratory, satire, poetry, medicine, historiography,
Hellenistic didactic and fable, and the Roman novel. The
Introduction addresses key methodological issues concerning the
nature of the emotion, its cognitive structure, and modern
approaches to it. It also outlines the differences between ancient
and modern disgust and emphasizes the appropriateness of
"projective or second-level disgust" (vilification) as a means of
marginalizing unwanted types of behavior and stigmatizing morally
condemnable categories of individuals. The volume is addressed
first to scholars who work in the field of classics, but, since
texts involving disgust also exhibit significant cultural
variation, the essays will attract the attention of scholars who
work in a wide spectrum of disciplines, including history, social
psychology, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, and
cross-cultural studies.
From the Great Game to the present, an international cultural and
political biography of one of our most evocative, compelling, and
poorly understood narratives of history. The Silk Road is rapidly
becoming one of the key geocultural and geostrategic concepts of
the twenty-first century. Yet, for much of the twentieth century
the Silk Road received little attention, overshadowed by
nationalism and its invented pasts, and a world dominated by
conflict and Cold War standoffs. In The Silk Road, Tim Winter
reveals the different paths this history of connected cultures took
towards global fame, a century after the first evidence of contact
between China and Europe was unearthed. He also reveals how this
remarkably popular depiction of the past took hold as a platform
for geopolitical ambition, a celebration of peace and cosmopolitan
harmony, and created dreams of exploration and grand adventure.
Winter further explores themes that reappear today as China seeks
to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century. Known across
the globe, the Silk Road is a concept fit for the modern world, and
yet its significance and origins remain poorly understood and are
the subject of much confusion. Pathbreaking in its analysis, this
book presents an entirely new reading of this increasingly
important concept, one that is likely to remain at the center of
world affairs for decades to come.
Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the
starting point for the modern conception of human rights. According
to the Declaration, the rights of man are held to be universal, at
all times and all places. But as recent crises around migrants and
refugees have made obvious, this idea, sacred as it might be among
human rights advocates, is exhausted. It's long past time to
reconsider the principles on which Western economic and political
norms rest. This book advocates for a tradition of political
universality as an alternative to the juridical universalism of the
Declaration. Insurgent universality isn't based on the idea that we
all share some common humanity but, rather, on the democratic
excess by which people disrupt and reject an existing political and
economic order. Going beyond the constitutional armor of the
representative state, it brings into play a plurality of powers to
which citizens have access, not through the funnel of national
citizenship but in daily political practice. We can look to recent
history to see various experiments in cooperative and insurgent
democracy: the Indignados in Spain, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the
Zapatistas in Mexico, and, going further back, the Paris Commune,
the 1917 peasant revolts during the Russian Revolution, and the
Haitian Revolution. This book argues that these movements belong to
the common legacy of insurgent universality, which is characterized
by alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed,
hindered, and forgotten. Massimiliano Tomba examines these events
to show what they could have been and what they can still be. As
such he explores how their common legacy can be reactivated.
Insurgent Universality analyzes the manifestos and declarations
that came out of these experiments considering them as collective
works of an alternative canon of political theory that challenges
the great names of the Western pantheon of political thought and
builds bridges between European and non-European political and
social experiments.
'Beautifully written, sumptuously illustrated, constantly
fascinating' The Times On 26 November 1922 Howard Carter first
peered into the newly opened tomb of an ancient Egyptian boy-king.
When asked if he could see anything, he replied: 'Yes, yes,
wonderful things.' In Tutankhamun's Trumpet, acclaimed Egyptologist
Toby Wilkinson takes a unique approach to that tomb and its
contents. Instead of concentrating on the oft-told story of the
discovery, or speculating on the brief life and politically
fractious reign of the boy king, Wilkinson takes the objects buried
with him as the source material for a wide-ranging, detailed
portrait of ancient Egypt - its geography, history, culture and
legacy. One hundred artefacts from the tomb, arranged in ten
thematic groups, are allowed to speak again - not only for
themselves, but as witnesses of the civilization that created them.
Never before have the treasures of Tutankhamun been analysed and
presented for what they can tell us about ancient Egyptian culture,
its development, its remarkable flourishing, and its lasting
impact. Filled with surprising insights, unusual details, vivid
descriptions and, above all, remarkable objects, Tutankhamun's
Trumpet will appeal to all lovers of history, archaeology, art and
culture, as well as all those fascinated by the Egypt of the
pharaohs. 'I've read many books on ancient Egypt, but I've never
felt closer to its people' The Sunday Times
Music Downtown Eastside draws on two decades of research in one of
North America's poorest urban areas to illustrate how human rights
can be promoted through music. Harrison's examination of how
gentrification, grant funding, and community organizations affect
the success or failure of human rights-focused musical initiatives
offers insights into the complex relationship between culture,
poverty, and human rights that have global implications and
applicability. The book takes the reader into popular music jams
and music therapy sessions offered to the poor in churches,
community centers and health organizations. Harrison analyzes the
capabilities music-making develops, and musical moments where human
rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated. The book
offers insights on the relationship between music and poverty, a
social deprivation that diminishes capabilities and rights. It
contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically
how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices and
policy.
Support your learners as they explore Theory of Knowledge (TOK) in
line with the new Guide for first teaching in September 2020.
Extremely experienced authoring team of examiners, curriculum
reviewers and workshop leaders - Sue Bastian, Julian Kitching and
Ric Sims. Provides full coverage of the 2020 curriculum Guide
including the Core, Optional themes, and Areas of knowledge.
Structured to match the new knowledge framework. Examples of
knowledge questions to help students recognise and decipher them.
Support for the essay and the new exhibition assessment.
Illustrations by TOK teacher Gary Goodwin, to add interest and
humour.
This book takes a fresh look at the earliest Buddhism texts and
offers various suggestions how the teachings in them had developed.
Two themes predominate. Firstly, it argues that we cannot
understand the Buddha unless we understand that he was debating
with other religious teachers, notably brahmins. For example, he
denied the existence of a 'soul'; but what exactly was he denying?
Another chapter suggests that the canonical story of the Buddha's
encounter with a brigand who wore a garland of his victims' fingers
probably reflects an encounter with a form of ecstatic
religion.;The other main theme concerns metaphor, allegory and
literalism. By taking the words of the texts literally - despite
the Buddha's warning not to - successive generations of his
disciples created distinctions and developed doctrines far beyond
his original intention. One chapter shows how this led to a
scholastic categorisation of meditation. Failure to understand a
basic metaphor also gave rise to the later argument between the
Mahayana and the older tradition.;Perhaps most important of all, a
combination of literalism with ignorance of the Buddha's allusions
to brahminism led buddhists to forget that the B
In the early 1900s, the language of America was becoming colloquial
English-the language of the businessman, manager, and professional.
Since college and high school education were far from universal,
many people turned to correspondence education-that era's distance
learning-to learn the art of speaking and writing. By the 1920s and
1930s, thousands of Americans were sending coupons from newspapers
and magazines to order Sherwin Cody's 100% Self-correcting Course
in the English Language, a patented mail-order course in English
that was taken by over 150,000 people.
Cody's ubiquitous signature advertisement, which ran for over
forty years, promised a scientifically-tested invention that
improved speaking and writing in just 15 minutes a day. Cody's ad
explained that people are judged by their English, and he offered
self-improvement and self-confidence through the mail.
In this book, linguist Edwin Battistella tells the story of
Sherwin Cody and his famous English course, situating both the man
and the course in early twentieth century cultural history. The
author shows how Cody became a businessman-a writer, grammatical
entrepreneur, and mass-marketer whose ads proclaimed "Good Money in
Good English" and asked "Is Good English Worth 25 Cents to You?"
His course, perhaps the most widely-advertised English education
program in history, provides a unique window onto popular views of
language and culture and their connection to American notions of
success and failure. But Battistella shows Sherwin Cody was also
part of a larger shift in attitudes. Using Cody's course as a
reference point, he also looks at the self-improvement ethic
reflected in such courses and products as theHarvard Classics, The
Book of Etiquette, the Book-of-the-Month Club, the U.S. School of
Music, and the Charles Atlas and Dale Carnegie courses to
illustrate how culture became popular and how self-reliance evolved
into self-improvement.
This is the first study of May 68 in fiction and in film. It looks
at the ways the events themselves were represented in narrative,
evaluates the impact these crucial times had on French cultural and
intellectual history, and offers readings of texts which were
shaped by it. The chosen texts concentrate upon important features
of May and its aftermath: the student rebellion, the workers
strikes, the question of the intellectuals, sexuality, feminism,
the political thriller, history, and textuality. Attention is paid
to the context of the social and cultural history of the Fifth
Republic, to Gaullism, and to the cultural politics of gauchisme.
The book aims to show the importance of the interplay of real and
imaginary in the text(s) of May, and the emphasis placed upon the
problematic of writing and interpretation. It argues that
re-reading the texts of May forces a reconsideration of the
existing accounts of postwar cultural history. The texts of May
reflect on social order, on rationality, logic, and modes of
representation, and are this highly relevant to contemporary
debates on modernity.
The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide examines how these
cities' world-famous arts events have shaped and been shaped by
their long-term interaction with their urban environments. While
the Edinburgh International Festival and Adelaide Festival are
long-established, prestigious events that champion artistic
excellence, they are also accompanied by the two largest
open-access fringe festivals in the world. It is this simultaneous
staging of multiple events within Edinburgh's Summer Festivals and
Adelaide's Mad March that generates the visibility and festive
atmosphere popularly associated with both places. Drawing on
perspectives from theatre studies and cultural geography, this book
interrogates how the Festival City, as a place myth, has developed
in the very different local contexts of Edinburgh and Adelaide, and
how it is challenged by groups competing for the right to use and
define public space. Each chapter examines a recent performative
event in which festival debates and controversies spilled out
beyond the festival space to activate the public sphere by
intersecting with broader concerns and audiences. This book forges
an interdisciplinary, comparative framework for festival studies to
interrogate how festivals are embedded in the social and political
fabric of cities and to assess the cultural impact of the
festivalisation phenomenon.
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