From the Great Panathenaea of ancient Greece to the hajj of today, people of all religions and cultures have made sacred journeys to confirm their faith and their part in a larger identity. This book is a fascinating guide through the vast and varied cultural territory such pilgrimages have covered across the ages. The first book to look at the phenomenon and experience of pilgrimage through the multiple lenses of history, religion, sociology, anthropology, and art history, this sumptuously illustrated volume explores the full richness and range of sacred travel as it maps the cultural imagination.
The authors consider pilgrimage as a physical journey through time and space, but also as a metaphorical passage resonant with meaning on many levels. It may entail a ritual transformation of the pilgrim's inner state or outer status; it may be a quest for a transcendent goal; it may involve the healing of a physical or spiritual ailment. Through folktales, narratives of the crusades, and the firsthand accounts of those who have made these journeys; through descriptions and pictures of the rituals, holy objects, and sacred architecture they have encountered, as well as the relics and talismans they have carried home, Pilgrimage evokes the physical and spiritual landscape these seekers have traveled. In its structure, the book broadly moves from those religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--that cohere around a single canonical text to those with a multiplicity of sacred scriptures, like Hinduism and Buddhism. Juxtaposing the different practices and experiences of pilgrimage in these contexts, this book reveals the common structures and singular features of sacred travel from ancient times to our own.
Few things suggest rugged individualism as powerfully as the solitary mountaineer testing his or her mettle in the rough country. Yet the long history of wilderness sport complicates this image. In this surprising story of the premier rock-climbing venue in the United States, Pilgrims of the Vertical offers insight into the nature of wilderness adventure.
From the founding era of mountain climbing in Victorian Europe to present-day climbing gyms, Pilgrims of the Vertical shows how ever-changing alignments of nature, technology, gender, sport, and consumer culture have shaped climbers’ relations to nature and to each other. Even in Yosemite Valley, a premier site for sporting and environmental culture since the 1800s, elite athletes cannot be entirely disentangled from the many men and women seeking recreation and camaraderie.
Following these climbers through time, Joseph Taylor uncovers lessons about the relationship of individuals to groups, sport to society, and nature to culture. He also shows how social and historical contexts influenced adventurers’ choices and experiences, and why some became leading environmental activists—including John Muir, David Brower, and Yvon Chouinard. In a world in which wild nature is increasingly associated with play, and virtuous play with environmental values, Pilgrims of the Vertical explains when and how these ideas developed, and why they became intimately linked to consumerism.
Pilgrims to the Wild is a survey of American writers who have responded to their encounters with the natural world. Ranging in its treatment from Thoreau’s important but neglected essay, 'Walking,' to the exuberant letters of the young artist Everett Ruess (who disappeared in the Escalante canyonlands), this is a broadly based exploration that brings to bear Eastern and Western classical philosophy, as well as contemporary critical theory, on a distinctive tradition of American Writing—those works concerned with the human relationship to the nonhuman world.
In addition to offering a fresh interpretation of classic authors such a Thoreau and Muir, this book introduces readers to the less widely known but equally fascinating writers Clarence King and Mary Austin.
Written with exquisite sensitivity and wit, this memoir by one of Mexico’s foremost men of letters describes coming of age during the violence of the Mexican Revolution and “living dangerously” as an openly homosexual man in a brutally machista society.
Salvador Novo (1904–1974) was a provocative and prolific cultural presence in Mexico City through much of the twentieth century. With his friend and fellow poet Xavier Villaurrutia, he cofounded Ulises and Contemporáneos, landmark avant-garde journals of the late 1920s and 1930s. At once “outsider” and “insider,” Novo held high posts at the Ministries of Culture and Public Education and wrote volumes about Mexican history, politics, literature, and culture. The author of numerous collections of poems, including XX poemas, Nuevo amor, Espejo, Dueño mío, and Poesía 1915–1955, Novo is also considered one of the finest, most original prose stylists of his generation.
Pillar of Salt is Novo’s incomparable memoir of growing up during and after the Mexican Revolution; shuttling north to escape the Zapatistas, only to see his uncle murdered at home by the troops of Pancho Villa; and his initiations into literature and love with colorful, poignant, complicated men of usually mutually exclusive social classes. Pillar of Salt portrays the codes, intrigues, and dynamics of what, decades later, would be called “a gay ghetto.” But in Novo’s Mexico City, there was no name for this parallel universe, as full of fear as it was canny and vibrant. Novo’s memoir plumbs the intricate subtleties of this world with startling frankness, sensitivity, and potential for hilarity. Also included in this volume are nineteen erotic sonnets, one of which was long thought to have been lost.
Pillars of Justice explores the purpose and possibilities of life in the law through moving accounts of thirteen lawyers who shaped the legal world during the past half century.
Some, such as Thurgood Marshall, were Supreme Court Justices. Others, like John Doar and Burke Marshall, set the civil rights policies of the federal government during the 1960s. Some, including Harry Kalven and Catharine MacKinnon, have taught at the greatest law schools of the nation and nourished the liberalism rooted in the civil rights era. Jurists from abroad—Aharon Barak, for example—were responsible for the rise of the human rights movement that today carries the burden of advancing liberal values. These lawyers came from diverse backgrounds and held various political views. What unites them is a deep, abiding commitment to Brown v. Board of Education as an exceptional moment in the life of the law—a willingness to move mountains, if need be, to ensure that we are living up to our best selves. In tracing how these lawyers over a period of fifty years used the Brown ruling and its spirit as a beacon to guide their endeavors, this history tells the epic story of the liberal tradition in the law.
For Owen Fiss, one of the country’s leading constitutional theorists, the people described were mentors, colleagues, friends. In his portraits, Fiss tries to identify the unique qualities of mind and character that made these individuals so important to the institutions and legal principles they served.
How can children simultaneously be the most important and least powerful people in a nation? In her innovative ethnography of Ugandan children—the pillars of tomorrow’s Uganda, according to the national youth anthem—Kristen E. Cheney answers this question by exploring the daily contradictions children face as they try to find their places amid the country’s rapidly changing social conditions.
Drawing on the detailed life histories of several children, Cheney shows that children and childhood are being redefined by the desires of a young country struggling to position itself in the international community. She moves between urban schools, music festivals, and war zones to reveal how Ugandans are constructing childhood as an empowering identity for the development of the nation. Moreover, through her analysis of children’s rights ideology, national government strategy, and children’s everyday concerns, Cheney also shows how these young citizens are vitally linked to the global political economy as they navigate the pitfalls and possibilities for a brighter tomorrow.
A collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables about the burden on women and families.
The Pillow Museum is a collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables set in various simulacra of our world. Claire Bateman’s gorgeous prose captures the imagination with closely observed details of people and places that are startlingly familiar yet unreal, where nothing can be taken for granted, including narrative logic: "It was snowing the night they had the fight about the glass piano whose music provided all the light in the house."
In an authoritative voice that offers no apologies or justifications, The Pillow Museum evokes a closely observed slipstream strangeness that refuses to take any moment or detail for granted—a fruitful, delirious disruption.
A collection of 16 uniquely funny short stories by acclaimed Danish poet Benny Andersen.
A rich, long-term ethnography of women seafood traders in Mexico.
The "shrimp ladies," locally known as changueras in southern Sinaloa, Mexico, sell seafood in open-air markets, forming an extralegal but key part of the economy built around this "pink gold.” Over time, they struggled to evolve from marginalized peddlers to local icons depicted in popular culture, even as they continue to work at an open-air street market.
Pink Gold documents the shrimp traders' resilience and resourcefulness, from their early conflicts with the city, state, and federal authorities and forming a union, to carving out a physical space for a seafood market, and even engaging in conflicts with the Mexican military. Drawing from her two decades of fieldwork, María L. Cruz-Torres explores the inspiring narrative of this overlooked group of women involving grassroots politics, trans-border and familial networking, debt and informal economic practices, personal sacrifices, and simple courage. She argues that, amid intense economic competition, their success relies on group solidarity that creates interlocking networks of mutual trust, or confianza, that in turn enable them to cross social and political boundaries that would typically be closed to them. Ultimately, Pink Gold offers fresh insights into issues of gender and labor, urban public space, the street economy, commodities, and globalization.
Contemporary electronic music practices are illuminated through the stories of women artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. They include the creators of ambient soundscapes, “performance novels,” sound sculptures, and custom software, as well as the developer of the Deep Listening philosophy and the founders of the Liquid Sound Lounge radio show and the monthly Basement Bhangra parties in New York. These and many other artists open up about topics such as their conflicted relationships to formal music training and mainstream media representations of women in electronic music. They discuss using sound to work creatively with structures of time and space, and voice and language; challenge distinctions of nature and culture; question norms of technological practice; and balance their needs for productive solitude with collaboration and community. Whether designing and building modular synthesizers with analog circuits or performing with a wearable apparatus that translates muscle movements into electronic sound, these artists expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noisemaking. Pink Noises is a powerful testimony to the presence and vitality of women in electronic music cultures, and to the relevance of sound to feminist concerns.
Interviewees: Maria Chavez, Beth Coleman (M. Singe), Antye Greie (AGF), Jeannie Hopper, Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum), Christina Kubisch, Le Tigre, Annea Lockwood, Giulia Loli (DJ Mutamassik), Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), Riz Maslen (Neotropic), Kaffe Matthews, Susan Morabito, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Eliane Radigue, Jessica Rylan, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami, Bev Stanton (Arthur Loves Plastic), Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat)
Today, copyright is everywhere, surrounded by a thicket of no trespassing signs that mark creative work as private property. Caren Irr’s Pink Pirates asks how contemporary novelists—represented by Ursula Le Guin, Andrea Barrett, Kathy Acker, and Leslie Marmon Silko—have read those signs, arguing that for feminist writers in particular copyright often conjures up the persistent exclusion of women from ownership. Bringing together voices from law schools, courtrooms, and the writer's desk, Irr shows how some of the most inventive contemporary feminist novelists have reacted to this history.
Explaining the complex, three-century lineage of Anglo-American copyright law in clear, accessible terms and wrestling with some of copyright law's most deeply rooted assumptions, Irr sets the stage for a feminist reappraisal of the figure of the literary pirate in the late twentieth century—a figure outside the restrictive bounds of U.S. copyright statutes.
Going beyond her readings of contemporary women authors, Irr’s exhaustive history of how women have fared under intellectual property regimes speaks to broader political, social, and economic implications and engages digital-era excitement about the commons with the most utopian and materialist strains in feminist criticism.
The Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities Series continues its detailed exploration of language dynamics among deaf people in the fourth entry, Pinky Extension and Eye Gaze: Language Use in Deaf Communities. This volume’s ten meticulously prepared chapters reflect the refinements of research in six major sociolinguistics areas. Rob Hoopes’ work, “A Preliminary Examination of Pinky Extension: Suggestions Regarding Its Occurrence, Constraints, and Function,” commences Part One: Variation with a sound explanation of this American Sign Language (ASL) phonological characteristic. Part Two: Languages in Contact includes findings by Jean Ann on contact between Taiwanese Sign Language and written Taiwanese.
Priscilla Shannon Gutierrez considers the relationship of educational policy with language and cognition in deaf children in Part Three: Language in Education, and in Part Four: Discourse Analysis, Melanie Metzger discusses eye gaze and pronominal reference in ASL. Part Five: Second-Language Learning presents the single chapter “An Acculturation Model for ASL Learners,” by Mike Kemp. Sarah E. Burns defines Irish Sign Language as Ireland’s second minority language after Gaelic, in Part Six: Language Attitudes, the final area of concentration in this rigorously researched volume. These studies and the others by the respected scholars featured in Pinky Extension and Eye Gaze make it an outstanding and eminently valuable addition to this series.
Nearly a century ago, hundreds of families journeyed from Spain to the United States, to search for a better life in the growing zinc-industry towns of Harrison County, West Virginia. As they created a new culture and a new home in this strange land, they added another thread to the rich fabric of our nation. Writing from his perspective as a first-generation son of this immigrant community, González recounts his childhood memories of his neighborhood, where these immigrants raised their families, worked in the often insufferable conditions of the zinc factories, and celebrated "romerias" and feast days with their neighbors.
An engaging look at the history of the piñon pine and its ecosystem. Combining natural history and observations of the cultural importance of the tree to both native Indians and European settlers, Lanner provides information on the management of the tree and its interdependence with the birds and animals of the piñon-juniper woodland. Science, cultural history, and ecologicall issues, plus delicious recipes using the piñon pine nuts, make for a concise natural and cultural history of the piñon pine.
Home to 33,000 Filipino American residents, Daly City, California, located just outside of San Francisco, has been dubbed “the Pinoy Capital of the United States.” In this fascinating ethnographic study of the lives of Daly City residents, Benito Vergara shows how Daly City has become a magnet for the growing Filipino American community.
Vergara challenges rooted notions of colonialism here, addressing the immigrants’ identities, connections and loyalties. Using the lens of transnationalism, he looks at the “double lives” of both recent and established Filipino Americans. Vergara explores how first-generation Pinoys experience homesickness precisely because Daly City is filled with reminders of their homeland’s culture, like newspapers, shops and festivals. Vergara probes into the complicated, ambivalent feelings these immigrants have—toward the Philippines and the United States—and the conflicting obligations they have presented by belonging to a thriving community and yet possessing nostalgia for the homeland and people they left behind.
Beginning with the pin-up’s origins in mid-nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographs of burlesque performers, Buszek explores how female sex symbols, including Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson, fought to exert control over their own images. Buszek analyzes the evolution of the pin-up through the advent of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, fanzine photographs of early film stars, the Varga Girl illustrations that appeared in Esquire during World War II, the early years of Playboy magazine, and the recent revival of the genre in appropriations by third-wave feminist artists. A fascinating combination of art history and cultural history, Pin-Up Grrrls is the story of how women have publicly defined and represented their sexuality since the 1860s.
"The University of Alabama Press has produced yet another excellent book on Florida. Gracefully written, it offers one of the most compelling images of rural life in early 20th-century Florida that exists in print. It should enjoy wide readership." —The Florida Historical Quarterly
Pioneer Family is based on the recollections of Hugie and Oleta Oesterreicher, who lived in rural northeast Florida in the early decades of the twentieth century. Northeast Florida was still frontier country then, and Hugie and Oleta were pioneers. Although the time and setting of their story are particular, the theme of survival during hard times is universal. Born in a cypress cabin on the edge of the great Durbin Swamp located midway between St. Augustine and Jacksonville, Hugie knew every alligator hole, every bog, every creek; he could dry venison so it lasted without refrigeration for months, could build a potato bank that kept potatoes warm all winter, and put down a well without machinery. He knew how to cope with rattlesnakes and moccasins. Early one morning in 1925, Hugie fell in love with a tall, brown-eyed girl as he passed her place on a cattle drive. He courted this girl, Oleta Brown, with no success at first, but finally they were married in 1927.
Their daughter retells their story from vivid accounts they gave of their childhood, courtship, early years of marriage, and struggles during the Great Depression. In an age bereft of heroes, the story of their courage, their faith, and their commitment provides a fascinating empathy with a time that has passed; a place that has disappeared.
Dean of the Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health in the 1920's and '30's,David Edsall was one of the leaders in a period of great change and progress in medicine. At the beginning of Edsall's career, a doctor's chief weapons were his informed mind and trained senses. By the end of it, the permanent alliance of the sciences and medicine had profoundly altered the doctor's practice and his education. It was a time of struggle, of conflict, and of enduring accomplishment.
Edsall was at the center of this revolutionary effort in three leading schools of medicine: the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvard. He began his career in Pennsylvania as recording clerk to the famous Dr. William Pepper, Jr., at the same time making scientific contributions in metabolism through his work in the Pepper Laboratory of Clinical Medicine. By 1907 he had become Professor of Therapeutics and Pharmacology. In 1910 and '11, for one stormy year, he was the school's Professor of Medicine. This was a key year -in 1910 the publication of Abraham Flexner's Medical Education in the United States and Canada had led to the eradication of one quarter of U. S. medical schools and radical reform of many others.
From Pennsylvania Edsall went to St. Louis as Professor of Preventive Medicine, and his part in the reform of that medical school is both controversial and fascinating.
,Edsall's appointment in 1912 to a double post at Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital brought him to Boston -the field of his major contributions. This remarkable period was the day of such people as Harvard's Walter Cannon, Otto Folin, Harvey Cushing, Alice Hamilton, L. J. Henderson. It saw the founding of the School of Public Health, the major endowment of the Medical School. In his ten years at the hospital and his seventeen years as dean, as in his influence as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, Edsall gave direction to many developments in American medicine which bear his mark to this day.
Originally published in 1887, The Pioneer Preacher is a lively account of a Congregationalist minister's attempts to lead a sin-free existence on the American frontier. Sherlock Bristol (1815-1906) was a California gold miner, wagon train captain, Wisconsin farmer, Idaho rancher, Indian fighter, abolitionist, and Oberlin-trained clergyman. While serving a series of churches in the East, he periodically cured himself of "nervous disorders" by journeying out West. He only broke the Sabbath once---during an Indian attack!
Reflecting in his memoirs the exploits of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Bristol delights in recounting his adventures, ecclesiastical or otherwise. He vividly recalls his redemption in the wilderness where he enjoyed having "little opportunity for reading books or mental exercise, and an abundance of calls for muscular employment." Greatly influenced by the evangelist Charles G. Finney at Oberlin, Bristol tried to teach miners and frontiersmen the principles of revivalism, postmillennialism, and perfectionism. In The Pioneer Preacher he shares his own disputatious views on abolition, American Indians, temperance, and other issues of his day.
Samuel Bangs, the first printer in the territory that is now Texas, once owed his life to his printing press. One of the few survivors of the Mina Expedition to Mexico in 1817, Bangs wrote to Servando de Mier, “I had the good fortune, through the will of God, to have my life saved, as I was a printer.”
Bangs was not always so fortunate. Losses and disappointments plagued him throughout his career, and he spent many miserable months in Mexican jails. But his ingenuity in the face of adversity, his courage and charm, stamped him not only as a storybook hero but as a man whose virtues were large enough to be their own reward.
Lota Spell’s fine biography of Samuel Bangs is at the same time a fascinating history of northern Mexico (including Texas) in the first half of the nineteenth century. Through the successes and failures of an individual it presents the facts about the operation of a business during a time of important political and economic change.
Even more important is its contribution to our knowledge of printing and of the contemporary periodical press. Although first of all a printer, Samuel Bangs was also involved in the production of newspapers, making this book a detailed history of journalism in the Mexico and Texas of his day. His printing office also functioned as a typographer’s school, through which he instituted the apprentice system in the Southwest; and as a result of his interest in presses as a commodity of trade, the first business for merchandising and servicing printing presses in the area was developed.
This narrative, combining the story of a man’s life, the history of his times, and the development of his profession, fills a gap in our knowledge of Mexico and Texas, and does it with perception and charm.
The Alaskan frontier tempted fur traders, whalers, salmon fishers, gold miners, hunters, and oilmen to take what they could without regard for long-term consequences. Wildlife species, ecosystems, and Native cultures suffered, sometimes irreparably. Damage to wildlife and lands drew the attention of environmentalists, including John Muir, who applied their influence to enact wildlife protection laws and set aside lands for conservation. Alaska served as a testing ground for emergent national resource policy in the United States, as environmental values of species and ecosystem sustainability replaced the unrestrained exploitation of Alaska's early frontier days.
Efforts of conservation leaders and the territory's isolation, small human population, and late development prevented widespread destruction and gave Americans a unique opportunity to protect some of the world's most pristine wilderness.
Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska illustrates the historical precedents for current natural resource disputes in Alaska and will fascinate readers interested in wildlife and conservation.
With The Pioneers (1823), Cooper initiated his series of elegiac romances of frontier life and introduced the world to Natty Bumppo (or Leather-stocking). Set in 1793 in New York State, the novel depicts an aging Leather-stocking negotiating his way in a restlessly expanding society. In his introduction, Robert Daly argues for the novel’s increasing relevance: we live in a similarly complex society as Cooper’s frontier world, faced with the same questions about the limits of individualism, the need for voluntary cooperation, and stewardship of the environment.
The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Pioneers in the The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, published by the State University of New York Press.
The profiles are edited transcripts of interviews videotaped between 1996 and 2004. They tell of the development of new techniques such as the "blue baby operation," the first heart-lung machine, the first artificial heart valve, and the first coronary bypass operation. They also tell the unusual life stories of the surgeons and allude to professional and institutional rivalries. A particularly valuable part of the book is the author's brief history of cardiac surgery, designed to orient the reader for reading the profiles that follow.
In this exciting new study, Bahru Zewde, one of the foremost historians of modern Ethiopia, has constructed a collective biography of a remarkable group of men and women in a formative period of their country’s history. Ethiopia’s political independence at the end of the nineteenth century put this new African state in a position to determine its own levels of engagement with the West. Ethiopians went to study in universities around the world. They returned with the skills of their education acquired in Europe and America, and at home began to lay the foundations of a new literature and political philosophy. Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia describes the role of these men and women of ideas in the social and political transformation of the young nation and later in the administration of Haile Selassie.
Internationally renowned for its pioneering role in the ecological restoration of tallgrass prairies, savannas, forests, and wetlands, the University of Wisconsin Arboretum contains the world’s oldest and most diverse restored ecological communities. A site for land restoration research, public environmental education, and enjoyment by nature lovers, the arboretum remains a vibrant treasure in the heart of Madison’s urban environment.
Pioneers of Ecological Restoration chronicles the history of the arboretum and the people who created, shaped, and sustained it up to the present. Although the arboretum was established by the University of Wisconsin in 1932, author Franklin E. Court begins his history in 1910 with John Nolen, the famous landscape architect who was invited to create plans for the city of Madison, the university campus, and Wisconsin state parks. Drawing extensive details from archives and interviews, Court follows decades of collaborative work related to the arboretum’s lands, including the early efforts of Madison philanthropists and businessmen Michael Olbrich, Paul E. Stark, and Joseph W. “Bud” Jackson.
With labor from the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 1930s Depression, University of Wisconsin scientists began establishing both a traditional horticultural collection of trees and plants and a completely new, visionary approach to recreate native ecosystems. Hundreds of dedicated scientists and staff have carried forward the arboretum’s mission in the decades since, among them G. William Longenecker, Aldo Leopold, John T. Curtis, Rosemary Fleming, Virginia Kline, and William R. Jordan III.
This archival record of the arboretum’s history provides rare insights into how the mission of healing and restoring the land gradually shaped the arboretum’s future and its global reputation; how philosophical conflicts, campus politics, changing priorities, and the encroaching city have affected the arboretum over the decades; and how early aspirations (some still unrealized) have continued to motivate the work of this extraordinary institution.
Who says you can’t be pious and fashionable? Throughout the Muslim world, women have found creative ways of expressing their personality through the way they dress. Headscarves can be modest or bold, while brand-name clothing and accessories are part of a multimillion-dollar ready-to-wear industry that caters to pious fashion from head to toe. In this lively snapshot, Liz Bucar takes us to Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia and finds a dynamic world of fashion, faith, and style.
“Brings out both the sensuality and pleasure of sartorial experimentation.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“I defy anyone not to be beguiled by [Bucar’s] generous-hearted yet penetrating observation of pious fashion in Indonesia, Turkey and Iran… Bucar uses interviews with consumers, designers, retailers and journalists…to examine the presumptions that modest dressing can’t be fashionable, and fashion can’t be faithful.”
—Times Higher Education
“Bucar disabuses readers of any preconceived ideas that women who adhere to an aesthetic of modesty are unfashionable or frumpy.”
—Robin Givhan, Washington Post
“A smart, eye-opening guide to the creative sartorial practices of young Muslim women… Bucar’s lively narrative illuminates fashion choices, moral aspirations, and social struggles that will unsettle those who prefer to stereotype than inform themselves about women’s everyday lives in the fast-changing, diverse societies that constitute the Muslim world.”
—Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
Watching Chinatown fifty years after its release reveals hidden connections to today’s energy and climate crises
Pipeline Noir offers a fascinating interpretation of Chinatown, a classic of New Hollywood cinema, through the lens of petromodernity. Michael Rubenstein reimagines the film as an allegory for the 1970s energy crises, revealing how its focus on water infrastructure in early-twentieth-century California serves as a surrogate for the oil pipelines shaping the postwar global order. Introducing the concept of the “petroscope,” Rubenstein demonstrates how the film’s cinematic style mirrors the worldview shaped by petroleum’s dominance in modern life.
Blending appreciation and analysis, this book uncovers layers of Chinatown’s narrative that resonate urgently today, and Rubenstein’s meticulous examinations of the screenplay’s draft history and of key scenes in the finished film shed new light on the film’s cultural and environmental significance. By aligning Chinatown with the emerging field of petrocriticism, Pipeline Noir offers a compelling contribution to film theory and the energy humanities.
How contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles
Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction.
Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the “affective infrastructures” emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire—crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era’s immense environmental struggles.
Pipeline Populism reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements around the world.
In the decade and a half since Napster first emerged, forever changing the face of digital culture, the claim that “internet pirates killed the music industry” has become so ubiquitous that it is treated as common knowledge. Piracy is a scourge on legitimate businesses and hard-working artists, we are told, a “cybercrime” similar to identity fraud or even terrorism.
In The Piracy Crusade, Aram Sinnreich critiques the notion of “piracy” as a myth perpetuated by today's cultural cartels—the handful of companies that dominate the film, software, and especially music industries. As digital networks have permeated our social environment, they have offered vast numbers of people the opportunity to experiment with innovative cultural and entrepreneurial ideas predicated on the belief that information should be shared widely. This has left the media cartels, whose power has historically resided in their ability to restrict the flow of cultural information, with difficult choices: adapt to this new environment, fight the changes tooth and nail, or accept obsolescence. Their decision to fight has resulted in ever stronger copyright laws and the aggressive pursuit of accused infringers.
Yet the most dangerous legacy of this “piracy crusade” is not the damage inflicted on promising start-ups or on well-intentioned civilians caught in the crosshairs of file-sharing litigation. Far more troubling, Sinnreich argues, are the broader implications of copyright laws and global treaties that sacrifice free speech and privacy in the name of combating the phantom of piracy—policies that threaten to undermine the foundations of democratic society.
Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.
Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.
A coal miner's daughter, Jackson grew up in eastern Kentucky, married a miner, and became a midwife, labor activist, and songwriter. Fusing hard experience with the rich Appalachian musical tradition, her songs became weapons of struggle. In 1931, at age fifty, she was "discovered" and brought north. There, she was sponsored and befriended by an illustrious circle of left-wing intellectuals and musicians that included Theodore Dreiser, Alan Lomax, and Charles and Pete Seeger. Along with Sarah Ogan Gunning, Jim Garland (two of Aunt Molly's half-siblings), Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and other folk musicians, Jackson served as a cultural broker who linked the rural working poor to big-city, left-wing activism.
Shelly Romalis combines interviews with archival materials to construct an unforgettable portrait of an Appalachian woman who remained radical, raucous, proud, poetic, offensive, self-involved, and in spirit the "real" pistol packin' mama of the song.
Pitch Dark Anarchy investigates the danger of one single narrative with multilayered poems that challenge concepts of beauty and image, race and identity, as well as the construction of skin color. Through African American memory and moments in literature, the poems seek to disrupt and dismantle foundations that create erasures and echoes of the unremembered. Pitch Dark Anarchy uses the slave revolt of the Amistad as a starting point, a metaphor for "opposition" and "against." These themes run through the very core for the book while drawing on inventive and playful language. The poems bring to life human experiences and conditions created by an "elite" society. In these poems, locations and landscapes are always shifting, proving that our shared experiences can be interchangeable. At the very core of Pitch Dark Anarchy is a seven-part poem based on the artist Margret Bowland’s "Another Thorny Crown Series," which are paintings of an African American girl in white face.
Through innovative formal and visual techniques, such as fractured syntax and typographical disruption, Horton evokes the disorienting experiences of urban life, while also calling into question the complicity of language in the oppressive structures he anatomizes.
How Dominicans contribute to Major League Baseball and what they receive in return.
From Juan Marichal and Pedro Martínez to Albert Pujols and Juan Soto, Dominicans have long been among Major League Baseball’s best. How did this small Caribbean nation become a hothouse of baseball talent? To many fans, the answer is both obvious and disconcerting: pro teams use their riches to develop talent abroad, creating opportunities for superhuman athletes and corrupt officials, while the rest of the population sees little benefit.
Yet this interpretation of history is incomplete. April Yoder traces how baseball has empowered Dominicans in their struggles for democracy and social justice. While the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo saw the sport as a means of cementing its power at home and abroad, the Dominican people fashioned an emancipated civic sphere by seeing their potential for democratic success in their compatriots’ baseball success. Later, Dominicans articulated demands for democracy, economic opportunity, and civil rights through successful calls for public support of amateur and professional baseball. Today, Dominicans continue to demand that incentives for the baseball industry foster human as well as economic development. A revelatory and innovative history, Pitching Democracy restores agency to the Dominican people and honors their true love of the game.
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