We have always had land in which the agricultural productivity is limited because there is not enough moisture. Systems of farming and burning often degrade dryland further until it is desert. Today, however, the problem is becoming much more serious. Over 20 per cent of the world's population lives in dryland areas, and unless action is taken drylands will increase dramatically. This book focuses on the people who live and .farm in the drylands, their use of land resources and the economic returns from their decisions. In a clear and thorough economic appraisal, the authors show how it is still possible to arrest the problem. Originally published in 1989

The contribution of economic thought and method to environmental management needs practical illustration. Too few books on the subject achieve such an outcome. This book is among the notable exceptions. That economics can provide a powerful vehicle for communicating an integrated understanding of the often diverse scientific findings germane to environmental im pact assessment needs to be illustrated convincingly. This book does just that. But it does more. It speaks across cultures: not to transfer know-how from one culture to another, but rather to activate an effective exchange of insights from one locale on the planet to another. As such, it is a genuine contribution to the great en vironmental exhortation of our times - think globally, act locally. Too often the people best placed to make such contributions are too committed to practical outcomes and making a living doing so. Just occasionally, however, they can be persuaded to make the special effort required to communicate globally. In this book, David James has once again orchestrated the contributions of vir tuoso performers. In doing so he has emulated the contribution he sustained throughout the International Drylands Project and preparation of the books written with John Dixon and Paul Sherman: The Economics ofDry/and Management and Case Studies in Dry/and Management (Earthscan, London). Taken together with his recent work as Special Commissioner for the path breaking national Forest and Timber Inquiry for the Australian Government, we have a body of work characterised by great worthiness, integrity and true global significance."

Drylands are a sizeable part of the world's potentially arable land. They vary from the hyper-arid regions of the classic deserts of Africa and Asia to the more common semi-arid and sub-humid areas that support extensive agricultural systems dependent on rainfall or irrigation. Following their successful and innovative work The Economics of Dryland Management the editors have assembled twenty case studies from nine countries in the continents of Africa, Asia, North America and Australia. They help to explore more fully the costs of land degradation and illustrate the economics of reclamation, rehabilitation and prevention. The cases in this book present a rich, varied and readable survey of a wide range of drylands and their resources. Originally published in 19990

Drylands are a sizeable part of the world's potentially arable land. They vary from the hyper-arid regions of the classic deserts of Africa and Asia to the more common semi-arid and sub-humid areas that support extensive agricultural systems dependent on rainfall or irrigation. Following their successful and innovative work The Economics of Dryland Management the editors have assembled twenty case studies from nine countries in the continents of Africa, Asia, North America and Australia. They help to explore more fully the costs of land degradation and illustrate the economics of reclamation, rehabilitation and prevention. The cases in this book present a rich, varied and readable survey of a wide range of drylands and their resources. Originally published in 19990

Ken Jacobs has been making cinema for more than fifty years. Along with over thirty film and video works, he has created an array of shadow plays, sound pieces, installations, and magic lantern and film performances that have transformed how we look at and think about moving images. He is part of the permanent collections at MoMA and the Whitney, and his work has been celebrated in Europe and the U.S. While his importance is well-recognized, this is the first volume dedicated entirely to him. It includes essays by prominent film scholars along with photographs and personal pieces from artists and critics, all of which testify to the extraordinary variety and influence of his accomplishments. Anyone interested in cinema or experimental arts will be well-rewarded by a greater acquaintance with the genius, the innovation, and the optical antics of Ken Jacobs.

The contribution of economic thought and method to environmental management needs practical illustration. Too few books on the subject achieve such an outcome. This book is among the notable exceptions. That economics can provide a powerful vehicle for communicating an integrated understanding of the often diverse scientific findings germane to environmental im pact assessment needs to be illustrated convincingly. This book does just that. But it does more. It speaks across cultures: not to transfer know-how from one culture to another, but rather to activate an effective exchange of insights from one locale on the planet to another. As such, it is a genuine contribution to the great en vironmental exhortation of our times - think globally, act locally. Too often the people best placed to make such contributions are too committed to practical outcomes and making a living doing so. Just occasionally, however, they can be persuaded to make the special effort required to communicate globally. In this book, David James has once again orchestrated the contributions of vir tuoso performers. In doing so he has emulated the contribution he sustained throughout the International Drylands Project and preparation of the books written with John Dixon and Paul Sherman: The Economics ofDry/and Management and Case Studies in Dry/and Management (Earthscan, London). Taken together with his recent work as Special Commissioner for the path breaking national Forest and Timber Inquiry for the Australian Government, we have a body of work characterised by great worthiness, integrity and true global significance."

Rock 'N' Film presents a cultural history of films about US and British rock music during the period when biracial popular music was fundamental to progressive social movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Considering the music's capacity for utopian popular cultural empowerment and its usefulness for the capitalist media industries, Rock 'N' Film explores how its contradictory potentials were reproduced in various kinds of cinema, including major studio productions, minor studios' exploitation projects, independent documentaries, and avant-garde works. These include Rock Around the Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956) and other 1950s jukebox musicals; Elvis's King Creole (Michael Curtiz, 1958) and other important films he made before being drafted as well as the formulaic musical comedies in which Hollywood abused his genius in the 1960s; early documentaries such as The T.A.M.I. Show (Steve Binder, 1964) that presented James Brown and the Rolling Stones as core of a black-white, US-UK cultural commonality; A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964) that precipitated the British Invasion, Dont Look Back (1967), Monterey Pop (1968), and other Direct Cinema documentaries about the music of the counterculture by D. A. Pennebaker; Woodstock (1970); avant-garde documentaries about the Rolling Stones by Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Anger, Robert Frank, and others. After the turn of the decade, notably Gimme Shelter (1970) in which Charlotte Zwerin edited David and Albert Maysles's footage of the Altamont free concert so as to portray the Stone's complicity in the Hells Angels' murder of a young man, the 60s' utopian biracial music-and films about it-reverted to separate black and white traditions based respectively on soul and country. These produced Blaxploitation and Lady Sings the Blues (Sidney J. Furie, 1972) on the one hand, and bigoted representations of the Southern culture in Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) on the other. Both these last two films ended with the deaths of their stars, and it seemed that rock 'n' roll had died or even, as David Bowie proclaimed, that it had committed suicide. But in another documentary about Bowie's concert, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973), D.A. Pennebaker triumphantly re-affirmed the community of musicians and fans in glam rock. In analyzing this history, David James adapts the methodology of histories of the classic musical to rock 'n' roll to show how the rock 'n' roll film both displaced and recreated the film musical.

Ken Jacobs has been making cinema for more than fifty years. Along with over thirty film and video works, he has created an array of shadow plays, sound pieces, installations, and magic lantern and film performances that have transformed how we look at and think about moving images. He is part of the permanent collections at MoMA and the Whitney, and his work has been celebrated in Europe and the U.S. While his importance is well-recognized, this is the first volume dedicated entirely to him. It includes essays by prominent film scholars along with photographs and personal pieces from artists and critics, all of which testify to the extraordinary variety and influence of his accomplishments. Anyone interested in cinema or experimental arts will be well-rewarded by a greater acquaintance with the genius, the innovation, and the optical antics of Ken Jacobs.

For two decades after the mid-1950s, biracial popular music played a fundamental role in progressive social movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Balancing rock's capacity for utopian popular cultural empowerment with its usefulness for the capitalist media industries, Rock 'N' Film explores how the music's contradictory potentials were reproduced in various kinds of cinema, including major studio productions, minor studios' exploitation projects, independent documentaries, and the avant-garde. These include Rock Around the Clock and other 1950s jukebox musicals; the films Elvis made before being drafted, especially King Creole, as well as the formulaic comedies in which Hollywood abused his genius in the 1960s; early documentaries such as The T.A.M.I. Show that presented James Brown and the Rolling Stones as the core of a black-white, US-UK cultural commonality; A Hard Day's Night that marked the British Invasion; Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop, Woodstock, and other Direct Cinema documentaries about the music of the counterculture; and avant-garde films about the Rolling Stones by Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Anger, and Robert Frank. After the turn of the decade, notably Gimme Shelter, in which the Stones appeared to be complicit in the Hells Angels' murder of a young black man, 1960s' music-and films about it-reverted to separate black and white traditions based respectively on soul and country. These produced blaxploitation and Lady Sings the Blues on the one hand, and bigoted representations of Southern culture in Nashville on the other. Ending with the deaths of their stars, both films implied that rock 'n' roll had died or even, as David Bowie proclaimed, that it had committed suicide. But in his documentary about Bowie, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, D.A. Pennebaker triumphantly re-affirmed the community of musicians and fans in glam rock. In analyzing this history, David E. James adapts the methodology of histories of the classic film musical to show how the rock 'n' roll film both displaced and recreated it.

This book will be released as Open Access. Based on a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, this book examines 40 years of post-war independent immigrant filmmaking in Sweden. John Sundholm and Lars Gustaf Andersson consider the creativity that lies in the state of exile, offering analyses of over 50 rarely seen immigrant films that would otherwise remain invisible and unarchived. They shed light on the complex web of personal, economic, and cultural circumstances that surround migrant filmmaking, discuss associations that became important sites of self-organization for exiled filmmakers, and explore the cultural practice of minor immigrant cinema archiving. The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking applies film theory to immigrant filmmaking in a transnational context, exploring how immigrant filmmakers use film to find a place in a new cultural situation.

Jonas Mekas, one of the driving forces behind New York's alternative film culture from the 1950s through the 1980s, made for an unlikely counterculture hero: a Lithuanian emigr and fervent nationalist from an agrarian family, he had not grown up with either capitalist commercialism or the postwar rebellion against it. By focusing on his sensitivity to political struggle, however, leading film commentators here offer fascinating insights into Mekas's career as a writer, filmdistributor, and film-maker, while exploring the history of independent cinema in New York since World War II. This collection of essays, interviews, and photographs addresses such topics as Mekas's column in the Village Voice, his foundation and editorship of Film Culture, his role in the establishment of Anthology Film Archives and The Film-Makers Co-op (the major distribution center for independent film), his interaction with other artists, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and finally the critical assessment of his own films, from Guns of the Trees and The Brig in the sixties to the diary films that followed Walden. The contributors to this volume are Paul Arthur, Vyt Bakaitis, Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Rudy Burckhardt, David Curtis, Richard Foreman, Tom Gunning, Bob Harris, J. Hoberman, David E. James, Marjorie Keller, Peter Kubelka, George Kuchar, Richard Leacock, Barbara Moore, Peter Moore, Scott Nygren, John Pruitt, Lauren Rabinovitz, Michael Renov, Jeffrey K. Ruoff, and Maureen Turim.

Korean cinema was virtually unavailable to the West during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), and no film made before 1943 has been recovered even though Korea had an active film-making industry that produced at least 240 films. For a period of forty years, after Korea was liberated from colonialism, a time where Western imports were scarce, Korean cinema became an innovative force reflecting a society whose social and cultural norms were becoming less conservative. Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema is a collection of essays written about Im Kwon-Taek, better known as the father of New Korean Cinema, that takes a critical look at the situations of filmmakers in South Korea.

Written by leading Koreanists and scholars of Korean film in the United States, Im Kwon-Taek is the first scholarly treatment of Korean cinema. It establishes Im Kwon-Taek as the only major Korean director whose life's work covers the entire history of South Korea's military rule (1961-1992). It demonstrates Im's struggles with Korean cinema's historical contradictions and also shows how Im rose above political discord. The book includes an interview with Im, a chronology of Korean cinema and Korean history showing major dynastic periods and historical and political events, and and a complete filmography.

Im Kwon-Taek is timely and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Korean cinema. These essays situate Im Kwon-Taek within Korean filmmaking, placing him in industrial, creative, and social contexts, and closely examine some of his finest films. Im Kwon-Taek will interest students and scholars of film studies, Korean studies, religious studies, postcolonial studies, andAsian studies.

On the current battlefield of cultural criticism and production, no term has been more vigorously contested than 'postmodernism'. Defying clear definition, yet persisting as an indispensable category, it has become one of the central topics in the theory and practice of contemporary culture. Postmodernism and Its Discontents collects some of the major theoretical statements in this debate, including the key intervention of Fredric Jameson, and pits them against original contributions by a range of younger writers who explore the terrain of postmodernism in a variety of cultural practices. Essays on poetry and punk culture, recent American fiction, rock videos, Hollywood and foreign film, and sports and soap operas complement more directly theoretical pieces which tackle, to repeat the title of one essay, 'what is at stake in the debate on postmodernism.' Above all, this collection is distinguished by its steadfast refusal to elide the determinate political issues posed by postmodernism. Each of the essays insists upon the materiality of cultural production, locating various post-modernist practices in the social conditions of contemporary life, including the overarching structures of gender and class.

Mass culture: pro or con? From the time of Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal essay on "the culture industry", cultural studies has stood in the shadow of the Frankfurt School's critique of mass culture and its 'model of popular vs. elite culture, whatever the merits of either. Looking at culture as something people do rather than buy, Power Misses challenges the prevailing wisdom in cultural studies today. David James insists that popular resistance to domination by the culture industry must intervene at the point of production rather than consumption. In its most resolute instances, from the poetry of William Blake to the British Miners' Campaign Tape Project, alternative culture has fused with radical politics. Authoritatively mapping the terrain of cultural resistance under capitalism, James examines the material contradictions and the utopian potentials articulated in John Berger's fiction, Dada, rock music, the films of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, and the poetry of punk. Following in the steps of Brecht and Benjamin, James explores the myriad ways in which culture is saturated by the commodity form, while at the same time giving rise to numerous forms of popular resistance to the culture industry's dominance.