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1713 books match the query '21st century' and 10 start with k

cover of Kaija Saariaho

Kaija Saariaho

Pirkko Moisala

University of Illinois Press, 2008

This book is the first comprehensive study of the music and career of contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho. Born in Finland in 1952, Saariaho received her early musical training at the Sibelius Academy, where her close circle included composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. She has since become internationally known and recognized for her operas L'amour de loin and Adriana Mater and other works that involve electronic music. Her influences include the spectral analysis of timbre, especially string sounds, micropolyphonic techniques, as well as the visual and literary arts and sounds in the natural world. Pirkko Moisala approaches the unique characteristics of Saariaho's music through composition sketches, scores, critical reviews, and interviews with the composer and her trusted musicians.
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cover of Katrina's Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America

Katrina's Imprint

Race and Vulnerability in America

Wailoo, Keith

Rutgers University Press, 2010

Katrina's Imprint highlights the power of this sentinel American event and its continuing reverberations in contemporary politics, culture, and public policy. Published on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the multidisciplinary volume reflects on how history, location, access to transportation, health care, and social position feed resilience, recovery, and prospects for the future of New Orleans and the Gulf region. Essays examine the intersecting vulnerabilities that gave rise to the disaster, explore the cultural and psychic legacies of the storm, reveal how the process of rebuilding and starting over replicates past vulnerabilities, and analyze Katrina's imprint alongside American's myths of self-sufficiency. A case study of new weaknesses that have emerged in our era, this book offers an argument for why we cannot wait for the next disaster before we apply the lessons that should be learned from Katrina.
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cover of Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction

Kept Secret

The Half-Truth in Nonfiction

Jen Hirt

Michigan State University Press, 2017

Creative nonfiction writers wrestle constantly with the boundaries of creative license—what to reveal, when to reveal it, and how best to do it. While the truth may inspire us to make confident assertions, secrets, lies, and half-truths inspire us to delve further into our own writing to discover the heart of the story. The pieces in this collection feature essayists who do this type of detective work. Each essay contains a secret, lie, or half-truth—some of these are revealed by the author, but others remain buried. Ranging from the deep family secret to the little white lie, from the shocking to the humorous, and from the straightforward revelation to the slanted half-truth, these essays ask us to appreciate the magnitude of keeping a secret. They also ask us to consider the obstacles writers must overcome if they want to write about secrets in their own lives and the lives of others. In short interviews following each essay the contributors discuss craft, ethics, creativity, and how they eventually decided to reveal—or not reveal—a secret.
 
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cover of Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin

Kids on the Street

Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin

Joseph Plaster

Duke University Press, 2023

In Kids on the Street Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed these kids to foster social support and mutual aid. He shows how they collectively and creatively managed the social trauma they experienced, in part by building relationships with johns, bartenders, hotel managers, bouncers, and other vice district denizens. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.
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cover of Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities

Killing Poetry

Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities

Johnson, Javon

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Winner of the 2019 Lilla A. Heston Award
Co-winner of the 2018 Ethnography Division’s Best Book from the NCA

In recent decades, poetry slams and the spoken word artists who compete in them have sparked a resurgent fascination with the world of poetry. However, there is little critical dialogue that fully engages with the cultural complexities present in slam and spoken word poetry communities, as well as their ramifications.
 
In Killing Poetry, renowned slam poet, Javon Johnson unpacks some of the complicated issues that comprise performance poetry spaces. He argues that the truly radical potential in slam and spoken word communities lies not just in proving literary worth, speaking back to power, or even in altering power structures, but instead in imagining and working towards altogether different social relationships. His illuminating ethnography provides a critical history of the slam, contextualizes contemporary black poets in larger black literary traditions, and does away with the notion that poetry slams are inherently radically democratic and utopic.
 
Killing Poetry—at times autobiographical, poetic, and journalistic—analyzes the masculine posturing in the Southern California community in particular, the sexual assault in the national community, and the ways in which related social media inadvertently replicate many of the same white supremacist, patriarchal, and mainstream logics so many spoken word poets seem to be working against. Throughout, Johnson examines the promises and problems within slam and spoken word, while illustrating how community is made and remade in hopes of eventually creating the radical spaces so many of these poets strive to achieve. 
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cover of Kinflix: Adoption and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Film

Kinflix

Adoption and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Film

Marina Fedosik

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

In Kinflix, Marina Fedosik analyzes cinematic representations of adoption and technologically assisted reproduction to identify the intersecting paradigms through which Western cultures understand these ways of making families. Looking at diverse genres—films include The Omen,Raising Arizona,Losing Isaiah,Blade Runner, and more—Fedosik finds that the heterocoital family remains a hegemonic metaphor for representing and structuring all other methods of reproduction. This potentially precludes understanding adoption and ARTs on their own terms and requires those involved in nontraditional family formation to negotiate kinship connections and identities against the cultural demands of this model.

Resisting simple ideological readings of film genres, Fedosik unsettles cultural scripts around adoption and reproduction and scrutinizes moments where formulaic genre logic may be troubled by representations of lived experience that transcend common tropes of family formation. She argues that adoption as a reproductive technology is uniquely situated to expose cultural tensions around nontraditional methods of reproduction that are rapidly developing in the post-IVF biocultural landscape. Rapidly changing reproductive technologies, Fedosik asserts, demand a cultural response—and require more expansive reflection on reproductive futurities.
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cover of Kingdom at Any Cost: Right-Wing Visions of Apocalypse in America

Kingdom at Any Cost

Right-Wing Visions of Apocalypse in America

Johnnie Chamberlin

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2009

Director Michael Wilson and producer Natalie Zimmerman, in their documentary film Silhouette City, have dramatically captured the religious right's concerted effort to form a theocracy in America, with an aim to spread control worldwide. This insightful book, Kingdom at Any Cost, includes valuable interviews and writings not covered in the film, but further revealing the impact of the ominous religious movement. It serves as a powerful resource: a handbook for studying the film and a reader for examining America's contemporary Christian extremes.
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cover of Kree: A Post-Exotic Novel

Kree

A Post-Exotic Novel

draeger

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

A warrior struggles through an apocalyptic landscape and the world after death
 

Kree Toronto has been raised as a warrior in a ravaged world: postapocalyptic, posthuman, the population decimated by wars and civilization long since collapsed. After her attempt to avenge the death of her dog, Loka, goes horribly wrong, Kree finds herself lost in a world after death and wanders into the city of the terrible mendicants.

 

Under the Brothers’ totalitarian rule, Kree can lead a quiet life and forget her violent past, even if needles grow in her skull and hallucinatory blood rains pour down now and then to remind her. She can make friends: a shamanic healer with a shaking tent, a mysterious stranger hatched from an egg, and a gruff Tibetan electrician in a world without electricity. And she can have her Loka as long as she toes the Party line and does as she’s told. When she can’t—when her friends start to disappear and the Brothers turn against her—Kree sets out on a quest, searching for a new way forward.

 

Multiply reincarnated and unstuck in time, Kree is the characteristically marvelous creation of Manuela Draeger, whose extraordinary stories, in the words of author China Miéville, “are as close to dreams as fiction can be.”

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cover of Kurdish Awakening: Nation Building in a Fragmented Homeland

Kurdish Awakening

Nation Building in a Fragmented Homeland

Edited by Ofra Bengio

University of Texas Press, 2014

Kurdish Awakening examines key questions related to Kurdish nationalism and identity formation in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. The world’s largest stateless ethnic group, Kurds have steadily grown in importance as a political power in the Middle East, particularly in light of the “Arab Spring.” As a result, Kurdish issues—political, cultural, and historical alike—have emerged as the subject of intense scholarly interest. This book provides fresh ways of understanding the historical and sociopolitical underpinnings of the ongoing Kurdish awakening and its already significant impact on the region.

Rather than focusing on one state or angle, this anthology fills a gap in the literature on the Kurds by providing a panoramic view of the Kurdish homeland’s various parts. The volume focuses on aspects of Kurdish nationalism and identity formation not addressed elsewhere, including perspectives on literature, gender, and constitution making. Further, broad thematic essays include a discussion of the historical experiences of the Kurds from the time of their Islamization more than a millennium ago up until the modern era, a comparison of the Kurdish experience with other ethno-national movements, and a treatment of the role of tribalism in modern nation building. This collection is unique in its use of original sources in various languages. The result is an analytically rich portrayal that sheds light on the Kurds’ prospects and the challenges they confront in a region undergoing sweeping upheavals.

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cover of Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities

Kuxlejal Politics

Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities

By Mariana Mora

University of Texas Press, 2017

Over the past two decades, Zapatista indigenous community members have asserted their autonomy and self-determination by using everyday practices as part of their struggle for lekil kuxlejal, a dignified collective life connected to a specific territory. This in-depth ethnography summarizes Mariana Mora’s more than ten years of extended research and solidarity work in Chiapas, with Tseltal and Tojolabal community members helping to design and evaluate her fieldwork. The result of that collaboration—a work of activist anthropology—reveals how Zapatista kuxlejal (or life) politics unsettle key racialized effects of the Mexican neoliberal state.

Through detailed narratives, thick descriptions, and testimonies, Kuxlejal Politics focuses on central spheres of Zapatista indigenous autonomy, particularly governing practices, agrarian reform, women’s collective work, and the implementation of justice, as well as health and education projects. Mora situates the proposals, possibilities, and challenges associated with these decolonializing cultural politics in relation to the racialized restructuring that has characterized the Mexican state over the past twenty years. She demonstrates how, despite official multicultural policies designed to offset the historical exclusion of indigenous people, the Mexican state actually refueled racialized subordination through ostensibly color-blind policies, including neoliberal land reform and poverty alleviation programs. Mora’s findings allow her to critically analyze the deeply complex and often contradictory ways in which the Zapatistas have reconceptualized the political and contested the ordering of Mexican society along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.

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