Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association and the reasons for its perseverance of ten seem unclear. Anthony Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so particular as the social habit of hospitality which is exercised among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular practices and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of an entire region of the country. Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly in light of the region's historical legacy of slavery and segregation.

Sex, death and nostalgia are among the impulses driving Beatles fandom: the metaphorical death of the Beatles after their break-up in 1970 has fueled the progressive nostalgia of fan conventions for 48 years; the death of John Lennon and George Harrison has added pathos and drama to the Beatles' story; Beatles Monthly predicated on the Beatles' good looks and the letters page was a forum for euphemistically expressed sexuality. The Beatles and Fandom is the first book to discuss these fan subcultures. It combines academic theory on fandom with compelling original research material to tell an alternative history of the Beatles phenomenon: a fans' history of the Beatles that runs concurrently with the popular story we all know.

As an American comic book writer, editor, and businessman, Jim Shooter (b. 1952) remains among the most important figures in the history of the medium. Starting in 1966 at the age of fourteen, Shooter, as the young protege of verbally abusive DC editor Mort Weisinger, helped introduce themes and character development more commonly associated with DC competitor Marvel Comics. Shooter created several characters for the Legion of Super-Heroes, introduced Superman's villain the Parasite, and jointly devised the first race between the Flash and Superman. When he later ascended to editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics, the company, indeed the medium as a whole, was moribund. Yet by the time Shooter left the company a mere decade later, the industry had again achieved considerable commercial viability, with Marveldominating the market. Shooter enjoyed many successes during his tenure, such as Chris Claremont and John Byrne's run on the Uncanny X-Men, Byrne's work on the Fantastic Four, Frank Miller's Daredevil stories, Walt Simonson's crafting of Norse mythology in Thor, and Roger Stern's runs on Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man, as well as his own successes writing Secret Wars and Secret Wars II. After a rift at Marvel, Shooter then helped lead Valiant Comics into one of the most iconic comic book companies of the 1990s, before moving to start-up companies Defiant andBroadway Comics. Interviews collected in this book span Shooter's career. Included here is a 1969 interview that shows a restless teenager; the 1973 interview that returned Shooter to comics; a discussion from 1980 during his pinnacle at Marvel; and two conversations from his time at Valiant and Defiant Comics. At the close, anextensive, original interview encompasses Shooter's full career.

What Movies Teach about Race: Exceptionalism, Erasure, & Entitlement reveals the way that media frames in entertainment content persuade audiences to see themselves and others through a prescriptive lens that favors whiteness. These media representations threaten democracy as conglomeration and convergence concentrate the media's global influence in the hands of a few corporations. By linking film's political economy with the movie content in the most influential films, this critical discourse study uncovers the socially-shared cognitive structures that the movie industry passes down from one generation to another. Roslyn M. Satchel encourages media literacy and proposes an entertainment media cascading network activation theory that uncovers racialized rhetoric in media content that cyclically begins in historic ideologies, influences elite discourse, embeds in media systems, produces media frames and representations, shapes public opinion, and then is recycled and perpetuated generationally.

The "Hizmet" ("Service") Movement of Fethullah Gulen is Turkey's most influential Islamic identity community. Widely praised throughout the early 2000s as a mild and moderate variation on Islamic political identity, the Gulen Movement has long been a topic of both adulation and conspiracy in Turkey. In Gulen, Joshua D. Hendrick suggests that the Gulen Movement should be given credit for playing a significant role in Turkey's rise to global prominence. Hendrick draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and the U.S. for his study. He argues that the movement's growth and impact both inside and outside Turkey position both its leader and its followers as indicative of a "post political" turn in twenty-first century Islamic political identity in general, and as illustrative of Turkey's political, economic, and cultural transformation in particular.

Product of a Post-doctoral research done at the University of Washington, (Seattle), USA, the present work is an attempt to conceptualise and analyse the postulates underlying India's Foreign Policy from its formative years in the early fifties to its maturation in the early eighties of the last century. It subjects the management of foreign relations by India to a full scale theoretical examination from the political economy angle-an exercise few scholars then or now have undertaken .Notions of security, national interest, diplomatic leverage, decision making process and so on have, in this work, been revisited in the decisive context of a domestic-external continuum in which forces of economic origin were seen as defining the rationale of a foreign policy that was supposed to take a developing nation to the fulfilment of its legitimate aspirations. At the same time, the innovations that were made with practically no earlier precedent to go by and the kind of institution building required for the purpose have been dealt with critically so as to bring out the interplay of domestic development aspirations and the art of ensuring policy independence by appropriate diplomacy. In the turbulent context of the Cold War the Indian experiment in the management of foreign relations and the positive gains it reaped in collectivising the principle of non-alignment did constitute a subject that demanded a non-conventional approach to get to the bottom of it. That is precisely what distinguishes the book by one of the most qualified experts in International Relations, enjoying intellectual acclaim both at home and abroad. The book starts with a theoretical discourse on the applicability or otherwise of the political economy approach as it stood at the time of writing. In subsequent chapters it examines a dependent economy's quest for an independent foreign policy, the central challenge before the external affairs ministry of the country. It needed, among other things handling of external aid, and foreign investment to recharge the developmental enterprises at home in a manner that would not interfere with the autonomy in judging and reacting to external events. Economic restructuring at home which brought a strong public sector as complementary to a fledgling private sector constituted an essential aspect. So also came up the new experiment of building a collective economic front with other developing nations. In its compact, yet well documented, analysis the book provides the most engaging scholarly presentation of the subject in all its relevant technicalities.

The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great Famine

An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural disaster."

As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.

"Tombstone" is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, "Tombstone" is written both as a memorial to the lives lost--an enduring tombstone in memory of the dead--and in hopeful anticipation of the final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in "The New York Review of Books," called the Chinese edition of "Tombstone ""groundbreaking . . . One of the most important books to come out of China in recent years."

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Venice, many of the world's great cities were built on wetlands and swamps. Cities and Wetlands is the first book to explore the literary and cultural histories of these cities and their relationships to their environments and buried histories. Developing a ground-breaking new mode of psychoanalytic ecology and surveying a wide range of major cities in North America and Europe, ecocritic and activist Rod Giblett shows how the wetland origins of these cities haunt their later literature and culture and might prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human culture and the environment. Cities covered include: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Hamburg, London, New Orleans, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Venice and Washington.

Contemporary craft, art and design are inseparable from the flows of production and consumption under global capitalism. The New Politics of the Handmade features twenty-three voices who critically rethink the handmade in this dramatically shifting economy. The authors examine craft within the conditions of extreme material and economic disparity; a renewed focus on labour and materiality in contemporary art and museums; the political dimensions of craftivism, neoliberalism, and state power; efforts toward urban renewal and sustainability; the use of digital technologies; and craft's connections to race, cultural identity and sovereignty in texts that criss-cross five continents. They claim contemporary craft as a dynamic critical position for understanding the most immediate political and aesthetic issues of our time.

Rooted in feminist ethnography and decolonial feminist theory, this book explores the subjectivity of Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli prisons, as shaped by resistance. Ashjan Ajour examines how these prisoners use their bodies in anti-colonial resistance; what determines this mode of radical struggle; the meanings they ascribe to their actions; and how they constitute their subjectivity while undergoing extreme bodily pain and starvation. These hunger strikes, which embody decolonisation and liberation politics, frame the post-Oslo period in the wake of the decline of the national struggle against settler-colonialism and the fragmentation of the Palestinian movement. Providing narrative and analytical insights into embodied resistance and tracing the formation of revolutionary subjectivity, the book sheds light on the participants' views of the hunger strike, as they move beyond customary understandings of the political into the realm of the 'spiritualisation' of struggle. Drawing on Foucault's conception of the technologies of the self, Fanon's writings on anti-colonial violence, and Badiou's militant philosophy, Ajour problematises these concepts from the vantage point of the Palestinian hunger strike.

This book engages with the experience of space and time in youth cultures across the world. Putting together contemporary case studies on young transnationalists, young glocals and young protesters in cities on the five continents, it analyzes new agoras and chronotopes in global cities. It is based on a selection of papers first presented to the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee 34 session on Youth Cultures, Space and Time that took place during the ISA World Congresses of Sociology in Gothenburg, Sweden (2010), and in Yokohama, Japan (2014). The value of this volume for youth researchers worldwide is twofold. Firstly, the chapters exemplify innovative approaches to understanding the fluid and dynamic urban space-time dimension in which young people's cultural and bodily practices are located. Secondly, the volume offers a transnational perspective. Chapter contributors come from countries across the world, and give account of very diverse youth culture phenomena. They represent both established researchers and new voices in youth research. Contributors are: Oscar Aguilera Ruiz, Ilenya Camozzi, Carles Feixa, Vitor Sergio Ferreira, Liliana Galindo Ramirez, Elham Golpoush-Nezhad, Leila Jeolas, Jeffrey J. Juris, Hagen Kordes, Sofia Laine, Carmen Leccardi, Pam Nilan, Jordi Nofre, Ndukaeze Nwabueze, Luca Queirolo Palmas, Yannis Pechtelidis, Geoffrey Pleyers, Jose Sanchez Garcia, Mahmood Shahabi. Youth, Space and Time is now available in paperback for individual customers.

In Moral Pressure for Responsible Globalization, Sherrie M. Steiner offers an account of religious diplomacy with the G8, G7 and G20 to evoke new possibilities in an effort to influence globalization to become more equitable and sustainable. Commonly portrayed as 'out of control', globalization is considered here as a political process that can be redirected to avoid the tragedy of the global commons. The secularization tradition of religion depicts faith-based public engagement as dangerous. Making use of historical materials from faith-based G-plus System shadow summits (2005-2017), Steiner provides ample information to arrive at an interpretation that significantly differs from traditional accounts. Using broader scope conditions, Steiner considers how human induced environmental changes contribute to religious resurgence under conditions of weakening nation states.

Black celebrities in America have always walked a precarious line between their perceived status as spokespersons for their race and their own individual success -and between being "not black enough" for the black community or "too black" to appeal to a broader audience. Few know this tightrope walk better than Kanye West, who transformed hip-hop, pop and gospel music, redefined fashion, married the world's biggest reality TV star and ran for president, all while becoming one of only a handful of black billionaires worldwide. Despite these accomplishments, his polarizing behavior, controversial alliances and bouts with mental illness have made him a caricature in the media and a disappointment among much of his fanbase. This book examines West's story and what it reveals about black celebrity and identity and the American dream.

Readings in the Anthropocene brings together scholars from German Studies and beyond to interpret the German tradition of the last two hundred years from a perspective that is mindful of the challenge posed by the concept of the Anthropocene. This new age of man, unofficially pronounced in 2000, holds that humans are becoming a geological force in shaping the Earth's future. Among the biggest challenges facing our future are climate change, accelerated species loss, and a radical transformation of land use. What are the historical, philosophical, cultural, literary, and artistic responses to this new concept? The essays in this volume bring German culture to bear on what it means to live in the Anthropocene from a historical, ethical, and aesthetic perspective.

For Georgia, the signing of the Association Agreement and the DCFTA with the European Union in 2014 was an act of strategic geopolitical significance. Of all the EU's eastern partners, the country distinguished itself since the Rose Revolution of 2003 by pushing ahead with a radical liberalisation and economic reform agenda. Georgia is unique among the countries in the region for having largely cleansed its economy of corruption in the post-Rose Revolution period, although its political system is marked by oligarchal state capture since the change of government in 2012. The purpose of this Handbook is to make the complex political, economic and legal content of the Association Agreement readily understandable. This third edition, published seven years since signature of after entry into force of the Agreement's implementation is substantially new in content, both updating how Georgia has been implementing the Agreement, and introducing new dimensions (including the Green Deal, the Covid-19 pandemic, cyber security, and gender equality). The Handbook is also up to date in analysing Georgia's troubled democracy. Two teams of researchers from leading independent think tanks, CEPS in Brussels and Reformatics in Tbilisi, collaborated on this project, with the support of the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida). This Handbook is one of a trilogy examining similar Association Agreements made by the EU with Ukraine and Moldova.