193 books match the query 'Empire' and 8 start with m

cover of Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization

Main Street and Empire

The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization

Poll, Ryan

Rutgers University Press, 2012

The small town has become a national icon that circulates widely in literature, culture, and politics as an authentic American space and community. Yet there are surprisingly few critical studies that analyze the small town’s centrality to the United States’ identity and imagination.

In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll addresses this need, arguing that the small town, as evoked by the image of “Main Street,” is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which America’s “everyday” stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global scale.

Bringing together a broad selection of texts—from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show to the speeches of William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama—Poll examines how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century. He contends that the dominant small town, despite its innocent, nostalgic appearance, is central to the development of the U.S. empire and global capitalism.


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cover of Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative And The Disruption Of Empire

Manifest Perdition

Shipwreck Narrative And The Disruption Of Empire

Josiah Blackmore

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A new take on a famous collection of shipwreck narratives that places them at the center of resistance to colonialism

Shipwreck, death, and survival; terror, hunger, and salvation—these are the experiences of the passengers onboard merchant Portuguese ships sailing the high seas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And this is the stuff of the stories committed to print by survivors upon their return to the homeland. These Portuguese shipwreck narratives, rescued for all time in the eighteenth century by Bernardo Gomes de Brito in História Trágico-Marítima (1735-36), or The Tragic History of the Sea, are the subject of Manifest Perdition, a work that reveals their important—and until now, largely ignored—place in literary history.

In this book we see how the dramatic, compelling, and often gory accounts of shipwreck, depicting a world out of control, challenge state-sponsored versions of events in the prevailing historiographic culture. Written during the heyday of Iberian maritime expansion and colonialism, the shipwreck narrative builds an alternative historical record to the vision and reality of empire elaborated by the official chroniclers of the realm. Manifest Perdition presents both theoretical considerations this genre and close readings of several texts, readings that disclose a poetics of the shipwreck text, of how survivors characteristically yet multifariously narrated their world. Included is a study of the medieval Iberian poetic predecessors of the shipwreck tale, as well as an exploration of the Portuguese Inquisition’s attempt to commandeer and steer the reading of the unruly narratives. The book engages issues of literary theory, historiography, and colonialism to portray the Portuguese shipwreck narrative for the first time as both a product of and a resistance to the prolific culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansionist history.
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cover of Manifest Technique: Hip Hop, Empire, and Visionary Filipino American Culture

Manifest Technique

Hip Hop, Empire, and Visionary Filipino American Culture

Mark R. Villegas

University of Illinois Press, 2021

An obscured vanguard in hip hop

Filipino Americans have been innovators and collaborators in hip hop since the culture’s early days. But despite the success of artists like Apl.de.Ap of the Black Eyed Peas and superstar producer Chad Hugo, the genre’s significance in Filipino American communities is often overlooked. Mark R. Villegas considers sprawling coast-to-coast hip hop networks to reveal how Filipino Americans have used music, dance, and visual art to create their worlds. Filipino Americans have been exploring their racial position in the world in embracing hip hop’s connections to memories of colonial and racial violence. Villegas scrutinizes practitioners’ language of defiance, placing the cultural grammar of hip hop within a larger legacy of decolonization.

An important investigation of hip hop as a movement of racial consciousness, Manifest Technique shows how the genre has inspired Filipino Americans to envision and enact new ideas of their bodies, their history, and their dignity.  

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cover of Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire

Mapping Europe's Borderlands

Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire

Steven Seegel

University of Chicago Press, 2012

The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book.
Mapping Europe’s Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, Seegel explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. Seegel concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographers’ regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices. 
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cover of Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843

Mapping an Empire

The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843

Matthew H. Edney

University of Chicago Press, 1997

In this fascinating history of the British surveys of India, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain used modern survey techniques to not only create and define the spatial image of its Empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities.

"There is much to be praised in this book. It is an excellent history of how India came to be painted red in the nineteenth century. But more importantly, Mapping an Empire sets a new standard for books that examine a fundamental problem in the history of European imperialism."—D. Graham Burnett, Times Literary Supplement

"Mapping an Empire is undoubtedly a major contribution to the rapidly growing literature on science and empire, and a work which deserves to stimulate a great deal of fresh thinking and informed research."—David Arnold, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

"This case study offers broadly applicable insights into the relationship between ideology, technology and politics. . . . Carefully read, this is a tale of irony about wishful thinking and the limits of knowledge."—Publishers Weekly

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cover of Mapping and Empire: Soldier-Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier

Mapping and Empire

Soldier-Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier

Edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon

University of Texas Press, 2005

From the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, Spain, then Mexico, and finally the United States took ownership of the land from the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico to the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California—today's American Southwest. Each country faced the challenge of holding on to territory that was poorly known and sparsely settled, and each responded by sending out military mapping expeditions to set boundaries and chart topographical features. All three countries recognized that turning terra incognita into clearly delineated political units was a key step in empire building, as vital to their national interest as the activities of the missionaries, civilian officials, settlers, and adventurers who followed in the footsteps of the soldier-engineers.

With essays by eight leading historians, this book offers the most current and comprehensive overview of the processes by which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. soldier-engineers mapped the southwestern frontier, as well as the local and even geopolitical consequences of their mapping. Three essays focus on Spanish efforts to map the Gulf and Pacific Coasts, to chart the inland Southwest, and to define and defend its boundaries against English, French, Russian, and American incursions. Subsequent essays investigate the role that mapping played both in Mexico's attempts to maintain control of its northern territory and in the United States' push to expand its political boundary to the Pacific Ocean. The concluding essay draws connections between mapping in the Southwest and the geopolitical history of the Americas and Europe.

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cover of Married to the Empire: Three Governors' Wives in Russian America 1829-1864

Married to the Empire

Three Governors' Wives in Russian America 1829-1864

Susanna Rabow-Edling

University of Alaska Press, 2015

The Russian Empire had a problem. While they had established successful colonies in their territory of Alaska, life in the settlements was anything but civilized. The settlers of the Russian-America Company were drunk, disorderly, and corrupt. Worst of all, they were terrible role models for the Natives, whom the empire saw as in desperate need of moral enlightenment. The empire’s solution? Send in women. In 1829, the Company decreed that any governor appointed after that date had to have a wife, in the hopes that these more pious women would serve as glowing examples of domesticity and bring charm to a brutish territory.

Elisabeth von Wrangell, Margaretha Etholén, and Anna Furuhjelm were three of eight governors' wives who took up this domestic mantle. Married to the Empire tells their stories using their own words and though extraordinary research by Susanna Rabow-Edling. All three were young and newly wed when they left Russia for the furthest outpost of the empire, and all three went through personal and cultural struggles as they worked to adjust to life in the colony. Their trials offer a little-heard female history of Russian Alaska, while illuminating the issues that arose while trying to reconcile expectations of womanhood with the realities of frontier life.
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cover of Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues

Mistaken for an Empire

A Memoir in Tongues

Christine Imperial

The Ohio State University Press, 2023

“As an adult, [Imperial] attempted what no one else had done: translating [‘The White Man’s Burden’] into Tagalog. These efforts led Imperial to reflect on her many (often disorienting) moves between the U.S. and the Philippines as well as the pain that translating the poem, alongside her own fractured experiences, represented.…Kipling’s ‘burden,’ Imperial suggests, is far more nuanced than many believe.…An intriguing and provocative book.”—Kirkus Born in postcolonial Philippines into a family—and country—with a complicated history, Christine Imperial learns from a lifetime of experiences that there is no easy path to understanding or belonging. Setting out to renew her relationship to Tagalog, the language she had previously distanced herself from, she contends with the meaning of her dual Philippine/US citizenship along with the conditions surrounding it, reflecting on imperialist and class systems and the history of her birth country. Beginning with an attempt to translate into Tagalog Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”—Kipling’s ode to American imperialism after the US takeover of the Philippines—Imperial reflects on and writes against Kipling’s poem as she unspools her fractured family’s story. Reckoning with both the anguish and promise of hybridity, Mistaken for an Empire expands into an exploration of the author’s relationship to English and Tagalog, history, family and state, origin and belonging. By interrogating the many intricacies of individual and national identity and the legacies that shape them, Imperial grapples with the tangled nature of allegiance, whether it be to family, to country, or to self.
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