front cover of Whatever Happened to Antara?
Whatever Happened to Antara?
And Other Stories
By Walid Ikhlassi
University of Texas Press, 2004

Walid Ikhlassi evokes the individual's struggle for dignity and significance in the Syrian city of Aleppo during the French mandate of the forties and fifties. His characters' seeking of personal fulfillment parallels the struggle of the nation for self-definition. The changing political and cultural landscape of Syria challenges individuals in their attempts to live lives of integrity, as Ikhlassi provides analytical insights into the civil society of Syria, the axis of his writing.

From the boy Antara who personifies the Arab legend of a half-African slave warrior/hero to everyday middle-aged lovers, Ikhlassi's characters fight colonial oppression and corruption from the newly formed government. Foreign and internal forces challenge the evolution of a modern nation rooted in traditional Arab values. Its strong and determined men and women refuse to accept victimhood. The introduction by author and critic Elizabeth Warnock Fernea places the stories in their historical and literary context.

An avowed experimentalist, Ikhlassi portrays the modern human situation through techniques as widely divergent as realism, surrealism, interior monologue, and stream-of-consciousness. Selections of his work have been translated into English, Russian, French, German, Dutch, Armenian, and other languages.

[more]

front cover of Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?
Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?
Redefinition and the Myth of the 'Collective Jew'
Antony Lerman
Pluto Press, 2020

'This elegantly written, erudite book is essential reading for all of us, whatever our identifications' - Lynne Segal

Antisemitism is one of the most controversial topics of our time. The public, academics, journalists, activists and Jewish people themselves are divided over its meaning. Antony Lerman shows that this is a result of a 30-year process of redefinition of the phenomenon, casting Israel, problematically defined as the 'persecuted collective Jew', as one of its main targets.

This political project has taken the notion of the 'new antisemitism' and codified it in the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's 'working definition' of antisemitism. This text is the glue holding together an international network comprising the Israeli government, pro-Israel advocacy groups, Zionist organizations, Jewish communal defence bodies and sympathetic governments fighting a war against those who would criticize Israel.

The consequences of this redefinition have been alarming, supressing free speech on Palestine/Israel, legitimizing Islamophobic right-wing forces, and politicizing principled opposition to antisemitism.

[more]

front cover of Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?
Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?
A B-Novel
By Caio Fernando Abreu
University of Texas Press, 2001

A forty-year-old Brazilian journalist reduced to living in a dilapidated building inhabited by a bizarre human fauna—fortune-tellers, transvestites, tango-loving Argentinean hustlers—is called upon to track down and write the story of Dulce Veiga, a famous singer who disappeared twenty years earlier on the eve of her first big show. Thus begins a mad race through an underground, nocturnal São Paulo among rock bands with eccentric names, feline reincarnations of Vita Sackville-West, ex-revolutionaries turned junkies, gay Pietas, echoes of Afro-Brazilian religions, and intimations of AIDS . . .

Constructed like a mystery, the novel unravels over a week, evoking a decadent and contaminated atmosphere in which the journalist's own search for meaning finds its expression in the elusive Dulce Veiga, who constantly appears to him as if in a dream, her arm pointing heavenward. Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? is a descent into the underworld of contemporary megalopolises where, like the inside of a huge TV, life intermingles with bits of music, film clips, and soap opera characters in a crazy and macabre dance, moving toward a possible catharsis.

[more]

front cover of Whatever Happened to Party Government?
Whatever Happened to Party Government?
Controversies in American Political Science
Mark Wickham-Jones
University of Michigan Press, 2018

In 1950, the Committee on Political Parties of the American Political Science Association (APSA) published its much-anticipated report, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System. Highly critical of the existing state of affairs, the report became extremely controversial: before publication, scholars attacked the committee’s draft and suggested it should be suppressed. When released it received a barrage of criticisms. Most academics concluded it was an ill-conceived and mistaken initiative.

Mark Wickham-Jones provides the first full, archival-based assessment of the arguments within APSA about political parties and the 1950 report. He details the report’s failure to generate wider discussion between media, politicians, and the White House. He examines whether it was dominated by a dogmatic attachment to “party government,” and charts the relationship between behavioralists and institutionalists. He also discusses the political dimension to research during the McCarthyite years, and reflects on the nature of American political science in the years after 1945, the period in which behavioralism (which privileges the influence of individuals over institutions) became dominant.

Detailing APSA’s most direct and significant intervention in the political process, Wickham-Jones makes an important contribution to debates that remain in the forefront of discussions about American politics.

[more]

front cover of Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes?
Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes?
Detective Fiction, Popular Theology, and Society
Robert S. Paul
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Robert S. Paul suggests that the reason detective fiction has won legions of readers may be that "the writer of detective fiction, without conscious intent, appeals directly to those moral and spiritual roots of society unconsciously affirmed and endorsed by the readers."

Because detective stories deal with crime and punishment they cannot help dealing implicitly with theological issues, such as the reality of good and evil, the recognition that humankind has the potential for both, the nature of evidence (truth and error), the significance of our existence in a rational order and hence the reality of truth, and the value of the individual in a civilized society.

Paul argues that the genre traces its true beginning to the Enlightenment and documents two related but different reactions to the theological issues involved: first, a line of writers who are generally positive in relation to their cultural setting, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle; and second, a reactionary strain, critical of the prevailing culture, that begins in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and continues through the anti-heroic writers like Arsène Lupin to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and John MacDonald.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter