Results by title

808 books match the query 'Civilization' and 29 start with h

cover of Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics

Happy Days and Wonder Years

The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics

Marcus, Daniel

Rutgers University Press, 2004

In the twenty-first century, why do we keep talking about the Fifties and the Sixties? The stark contrast between these decades, their concurrence with the childhood and youth of the baby boomers, and the emergence of television and rock and roll help to explain their symbolic power. In Happy Days and Wonder Years, Daniel Marcus reveals how interpretations of these decades have figured in the cultural politics of the United States since 1970.

From Ronald Reagan's image as a Fifties Cold Warrior to Bill Clinton's fandom for Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy, politicians have invoked the Fifties and the Sixties to connect to their public. Marcus shows how films, television, music, and memoirs have responded to the political nostalgia of today, and why our entertainment remains immersed in reruns, revivals, and references to earlier times. This book offers a new understanding of how politics and popular culture have influenced our notions of the past, and how events from long ago continue to shape our understanding of the present day.
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cover of Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America

Happy Days

Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America

Benjamin L. Alpers

Rutgers University Press, 2024

After the techno-futurism of the 1950s and the utopian 1960s vision of a “great society,” the 1970s saw Americans turning to the past as a source for both nostalgic escapism and serious reflection on the nation’s history. While some popular works like Grease presented the relatively recent past as a more innocent time, far away from the nation’s post-Vietnam, post-Watergate malaise, others like Roots used America’s bicentennial as an occasion for deep soul-searching. 
 
Happy Days investigates how 1970s popular culture was obsessed with America’s past but often offered radically different interpretations of the same historical events and icons. Even the figure of the greaser, once an icon of juvenile delinquency, was made family-friendly by Henry Winkler’s Fonzie at the same time that he was being appropriated in more threatening ways by punk and gay subcultures. The cultural historian Benjamin Alpers discovers similar levels of ambivalence toward the past in 1970s neo-noir films, representations of America’s founding, and neo-slave narratives by Alex Haley and Octavia Butler. By exploring how Americans used the 1970s to construct divergent representations of their shared history, he identifies it as a pivotal moment in the nation’s ideological fracturing. 
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cover of Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas

Hard Luck and Heavy Rain

The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas

Joseph C. Russo

Duke University Press, 2023

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.
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cover of Havana beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989

Havana beyond the Ruins

Cultural Mappings after 1989

Anke Birkenmaier and Esther Whitfield, eds.

Duke University Press, 2011

In Havana beyond the Ruins, prominent architects, scholars, and writers based in and outside of Cuba analyze how Havana has been portrayed in literature, music, and the visual arts since Soviet subsidies of Cuba ceased, and the Cuban state has re-imagined Havana as a destination for international tourists and business ventures. Cuba’s capital has experienced little construction since the revolution of 1959; many of its citizens live in poorly maintained colonial and modernist dwellings. It is this Havana—of crumbling houses, old cars, and a romantic aura of ruined hopes—that is marketed in picture books, memorabilia, and films. Meanwhile, Cuba remains a socialist economy, and government agencies maintain significant control of urban development, housing, and employment. Home to more than two million people and a locus of Cuban national identity, Havana today struggles with the some of the same problems as other growing world cities, including slums and escalating social and racial inequalities. Bringing together assessments of the city’s dwellings and urban development projects, Havana beyond the Ruins provides unique insights into issues of memory, citizenship, urban life, and the future of the revolution in Cuba.

Contributors
Emma Álvarez-Tabío Albo
Eric Felipe-Barkin
Anke Birkenmaier
Velia Cecilia Bobes
Mario Coyula-Cowley
Elisabeth Enenbach
Sujatha Fernandes
Jill Hamberg
Patricio del Real
Cecelia Lawless
Jacqueline Loss
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Antonio José Ponte
Nicolás Quintana
Jose Quiroga
Laura Redruello
Rafael Rojas
Joseph L. Scarpaci
Esther Whitfield

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cover of Hawaii’s Past in a World of Pacific Islands

Hawaii’s Past in a World of Pacific Islands

James M. Bayman

University Press of Colorado, 2013

Given its relatively late encounter with the West, Hawaii offers an exciting opportunity to study a society whose traditional lifeways and technologies were recorded in native oral traditions and written documents before they were changed by contact with non-Polynesian cultures. This book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series chronicles the role of archaeology in constructing a narrative of Hawaii’s cultural past, focusing on material evidence dating from the Polynesians’ first arrival on Hawaii’s shores about a millennium ago to the early decades of settlement by Americans and Europeans in the nineteenth century. A final chapter discusses new directions taken by native Hawaiians toward changing the practice of archaeology in the islands today.
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cover of Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West

Hell of a Vision

Regionalism and the Modern American West

Robert L. Dorman

University of Arizona Press, 2012

The American West has taken on a rich and evocative array of regional identities since the late nineteenth century. Wilderness wonderland, Hispanic borderland, homesteader’s frontier, cattle kingdom, urban dynamo, Native American homeland. Hell of a Vision explores the evolution of these diverse identities during the twentieth century, revealing how Western regionalism has been defined by generations of people seeking to understand the West’s vast landscapes and varied cultures.

Focusing on the American West from the 1890s up to the present, Dorman provides us with a wide-ranging view of the impact of regionalist ideas in pop culture and diverse fields such as geography, land-use planning, anthropology, journalism, and environmental policy-making.

Going well beyond the realm of literature, Dorman broadens the discussion by examining a unique mix of texts. He looks at major novelists such as Cather, Steinbeck, and Stegner, as well as leading Native American writers. But he also analyzes a variety of nonliterary sources in his book, such as government reports, planning documents, and environmental impact studies.

Hell of a Vision is a compelling journey through the modern history of the American West—a key region in the nation of regions known as the United States.

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cover of Hemispheric American Studies

Hemispheric American Studies

Levander, Caroline F

Rutgers University Press, 2007

This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars working in the fields of Latin American studies, Asian American studies, American studies, American literature, African Diaspora studies, and comparative literature address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as: What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? What happens if we recognize the nation as historically evolving and contingent rather than already formed? Finally, what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?

With essays that examine stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts and discourses across the ever-changing and stratified geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere. This collection promises to chart new directions in American literary and cultural studies.



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cover of Her Husband

Her Husband

Luigi Pirandello

Duke University Press, 2000

One of the twentieth century’s greatest literary artists and winner of the Nobel prize in 1934, Luigi Pirandello wrote the novel Her Husband in 1911, before he produced any of the well-known plays with which his name is most often associated today. Her Husband—translated here for the first time into English—is a profoundly entertaining work, by turns funny, bitingly satirical, and tinged with anguish. As important as any of the other works in Pirandello’s oeuvre, it portrays the complexities of male/female relations in the context of a newly emerging, small but vocal Italian feminist movement.
Evoking in vivid detail the literary world in Rome at the turn of the century, Her Husband tells the story of Silvia Roncella, a talented young female writer, and her husband Giustino Boggiolo. The novel opens with their arrival in Rome after having left their provincial southern Italian hometown following the success of Silvia’s first novel, the rather humorously titled House of Dwarves. As his wife’s self-appointed (and self-important) promoter, protector, counselor, and manager, Giustino becomes the primary target of Pirandello’s satire. But the couple’s relationship—and their dual career—is also complicated by a lively supporting cast of characters, including literary bohemians with avant-garde pretensions and would-be aristocratic esthetes who are all too aware of the newly acquired power of journalists and the publishing establishment to make or break their careers. Having based many of the characters—including Silvia and Giustino—on actual literary acquaintances of his, Pirandello reacted to the novel’s controversial reception by not allowing it to be reprinted after the first printing sold out. Not until after his death were copies again made available in Italy.
Readers will find Her Husband eerily evocative of the present in myriad ways—not the least of which is contemporary society’s ongoing transformation wrought by the changing roles of men and women, wives and husbands.


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cover of Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals

Heresy in the University

The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals

Jacques Berlinerblau

Rutgers University Press, 1999

One of the most controversial books to come out of the academy in the last fifteen years is Martin Bernal's Black Athena. It has been a true cause celebre. Afrocentrists have both praised the book and claimed that Bernal stole from the work of black scholars to create his study of the Afroasiastic roots of classical civilization. Classicists feel passionately about what they perceive as an attack from an outsider on the origins not only of ancient Greece but of their own discipline. It seems that everyone has something to say about the book; the question is how many really understand it. In Heresy in the University, Jacques Berlinerblau provides an exegesis of the contents of Black Athena, making it accessible to a wider audience. As he clarifies and restates Bernal's opus, Berlinerblau identifies Bernal's flaws in reasoning and gaps in evidence. He cuts to the heart of Bernal's prose, singling out the key points of Bernal's argument, explaining and arranging them in a cogent manner. Berlinerblau addresses the critics' really important objections, including his own, and links each of them to the appropriate substantive argument in Black Athena. He goes beyond simple summary and exposition to present the underlying --stated and unstated--agendas of Bernal and his critics. Ultimately, he exposes both sides and asks what the flawed reasoning from all concerned reveals about the stakes in this key academic dispute and what that, in turn, says about the modern academy. Jacques Berlinerblau is an assistant professor and director of Judaic studies at Hofstra University.
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cover of Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination

Heretical Hellenism

Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination

Shanyn Fiske

Ohio University Press, 2008

The prevailing assumption regarding the Victorians’ relationship to ancient Greece is that Greek knowledge constituted an exclusive discourse within elite male domains. Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination challenges that theory and argues that while the information women received from popular sources was fragmentary and often fostered intellectual insecurities, it was precisely the ineffability of the Greek world refracted through popular sources and reconceived through new fields of study that appealed to women writers’ imaginations.

Examining underconsidered sources such as theater history and popular journals, Shanyn Fiske uncovers the many ways that women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy without formal classical training. Through discussions of women writers such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Jane Harrison, Heretical Hellenism demonstrates that women established the foundations of a heretical challenge to traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about women’s place in literary history.

Heretical Hellenism provides a historical rationale for a more expansive definition of classical knowledge and offers an interdisciplinary method for understanding the place of classics both in the nineteenth century and in our own time.

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cover of Hersilia's Sisters: Jacques-Louis David, Women, and the Emergence of Civil Society in Post-Revolution France

Hersilia's Sisters

Jacques-Louis David, Women, and the Emergence of Civil Society in Post-Revolution France

Norman Bryson

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0

Political and cultural history and the arts combine in this engaging account of 1790s France.
 
In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power.
 
Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.
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cover of Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean

Hidden Histories

Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean

Basem L. Ra'ad

Pluto Press, 2010

For thousands of years, the region of Palestine and the East Mediterranean has been denied an indigenous voice for an inclusive history. Three religions ascribe their origins to this part of the world, appropriating and re-appropriating the "Holy Land" time and again.

Hidden Histories offers a powerful corrective to common understandings. It emphasizes Palestine's long history and dispels many old and new myths – covering issues of religious origins and sacred sites, identity and self-colonization, and the retrieval of ancient heritage.

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cover of High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place

High Mountains Rising

Appalachia in Time and Place

Edited by Richard A. Straw and H. Tyler Blethen

University of Illinois Press, 2004

This collection is the first comprehensive, cohesive volume to unite Appalachian history with its culture. Richard A. Straw and H. Tyler Blethen's High Mountains Rising provides a clear, systematic, and engaging overview of the Appalachian timeline, its people, and the most significant aspects of life in the region.

The first half of the fourteen essays deal with historical issues including Native Americans, pioneer settlement, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, industrialization, the Great Depression, migration, and finally, modernization. The remaining essays take a more cultural focus, addressing stereotypes, music, folklife, language, literature, and religion.

Bringing together many of the most prestigious scholars in Appalachian studies, this volume has been designed for general and classroom use, and includes suggestions for further reading.

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cover of Hipbillies: Deep Revolution in the Arkansas Ozarks

Hipbillies

Deep Revolution in the Arkansas Ozarks

Jared M. Phillips

University of Arkansas Press, 2019

Counterculture flourished nationwide in the 1960s and 1970s, and while the hippies of Haight–Ashbury occupied the public eye, a faction of back to the landers were quietly creating their own haven off the beaten path in the Arkansas Ozarks. In Hipbillies, Jared Phillips combines oral histories and archival resources to weave the story of the Ozarks and its population of country beatniks into the national narrative, showing how the back to the landers engaged in “deep revolution” by sharing their ideas on rural development, small farm economy, and education with the locals—and how they became a fascinating part of a traditional region’s coming to terms with the modern world in the process.
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cover of Historical Distance and the Holocaust: Interactions Between Historians and Middle-Class Western Europeans in Memory Education

Historical Distance and the Holocaust

Interactions Between Historians and Middle-Class Western Europeans in Memory Education

Thomas Van de Putte

Central European University Press, 2026

What happens when Holocaust historians leave their academic bubble and start interacting with laypeople? This book investigates practices and discourses of historical distance and their effects on vernacular understandings of the Holocaust among white, middle-class Europeans. In five chapters, Historical Distance and the Holocaust describes and explains how historians, in interactions with laypeople, strip the Holocaust of its moral meaning and emotional load, narrate it as a ‘system’, and use sick Holocaust humour as distancing strategy.
A detailed interactional analysis and thick ethnographic description demonstrate how the temporal, moral and emotional distancing practices reenforce the lay moralities and political subjectivities of the white middle-class. This comes with (mostly unintended) consequences. Distanced approaches to the Holocaust in non-academic environments reduce empathy for victims and survivors, normalize violence, disconnect the meaning of the Holocaust from contemporary conflict, and re-activate stereotypes about groups who employ more ‘close’ approaches to the Holocaust.
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cover of Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1: Politics, Religion, Economy, and Society in Britain

Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1

Politics, Religion, Economy, and Society in Britain

Michael McKeon

Bucknell University Press, 2023

The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly developments of modern life: racism and white supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule. These developments are thought to have grown from principles that are rooted in the soil of the Enlightenment: abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, universalization. Michael McKeon’s new book corrects this defective view by historicizing the Enlightenment--by showing that the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history. From its past: critics have ignored that Enlightenment thought is a reaction against deadly traditions that precede it. From its present: the Enlightenment extended its reactive analysis of the past to its own present through self-analysis and self-criticism. From its future: much of what’s been blamed amounts to the failure of its posterity to sustain Enlightenment principles. To historicize the Enlightenment requires that we conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace—society, privacy, the public, the market, experiment, secularity, representative democracy, human rights, social class, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude. McKeon’s book argues the continuity of Enlightenment thought, its consistency and integrity across this broad range of conceptual domains. It also shows how the Enlightenment has shaped our views of both tradition and modernity, and the revisionary work that needs to be done in order to understand our place in the future. In the process, Historicizing the Enlightenment exemplifies a distinctive historiography and historical method.
 
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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cover of Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 2: Literature, the Arts, and the Aesthetic in Britain

Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 2

Literature, the Arts, and the Aesthetic in Britain

Michael McKeon

Bucknell University Press, 2023

Enlightenment critics from Dryden through Johnson and Wordsworth conceived the modern view that art and especially literature entails a double reflection: a reflection of the world, and a reflection on the process by which that reflection is accomplished. Instead “neoclassicism” and “Augustanism” have been falsely construed as involving a one-dimensional imitation of classical texts and an unselfconscious representation of the world. In fact these Enlightenment movements adopted an oblique perspective that registers the distance between past tradition and its present reenactment, between representation and presence. Two modern movements, Romanticism and modernism, have  appropriated as their own these innovations, which derive from Enlightenment thought. Both of these movements ground their error in a misreading of “imitation” as understood by Aristotle and his Enlightenment proponents. Rightly understood, neoclassical imitation, constitutively aware of the difference between what it knows and how it knows it, is an experimental inquiry that generates a range of prefixes—“counter-,” “mock-,” “anti-,” “neo-”—that mark formal degrees of its epistemological detachment. Romantic ideology has denied the role of the imagination in Enlightenment imitation, imposing on the eighteenth century a dichotomous periodization: duplication versus imagination, the mirror versus the lamp. Structuralist ideology has dichotomized narration and description, form and content, structure and history. Poststructuralist ideology has propounded for the novel a contradictory “novel tradition”—realism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism—whose stages both constitute a sequence and collapse it, each stage claiming the innovation of the stage that precedes it.  

 
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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cover of History of Western Civilization: A Handbook

History of Western Civilization

A Handbook

William H. McNeill

University of Chicago Press, 1986

A compact yet thorough one-volume narrative of the entire history of the development of Western civilization

With this book, renowned historian William H. McNeil provides a brilliant narrative chronology of the development of Western civilization, representing its sociopolitical as well as cultural aspects. Sweeping in its coverage but careful in its attention to detail, and up to date with the latest scholarship History of Western Civlization is the perfect introduction to the subject for general readers and students alike.
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cover of History of the Persian Empire

History of the Persian Empire

A. T. Olmstead

University of Chicago Press, 1948

Out of a lifetime of study of the ancient Near East, Professor Olmstead has gathered previously unknown material into the story of the life, times, and thought of the Persians, told for the first time from the Persian rather than the traditional Greek point of view.

"The fullest and most reliable presentation of the history of the Persian Empire in existence."—M. Rostovtzeff
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cover of History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

History's Shadow

Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

Steven Conn

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Who were the Native Americans? Where did they come from and how long ago? Did they have a history, and would they have a future? Questions such as these dominated intellectual life in the United States during the nineteenth century. And for many Americans, such questions about the original inhabitants of their homeland inspired a flurry of historical investigation, scientific inquiry, and heated political debate.

History's Shadow traces the struggle of Americans trying to understand the people who originally occupied the continent claimed as their own. Steven Conn considers how the question of the Indian compelled Americans to abandon older explanatory frameworks for sovereignty like the Bible and classical literature and instead develop new ones. Through their engagement with Native American language and culture, American intellectuals helped shape and define the emerging fields of archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and art. But more important, the questions posed by the presence of the Indian in the United States forced Americans to confront the meaning of history itself, both that of Native Americans and their own: how it should be studied, what drove its processes, and where it might ultimately lead. The encounter with Native Americans, Conn argues, helped give rise to a distinctly American historical consciousness.

A work of enormous scope and intellect, History's Shadow will speak to anyone interested in Native Americans and their profound influence on our cultural imagination.

“History’s Shadow is an intelligent and comprehensive look at the place of Native Americans in Euro-American’s intellectual history. . . . Examining literature, painting, photography, ethnology, and anthropology, Conn mines the written record to discover how non-Native Americans thought about Indians.” —Joy S. Kasson, Los Angeles Times

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cover of History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama

History, Tragedy, Theory

Dialogues on Athenian Drama

Edited and with an introduction by Barbara Goff

University of Texas Press, 1995

Greek tragedy has held sway over the imagination of audiences for well over two millennia. This collection of essays on Athenian drama, the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, demonstrates that Greek tragedy still retains its power to provoke debate and to engage the interest of specialists and non-classicists alike.

The book includes essays by seven of the foremost scholars of Greek drama—Helene Foley, Michelle Gellrich, Peter W. Rose, David Rosenbloom, Richard Seaford, Bernd Seidensticker, and Froma I. Zeitlin. These writers explore the work of all three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and approach them from a variety of perspectives on history and theory, including poststructuralism and Marxism. They investigate the possibilities for coordinating theoretically informed readings of tragedy with a renewed attention to the pressure of material history within those texts. The collection thus represents a response within classics to "New Historicism" and the debates it has generated within related literary disciplines.

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cover of Homeless and at Home in America: Evidence for the Dignity of the Human Soul in Our Time and Place

Homeless and at Home in America

Evidence for the Dignity of the Human Soul in Our Time and Place

Peter Augustine Lawler

St. Augustine's Press, 2007

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cover of Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance

Hong Kong

Culture and the Politics of Disappearance

Ackbar Abbas

University of Minnesota Press, 1997

A consideration of what the culture of Hong Kong tells us about the state of the world at the fin-de-siècle.

On June 30, 1997, Hong Kong as we know it will disappear, ceasing its singular and ambiguous existence as a colonial holdover and becoming part of the People’s Republic of China. In an intriguing and provocative exploration of its cinema, architecture, photography, and literature, Ackbar Abbas considers what Hong Kong, with its unique relations to decolonization and disappearance, can teach us about the future of both the colonial city and the global city.

The culture of Hong Kong encompasses Jackie Chan and John Woo, British colonial architecture and postmodern skyscrapers. Ironically, it was not until they were faced with the imposition of Mainland power—with the signing of the Sino-British Joint Agreement in 1984—that the denizens of the colony began the search for a Hong Kong identity. According to Abbas, Hong Kong’s peculiar lack of identity is due to its status as “not so much a place as a space of transit,” whose residents think of themselves as transients and migrants on their way from China to somewhere else. Abbas explores the way Hong Kong’s media saturation changes its people’s experience of space so that it becomes abstract, dominated by signs and images that dispel memory, history, and presence.Hong Kong disappears through simple dualities such as East/West and tradition/modernity. What is missing from a view of Hong Kong as merely a colony is the paradox that Hong Kong has benefited from and made a virtue of its dependent colonial status, turning itself into a global and financial city and outstripping its colonizer in terms of wealth.Combining sophisticated theory and a critical perspective, this rich and thought-provoking work captures the complex situation of the metropolis that is contemporary Hong Kong. Along the way, it challenges, entertains, and makes an important contribution to our thinking about the surprising processes and consequences of colonialism.Copublished with Hong Kong University Press
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cover of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture

Hop on Pop

The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture

Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc, eds.

Duke University Press, 2003

Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars—from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies—whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies.
The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study.
Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader.

Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

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cover of Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment

Hope and Glory

Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment

Martin H. Blatt

University of Massachusetts Press, 2009

The monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, located on Boston Common, stands at a symbolic crossroads of American history. A reminder of the nation's ongoing struggle over race, it captures the Civil War's higher purpose—the end of slavery—and memorializes those black soldiers and white officers who made common cause in the service of freedom. The monument and the saga of the 54 th Massachusetts remain powerful touchstones, inspiring enduring meditations such as Robert Lowell's poem “For the Union Dead” and the popular film Glory. 

This volume brings together the best scholarship on the history of the 54th, the formation of collective memory and identity, and the ways Americans have responded to the story of the regiment and the Saint-Gaudens monument. Contributors use the historical record and popular remembrance of the 54th as a lens for examining race and community in the United States. The essays range in time from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and encompass history, literature, art, music, and popular culture.

In addition to the editors and Colin Powell, who writes about the memory and example of the 54th in his own career, contributors include Stephen Belyea, David W. Blight, Thomas Cripps, Kathryn Greenthal, James Oliver Horton, Edwin S. Redkey, Marilyn Richardson, Kirk Savage, James Smethurst, Cathy Stanton, Helen Vendler, Denise Von Glahn, and Joan Waugh.

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cover of How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory

How “Indians” Think

Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory

Gonzalo Lamana

University of Arizona Press, 2019

The conquest and colonization of the Americas marked the beginning of a social, economic, and cultural change of global scale. Most of what we know about how colonial actors understood and theorized this complex historical transformation comes from Spanish sources. This makes the few texts penned by Indigenous intellectuals in colonial times so important: they allow us to see how some of those who inhabited the colonial world in a disadvantaged position thought and felt about it.
 
This book shines light on Indigenous perspectives through a novel interpretation of the works of the two most important Amerindian intellectuals in the Andes, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. Building on but also departing from the predominant scholarly position that views Indigenous-Spanish relations as the clash of two distinct cultures, Gonzalo Lamana argues that Guaman Poma and Garcilaso were the first Indigenous activist intellectuals and that they developed post-racial imaginaries four hundred years ago. Their texts not only highlighted Native peoples’ achievements, denounced injustice, and demanded colonial reform, but they also exposed the emerging Spanish thinking and feeling on race that was at the core of colonial forms of discrimination. These authors aimed to alter the way colonial actors saw each other and, as a result, to change the world in which they lived.
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cover of Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity

Hybrid Cultures

Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity

Nestor Garcia Canclini

University of Minnesota Press, 1995

Garcia Canclini questions whether Latin America can compete in a global marketplace without losing its cultural identity. He moves with ease from the ideas of Gramsci and Foucault to economic analysis, from appraisals of the exchanges between Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges to Chicano film and grafitti. Hybrid Cultures at once clarifies the development of democratic institutions in Latin America and reveals that the most destructive ideological trends are still going strong.
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cover of Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity

Hybrid Cultures

Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity

Nestor Garcia Canclini

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

When it was originally published, Hybrid Cultures was foundational to Latin American cultural studies. This now-classic work features a new introduction in which Nestor Garcia Canclini calls for a cultural politics to contain the damaging effects of globalization and responds to relevant theoretical developments over the past decade.Garcia Canclini questions whether Latin America can compete in a global marketplace without losing its cultural identity. He moves with ease from the ideas of Gramsci and Foucault to economic analysis, from appraisals of the exchanges between Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges to Chicano film and grafitti. Hybrid Cultures at once clarifies the development of democratic institutions in Latin America and reveals that the most destructive ideological trends are still going strong.
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cover of Hybrid Renaissance: Culture, Language, Architecture

Hybrid Renaissance

Culture, Language, Architecture

Peter Burke

Central European University Press, 2016

Hybrid Renaissance introduces the idea that the Renaissance in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and in the world beyond Europe is an example of cultural hybridization.

The two key concepts used in this book are “hybridization” and “Renaissance”. Roughly speaking, hybridity refers to something new that emerges from the combination of diverse older elements. (The term “hybridization” is preferable to “hybridity” because it refers to a process rather than to a state, and also because it encourages the writer and the readers alike to think in terms of degree: where there is more or less, rather than presence versus absence.)

The book begins with a discussion of the concept of cultural hybridization and a cluster of other concepts related to it. Then comes a geography of cultural hybridization focusing on three locales: courts, major cities (whether ports or capitals) and frontiers. The following seven chapters describe the hybridity of the Renaissance in different fields: architecture, painting and sculpture, languages, literature, music, philosophy and law and finally religion. The essay concludes with a brief account of attempts to resist hybridization or to purify cultures or domains from what was already hybridized.

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