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1713 books match the query '21St Century' and 63 start with i

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Interstices

Negotiations at Contemporary Art’s Boundaries

Alexander Alberro

University of Chicago Press, 2025

An exploration of innovative practices flourishing at the margins of Western art.

With this book, Alexander Alberro engages decolonial theory to explore the dynamic exchanges that occur where the ideals and values of different artistic frameworks meet. Resisting notions of a singular art world and global contemporary art, Alberro explores what lies outside of Western art’s hegemonic presence, recognizing the rich multitude of art formations at its periphery, each with its own artistic narratives and conventions. Alberro brings into focus the complex negotiations that are cultivating innovation and transformation at the margins of Western art, showing how this seemingly monolithic framework is both crucial to and insufficient for a comprehensive understanding of contemporary art.

His examples include artists and collectives from around the world, including Iosu Aramburu, Subhankar Banerjee, Yto Barrada, Mabe Bethônico, El Colectivo, Maria Galindo and Mujeres Creando, Bouchra Khalili, Multiplicity, Lucy Orta, Raqs Media Collective, Tracey Rose, Doris Salcedo, Yinka Shonibare, World of Matter, and Yin Xiuzhen. As notions of transculturation and decoloniality continue to drive conversations about contemporary art, Interstices offers a critical explanation of what is at stake, showing how the tensions at the edges of the Western art framework are pushing it toward its discursive limits.

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Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle

A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's U.N. Address

John Oddo

Michigan State University Press, 2014

On a cold Wednesday morning in February 2003 Colin Powell argued before the United Nations Security Council that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction. Before the speech, nearly 90 percent of Americans reported that Powell’s speech would help them determine their view about invading Iraq. In the days after the speech, a strong majority of Americans reported that they found Powell’s evidence convincing enough to justify war. But most American adults did not watch Powell’s speech. Instead, they learned about it from journalists—and to a large extent formed their opinions about war with Iraq based on news coverage of his address. In Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle John Oddo investigates the “rhetorical life” of Colin Powell’s address as it was extended across several media reports. Focusing on one day of pre- and postspeech news coverage, Oddo examines how journalists influenced Powell’s presentation— precontextualizing and recontextualizing his speech, and prepositioning and repositioning audiences to respond to it. The book surveys a variety of news media (television, newspaper, and Internet) and systematically integrates several methodological approaches (critical, rhetorical, discourse-analytic, and multimodal). This revealing text shows the decisive role that journalists played in shaping American attitudes about Powell, his presentation, and the desirability of war in Iraq.

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Intricate Thicket

Reading Late Modernist Poetries

Mark Scroggins

University of Alabama Press, 2015

In Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries, Mark Scroggins writes with wit and dash about a fascinating range of key twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets and writers. In nineteen lively and accessible essays, he persuasively argues that the innovations of modernist verse were not replaced by postmodernism, but rather those innovations continue to infuse contemporary writing and poetry with intellectual and aesthetic richness.

In these essays, Scroggins reviews the legacy of Louis Zukofsky, delineates the exceptional influence of the Black Mountain poets, and provides close readings of a wealth of examples of poetic works from poets who have carried the modernist legacy into contemporary poetry. He traces with an insider’s keen observation the careers of many of the most dynamic, innovative, and celebrated poets of the past half-century, among them Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ronald Johnson, Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, and Anne Carson.

In a concluding pair of essays, Scroggins situates his own practice within the broad currents he has described. He reflects on his own aesthetics as a contemporary poet and, drawing on his extensive study and writing about Louis Zukofsky, examines the practical and theoretical challenges of literary biography.

While the core of these essays is the interpretation of poetry, Scroggins also offers clear aesthetic evaluations of the successes and failures of the poetries he examines. Scroggins engages with complex and challenging works, and yet his highly accessible descriptions and criticisms avoid theoretical entanglements and specialized jargon. Intricate Thicket yields subtle and multifaceted insights to experts and newcomers alike.

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Investigations in the Economics of Aging

Edited by David A. Wise

University of Chicago Press, 2012

One of the most well-established relationships in the economics of aging is that between health and wealth. Yet this relationship is also changing in conjunction with a rapidly aging population as well as a broad evolution in how people live later in life.

Building on findings from earlier editions in this National Bureau of Economic Research series, Investigations in the Economics of Aging focuses on the changing financial circumstances of the elderly and the relationship of these circumstances to health and health care. Among the topics addressed are the significance of out-of-pocket health care costs, the effects of inflation on social security, and the impact of the recent financial crisis on Americans’ well-being. Encompassing new data and advances in research methodology, the developments presented in this volume will have important implications for economies worldwide.

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Invisibility by Design

Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy

Gabriella Lukács

Duke University Press, 2020

In the wake of labor market deregulation during the 2000s, online content sharing and social networking platforms were promoted in Japan as new sites of work that were accessible to anyone. Enticed by the chance to build personally fulfilling careers, many young women entered Japan's digital economy by performing unpaid labor as photographers, net idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone novelists. While some women leveraged digital technology to create successful careers, most did not. In Invisibility by Design Gabriella Lukács traces how these women's unpaid labor became the engine of Japan's digital economy. Drawing on interviews with young women who strove to sculpt careers in the digital economy, Lukács shows how platform owners tapped unpaid labor to create innovative profit-generating practices without employing workers, thereby rendering women's labor invisible. By drawing out the ways in which labor precarity generates a demand for feminized affective labor, Lukács underscores the fallacy of the digital economy as a more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive mode of production.

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Isa Genzken

Sculpture as World Receiver

Lisa Lee

University of Chicago Press, 2017

The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken’s tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken’s studio.

Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.

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Islam and Popular Culture

Edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk, Mark LeVine, and Martin Stokes

University of Texas Press, 2016

Popular culture serves as a fresh and revealing window on contemporary developments in the Muslim world because it is a site where many important and controversial issues are explored and debated. Aesthetic expression has become intertwined with politics and religion due to the uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” while, at the same time, Islamist authorities are showing increasingly accommodating and populist attitudes toward popular culture. Not simply a “westernizing” or “secularizing” force, as some have asserted, popular culture now plays a growing role in defining what it means to be Muslim.

With well-structured chapters that explain key concepts clearly, Islam and Popular Culture addresses new trends and developments that merge popular arts and Islam. Its eighteen case studies by eminent scholars cover a wide range of topics, such as lifestyle, dress, revolutionary street theater, graffiti, popular music, poetry, television drama, visual culture, and dance throughout the Muslim world from Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East to Europe. The first comprehensive overview of this important subject, Islam and Popular Culture offers essential new ways of understanding the diverse religious discourses and pious ethics expressed in popular art productions, the cultural politics of states and movements, and the global flows of popular culture in the Muslim world.

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Islamic Activists

The Anti-Enlightenment Democrats

Deina Ali Abdelkader

Pluto Press, 2011

In the hysteria surrounding Political Islam, it is difficult to find analysis that doesn't feel the need to justify the existence of Islamic leaders or react to the West's fear of 'extremists'. In Islamic Activists, Deina Ali Abdelkader shows us what Islamic leaders and activists believe and what they think about just governance.

Explaining and comparing Islamist ideas, including those about leadership, justice and minority rights, Abdelkader explains how these have been represented in the writings of important historical and contemporary Islamists. In doing so, Abdelkader reveals that democracy is not the sole preserve of those who support Enlightenment values, offering the reader a chance to understand the populist non-violent side of Islamic activism. This includes an examination of the ideas of the leaders of the populist Islamist movements in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.

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Islamic State

Rewriting History

Michael Griffin

Pluto Press, 2015

When the attacks of September 11 sent Westerners in search of reliable information about Al Qaida, Michael Griffin was there: his book Reaping the Whirlwind quickly became the go-to resource for the media, political figures, and ordinary citizens alike.

Now, as Islamic State (also known as ISIS) is moving to take over broad swathes of territory throughout the Middle East, Griffin is back once again, ready to offer nuanced insight, analysis, history, and context for readers looking to understand this new and frightening threat.

An experienced journalist, Griffin tells the story of the development of the Islamic State in his usual fast-paced, narrative driven style, helping us to understand the long roots of the Islamic State in Iraq, their quiet involvement in the Arab Spring, and their rapid rise amid the chaos generated by the Syrian war. He clearly and carefully presents the interlocking web of influence, arms, and money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Iraq that have fuelled the rise of Islamic State, and highlights the importance of the uprising against Assad in Syria and the West’s relative inability to influence or support it. Ultimately, Griffin offers a portrait of a complicated, multivalent movement, one with roots in numerous real or perceived grievances and historical mistakes and one with the potential to foment unrest and violence throughout the Middle East for some time to come.

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Islamism and Modernism

The Changing Discourse in Iran

By Farhang Rajaee

University of Texas Press, 2007

While many previous books have probed the causes of Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979, few have focused on the power of religion in shaping a national identity over the decades leading up to it. Islamism and Modernism captures the metamorphosis of the Islamic movement in Iran, from encounters with Great Britain and the United States in the 1920s through twenty-first-century struggles between those seeking to reform Islam's role and those who take a hardline defensive stance.

Capturing the views of four generations of Muslim activists, Farhang Rajahee describes how the extremism of the 1960s brought more confidence to concerned Islam-minded Iranians and radicalized the Muslim world while Islamic alternatives to modernity were presented. Subsequent ideologies gave rise to the revolution, which in turn has fed a restructuring of Islam as a faith rather than as an ideology.

Presenting thought-provoking discussions of religious thinkers such as Ha'eri, Burujerdi, Bazargan, and Shari'ati, along with contemporaries such as Kadivar, Soroush, and Shabestari, the author sheds rare light on the voices fueling contemporary Islamic thinking in Iran. A comprehensive study of these interwoven aspects of politics, religion, society, and identity, Islamism and Modernism offers crucial new insight into the aftermath of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution fought one hundred years ago—and its ramifications for the newest generation to face the crossroads of modernity and Islamic discourse in modern Iran today.

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Israel's Dead Soul

Authored by Steven Salaita

Temple University Press, 2011

In his courageous book, Israel's Dead Soul, Steven Salaita explores the failures of Zionism as a political and ethical discourse. He argues that endowing nation-states with souls is a dangerous phenomenon because it privileges institutions and corporations rather than human beings.

Asserting that Zionism has been normalized--rendered "benign" as an ideology of "multicultural conviviality"—Salaita critiques the idea that Zionism, as an exceptional ideology, leads to a lack of critical awareness of the effects of the Israeli occupation in Palestinian territory and to an unquestioning acceptance of Israel as an ethnocentric state.

Salaita's analysis targets the Anti-Defamation League, films such as Munich and Waltz with Bashir, intellectuals including Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, gay rights activists, and other public figures who mourn the decline of Israel's "soul." His pointed account shows how liberal notions of Zionism are harmful to various movements for justice.

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