New Global Cities in Latin America and Asia: Welcome to the Twenty-First Century proposes new visions of global cities and regions historically considered “secondary” in the international context. The arguments are not only based on material progress made by these metropolises, but also on the growing social difficulties experienced  (e.g., organized crime, drug trafficking, slums, economic inequalities). The book illustrates the growth of cities according to these problems arising from the modernity of the new century, comparing Latin American and Asian cities.

This book analyzes the complex relationships within cities through an interdisciplinary approach, complementing other research and challenging orthodox views on global cities. At the same time, the book provides new theoretical and methodological tools to understand the progress of “Third World” cities and the way of understanding “globality” in the 21st century by confronting the traditional views with which global cities were appreciated since the 1980s. Pablo Baisotti brings together researchers from various fields who provide new interpretative keys to certain cities in Latin America and Asia.

Fables for the modern age

Many of us believe we recognize the symptoms of middle age: lower back pain, mortgages, and an aversion to loud late-night activities. This particular construction of midlife, most often rendered in chronological, biological, and medical terms, has become an accepted reality to European-Americans and has recently spread to such non-Western capitals as Tokyo and New Delhi. Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) explores the significance of this pervasive cultural representation alongside the alternative "fictions" that represent the life course in other regions of the world where middle age does not exist.

In this volume, anthropologists, behavioral scientists, and historians explore topics ranging from the Western ideology of "midlife decline" to cultural representations of mature adulthood that operate without the category of middle age. The result is a fascinating, panoramic collection that explores the myths surrounding and the representations of mature adulthood and of those years in the life span from thirty to seventy.

Welcome to Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbingride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow—microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche. Everythingis there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people’s lives, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm. Infused with the rhythms of the inner-city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong, and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow—living with the same energy and intimate knowledge with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.

In Welcome to the Dreamhouse feminist media studies pioneer Lynn Spigel takes on Barbie collectors, African American media coverage of the early NASA space launches, and television’s changing role in the family home and its links to the broader visual culture of modern art. Exploring postwar U.S. media in the context of the period’s reigning ideals about home and family life, Spigel looks at a range of commercial objects and phenomena, from television and toys to comic books and magazines.
The volume considers not only how the media portrayed suburban family life, but also how both middle-class ideals and a perceived division between private and public worlds helped to shape the visual forms, storytelling practices, and reception of postwar media and consumer culture. Spigel also explores those aspects of suburban culture that media typically render invisible. She looks at the often unspoken assumptions about class, nation, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation that underscored both media images (like those of 1960s space missions) and social policies of the mass-produced suburb. Issues of memory and nostalgia are central in the final section as Spigel considers how contemporary girls use television reruns as a source for women’s history and then analyzes the current nostalgia for baby boom era family ideals that runs through contemporary images of new household media technologies.
Containing some of Spigel’s well-known essays on television’s cultural history as well as new essays on a range of topics dealing with popular visual culture, Welcome to the Dreamhouse is important reading for students and scholars of media and communications studies, popular culture, American studies, women’s studies, and sociology.

How to live with difference—not necessarily in peace, but with resilience, engagement, and a lack of vitriol—is a defining worry in America at this moment. The poets, fiction writers, and essayists (plus one graphic novelist) who contributed to Welcome to the Neighborhood don’t necessarily offer roadmaps to harmonious neighboring. Some of their narrators don’t even want to be neighbors. Maybe they grieve, or rage. Maybe they briefly find resolution or community. But they do approach the question of what it means to be neighbors, and how we should do it, with open minds and nuance.

The many diverse contributors give this collection a depth beyond easy answers. Their attentions to the theme of neighborliness as an ongoing evolution offer hope to readers: possible pathways for rediscovering community, even just by way of a shared wish for it. The result is an enormously rich resource for the classroom and for anyone interested in reflecting on what it means to be American today, and how place and community play a part.

Contributors include Leila Chatti, Rita Dove, Jonathan Escoffery, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Amina Gautier, Ross Gay, Mark Halliday, Joy Harjo, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, Sonya Larson, Dinty W. Moore, Robert Pinsky, Christine Schutt, and many more.

How to live with difference—not necessarily in peace, but with resilience, engagement, and a lack of vitriol—is a defining worry in America at this moment. The poets, fiction writers, and essayists (plus one graphic novelist) who contributed to Welcome to the Neighborhood don’t necessarily offer roadmaps to harmonious neighboring. Some of their narrators don’t even want to be neighbors. Maybe they grieve, or rage. Maybe they briefly find resolution or community. But they do approach the question of what it means to be neighbors, and how we should do it, with open minds and nuance.

The many diverse contributors give this collection a depth beyond easy answers. Their attentions to the theme of neighborliness as an ongoing evolution offer hope to readers: possible pathways for rediscovering community, even just by way of a shared wish for it. The result is an enormously rich resource for the classroom and for anyone interested in reflecting on what it means to be American today, and how place and community play a part.

Contributors include Leila Chatti, Rita Dove, Jonathan Escoffery, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Amina Gautier, Ross Gay, Mark Halliday, Joy Harjo, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, Sonya Larson, Dinty W. Moore, Robert Pinsky, Christine Schutt, and many more.