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What does community mean, exactly? In this interdisciplinary study, Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello takes seriously the concept of community as an object of historical analysis.

Focusing on St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1900 to 1920, Modern Bonds explores the diverse ways that its people renegotiated private and public affiliations during a period of modernization. The book examines a wide range of subjects and materials, including photographs from an African American family, fictional depictions of middle-class women, built environments that created enclaves of immigrants, and public festivals designed to unite all citizens. As Duclos-Orsello demonstrates, it was in this period that a complex set of activities, policies, and practices led to new understandings of community that continue to shape life today.

What does community mean, exactly? In this interdisciplinary study, Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello takes seriously the concept of community as an object of historical analysis.

Focusing on St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1900 to 1920, Modern Bonds explores the diverse ways that its people renegotiated private and public affiliations during a period of modernization. The book examines a wide range of subjects and materials, including photographs from an African American family, fictional depictions of middle-class women, built environments that created enclaves of immigrants, and public festivals designed to unite all citizens. As Duclos-Orsello demonstrates, it was in this period that a complex set of activities, policies, and practices led to new understandings of community that continue to shape life today.

In the first half of the twentieth century, urban elevated highways were much more than utilitarian infrastructure, lifting traffic above the streets; they were statements of civic pride, asserting boldly modern visions for a city’s architecture, economy, and transportation network. Yet three of the most ambitious projects, launched in Chicago, New York, and Boston in the spirit of utopian models by architects such as Le Corbusier and Hugh Ferriss, ultimately fell short of their ideals.

Modern Mobility Aloft is the first study to focus on pre-Interstate urban elevated highways within American architectural and urban history. Amy Finstein traces the idealistic roots of these superstructures, their contrasting realities once built, their impacts on successive development patterns, and the recent challenges they have posed to contemporary urban designers.

Filled with more than 100 historic photographs and illustrations of beaux arts and art deco architecture, Modern Mobility Aloft provides a critical understanding of urban landscapes, transportation, and technological change as cities moved into the modern era.

Uncovering how secrecy, symbolism, and hidden meanings shape modern culture and communication.

The occult has traditionally been understood as the study of secrets of the practice of mysticism or magic. This book broadens our understanding of the occult by treating it as a rhetorical phenomenon tied to language and symbols and more central to American culture than is commonly assumed.

Joshua Gunn approaches the occult as an idiom, examining the ways in which acts of textual criticism and interpretation are occultic in nature, as evident in practices as diverse as academic scholarship, Freemasonry, and television production. Gunn probes, for instance, the ways in which jargon employed by various social and professional groups creates barriers and fosters secrecy. From the theory wars of cultural studies to the Satanic Panic that swept the national mass media in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gunn shows how the paradox of a hidden, buried, or secret meaning that cannot be expressed in language appears time and time again in Western culture.

These recurrent patterns, Gunn argues, arise from a generalized, popular anxiety about language and its limitations. Ultimately, Modern Occult Rhetoric demonstrates the indissoluble relationship between language, secrecy, and publicity, and the centrality of suspicion in our daily lives.

 

The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity.

Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.

Examines the role of imagination in the cultural development of our shrinking world.

The world is growing smaller. Every day we hear this idea expressed and witness its reality in our lives-through the people we meet, the products we buy, the foods we eat, and the movies we watch. In this bold look at the cultural effects of a shrinking world, leading cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai places these challenges and pleasures of contemporary life in a broad global perspective.

Offering a new framework for the cultural study of globalization, Modernity at Large shows how the imagination works as a social force in today's world, providing new resources for identity and energies for creating alternatives to the nation-state, whose era some see as coming to an end. Appadurai examines the current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation, and provides fresh ways of looking at popular consumption patterns, debates about multiculturalism, and ethnic violence. He considers the way images-of lifestyles, popular culture, and self-representation-circulate internationally through the media and are often borrowed in surprising (to their originators) and inventive fashions.

Appadurai simultaneously explores and explodes boundaries-between how we imagine the world and how that imagination influences our self-understanding, between social institutions and their effects on the people who participate in them, between nations and peoples that seem to be ever more homogeneous and yet ever more filled with differences. Modernity at Large  offers a path to move beyond traditional oppositions between culture and power, tradition and modernity, global and local, pointing out the vital role imagination plays in our construction of the world of today-and tomorrow.

Modernity in Motion offers a groundbreaking exploration of Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor’s richly layered body of work spanning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Through the lens of transnational Indigenous studies, this compelling study reveals how Vizenor’s concept of transmotion, which he defines as the interplay between local and global identities, reconstructs modernity as a dynamic force of transformation.

Close readings illuminate Vizenor’s radical storytelling, which bridges seemingly disparate worlds: the White Earth Reservation, Nazi-occupied Paris, post-Hiroshima Japan, and beyond. By weaving these far-flung geographies into unexpected constellations, Vizenor challenges readers to rethink Indigenous history, sovereignty, and creative expression within a global framework.

Positioned at the intersection of tribal-centric and world literature paradigms, Modernity in Motion is essential reading for scholars of Indigenous studies and comparative literature.

This is a fascinating inquiry into the factors that determine the acceptance or rejection of capitalism by the industrial working class. Combining classical social theory, historical evidence, and survey data, Waisman explores the relationship between the degree of modernization and the legitimacy of the capitalist social order.

Propositions about the interaction between established elites and emerging working classes are illustrated with three typical cases: Disraelian Britain, Bismarckian Germany, and Peronist Argentina. From the contrasting theories of Marx and Bakunin, the author derives hypotheses concerning the position of the working class in the economy and the consequences this has for legitimacy. He finds that countries at middle levels of industrial development—mostly latecomers to industrialization in Southern Europe and advanced areas of Latin America—have the greatest difficulty in establishing capitalism as a legitimate social order. They are advanced enough to have a large working class, yet underdeveloped enough to have a dissatisfied one.

Combining anthropological, historical, and public health perspectives, Modernizing Medicine in Zimbabwe explores the intersection of African healing traditions and Western health development, emphasizing the role of this historical relationship in current debates about HIV/AIDS. Drawing on diverse sources including colonial records, missionary correspondence, international health policy reports, and interviews with traditional healers, anthropologist David S. Simmons demonstrates the remarkable adaptive qualities of these disparate communities as they try to meet the urgent needs of the people.

Morocco is hailed by academics, international NGO workers, and the media as a trailblazer in women’s rights and legal reforms. The country is considered a model for other countries in the Middle East and North African region, but has Morocco made as much progress as experts and government officials claim? In Modernizing Patriarchy, Katja Žvan Elliott examines why women’s rights advances are lauded in Morocco in theory but are often not recognized in reality, despite the efforts of both Islamist and secular feminists.

In Morocco, female literacy rates remain among the lowest in the region; many women are victims of gender-based violence despite legal reforms; and girls as young as twelve are still engaged to adult men, despite numerous reforms. Based on extensive ethnographic research and fieldwork in Oued al-Ouliya, Modernizing Patriarchy offers a window into the life of Moroccan Muslim women who, though often young and educated, find it difficult to lead a dignified life in a country where they are expected to have only one destiny: that of wife and mother. Žvan Elliott exposes their struggles with modernity and the legal reforms that are supposedly ameliorating their lives. In a balanced approach, she also presents male voices and their reasons for criticizing the prevailing women’s rights discourse. Compelling and insightful, Modernizing Patriarchy exposes the rarely talked about reality of Morocco’s approach toward reform.

This volume presents the latest research on the development and use of communal spaces and places across the Mogollon region, located in what is now the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. New data demonstrate that these spaces and places, though diverse in form and function, were essential to community development and cohesion, particularly during critical formative periods associated with increasing sedentism and farming, and during comparable periods of social change.
 
The authors ask questions crucial to understanding past communities: What is a communal space or place? How did villagers across the Mogollon region use such places? And how do modern archaeologists investigate the past to learn how ancient people thought about themselves and the world around them? Contributors use innovative approaches to explore the development patterns and properties of communal spaces and places, as well as how and why these places were incorporated into the daily lives of village residents. Buildings and other types of communal spaces are placed into broader cultural and social contexts, acknowledging the enduring importance of the kiva-type structure to many Native American societies of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.

A bold reconsideration of Hoodoo belief and practice

Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. She examines Hoodoo culture and history by tracing its emergence from African traditions to religious practices in the Americas. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The spread came about through the mechanism of the "African Religion Complex," eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the African ethnic groups in the United States.

The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines Hoodoo material culture, particularly the "High John the Conquer" root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the "walking boy" and the "Ring Shout," a sacred dance of Hoodoo tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

How computer animation technologies became vital visualization tools in the life sciences

Who would have thought that computer animation technologies developed in the second half of the twentieth century would become essential visualization tools in today’s biosciences? This book is the first to examine this phenomenon. Molecular Capture reveals how popular media consumption and biological knowledge production have converged in molecular animations—computer simulations of molecular and cellular processes that immerse viewers in the temporal unfolding of molecular worlds—to produce new regimes of seeing and knowing.

Situating the development of this technology within an evolving field of historical, epistemological, and political negotiations, Adam Nocek argues that molecular animations not only represent a key transformation in the visual knowledge practices of life scientists but also bring into sharp focus fundamental mutations in power within neoliberal capitalism. In particular, he reveals how the convergence of the visual economies of science and entertainment in molecular animations extends neoliberal modes of governance to the perceptual practices of scientific subjects. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative metaphysics and Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality, Nocek builds a media philosophy well equipped to examine the unique coordination of media cultures in this undertheorized form of scientific media. More specifically, he demonstrates how governmentality operates across visual practices in the biosciences and the popular mediasphere to shape a molecular animation apparatus that unites scientific knowledge and entertainment culture.

Ultimately, Molecular Capture proposes that molecular animation is an achievement of governmental design. It weaves together speculative media philosophy, science and technology studies, and design theory to investigate how scientific knowledge practices are designed through media apparatuses.