The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens looks at the way in which issues of race and sexuality have become central concerns in cinema generated by and about Chinese communities in America after the mid-1990s. This companion volume to Marchetti's From Tian'anmen to Times Square looks specifically at the Chinese diaspora in relation to ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identity as depicted in the cinema.
Examining films from the United States and Canada, as well as transnational co-productions, The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens includes analyses of films such as The Wedding Banquet and Double Happiness in addition to interviews with celebrated filmmakers such as Wayne Wang.
Marchetti also reflects on how Chinese identity is presented in a multitude of media forms, including commercial cinema, documentaries, experimental films, and hybrid digital media to offer a textured look at representations of the Chinese diasporic experience after Tian'anmen.
Chinese Connections is a valuable new anthology that provides a prismatic look at the cross-fertilization between Chinese film and global popular culture. Leading film scholars consider the influence of world cinema on China-related and Chinese-related cinema over the last five decades. Highlighting the neglected connections between Chinese films and American and European cinema, the editors and contributors examine popular works such as Ang Lee’s The Hulk and Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep to show the nexus of international film production and how national, political, social and sexual identities are represented in the Chinese diaspora.
With talent flowing back and forth between East and West, Chinese Connections explores how issues of immigration, class, race and economic displacement are viewed on a global level, ultimately providing a greater understanding of the impact of Chinese filmmaking at home and abroad.
Contributors include: Grace An, Aaron Anderson, Chris Berry, Evans Chan, Li-Mei Chang, Frances Gateward, Andrew Grossman, Peter Hitchcock, Chuck Kleinhans, Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, Helen Leung, Aaron Magnan-Park, Gayle Wald, Esther C.M. Yau, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Xuelin Zhou and the editors.
Focusing on the power of ritual to serve as a communication medium, Regina M. Marchi combines a mix of ethnography, historical research, oral history, and critical cultural analysis to explore the manifold and unexpected transformations that occur when the tradition is embraced by the mainstream. A testament to the complex nature of ethnic identity, Day of the Dead in the USA provides insight into the power of ritual to create community, transmit oppositional messages, and advance educational, political, and economic goals.
In life, Elvis Presley went from childhood poverty to stardom, from world fame to dissipation and early death. As Greil Marcus shows in this remarkable book, Presley's journey after death takes him even further, pushing him beyond his own frontiers to merge with the American public consciousness—and the American subconscious.
As he listens in on the public conversation that recreates Elvis after death, Marcus tracks the path of Presley's resurrection. He grafts together scattered fragments of the eclectic dialogue—snatches of movies and music, books and newspapers, photographs, posters, cartoons—and amazes us with not only what America has been saying as it raises its late king, but also what this strange obsession with a dead Elvis can tell us about America itself.
"How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?" Robert Palmer wondered in Deep Blues. Greil Marcus answers here: more than we will ever know. It is the history in the riff, in the movie or novel or photograph, in the actor's pose or critic's posturing--in short, the history in cultural happenstance--that Marcus reveals here, exposing along the way the distortions and denials that keep us oblivious if not immune to its lessons.
Whether writing about the Beat Generation or Umberto Eco, Picasso's Guernica or the massacre in Tiananmen Square, The Manchurian Candidate or John Wayne's acting, Eric Ambler's antifascist thrillers or Camille Paglia, Marcus uncovers the histories embedded in our cultural moments and acts, and shows how, through our reading of the truths our culture tells and those it twists and conceals, we situate ourselves in that history and in the world. Rarely has a history lesson been so exhilarating. With the startling insights and electric style that have made him our foremost writer on American music, Marcus brings back to life the cultural events that have defined us and our time, the social milieu in which they took place, and the individuals engaged in them. As he does so, we see that these cultural instances--as lofty as The Book of J, as humble as a TV movie about Jan and Dean, as fleeting as a few words spoken at the height of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, as enduring as a Paleolithic painting--often have more to tell us than the master-narratives so often passed off as faultless representations of the past.
Again and again Marcus skewers the widespread assumption that history exists only in the past, that it is behind us, relegated to the dustbin. Here we see instead that history is very much with us, being made and unmade every day, and unless we recognize it our future will be as cramped and impoverished as our present sense of the past.
Was punk just another moment in music history, a flash in time when a group of young rebels exploded in a fury of raw sound, outrageous styles, and in-your-face attitude? Greil Marcus, author of the renowned Lipstick Traces, delves into the after-life of punk as a much richer phenomenon—a form of artistic and social rebellion that continually erupts into popular culture.
In more than seventy short pieces written over fifteen years, he traces the uncompromising strands of punk from Johnny Rotten to Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, even Bruce Springsteen. Marcus's unparalleled insight into present-day culture and brilliant ear for music bring punk's searing half-life into deep focus. Originally published in the U.S. as Ranters and Crowd Pleasers.
Greil Marcus has been one of the most distinctive voices in American music criticism for over forty years. His books, including Mystery Train and The Shape of Things to Come, traverse soundscapes of folk and blues, rock and punk, attuning readers to the surprising, often hidden affinities between the music and broader streams of American politics and culture.
Drawn from Marcus’s 2013 Massey Lectures at Harvard, his new work delves into three episodes in the history of American commonplace song: Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” Geeshie Wiley’s 1930 “Last Kind Words Blues,” and Bob Dylan’s 1964 “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” How each of these songs manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one illuminates different aspects of the commonplace song tradition. Some songs truly did come together over time without an identifiable author. Others draw melodies and motifs from obscure sources but, in the hands of a particular artist, take a final, indelible shape. And, as in the case of Dylan’s “Hollis Brown,” there are songs that were written by a single author but that communicate as anonymous productions, as if they were folk songs passed down over many generations.
In three songs that seem to be written by no one, Marcus shows, we discover not only three different ways of talking about the United States but three different nations within its formal boundaries.
America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history.
In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.
The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.
Historian Gilad Margalit eloquently fills a tragic gap in the historical record with this sweeping examination of the plight of Gypsies in Germany before, during, and since the era of the Third Reich.
Germany and Its Gypsies reveals the painful record of the official treatment of the German Gypsies, a people whose future, in the shadow of Auschwitz, remains uncertain. Margalit follows the story from the heightened racism of the nineteenth century to the National Socialist genocidal policies that resulted in the murder of most German Gypsies, from the shifting attitudes in the two Germanys in 1945 through reunification and up to the present day.
Drawing upon a rich variety of sources, Margalit considers the pivotal historic events, legal arguments, debates, and changing attitudes toward the status of the German Gypsies and shines a vitally important light upon the issue of ethnic groups and their victimization in society. The result is a powerful and unforgettable testament.
In Street Life under a Roof, Emily Margaretten draws on ten years of up-close fieldwork to explore the distinct cultural universe of the Point Place community. Margaretten's sensitive investigations reveal how young men and women draw on customary notions of respect and support to forge an ethos of connection and care that allows them to live far richer lives than ordinarily assumed. Her discussion of gender dynamics highlights terms like nakana--to care about or take notice of another--that young women and men use to construct "outside" and "inside" boyfriends and girlfriends and to communicate notions of trust. Margaretten exposes the structures of inequality at a local, regional, and global level that contribute to socioeconomic and political dislocation. But she also challenges the idea that Point Place's marginalized residents need "rehabilitation." As she argues, these young men and women want love, secure homes, and the means to provide for their dependents--in short, the same hopes and aspirations mirrored across South African society.
An exploration of the explosive illegal trade in succulents and the passion that drives it
Cacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world’s most threatened species. The fervor driving the illegal trade in succulents might also be driving some species to extinction. Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, The Cactus Hunters takes us to the heart of this conundrum: the mystery of how and why ardent lovers of these plants engage in their illicit trade. This is a world of alluring desires, where collectors and conservationists alike are animated by passions that at times exceed the limits of law.
What inspires the desire for a plant? What kind of satisfaction does it promise? The answer, Jared D. Margulies suspects, might be traced through the roots and workings of the illegal succulent trade—an exploration that traverses the fields of botany and criminology, political ecology and human geography, and psychoanalysis. His globe-spanning inquiry leads Margulies from a spectacular series of succulent heists on a small island off the coast of Mexico to California law enforcement agents infiltrating a smuggling ring in South Korea, from scientists racing to discover new and rare species before poachers find them to a notorious Czech “cacto-explorer” who helped turn a landlocked European country into the epicenter of the illegal succulent trade.
A heady blend of international intrigue, social theory, botanical lore, and ecological study, The Cactus Hunters offers complex insight into species extinction, conservation, and more-than-human care.
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Many Filipino Americans feel obligated to give charitably to their families, their communities, or social development projects and organizations back home. Their contributions provide relief to poor or vulnerable Filipinos, and address the forces that maintain poverty, vulnerability, and exploitative relationships in the Philippines. This philanthropy is a result of both economic globalization and the migration of Filipino professionals to the United States. But it is also central to the moral economies of Filipino migration, immigration, and diasporic return. Giving-related practices and concerns—and the bonds maintained through giving—infuse what it means to be Filipino in America.
Giving Back shows how integral this system is for understanding Filipino diaspora formation. Joyce Mariano “follows the money” to investigate the cultural, social, economic, and political conditions of diaspora giving. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how power operates through this charity and the ways the global economic and cultural dimensions of this practice reinforce racial subordination and neocolonialism. Giving Back explores how this charity can stabilize overlapping systems of inequality as well as the contradictions of corporate social responsibility programs in diaspora.
Contributors: Eiichiro Azuma, David Cook-Martín, David FitzGerald, Monique Laney, Heather Lee, Kathleen López, Laura Madokoro, Ronald L. Mize, Arissa H. Oh, Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Lorrin Thomas, Ruth Ellen Wasem, and Elliott Young
Ancient Minoan culture has been typically viewed as an ancestor of classical Greek civilization, but this book shows that Minoan Crete was on the periphery of a powerfully dynamic cultural interchange with its neighbors. Rather than viewing Crete as the autochthonous ancestor of Greece's glory, Nanno Marinatos considers ancient Crete in the context of its powerful competitors to the east and south.
Analyzing the symbols of the Minoan theocratic system and their similarities to those of Syria, Anatolia, and Egypt, Marinatos unlocks many Minoan visual riddles and establishes what she calls a "cultural koine," or standard set of cultural assumptions, that circulated throughout the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean at the time Minoan civilization reached its peak. With more than one hundred and fifty illustrations, Minoan Kingship and the Solar Goddess delivers a comprehensive reading of Minoan art as a system of thought.
Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Karen Brennan, Margaret Cohen, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Freeman, Carol Jacobs, Silvestra Mariniello, Larysa Mykyta, Laura Rice, Ivy Schweitzer, Doris Sommer, Hortense J. Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Wilt
Publications from the New York Times to Esquire have covered this disappearing village, yet few have taken the time to truly show the community and the two millennia of traditions at risk. In Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground, Elizabeth Marino brings Shishmaref into sharp focus as a place where people in a close-knit, determined community are confronting the realities of our changing planet every day. She shows how physical dangers challenge lives, while the stress and uncertainty challenge culture and identity. Marino also draws on Shishmaref’s experiences to show how disasters and the outcomes of climate change often fall heaviest on those already burdened with other social risks and often to communities who have contributed least to the problem. Stirring and sobering, Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground proves that the consequences of unchecked climate change are anything but theoretical.
Bulgaria’s media-driven pivot to right-wing populism parallels political developments taking place around the world. Martin Marinos applies a critical political economy approach to place Bulgarian right-wing populism within the structural transformation of the country’s media institutions. As Marinos shows, media concentration under Western giants like Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and News Corporation have led to a neoliberal turn of commercialization, concentration, and tabloidization across media. The Right have used the anticommunism and racism bred by this environment to not only undermine traditional media but position their own outlets to boost new political entities like the nationalist party Ataka. Marinos’s ethnographic observations and interviews with local journalists, politicians, and media experts add on-the-ground detail to his account. He also examines several related issues, including the performative appeal of populist media and the money behind it.
A timely and innovative analysis, Free to Hate reveals where structural changes in media intersect with right-wing populism.
Only by understanding the enduring poverty of Brazil can one hope to understand the recent growth of Protestant evangelical churches there, Cecília Loreto Mariz contends. Her study investigates how religious groups support individualism and encourage the poor to organize. Groups with shared values are then able to develop strategies to cope with poverty and, ultimately, to transform the social structure.
Interviews with members and leaders of religious groups, accounts of meetings, and close readings of religious literature contribute to a realistic account of Christian base communities and Assembly of God churches, folk Catholic tradition, and Afro Brazilian Spiritism.
Her parents never really explained what a D.P. was. Years later Daiva Markelis learned that “displaced person” was the designation bestowed upon European refugees like her mom and dad who fled communist Lithuania after the war. Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, though, Markelis had only heard the name T.P., since her folks pronounced the D as a T: “In first grade we had learned about the Plains Indians, who had lived in tent-like dwellings made of wood and buffalo skin called teepees. In my childish confusion, I thought that perhaps my parents weren’t Lithuanian at all, but Cherokee. I went around telling people that I was the child of teepees.” So begins this touching and affectionate memoir about growing up as a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants.
Markelis was raised during the 1960s and 1970s in a household where Lithuanian was the first language. White Field, Black Sheep derives much of its charm from this collision of old world and new: a tough but cultured generation that can’t quite understand the ways of America and a younger one weaned on Barbie dolls and The Brady Bunch, Hostess cupcakes and comic books, The Monkees and Captain Kangaroo. Throughout, Markelis recalls the amusing contortions of language and identity that animated her childhood. She also humorously recollects the touchstones of her youth, from her First Communion to her first game of Twister. Ultimately, she revisits the troubles that surfaced in the wake of her assimilation into American culture: the constricting expectations of her family and community, her problems with alcoholism and depression, and her sometimes contentious but always loving relationship with her mother.
Deftly recreating the emotional world of adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, White Field, Black Sheep is a poignant and moving memoir—a lively tale of this Lithuanian-American life.
Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands investigates Maya political and social structure in the southern lowlands, assessing, comparing, and interpreting the wide variation in Classic period Maya polity and city composition, development, and integration. Traditionally, discussions of Classic Maya political organization have been dominated by the debate over whether Maya polities were centralized or decentralized. With new, largely unpublished data from several recent archaeological projects, this book examines the premises, strengths, and weaknesses of these two perspectives before moving beyond this long-standing debate and into different territory.
The volume examines the articulations of the various social and spatial components of Maya polity—the relationships, strategies, and practices that bound households, communities, institutions, and dynasties into enduring (or short-lived) political entities. By emphasizing the internal negotiation of polity, the contributions provide an important foundation for a more holistic understanding of how political organization functioned in the Classic period.
Contributors include Francisco Estrada Belli, James L. Fitzsimmons, Sarah E. Jackson, Caleb Kestle, Brigitte Kovacevich, Allan Maca, Damien B. Marken, James Meierhoff, Timothy Murtha, Cynthia Robin, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Andrew Wyatt.
The typical female sports fan remains very different from her male counterparts. In their insightful and engaging book, Sportista, Andrei S. Markovits and Emily Albertson examine the significant ways many women have become fully conversant with sports—acquiring a knowledge of and passion for them as a way of forging identities that until recently were quite alien to women.
Sportista chronicles the relationship that women have developed with sports in the wake of the second wave of feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The changes women athletes have achieved have been nothing short of revolutionary. But, as Markovits and Albertson argue, women’s identities as sports fans, though also changed in recent decades, remain notably different from that of men. Sportista highlights the impediments to these changes that women have faced and the reality that, even as bona fide fans, they “speak” sports differently from and remain largely unaccepted by men.
In the series Politics, History and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey
Traces the changing meanings of lynching and examines the political power of lynching as metaphor
Between 1880 and 1930, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Beyond the horrific violence inflicted on these individuals, lynching terrorized whole communities and became a defining characteristic of Southern race relations in the Jim Crow era. As spectacle, lynching was intended to serve as a symbol of white supremacy. Yet, Jonathan Markovitz notes, the act's symbolic power has endured long after the practice of lynching has largely faded away.
Legacies of Lynching examines the evolution of lynching as a symbol of racial hatred and a metaphor for race relations in popular culture, art, literature, and political speech. Markovitz credits the efforts of the antilynching movement with helping to ensure that lynching would be understood not as a method of punishment for black rapists but as a terrorist practice that provided stark evidence of the brutality of Southern racism and as America’s most vivid symbol of racial oppression. Cinematic representations of lynching, from Birth of a Nation to Do the Right Thing, he contends, further transform the ways that American audiences remember and understand lynching, as have disturbing recent cases in which alleged or actual acts of racial violence reconfigured stereotypes of black criminality. Markovitz further reveals how lynching imagery has been politicized in contemporary society with the example of Clarence Thomas, who condemned the Senate's investigation into allegations of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings as a “high-tech lynching.”Even today, as revealed by the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and the national soul-searching it precipitated, lynching continues to pervade America's collective memory. Markovitz concludes with an analysis of debates about a recent exhibition of photographs of lynchings, suggesting again how lynching as metaphor remains always in the background of our national discussions of race and racial relations.This fascinating urban anthropological analysis of Sarajevo and its cultural complexities examines contemporary issues of social divisiveness, pluralism, and intergroup dynamics in the context of national identity and state formation. Rather than seeing Bosnia-Herzegovina as a volatile postsocialist society, the book presents its capital city as a vibrant yet wounded center of multicultural diversity, where citizens live in mutual recognition of difference while asserting a lifestyle that transcends boundaries of ethnicity and religion. It further illuminates how Sarajevans negotiate group identity in the tumultuous context of history, authoritarian rule, and interactions with the built environment and one another.
As she navigates the city, Fran Markowitz shares narratives of local citizenry played out against the larger dramas of nation and state building. She shows how Sarajevans' national identities have been forged in the crucible of power, culture, language, and politics. Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope acknowledges this Central European city's dramatic survival from the ravages of civil war as it advances into the present-day global arena.
All three women lived for a time in close proximity on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, an isolated region that thrived on tobacco and then lost it, procured slaves and then lost them, and produced strong-minded women and then condemned them. Though they never actually met, and their backgrounds and beliefs differed drastically, these women's lives converged through their active experiences of the conflict over slavery in Maryland and beyond, the uncertainties of economic transformation, the struggles in the legal foundation of slavery and, most of all, the growing dispute in gender relations in America.
Throughout this book, Carole C. Marks gleans historical fact and sociological insight from the persistent myths and exaggerations that color the women's legacies, and she investigates the common roots and motivations of three remarkable figures who bucked the era's expectations for women. She also considers how each woman's public identity reflected changing ideas of domesticity and the public sphere, spirituality, and legal rights and limitations. Cannon, Carroll, and Tubman, each in her own way, passionately fought for the future of Maryland and the United States, and from these unique vantage points, Moses and the Monster and Miss Anne portrays the intersecting and conflicting forces of race, economics, and gender that threatened to rend a nation apart.
Laura Helen Marks investigates the contradictions and seesawing gender dynamics in Victorian-inspired adult films and looks at why pornographers persist in drawing substance and meaning from the era's Gothic tales. She focuses on the particular Victorianness that pornography prefers, and the mythologies of the Victorian era that fuel today's pornographic fantasies. In turn, she exposes what porning the Victorians shows us about pornography as a genre.
A bold foray into theory and other forbidden places, Alice in Pornoland reveals how modern-day Victorian Gothic pornography constantly emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates issues of gender, sexuality, and race.
Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of “haptic visuality”—a visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste—to explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.
The Skin of the Film draws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture.
In early nineteenth-century Japan—the “silver age” of Edo-period literature—Ryutei Tanehiko was a well-known author of popular illustrated fiction. This account of his life and works covers his early yomihon (lengthy romances of improbable perils and adventures) and his gokan (intricately plotted stories in simple language intended for a general audience). Special emphasis is given his most popular work—the illustrated serial Nise Muraskai inaka Genji (An impostor Murasaki and rustic Genji), which ran for fourteen years—Japan's first national bestseller.
Andrew Markus deftly shows how Tanehiko transposed episodes of the eleventh-century Genji monogatari to a fifteenth-century Muromachi setting in a plot dependent on the conventions of nineteenth-century kabuki. Markus fleshes out Tanehiko's diaries and the remarks of his contemporaries to create a fascinating picture of an author who, after years of spectacular success, fell victim to the Tenpo Reform promulgations against “morally inappropriate” publications and whose mysterious death sent shock waves through the publishing world.
Analyzes and compares the rapid growth of medium-sized cities.
Over the past thirty years, transnational investment, trade, and government policies have encouraged the decentralization of national economies, disrupting traditional patterns of urban and regional growth. Many smaller cities-such as Seattle, Washington; Campinas, Brazil; Oita, Japan; and Kumi, Korea-have grown markedly faster than the largest metropolitan regions. These “second tier cities” are home to specialized industrial complexes that have taken root, provided significant job growth, and attracted mobile capital and labor.
The culmination of an ambitious five-year, fourteen-city research project conducted by an international team of economists and geographers, Second Tier Cities examines the potential of these new regions to balance uneven regional development, create good, stable jobs, and moderate hyper-urbanization. Comparing across national borders, the contributors describe four types of second tier cities: Marshallian industrial districts, hub-and-spoke cities, satellite platforms, and government-anchored complexes. They find that both industrial and regional policies have been important contributors to the rise of second tier cities, though the former often trump the latter. Lessons for local, national, and international policymakers are drawn. The authors are critical of devolution and argue that it must be accompanied by strong labor and environmental standards and mechanisms to overcome differential regional resource endowments.Contributors: Clelio Campolina Diniz, U Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil; Masatomi Funaba, Kobe U of Commerce, Japan; Elyse Golob, NYC Economic Development Goup; Mia Gray, Cambridge U; Jun Ho Jeong, Oxford U; Sam Ock Park, Seoul National U; Mohammad Razavi; Fabiana Borges T. Santos, U Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil; and Masayuki Sasaki, Kanzawa U, Japan.The Inspiring Story of Roberto Clemente's Greatest Season and One of the Most Important Teams in Sport History
In 1947, major league baseball experienced its first measure of integration when the Brooklyn Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson to the National League. While Robinson's breakthrough opened the gates of opportunity for African Americans and other minority players, the process of integration proved slow and uneven. It was not until the 1960s that a handful of major league teams began to boast more than a few Black and Latino players. But the 1971 World Championship team enjoyed a full and complete level of integration, with half of its twenty-five-man roster comprised of players of African American and Latino descent. That team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, managed by an old-time Irishman.
In The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, veteran baseball writer Bruce Markusen tells the story of one of the most likable and significant teams in the history of professional sports. In addition to the fact that they fielded the first all-minority lineup in major league history, the 1971 Pirates are noteworthy for the team's inspiring individual performances, including those of future Hall of Famers Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, and Bill Mazeroski, and their remarkable World Series victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles. But perhaps their greatest legacy is the team's influence on the future of baseball, inspiring later championship teams such as the New York Yankees and Oakland Athletics to open their doors fully to all talented players, regardless of race, particularly in the new era of free agency.
George Washington: Revolutionary general, Father of His Country, first president, authentic hero, prime mover in establishing a constitutional government, squire of Mount Vernon, itself a national shrine. The sheer ubiquity of his persona makes him an excellent focus for understanding how Americans from the centennial of the nation's birth to the present have rediscovered their colonial origins and have manipulated what they found for a variety of social, economic, and political purposes. The more modern we become, says Karal Ann Marling, the more desperately we cling to our Washingtons, to our old-fashioned heroes, to an imaginary lost paradise chock-full of colonial furniture.
Marling has pursued the figure of Washington from flea markets to World's Fairs in order to understand his significance in American culture and iconography. Of all American heroes, she points out, Washington is the one most closely tied to artifacts, relics, material possessions, style. She describes the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, where the federal government exhibited a scene of camp life at Valley Forge, complete with Washington's coat, pants, and other personal objects that lent a strong domestic flavor to the nascent colonial revival. When the restoration of Mount Vernon was begun in the late nineteenth century, it was financed and directed by women, as was much of the historic preservation of the period. Thanks to these efforts, the American home became the scene of successive waves of a revivalism that is still very alive in the 1980s.
In describing Washington's talismanic importance, Marling shows the efforts of twentieth-century politicians to co-opt his incorruptible image. When Harding wanted to convince Americans of his reliability and probity, he campaigned from the Colonial Revival porch of his house on Mount Vernon Avenue in Marion, Ohio. The Washington image was mined for the campaigns that celebrated Calvin Coolidge's Puritan simplicity and Herbert Hoover's engineering talents, said to be related to George Washington's career as a surveyor; more recently, Ronald Reagan at his second inaugural invoked the vision of the humble general praying in the snow at Valley Forge. The neutral and flexible Washington became whatever people wanted him to be—the decorators' darling, the doyen of the D.A.R., the model citizen held up as an example to unruly children and immigrants.
But Marling's book is about more than George Washington and the different ways in which Americans have made use of their past. In her quest for the unhistorical George, Marling has examined the subculture of American life—magazine fiction, historical romances, movies (both silent and talking), and journalism. She traces the descent of high art into such popular forms as posters, plaques, packages, and billboards, all to illuminate how Washington's iconic meaning has influenced styles and tastes on many levels.
It wouldn't be Christmas without the "things." How they came to mean so much, and to play such a prominent role in America's central holiday, is the tale told in this delightful and edifying book. In a style characteristically engaging and erudite, Karal Ann Marling, one of our most trenchant observers of American culture, describes the outsize spectacle that Christmas has become, showing us the provenance and significance of each of its essential parts: the decorated trees and holiday lights, the cards and gifts and wrapping papers, the toy villages and store displays and Macy's holiday parade, Bing Crosby and Santa Claus.
Viewing Christmas through the media of mass culture--engravings and lithographs, magazine fiction, pictorial ads, news photos, cards, and movies--Marling tells us how the beloved Christmas tree grew out of a much-reprinted image of Queen Victoria and her family gathered around a decorated fir; how Santa Claus lost his provincial Dutch character and turned into the jolly old soul we know; how Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol borrowed from Washington Irving's imaginings of what Christmas must have been like in Merrie Olde England; and how the holiday, balancing between the private and public realms, conferred a central and defining role on women.
A celebration of the visual culture of the season, Merry Christmas! offers captivating evidence that Christmas in America is primarily a secular celebration of abundance, goodwill, and familial identity, expressed in a multitude of material ways.
In late summer 1923, legal hangings in Texas came to an end, and the electric chair replaced the gallows. Of 520 convicted capital offenders sentenced to die between 1923 and 1972, 361 were actually executed, thus maintaining Texas’ traditional reputation as a staunch supporter of capital punishment.
This book is the single most comprehensive examination to date of capital punishment in any one state, drawing on data for legal executions from 1819 to 1990. The authors show persuasively how slavery and the racially biased practice of lynching in Texas led to the institutionalization and public approval of executions skewed according to race, class, and gender, and they also track long-term changes in public opinion up to the present.
The stories of the condemned are masterfully interwoven with fact and interpretation to provide compelling reading for scholars of law, criminal justice, race relations, history, and sociology, as well as partisans on both sides of the debate.
Based on the lives and crimes of no less than twenty real women, dokufu (poison women) narratives emerged as a powerful presence in Japan during the 1870s. During this tumultuous time, as the nation moved from feudalism to oligarchic government, such accounts articulated the politics and position of underclass women, sexual morality, and female suffrage. Over the next century, the figure of the oversexed female criminal, usually guilty of robbery or murder, became ubiquitous in modern Japanese culture.
In Poison Woman, Christine L. Marran investigates this powerful icon, its shifting meanings, and its influence on defining women’s sexuality and place in Japan. She begins by considering Meiji gesaku literature, in which female criminality was often medically defined and marginalized as abnormal. She describes the small newspapers (koshinbun) that originally reported on poison women, establishing journalistic and legal conventions for future fiction about them. She examines zange, or confessional narratives, of female and male ex-convicts from the turn of the century, then reveals how medical and psychoanalytical literature of the 1920s and 1930s offered contradictory explanations of the female criminal as an everywoman or a historical victim of social circumstances and the press. She concludes by exploring postwar pulp fiction (kasutori), film and underground theater of the 1970s, and the feminist writer Tomioka Taeko’s take on the transgressive woman.
Persistent stories about poison women illustrate how a few violent acts by women were transformed into myriad ideological, social, and moral tales that deployed notions of female sexual desire and womanhood. Bringing together literary criticism, the history of science, media theory, and gender and sexuality studies, Poison Woman delves into genre and gender in ways that implicate both in projects of nation-building.
Christine L. Marran is associate professor of Japanese literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota.
Drawing on a range of comparative readings by writers, theorists, and filmmakers, including John Edgar Wideman, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Issac Julien, Alain Locke, and Sidney Poitier, Haunted Life is a bold and original exploration of the legacies of black visual culture and the political, deeply sexualized violence that lies buried beneath it.
At the birth of the Internet Age, computer technologists in small, aggressive software development companies became part of a unique networked occupational community. They were creative, team-oriented, and enthusiastic workers who built "boundaryless careers," hopping from one employer to another.
In his absorbing ethnography The Company We Keep, sociologist Daniel Marschall immerses himself in IntenSivity, one such technological workplace. Chronicling the employees' experiences, Marschall examines how these workers characterize their occupational culture, share values and work practices, and help one another within their community. He sheds light on the nature of this industry marked by highly skilled jobs and rapid technological change.
The experiences at IntenSivity are now mirrored by employees at Facebook and thousands of other cutting-edge, high-tech start-up firms. The Company We Keep helps us understand the emergence of virtual work communities and the character of the contemporary labor market at the level of a small enterprise.
Jews have always been one of Nevada’s most active and influential ethnic minorities. They were among the state’s earliest Euro-American settlers, and from the beginning they have been involved in every area of the state’s life as businessmen, agrarians, scholars, educators, artists, politicians, and civic, professional, and religious leaders. Jews in Nevada is an engaging, multilayered chronicle of their lives and contributions to the state. Here are absorbing accounts of individuals and families who helped to settle and develop the state, as well as thoughtful analyses of larger issues, such as the reasons Jews came to Nevada in the first place, how they created homes and interacted with non-Jews, and how they preserved their religious and cultural traditions as a small minority in a sparsely populated region.
At most recent count, there are no fewer than forty-five women in Brazil directing or codirecting feature-length fiction or documentary films. In the early 1990s, women filmmakers in Brazil were credited for being at the forefront of the rebirth of filmmaking, or retomada, after the abolition of the state film agency and subsequent standstill of film production. Despite their numbers and success, films by Brazilian women directors are generally absent from discussions of Latin American film and published scholarly works.
In Practically Joking, the first full-length study of the practical joke, Moira Marsh examines the value, artistry, and social significance of this ancient and pervasive form of vernacular expression.
Though they are sometimes dismissed as the lowest form of humor, practical jokes come from a lively tradition of expressive play. They can reveal both sophistication and intellectual satisfaction, with the best demanding significant skill and talent not only to conceive but also to execute. Practically Joking establishes the practical joke as a folk art form subject to critical evaluation by both practitioners and audiences, operating under the guidance of local aesthetic and ethical canons.
Marsh studies the range of genres that pranks comprise; offers a theoretical look at the reception of practical jokes based on “benign transgression”—a theory that sees humor as playful violation—and uses real-life examples of practical jokes in context to establish the form’s varieties and meanings as an independent genre, as well as its inextricable relationship with a range of folklore forms. Scholars of folklore, humor, and popular culture will find much of interest in Practically Joking.
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