A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY32 start with M start with M
This book seeks to answer these questions through conversations and interviews with a generation of activists who came of political age in Los Angeles during the 1990s. Politically schooled in the city's vibrant immigrant worker and youth-led campaigns against xenophobic and racist voter initiatives, these young activists created a new political cohort with its own signature of democratic practice and vision. Combining analytical depth, engaging oral history, and rich description, this absorbing and accessible book will appeal to all those interested in social movements, racial justice, the political activism of women and men of color, and the labor movement today.
Wearing a mask—putting on another face—embodies a fundamental human fantasy of inhabiting other bodies and experiencing other lives. In this extensively illustrated book, Thomas Morawetz explores how the creation of transformational makeup for theatre, movies, and television fulfills this fantasy of self-transformation and satisfies the human desire to become "the other."
Morawetz begins by discussing the cultural role of fantasies of transformation and what these fantasies reveal about questions of personal identity. He next turns to professional makeup artists and describes their background, training, careers, and especially the techniques they use to create their art. Then, with numerous before-during-and-after photos of transformational makeups from popular and little-known shows and movies, ads, and artist's demos and portfolios, he reveals the art and imagination that go into six kinds of mask-making—representing demons, depicting aliens, inventing disguises, transforming actors into different (older, heavier, disfigured) versions of themselves, and creating historical or mythological characters.
In the 1960s, professors, students, and activists on the political Left viewed college curricula as useful sites for political transformation. They coordinated efforts to alter general education requirements at the college level to foster change in American thought, with greater openness toward people who had previously been excluded, including women, people of color, the poor and working classes, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ community. Their work reshaped American culture and politics, while prompting a significant backlash from conservatives attempting to, in their view, protect classical education from modern encroachment.
Elizabeth M. Kalbfleisch details how American universities became a battleground for identity politics from the 1960s through the 1980s. Focusing on two case studies at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin, Making the Radical University examines how curricular changes led to polarizing discussions nationwide around academic standards and identity politics, including the so-called canon wars. Today, these debates have only become more politically charged, complex, and barbed.
King considers three stars with popular and controversial personas: Norman Rockwell, Will Smith, and Kim Kardashian. Working in very different contexts and with very different public images, these figures nonetheless share a consistent, if not conspicuous, interest in celebrity as a construct. Offering intertextual readings of their public images across such sites as movie posters, magazines, cinema, and social media—and deploying rhetorical theories of metonymy (a linguistic device linking signifiers by shared associations)—King argues that these stars’ self-reflexive attention to the processes by which celebrity is created and constrained creates opportunities for reframing public discourse about what it means to be famous and what it means to be a person.
Those who have read Orpheus in the Bronx, Reginald Shepherd's previous collection of essays about the act of creating poetry, and those who take on the task, can immediately understand why it was a national finalist for a prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. Shepherd was candid and disarming, practical and funny, able to mix thoughts about the Transformers with meditations on the realities of growing up poor.
This is Reginald Shepherd's final opportunity to speak his mind about the craft he loved, the art of using words to express the soul and the wit of every person's experience. Edited by Shepherd's longtime partner and intellectual confidant, Robert Philen, A Martian Muse stands as a final monument to a master in the craft, but is also a readable, important work in its own right.
"Reginald Shepherd died September 10, 2008, after a hard struggle with cancer. While he had completed the essays presented here and had selected them from his available essays to form a collection, he didn't have time to organize the presentation of the essays within the collection.
"The task of editing this collection has been a daunting challenge as I struggle to live up to the level of intellectual engagement, clarity, and coherence that Reginald always expected. While daunting, it has also been a labor of love and a compulsion for me, based on the many years I spent with him as a partner, friend, lover, intellectual companion, and sharer of common passions."
---Robert Philen, from the Introduction
Reginald Shepherd was the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries and the author of five books of poetry. He was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and was the recipient of grants from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Florida Arts Council, and the Vogelstein Foundation, among many other awards and honors.
When Mayan leaders protested the celebration of the Quincentenary of the "discovery" of America and joined with other indigenous groups in the Americas to proclaim an alternate celebration of 500 years of resistance, they rose to national prominence in Guatemala. This was possible in part because of the cultural, political, economic, and religious revitalization that occurred in Mayan communities in the later half of the twentieth century. Another result of the revitalization was Mayan students' enrollment in graduate programs in order to reclaim the intellectual history of the brilliant Mayan past. Victor Montejo was one of those students.
This is the first book to be published outside of Guatemala where a Mayan writer other than Rigoberta Menchu discusses the history and problems of the country. It collects essays Montejo has written over the past ten years that address three critical issues facing Mayan peoples today: identity, representation, and Mayan leadership. Montejo is deeply invested in furthering the discussion of the effectiveness of Mayan leadership because he believes that self-evaluation is necessary for the movement to advance. He also criticizes the racist treatment that Mayans experience, and advocates for the construction of a more pluralistic Guatemala that recognizes cultural diversity and abandons assimilation. This volume maps a new political alternative for the future of the movement that promotes inter-ethnic collaboration alongside a reverence for Mayan culture.
Because technological change in broadcasting has enabled us to open up media markets, the shape of media and of society has become more internationally-oriented. Indeed, modern international media has bought into question the very legitimacy of national communities and ideologies. And this is a phenomenon whose greatest impact has been in Europe.
These studies address the future of public service broadcasting and the power of national regulators to shape trans-national media relationships. The author takes an empirical approach to analysis of these issues, exploring media and communication studies very much as a social science.
Contributors. Amy Corbin, Desirée J. Garcia, Joshua Glick, Noelle Griffis, Malini Guha, Ina Rae Hark, Peter C. Kunze, Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, Nicole Erin Morse, Elizabeth Patton, Matthew Thomas Payne, Merrill Schleier, Jacqueline Sheean, Sarah Louise Smyth, Erica Stein, Kirsten Moana Thompson, John Vanderhoef, Pamela Robertson Wojcik
Against the prevailing view that colonial texts provide insight only into their writers' perspectives, Wisecup demonstrates that Europeans, Natives, and Africans held certain medical ideas in common, including a conception of disease as both a spiritual and a physical entity, and a belief in the power of special rituals or prayers to restore health. As a consequence, medical knowledge and practices operated as a shared form of communication on which everyone drew in order to adapt to a world of devastating new maladies and unfamiliar cures.
By signaling one's relation to supernatural forces, to the natural world, and to other people, medicine became an effective means of communicating a variety of messages about power and identity as well as bodies and minds. Native Americans in Virginia and New England, for example, responded to the nearly simultaneous arrival of mysterious epidemics and peoples by incorporating colonists into explanations of disease, while British American colonists emphasized to their audiences back home the value of medical knowledge drawn from cross-cultural encounters in the New World.
Mediterranean in Dis/order reveals the connection between space and politics by examining the role that space has played in insurgencies, conflicts, uprisings, and mobilities in the Mediterranean region. With this approach, the authors are able to challenge well-established beliefs about the power structure of the state across different disciplines (including political science, history, sociology, geography, and anthropology), and its impact on the conception, production, and imagination of space in the broader Mediterranean. Further, they contribute to particular areas of studies, such as migration, political Islam, mobilization, and transition to democracy, among others. The book, infusing critical theory, unveils original and revelatory case studies in Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Morocco, and the EU Mediterranean policy, through a various set of actors and practices—from refugees and migrations policies, to Islamist or students’ movements, architectural sites, or movies. This multidisciplinary perspective on space and power provides a valuable resource for practitioners interested in how space, context, and time interact to produce institutions, political subjectivities, and asymmetries of power, particularly since the turning point of the Arab uprisings. The book also helps readers understand the conditions under which the uprisings develop, giving a clearer picture about various national, regional, and international dynamics.
Essential reading for scholars and students interested in sociology and biblical studies
In this collection scholars of biblical texts and rabbinics engage the work of Barry Schwartz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Georgia. Schwartz provides an introductory essay on the study of collective memory. Articles that follow integrate his work into the study of early Jewish and Christian texts. The volume concludes with a response from Schwartz that continues this warm and fruitful dialogue between fields.
Features:
- Articles that integrate the study of collective memory and social psychology into religious studies
- Essays from Barry Schwartz
- Theories applied rather than left as abstract principles
Merengue—the quintessential Dominican dance music—has a long and complex history, both on the island and in the large immigrant community in New York City. In this ambitious work, Paul Austerlitz unravels the African and Iberian roots of merengue and traces its growth under dictator Rafael Trujillo and its renewed popularity as an international music.
Using extensive interviews as well as written commentaries, Austerlitz examines the historical and contemporary contexts in which merengue is performed and danced, its symbolic significance, its social functions, and its musical and choreographic structures. He tells the tale of merengue's political functions, and of its class and racial significance. He not only explores the various ethnic origins of this Ibero-African art form, but points out how some Dominicans have tried to deny its African roots.
In today's global society, mass culture often marks ethnic identity. Found throughout Dominican society, both at home and abroad, merengue is the prime marker of Dominican identity. By telling the story of this dance music, the author captures the meaning of mass and folk expression in contemporary ethnicity as well as the relationship between regional, national, and migrant culture and between rural/regional and urban/mass culture. Austerlitz also traces the impact of migration and global culture on the native music, itself already a vibrant intermixture of home-grown merengue forms.
From rural folk idiom to transnational mass music, merengue has had a long and colorful career. Its well-deserved popularity will make this book a must read for anyone interested in contemporary music; its complex history will make the book equally indispensable to anyone interested in cultural studies.
We use the term “modernism” almost exclusively to characterize the work of European and American writers and artists who struggled to portray a new kind of fractured urban life typified by mechanization and speed. Between the 1880s and 1930s, Latin American artists were similarly engaged--but with a difference. While other modernists drew from “primitive” cultures for an alternative sense of creativity, Latin American modernists were taking a cue from local sources, primarily indigenous and black populations in their own countries. Although these artists remained outsiders to modernism elsewhere as a result of their race, nation, and identity, their racial heritage served as a positive tool in negotiating their relationship to the dichotomy between tradition and modernity.
In Mestizo Modernism Tace Hedrick focuses on four key artists who represent Latin American modernism—Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Hedrick interrogates what being “modern” and “American” meant for them and illuminates the cultural contexts within which they worked, as well as the formal methods they shared, including the connection they drew between ancient cultures and modern technologies. In so doing, she defines “modernism” more as a time frame at the turn of the twentieth century, marked broadly across the arts and national boundaries, than as a strict aesthetic or formal category. In fact, this look at Latin American artists will force the reconceptualization of what modernism has meant in academic study and what it might mean for future research.
Weaving narratives with gendered analysis and historiography of Mexicans in the Midwest, Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration examines the unique transnational community created between San Ignacio Cerro Gordo, Jalisco, and Detroit, Michigan, in the last three decades of the twentieth century, asserting that both the community of origin and the receiving community are integral to an immigrant's everyday life, though the manifestations of this are rife with contradictions.
Exploring the challenges faced by this population since the inception of the Bracero Program in 1942 in constantly re-creating, adapting, accommodating, shaping, and creating new meanings of their environments, Luz María Gordillo emphasizes the gender-specific aspects of these situations. While other studies of Mexican transnational identity focus on social institutions, Gordillo's work introduces the concept of transnational sexualities, particularly the social construction of working-class sexuality. Her findings indicate that many female San Ignacians shattered stereotypes, transgressing traditionally male roles while their husbands lived abroad. When the women themselves immigrated as well, these transgressions facilitated their adaptation in Detroit. Placed within the larger context of globalization, Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration is a timely excavation of oral histories, archival documents, and the remnants of three decades of memory.
Migration is a frequent topic of many debates nowadays, whether it concerns refugees from war-torn areas or the economic pros and cons of the mobility of multinational corporations and their employees. Yet such migration has always been a part of the human experience, and its dimensions—with its shifting nature, manifestations, and consequences—were often greater than we can imagine today.
In this book, ten scholars from Czechia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden focus on how migration has manifested itself in literature and culture through the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Examining the theme of migration as it relates to questions of identity, both national and individual, the authors argue that migration almost always leads to a disturbance of identity and creates a potential for conflicts between individuals and larger groups. The book digs deep into such cases of disturbance, disruption, and hybridization of identity as they are represented in three centuries of literary works from the European North.
This past decade has witnessed an extraordinary transformation in men's lives. For years, wave after wave of the women's movement, a movement that reshaped every aspect of American life, produced nary a ripple among men. But suddenly men are in the spotlight.
Yet, the public discussions often seem strained, silly, and sometimes flat-out wrong. The spotlight itself seems to obscure as much as it illuminates. Old tired clichTs about men's resistance to romantic commitment or reluctance to be led to the marriage altar seem perennially recyclable in advice books and on TV talk shows, but these days the laughter feels more forced, the defensiveness more pronounced. Pop biologists avoid careful confrontation with serious scientific research in their quest to find anatomical or evolutionary bases for promiscuity or porn addiction, hoping that by fiat, one can pronounce that "boys will be boys" and render it more than a flaccid tautology. And political pundits wring their hands about the feminization of American manhood, as if gender equality has neutered these formerly proud studs. Misframing Men, a collection of Michael Kimmel's commentaries on contemporary debates about masculinity, argues that the media have largely misframed this debate.
Kimmel, among the world's best-known scholars in gender studies, discusses political moments such as the Virginia Military Institute and Citadel cases that reached the Supreme Court (he participated as expert witness for the Justice Department) along with Promise Keepers rallies, mythopoetic gatherings, and white supremacists. He takes on antifeminists as the real male bashers, questions the unsubstantiated assertions that men suffer from domestic violence to the same degree as women, and examines the claims made by those who want to rescue boys from the "misandrous" reforms initiated by feminism.
In writings both solidly grounded and forcefully argued, Kimmel pushes the boundaries of today's modern conversation about men and masculinity.
With incisive analysis, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews.
This study includes several geopolitical regions—Chinese Central Asia, Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan, Transoxiana and Khurasan—and covers historical periods from the fifteenth century to the present. Drawing on scholarship in anthropology, religion, history, literature, and language studies, Muslims in Central Asia argues for an interdisciplinary, inter-regional dialog in the development of new approaches to understanding the Muslim societies in Central Asia. The authors creatively examine the social construction of identities as expressed through literature, Islamic discourse, historical texts, ethnic labels, and genealogies, and explore how such identities are formed, changed, and adopted through time.
Contributors. Hamid Algar, Muriel Atkin, Walter Feldman, Dru C. Gladney, Edward J. Lazzerini, Beatrice Forbes Manz, Christopher Murphy, Oliver Roy, Isenbike Togan
These witty and poignant short essays explore reasons for diva-worship as diverse as the writers themselves. My Diva offers both depth and glamour as it pays tribute with joy, intelligence, and fierce, fierce love.
Bryan K. Eldredge seeks to more precisely understand the relationship between ASL use and Deaf identity using the tools of linguistic anthropology. In this work, he presents research resulting from fieldwork with the Deaf community of Utah Valley. Through informal interactions and formal interviews, he explores the role of discourse in the projection and construction of Deaf identities and, conversely, considers how ideas about language affect the discourse that shapes identities. He finds that specific linguistic ideologies exist that valorize some forms of language over others and that certain forms of ASL serve to establish a culturally Deaf identity. My Mother Made Me Deaf demonstrates that the DEAF-WORLD consists of a multitude of experiences and ways of being even as it is bound together by certain essential elements that are common to Deaf people.
Genderqueer and nonbinary people of color often experience increased marginalization, belonging to an ethnic group that seldom recognizes their gender identity and a queer community that subscribes to white norms. Yet for this very reason, they have a lot to teach about how racial, sexual, and gender identities intersect. Their experiences of challenging social boundaries demonstrate how queer communities can become more inclusive and how the recognition of nonbinary genders can be an anti-racist practice.
My Race is My Gender is the first anthology by nonbinary writers of color to include photography and visual portraits, centering their everyday experiences of negotiating intersectional identities. While informed by queer theory and critical race theory, the authors share their personal stories in accessible language. Bringing together Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian perspectives, its six contributors present an intergenerational look at what it means to belong to marginalized queer communities in the U.S. and feel solidarity with a global majority at the same time. They also provide useful insights into how genderqueer and nonbinary activism can both energize and be fueled by such racial justice movements as Black Lives Matter.
The first in-depth analysis of some of the most important epic poems of the Spanish Golden Age, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain breathes new life into five of these long- neglected texts. Elizabeth Davis demonstrates that the epic must not be overlooked, for doing so creates a significant gap in one's ability to appraise not only the cultural practice of the imperial age, but also the purest expression of its ideology.
Davis's study focuses on heroic poetry written from 1569 to 1611, including Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana, undeniably the most significant epic poem of its time. Also included are Diego de Hojeda's La Christiada, Juan Rufo's La Austriada,. Lope de Vega's Jerusalén Conquistada, and Cristóbal de Virués's Historia del Monserrate.
Examining these epics as the major site for the construction of cultural identities and Renaissance nationalist myths, Davis analyzes the means by which the epic constructs a Spanish sense of self. Because this sense of identity is not easily susceptible to direct representation, it is often derived in opposition to an "other," which serves to reaffirm Spanish cultural superiority. The Spanish Christian caballeros are almost always pitted against Amerindians, Muslims, Jews, or other adversaries portrayed as backward or heathen for their cultural and ethnic differences.
The pro-Castilian elite of sixteenth-century Spain faced the daunting task of constructing unity at home in the process of expansion and conquest abroad, yet ethnic and regional differences in the Iberian Peninsula made the creation of an imperial identity particularly difficult. The epic, as Davis shows, strains to convey the overriding image of a Spain that appears more unified than the Spanish empire ever truly was.
An important reexamination of the Golden Age canon, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain brings a new twist to the study of canon formation. While Davis does not ignore more traditional approaches to the literary text, she does apply recent theories, such as deconstruction and feminist criticism, to these poems, resulting in an innovative examination of the material.
Confronting such issues as canonicity, gender, the relationship between literature and Golden Age culture, and that between art and power, this publication offers scholars a new perspective for assessing Golden Age and Transatlantic studies.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press