A Times Higher Education Book of the Year
Uprisings spread like wildfire across the Arab world from 2010 to 2012, fueled by a desire for popular sovereignty. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, protesters flooded the streets and the media, voicing dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos, and satire that called for the overthrow of dictators and the regimes that sustained them. Investigating what drives people to risk everything to express themselves in rebellious art, The Naked Blogger of Cairo uncovers the creative insurgency at the heart of the Arab uprisings.
“A deep dive into the cultural politics of the Arab uprisings…Kraidy’s sharp insights and rich descriptions of a new Arab generation’s irrepressible creative urges will amply reward the effort. Reading Kraidy’s accounts of the politically charted cultural gambits of wired Arab youth rekindles some of the seemingly lost spirit of the early days of the Arab uprisings and offers hope for the future.”
—Marc Lynch, Washington Post
“The Naked Blogger of Cairo is a superb and important work not just for scholars but for anyone who cares about the relationships between art, the body, and revolution.”
—Hans Rollman, PopMatters
This biography captures the spirit and the flavor of Ms. Hanks's remarkable life, above all during the eight years in which she led the Endowment. Tracing her childhood in Florida and North Carolina through her achievements as a student leader at Duke University, Straight makes clear her conscious effort to find a path with more scope than the usual marriage-and-a-family when expected of Southern women. Nancy Hanks went to Washington and found a job with the Office of War Mobilization. She later worked with Nelson Rockefeller, who became governor of New York, a Republican party luminary, and vice president under Gerald Ford, in addition to being an heir to one of America's greatest fortunes. Her relationship with Rockefeller was crucial to her personal life, and his conception of government and its role and a lasting influence on her career.
Straight examines Nancy Hanks's leadership of the NEA and takes particular note of the intense debate over the role of government in fostering American artistic expression, an issue with roots running back through the New Deal to the early history of the United States. Nancy Hanks took a strong and activist role in the formulation and administration of a national arts policy, and her accomplishments have left an indelible mark on public support for arts in the United States. Straight, who worked closely with Ms. Hanks and admired her despite frequent policy disagreements, deals honestly with both the successes and failures of her efforts. His biography imparts a sense of the reasons why her many friends felt such loyalty to this complex and gifted woman.
Art and technology have been converging rapidly in the past few years; an important example of this convergence is the alliance of neuroscience with aesthetics, which has produced the new field of neuroaesthetics.
Irving Massey examines this alliance, in large part to allay the fears of artists and audiences alike that brain science may "explain away" the arts. The first part of the book shows how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of certain features of art. The second part of the book illustrates a humanistic approach to the arts; it is written entirely without recourse to neuroscience, in order to show the differences in methodology between the two approaches. The humanistic style is marked particularly by immersion in the individual work and by evaluation, rather than by detachment in the search for generalizations. In the final section Massey argues that, despite these differences, once the reality of imagination is accepted neuroscience can be seen as the collaborator, not the inquisitor, of the arts.
In the late 1990s Angels in America,Tony Kushner’s epic play about homosexuality and AIDS in the Reagan era, toured the country, inspiring protests in a handful of cities while others received it warmly. Why do people fight over some works of art but not others? Not Here, Not Now, Not That! examines a wide range of controversies over films, books, paintings, sculptures, clothing, music, and television in dozens of cities across the country to find out what turns personal offense into public protest.
What Steven J. Tepper discovers is that these protests are always deeply rooted in local concerns. Furthermore, they are essential to the process of working out our differences in a civil society. To explore the local nature of public protests in detail, Tepper analyzes cases in seventy-one cities, including an in-depth look at Atlanta in the late 1990s, finding that debates there over memorials, public artworks, books, and parades served as a way for Atlantans to develop a vision of the future at a time of rapid growth and change.
Eschewing simplistic narratives that reduce public protests to political maneuvering, Not Here, Not Now, Not That! at last provides the social context necessary to fully understand this fascinating phenomenon.
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