468 books match the query 'Identity' and 37 start with p

cover of PERFORMING THE VICTORIAN: JOHN RUSKIN AND IDENTITY IN THEATER, SCIENCE, AND EDUCATION

PERFORMING THE VICTORIAN

JOHN RUSKIN AND IDENTITY IN THEATER, SCIENCE, AND EDUCATION

SHARON ARONOFSKY WELTMAN

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is the first book to examine Ruskin’s writing on theater.
            In works as celebrated as Modern Painters and obscure as Love’s Meinie, Ruskin uses his voracious attendance at the theater to illustrate points about social justice, aesthetic practice, and epistemology. Opera, Shakespeare, pantomime, French comedies, juggling acts, and dance prompt his fascination with performed identities that cross boundaries of gender, race, nation, and species. These theatrical examples also reveal the primacy of performance to his understanding of science and education.
            In addition to Ruskin on theater, Performing the Victorian interprets recent theater portraying Ruskin (The Invention of Love, The Countess, the opera Modern Painters) as merely a Victorian prude or pedophile against which contemporary culture defines itself. These theatrical depictions may be compared to concurrent plays about Ruskin’s friend and student Oscar Wilde (Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Judas Kiss). Like Ruskin, Wilde is misrepresented on the fin-de-millennial stage, in his case anachronistically as an icon of homosexual identity. These recent characterizations offer a set of static identity labels that constrain contemporary audiences more rigidly than the mercurial selves conjured in the prose of either Ruskin or Wilde.
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cover of Palestinian Music: Modernity, Culture, and Identity from the Arab Revolt to Black September

Palestinian Music

Modernity, Culture, and Identity from the Arab Revolt to Black September

Issa Boulos

University of Texas Press, 2027

An exploration of how Palestinian music—from village songs to urban broadcasts—adapted to political upheaval, colonial pressure, and diaspora life, serving as both a cultural anchor and a vehicle for regional identity during the mid-twentieth century.

Palestinian music has long been embedded in everyday life, shaping and reflecting social, cultural, and political identities. It has served as a means of storytelling and news-sharing, a part of ritual and community life, and a connection to the broader musical traditions of the Near East. As displacement scattered Palestinians across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and beyond, musicians carried folk and urban musical traditions into new political and cultural contexts, blending them with various modernities and transforming the process of music-making. In the decades that followed, music and dance were increasingly folklorized and mobilized as symbols of Palestinian identity.

Palestinian Music traces these transformations from the British Mandate through the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1970s. Drawing on rare recordings, oral histories, archival materials, and original musical transcriptions, ethnomusicologist Issa Boulos examines two dozen artists across five countries and follows the composers, producers, and performers whose innovations helped shape the musical scene of the entire region. Palestinian music emerges as a dynamic medium through which Palestinians continually negotiated identity, solidarity, and hope—balancing preservation and innovation, rootedness and displacement.

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cover of Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948

Palestinian Rituals of Identity

The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948

Awad Halabi

University of Texas Press, 2023

Members of Palestine’s Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses’s tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations.

Palestinian Rituals of Identity takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine’s modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians’ responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation’s growing national identity.

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cover of Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion

Paper Families

Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion

Estelle T. Lau

Duke University Press, 2006

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Chinese the first immigrant group officially excluded from the United States. In Paper Families, Estelle T. Lau demonstrates how exclusion affected Chinese American communities and initiated the development of restrictive U.S. immigration policies and practices. Through the enforcement of the Exclusion Act and subsequent legislation, the U.S. immigration service developed new forms of record keeping and identification practices. Meanwhile, Chinese Americans took advantage of the system’s loophole: children of U.S. citizens were granted automatic eligibility for immigration. The result was an elaborate system of “paper families,” in which U.S. citizens of Chinese descent claimed fictive, or “paper,” children who could then use their kinship status as a basis for entry into the United States. This subterfuge necessitated the creation of “crib sheets” outlining genealogies and providing village maps and other information that could be used during immigration processing.

Drawing on these documents as well as immigration case files, legislative materials, and transcripts of interviews and court proceedings, Lau reveals immigration as an interactive process. Chinese immigrants and their U.S. families were subject to regulation and surveillance, but they also manipulated and thwarted those regulations, forcing the U.S. government to adapt its practices and policies. Lau points out that the Exclusion Acts and the pseudo-familial structures that emerged in response have had lasting effects on Chinese American identity. She concludes with a look at exclusion’s legacy, including the Confession Program of the 1960s that coerced people into divulging the names of paper family members and efforts made by Chinese American communities to recover their lost family histories.

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cover of Pasadena Before the Roses: Race, Identity, and Land Use in Southern California, 1771–1890

Pasadena Before the Roses

Race, Identity, and Land Use in Southern California, 1771–1890

Yvette J. Saavedra

University of Arizona Press, 2018

Incorporated in 1886 by midwestern settlers known as the Indiana Colony, the City of Pasadena has grown into a world-famous tourist destination recognized for the beauty of its Tournament of Roses Parade, the excitement of the annual Rose Bowl, and the charm of the Old Town District.

But what existed before the roses? Before it was Pasadena, this land was Hahamog’na, the ancestral lands of the Tongva people. Later, it comprised the heart of the San Gabriel Mission lands, and in the Mexican period, it became Rancho San Pascual. The 1771 Spanish conquest of this land set in motion several colonial processes that would continue into the twentieth century and beyond.

In Pasadena Before the Roses, historian Yvette J. Saavedra examines a period of 120 years to illustrate the interconnectedness of power, ideas of land use, and the negotiation of identity within multiple colonial moments. By centering the San Gabriel Mission lands as the region’s economic, social, and cultural foundation, she shows how Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American groups each have redefined the meanings of land use to build their homes and their lives. These visions have resulted in competing colonialisms that framed the racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies of their respective societies.
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cover of Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany

Passing Illusions

Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany

Kerry Wallach

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Weimar Germany (1919–33) was an era of equal rights for women and minorities, but also of growing antisemitism and hostility toward the Jewish population. This led some Jews to want to pass or be perceived as non-Jews; yet there were still occasions when it was beneficial to be openly Jewish. Being visible as a Jew often involved appearing simultaneously non-Jewish and Jewish. Passing Illusions examines the constructs of German-Jewish visibility during the Weimar Republic and explores the controversial aspects of this identity—and the complex reasons many decided to conceal or reveal themselves as Jewish. Focusing on racial stereotypes, Kerry Wallach outlines the key elements of visibility, invisibility, and the ways Jewishness was detected and presented through a broad selection of historical sources including periodicals, personal memoirs, and archival documents, as well as cultural texts including works of fiction, anecdotes, images, advertisements, performances, and films. Twenty black-and-white illustrations (photographs, works of art, cartoons, advertisements, film stills) complement the book’s analysis of visual culture.

 
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cover of Passing and the Fictions of Identity

Passing and the Fictions of Identity

Elaine K. Ginsberg

Duke University Press, 1996

Passing refers to the process whereby a person of one race, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation adopts the guise of another. Historically, this has often involved black slaves passing as white in order to gain their freedom. More generally, it has served as a way for women and people of color to access male or white privilege. In their examination of this practice of crossing boundaries, the contributors to this volume offer a unique perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities.

These essays consider a wide range of texts and moments from colonial times to the present that raise significant questions about the political motivations inherent in the origins and maintenance of identity categories and boundaries. Through discussions of such literary works as Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, The Autobiography of an Ex–Coloured Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Hidden Hand, Black Like Me, and Giovanni’s Room, the authors examine issues of power and privilege and ways in which passing might challenge the often rigid structures of identity politics. Their interrogation of the semiotics of behavior, dress, language, and the body itself contributes significantly to an understanding of national, racial, gender, and sexual identity in American literature and culture.
Contextualizing and building on the theoretical work of such scholars as Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Passing and the Fictions of Identity will be of value to students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as U.S. history and literature.

Contributors. Martha Cutter, Katharine Nicholson Ings, Samira Kawash, Adrian Piper, Valerie Rohy, Marion Rust, Julia Stern, Gayle Wald, Ellen M. Weinauer, Elizabeth Young

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cover of Passing for Spain: CERVANTES AND THE FICTIONS OF IDENTITY

Passing for Spain

CERVANTES AND THE FICTIONS OF IDENTITY

Barbara Fuchs

University of Illinois Press, 2003

Passing for Spain charts the intersections of identity, nation, and literary representation in early modern Spain. Barbara Fuchs analyzes the trope of passing in Don Quijote and other works by Cervantes, linking the use of disguise to the broader historical and social context of Counter-Reformation Spain and the religious and political dynamics of the Mediterranean Basin.
 
In five lucid and engaging chapters, Fuchs examines what passes in Cervantes’s fiction: gender and race in Don Quijote and “Las dos doncellas”; religion in “El amante liberal” and La gran sultana; national identity in the Persiles and “La española inglesa.” She argues that Cervantes represents cross-cultural impersonation -- or characters who pass for another gender, nationality, or religion -- as challenges to the state’s attempts to assign identities and categories to proper Spanish subjects.
 
Fuchs demonstrates the larger implications of this challenge by bringing a wide range of literary and political texts to bear on Cervantes’s representations. Impeccably researched, Passing for Spain examines how the fluidity of individual identity in early modern Spain undermined a national identity based on exclusion and difference.
 
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cover of Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity

Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs

Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity

Wayne Brekhus

University of Chicago Press, 2003

What does it mean to be a gay man living in the suburbs? Do you identify primarily as gay, or suburban, or some combination of the two? For that matter, how does anyone decide what his or her identity is?

In this first-ever ethnography of American gay suburbanites, Wayne H. Brekhus demonstrates that who one is depends at least in part on where and when one is. For many urban gay men, being homosexual is key to their identity because they live, work, and socialize in almost exclusively gay circles. Brekhus calls such men "lifestylers" or peacocks. Chameleons or "commuters," on the other hand, live and work in conventional suburban settings, but lead intense gay social and sexual lives outside the suburbs. Centaurs, meanwhile, or "integrators," mix typical suburban jobs and homes with low-key gay social and sexual activities. In other words, lifestylers see homosexuality as something you are, commuters as something you do, and integrators as part of yourself.

Ultimately, Brekhus shows that lifestyling, commuting, and integrating embody competing identity strategies that occur not only among gay men but across a broad range of social categories. What results, then, is an innovative work that will interest sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and students of gay culture.
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cover of Peer Power: Preadolescent Culture and Identity

Peer Power

Preadolescent Culture and Identity

Adler, Peter

Rutgers University Press, 1998

Peer Power seeks to explode existing myths about children's friendships, power and popularity, and the gender chasm between elementary school boys and girls. Based on eight years of intensive insider participant observation in their own children's community, Peter and Patti Adler discuss the vital components of the lives of preadolescents, popularity, friendships, cliques, social status, social isolation, loyalty, bullying, boy-girl relationships, and afterschool activities. They describe how friendships shift and change, how people are drawn into groups and excluded from them, how clique leaders maintain their power and popularity, and how individuals' social experiences and feelings about themselves differ from the top of the pecking order to the bottom. In so doing, the Adlers focus their attention on the peer culture of the children themselves and the way this culture extracts and modifies elements from adult culture. Children's peer culture, as it is nourished in those spaces where grown ups cannot penetrate, stands between individual children and the larger adult society. As such, it is a mediator and shaper, influencing the way children collectively interpret their surroundings and deal with the common problems they face.

The Adlers explore some of the patterns that develop in this social space, noting both the differences in boys' and girls' gendered cultures and the overlap in many social dynamics, afterschool activities, role behaviour, romantic inclinations and social stratification. For example, children's participation in adult-organized afterschool activities - a now-prominent feature of many American children's social experience - has profound implications for their socialization and development, moving them away from the negotiated, spontaneous character of play into the formal systems of adult norms and values at ever-younger ages. When they retreat from adults, however, they still display distinctive peer group dynamics, forging strong ingroup/outgroup differentiation, loyalty and identification. Peer culture thus contains informal social mechanisms through which children create their social order, determine their place and identity, and develop positive and negative feelings about themselves. Studying children's peer culture is thus valuable as it reveals not only how this subculture parallels the adult world but also how it differs from it.
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cover of Performing Brazil: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Performing Arts

Performing Brazil

Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Performing Arts

Edited by Severino J. Albuquerque and Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

A field-shaping anthology by top cultural critics and practitioners representing a wide range of disciplines and art forms, Performing Brazil is the first book to bring together studies of the many and varied manifestations of Brazilian performance in and beyond their country of origin. Arguing that diverse forms of performance are best understood when presented in tandem, it offers new takes on better-known forms, such as carnival and capoeira, as well as those studied less often, including gender acts, curatorial practice, political protest, and the performance of Brazil in the United States.
            The contributors to the volume are Maria José Somerlate Barbosa, Eric A. Galm, Annie McNeill Gibson, Ana Paula Höfling, Benjamin Legg, Bryan McCann, Simone Osthoff, Fernando de Sousa Rocha, Cristina F. Rosa, Alessandra Santos, and Lidia Santos.
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cover of Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality

Performing the News

Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality

Elia Powers

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality explores how journalists from historically marginalized groups have long felt pressure to conform when performing for audiences. Many speak with a flat, “neutral” accent, modify their delivery to hide distinctive vocal attributes, dress conventionally to appeal to the “average” viewer, and maintain a consistent appearance to avoid unwanted attention. Their aim is what author Elia Powers refers to as performance neutrality—presentation that is deemed unobjectionable, reveals little about journalists’ social identity, and supposedly does not detract from their message. Increasingly, journalists are challenging restrictive, purportedly neutral forms of self-presentation. This book argues that performance neutrality is a myth that reinforces the status quo, limits on-air diversity, and hinders efforts to make newsrooms more inclusive. Through in-depth interviews with journalists in broadcasting and podcasting, and those who shape their performance, the author suggests ways to make journalism more inclusive and representative of diverse audiences.

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cover of Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast

Persistent Callings

Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast

Joseph E. Taylor

Oregon State University Press, 2019

The Nestucca Valley is a small watershed, tucked away in one corner of a county in far western Oregon. There are no incorporated towns, and cows outnumber humans. It has long been a place without a written history, yet its past offers many surprising twists on received wisdom about rural economies. In crisp prose and succinct chapters, Persistent Callings carries readers from aboriginal times to the present, illustrating the wisdom of seasonal labor, the complex relationships between work and identity, and the resilience of rural economics across more than a century of almost continual change.

Life in this watershed, known to locals as “South County,” has always been demanding. Farming, fishing, and logging were difficult occupations, but work had deeper meanings. Challenges arrived in many forms, including climate shifts, market crashes, regulatory changes, and industry consolidations. Residents’ ability to innovate was their greatest resource, and their persistence helps us to recognize the callings they pursued.

During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, disruptions came more quickly, and they coincided with infusions of capital that dramatically altered the structure of employment, with devastating results for the valley’s hardest working residents. Unemployment and poverty skyrocketed while health and life expectancy dropped to alarming levels. Moreover, the arrival of retirees and rise of environmental amenities actually exacerbated some ecological problems. Little in this history plays out as expected, and much of it will make readers reconsider how they think about the social, economic, and environmental contours of rural life in the American West.

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cover of Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism

Personal Demons

Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism

Grace Lavery

Duke University Press, 2026

Personal Demons offers a new theory of the relation between sex, desire, and personhood, asking what we should make of the many contemporary instances when bodies seem to want different things from the consciousnesses within them. Grace Lavery maps the negative energies—demonic, incoherent, resistant—through which liberalism produces and disciplines its scapegoats. Through an examination of modern possession narratives, from racialized spectacles of bodily transformation and disguise to the liturgy of the Church of Scientology, Lavery unspools the knot of body, affect, and representation at the end of liberalism. In the face of the uneasy bargains queer and trans liberal organizations made with the phobic state, Personal Demons elaborates a vision of queer collective living that does not assume a shared concept of interiority, taking the incompatibility of such concepts as the founding axiom for a coalition against the ideological regulation of bodies and minds.
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cover of Personal Names in Asia: History, Culture and Identity

Personal Names in Asia

History, Culture and Identity

Edited by Yangwen Zheng and Chales J-H MacDonald

National University of Singapore Press, 2009

The world's population negotiates a multiplicity of naming systems. Some are compatible with the "normative" system of the world of passports and identity cards but a great many are not. This is particularly true in Asia, a region with some of the most sophisticated naming devices found anywhere in the world, including nicknames and teknonyms, religious and corporation names, honor and death names, pseudonyms and retirement names, house names and clan names, local and foreign names, official and private names. People across the continent carry multiple names meaningful to different audiences. Some are used only in family relations while others locate individuals in terms of gender, ethnicity, religion, caste, class, and nation. The centrality of names to many of the crucial debates and preoccupations of the modern world – identity, hybridity, migration, nationalism, multi-culturalism, globalization – makes it particularly surprising that there has been little systematic comparative exploration of Asian names and naming systems. This path-breaking volume classifies and theorizes the systems underlying naming practices in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia where systems are abundant and fluid. Using historical and socio-anthropological perspectives, the authors of this exceptionally close collaborative effort show the intricate connections between naming systems, notions of personhood and the prevailing ethos of interpersonal relations. They also show how the peoples of Asia are fashioning new types of naming and different ways of identifying themselves to suit the demands of a changing world.
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cover of Phantom Byzantium: Europe, Empire, and Identity from Late Antiquity to World War II

Phantom Byzantium

Europe, Empire, and Identity from Late Antiquity to World War II

Anthony Kaldellis

University of Chicago Press, 2026

How the West appropriated aspects of the eastern Roman empire while portraying it as inferior.
 
Unveiling the ideological foundations of Byzantine studies, Phantom Byzantium is a pioneering survey of western European perceptions of the eastern Roman empire (also known as Byzantium) spanning late antiquity to World War II. Through ten chronological chapters, Anthony Kaldellis makes the case that western Europe gradually formed its identity by adopting prestigious cultural elements from the eastern empire but simultaneously portraying the east as inferior. The West modeled its Roman imperial style on Constantinople while minimizing the latter as Greek rather than Roman; appropriated a host of Christian traditions from the east while casting the east as schismatic, heretical, or treacherous; and, during the Renaissance, used classical Hellenic philology from Greek scholars before marginalizing them as unworthy bearers of that tradition. This orientalizing impulse worked to buttress western exceptionalism and resulted in the fictitious construction of “Byzantium” as Europe’s evil doppelgänger, embodying the worst versions of traditions fundamental to European identity and casting the region as despotic, superstitious, and degenerate.

Explaining the creation, history, and functions of the ideological construct of Byzantium in the western imagination and European self-fashioning, this book has critical implications for contemporary views of European history.

 
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cover of Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation

Picturing the Beast

Animals, Identity, and Representation

Steve Baker

University of Illinois Press, 1993

From Mickey Mouse to the teddy bear, from the Republican elephant to the use of "jackass" as an all-purpose insult, images of animals play a central role in politics, entertainment, and social interactions. In this penetrating look at how Western culture pictures the beast, Steve Baker examines how such images--sometimes affectionate, sometimes derogatory, always distorting--affect how real animals are perceived and treated.

Baker provides an animated discussion of how animals enter into the iconography of power through wartime depictions of the enemy, political cartoons, and sports symbolism. He examines a phenomenon he calls the "disnification" of animals, meaning a reduction of the animal to the trivial and stupid, and shows how books featuring talking animals underscore human superiority. He also discusses how his findings might inform the strategies of animal rights advocates seeking to call public attention to animal suffering and abuse. Until animals are extricated from the baggage of imposed images, Baker maintains, neither they nor their predicaments can be clearly seen.

For this edition, Baker provides a new introduction, specifically addressing an American audience, that touches on such topics as the Cow Parade, animal imagery in the presidential race, and animatronic animals in recent films.
 
 
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cover of Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation

Place Envy

Essays in Search of Orientation

Michael Lowenthal

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

A queer, Jewish writer searches for belonging across countries, identities, and histories in a moving collection of essays about orientation and home.

Growing up in places where his family had no past, and met mostly by silence from his Holocaust-refugee grandparents, Michael Lowenthal longed to be from somewhere. Then he realized he was gay and felt displaced from his own displaced family. Place Envy—his first book of essays after five acclaimed books of fiction—chronicles his quest for orientation in the world: as an agnostic Jew, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth. Yearning for a queer lineage, he obsesses about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then finds, in his grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy. He lives with a Pennsylvania Amish family; accompanies blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; plays jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and pursues a clarifying love affair in Brazil. Collectively, these essays recount Lowenthal’s many journeys of dislocation and relocation: to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.
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cover of Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature

Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature

Dorothy E. Mosby

University of Missouri Press, 2003

In Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature, Dorothy E. Mosby investigates contemporary black writing from Costa Rica and argues that it reveals the story of a people formed by multiple migrations and cultural transformations. Afro–Costa Rican writers from different historical periods express their relation to place, language, and identity as a “process,” a transformation partly due to sociohistorical circumstances and partly in reaction against the national myths of whiteness in the dominant Hispanic culture. Black writers in Costa Rica have used creative writing as a means to express this change in self-identity—as West Indians, as Costa Ricans, as “Latinos,” and as a contentious union of all these cultural identifications—as well as to combat myths and extrinsic definitions of their culture.
Mosby examines the transformation of identity in works by black writers in Costa Rica of Afro–West Indian descent as particular national identities find common ground in the expression of an Afro–Costa Rican identity. These writers include Alderman Johnson Roden, Dolores Joseph, Eulalia Bernard, Quince Duncan, Shirley Campbell, and Delia McDonald, all of whose works are analyzed for their use of language and their reflections on place and exile. Their works are also read as articulations of generational shifts in the assertion of cultural and national identity. Mosby convincingly argues that Afro–Costa Rican literature emerged out of the African-derived oral traditions of Anglo–West Indian literature. She then goes on to show how second-generation writers included this literary tradition in their work, while fourth-generation poets refer to it only through occasional allusions.
With the current growth of interest in Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Latin American cultural and literary studies, this book will be essential for courses in Latin American and Caribbean literature, comparative studies, Diaspora studies, history, cultural studies, and the literature of migration.
 
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cover of Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity

Placing the Academy

Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity

edited by Jennifer Sinor and Rona Kaufman

Utah State University Press, 2007

Twenty-one writers answer the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are--where, for each of them, being in some way part of academia. In personal essays, they imaginatively delineate and engage the diverse, occasionally unexpected play of place in shaping them, writers and teachers in varied environments, with unique experiences and distinctive world views, and reconfiguring for them conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.

Contents

I Introduction Writing Place, Jennifer Sinor

II Here
Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy, Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore
The Work the Landscape Calls Us To, Michael Sowder
Valley Language, Diana Garcia
What I Learned from the Campus Plumber, Charles Bergman
M-I-Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter, Katherine Fischer
On Frogs, Poems, and Teaching at a Rural Community College, Sean W. Henne

III There
Levittown Breeds Anarchists Film at 11:00, Kathryn T. Flannery
Living in a Transformed Desert, Mitsuye Yamada
A More Fortunate Destiny, Jayne Brim Box
Imagined Vietnams, Charles Waugh

IV Everywhere
Teaching on Stolen Ground, Deborah A. Miranda
The Blind Teaching the Blind: The Academic as Naturalist, or Not, Robert Michael Pyle
Where Are You From? Lee Torda

V In Between
Going Away to Think, Scott Slovic
Fronteriza Consciousness: The Site and Language of the Academy and of Life, Norma Elia Cantu
Bones of Summer, Mary Clearman Blew
Singing, Speaking, and Seeing a World, Janice M. Gould
Making Places Work: Felt Sense, Identity, and Teaching, Jeffrey M. Buchanan

VI Coda
Running in Place: The Personal at Work, in Motion, on Campus, and in the Neighborhood, Rona Kaufman

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cover of Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom

Planet Cosplay

Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom

Edited by Paul Mountfort, Anne Peirson-Smith and Adam Geczy

Intellect Books, 2019

This book examines cosplay from a set of ground-breaking disciplinary approaches, highlighting the latest and emerging discourses around this popular cultural practice. Planet Cosplay is authored by widely-published scholars in this field, examining the central aspects of cosplay ranging from sources and sites to performance and play, from sex and gender to production and consumption. Topics discussed include the rise of cosplay as a cultural phenomenon and its role in personal, cultural, and global identities. Planet Cosplay provides a unique, multifaceted examination of the practice from theoretical bases including popular cultural studies, performance studies, gender studies, and transmedia studies. As the title suggests, the book’s purview is global, encompassing some of the main centers of cosplay throughout the United States Asia  Europe and Australasia. Each of the chapters offers not only a set of entry points into its subject matter, but also a narrative of the development of cosplay and scholarly approaches to it.
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cover of Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity in the Cameroon Grassfields

Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs

Threatened Reproduction and Identity in the Cameroon Grassfields

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs examines the symbolic language of food, fertility, and infertility in a small, mountainous African kingdom to explore more general notions of gender, modernity, and cultural identity.
In the Cameroon grassfields, an area of high fertility, women hold a paradoxical fear of infertility. By combining symbolic, political-economic, and historical analyses, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg traces the way reproductive threat is invoked in struggles over gender and ethnic identities. Women's fears of reproductive disorders, she finds, are an important mode of expression for their worries about much larger issues, such as rural poverty, brought about or exacerbated by political and economic changes in this century.
A lively case study of an infertile queen who flees the palace sets the stage for discussions of the ethnographic and historical setting, the symbolism of fertility and infertility, and the development and interaction of cosmopolitan and ethno-gynecologies. The book concludes with an analysis of the links between women's role in human reproduction and the divine king's role in social reproduction, both occurring in the rapidly changing context of a multiethnic African nation.
Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs underscores the relevance of medical anthropology to other anthropological specializations, as well as to epidemiologists, population specialists, and development planners. It should reach a broad audience in medical anthropology, public health, and women's studies.
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Carleton College.
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cover of Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity in the Cameroon Grassfields

Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs

Threatened Reproduction and Identity in the Cameroon Grassfields

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

University of Michigan Press, 0

Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs examines the symbolic language of food, fertility, and infertility in a small, mountainous African kingdom to explore more general notions of gender, modernity, and cultural identity.
In the Cameroon grassfields, an area of high fertility, women hold a paradoxical fear of infertility. By combining symbolic, political-economic, and historical analyses, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg traces the way reproductive threat is invoked in struggles over gender and ethnic identities. Women's fears of reproductive disorders, she finds, are an important mode of expression for their worries about much larger issues, such as rural poverty, brought about or exacerbated by political and economic changes in this century.
A lively case study of an infertile queen who flees the palace sets the stage for discussions of the ethnographic and historical setting, the symbolism of fertility and infertility, and the development and interaction of cosmopolitan and ethno-gynecologies. The book concludes with an analysis of the links between women's role in human reproduction and the divine king's role in social reproduction, both occurring in the rapidly changing context of a multiethnic African nation.
Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs underscores the relevance of medical anthropology to other anthropological specializations, as well as to epidemiologists, population specialists, and development planners. It should reach a broad audience in medical anthropology, public health, and women's studies.
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Carleton College.
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cover of Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies

Pluralising Pasts

Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies

Brian Graham, G. J. Ashworth, and J. E. Tunbridge

Pluto Press, 2007

The heritage industry is big business. From museums and the preservation of old buildings to broader questions of community and identity, heritage is now a political issue. This book explores what heritage means and how it is used to encourage people to identify with particular places and 'traditions'. The authors show how contemporary societies use heritage in the creation and management of collective identities and, most especially, the different ways in which it is involved with the questions of multicultural societies. The resources that are poured into heritage mean that questions of identity are widely discussed at a policy level: what does it mean to be American or British, or a minority in any society? This book shows how heritage is used politically and commercially to shape the ways people represent themselves, and are represented, in diverse and hybrid societies.
[more]
cover of Poetics of Processing: Memory Formation, Identity, and the Handling of the Dead

Poetics of Processing

Memory Formation, Identity, and the Handling of the Dead

Anna J. Osterholtz

University Press of Colorado, 2020

In 2002, Neil Whitehead published Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death, in which he applied the concept of poetics to the study of violence and observed the power of violence in the creation and expression of identity and social relationships. The Poetics of Processing applies Whitehead’s theory on violence to mortuary and skeletal assemblages in the Andes, Mexico, the US Southwest, Jordan, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Turkey, examining the complex cultural meanings of the manipulation of remains after death.
 
The contributors interpret postmortem treatment of the physical body through a poetics lens, examining body processing as a mechanism for the re-creation of cosmological events and processing’s role in the creation of social memory. They analyze methods of processing and the ways in which the living use the physical body to stratify society and gain power, as evidenced in rituals of body preparation and burial around the world, objects buried with the dead and the hierarchies of tomb occupancy, the dissection of cadavers by medical students, the appropriation of living spaces once occupied by the dead, and the varying treatments of the remains of social outsiders, prisoners of war, and executed persons.
 
The Poetics of Processing combines social theory and bioarchaeology to examine how the living manipulate the bodies of the dead for social purposes. These case studies—ranging from prehistoric to historic and modern and from around the globe—explore this complex material relationship that does not cease with physical death. This volume will be of interest to mortuary archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, and cultural anthropologists.
 
Contributors:
Dil Singh Basanti, Roselyn Campbell, Carlina de la Cova, Eric Haanstad, Scott Haddow, Christina Hodge, Christopher Knusel, Kristin Kuckelman, Clark Spencer Larsen, Debra Martin, Kenneth Nystrom, Adrianne Offenbecker, Megan Perry, Marin Pilloud, Beth K. Scaffidi, Mehmet Somel, Kyle D. Waller
 
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cover of Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture

Polacos in Argentina

Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture

Mariusz Kalczewiak

University of Alabama Press, 2020

Winner of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Book Award 2020

An examination of the social and cultural repercussions of Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s

Between the 1890s and 1930s, Argentina, following the United States and Palestine, became the main destination for Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews seeking safety, civil rights, and better economic prospects. In the period between 1918 and 1939, sixty thousand Polish Jews established new homes in Argentina. They formed a strong ethnic community that quickly embraced Argentine culture while still maintaining their unique Jewish-Polish character. This mass migration caused the transformation of cultural, social, and political milieus in both Poland and Argentina, forever shaping the cultural landscape of both lands.

In Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture, Mariusz Kałczewiak has constructed a multifaceted and in-depth narrative that sheds light on marginalized aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish studies and Polish Jewish Studies. Based on archival research, Yiddish travelogues on Argentina, and the Yiddish and Spanish-language press, this study recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina.

Most studies on mass migration fail to acknowledge the role of the country of origin, but this innovative work approaches Jewish migration to Argentina as a continuous process that took place on both sides of the Atlantic. Taken as a whole, Polacos in Argentina enlightens the heterogeneous and complex issue of immigrant commitments, belongings, and expectations. Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina serves as a case study of how ethnicity evolves among migrants and their children, and the dynamics  that emerge between putting down roots in a new country and  maintaining commitments to the country of origin.
 
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cover of Pole/Jew: History, Literature, Identity, Future

Pole/Jew

History, Literature, Identity, Future

John J. Bukowczyk and Halina Filipowicz

Ohio University Press, 0

Pole/Jew brings together a group of scholars—about half of them Jewish, about half of them ethnic Poles—from the United States, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Canada and enlists their diverse methodological and generational perspectives to push debates over Polish-Jewish relations beyond entrenched and reductive positions. At the core of the volume are the following questions:

–What impact has the Holocaust had on Polish history and Polish literature?

–How has the Holocaust affected Polish-Jewish—and Polish—identity?

–What future is there for relations between Poland’s small Jewish minority and the country’s overwhelming ethnic Polish majority? Between Poland and Israel? Between Jews of the diaspora and ethnic Poles abroad?

–Which research areas have yet to be addressed or revisited and reexamined?

–Are there ways to move beyond the reductive notion of 1989 (i.e., the fall of the communist regime in Poland) as wall and fulcrum?

By addressing these compelling questions, this volume offers fresh perspectives and encourages a nuanced understanding of Polish-Jewish relations.

Contributors:

M. B. B. Biskupski
Robert Blobaum
John J. Bukowczyk
Patrice M. Dabrowski
Halina Filipowicz
Agnieszka Jezyk
Bozena Karwowska
Kamil Kijek
Kate Korycki
Elzbieta Kossewska
Grazyna J. Kozaczka
Stanislaw Krajewski
Adam Lipszyc
Wiktor Marzec
Alina Molisak
Stanislaw Obirek
Benjamin Paloff
Antony Polonsky
Brian Porter-Szucs
Piotr Puchalski
Roma Sendyka
Dariusz Stola
Katarzyna Zechenter
Joshua D. Zimmerman
Geneviève Zubrzycki
Slawomir Zurek

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cover of Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy

Political Mourning

Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy

Heather Pool

Temple University Press, 2021

What leads us to respond politically to the deaths of some citizens and not others? This is one of the critical questions Heather Pool asks in Political Mourning. Born out of her personal experiences with the trauma of 9/11, Pool’s astute book looks at how death becomes political, and how it can mobilize everyday citizens to argue for political change. 

Pool examines four tragedies in American history—the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the lynching of Emmett Till, the September 11 attacks, and the Black Lives Matter movement—that offered opportunities to tilt toward justice and democratic inclusion. Some of these opportunities were taken, some were not. However, these watershed moments show, historically, how political identity and political responsibility intersect and how racial identity shapes who is mourned. Political Mourning helps explain why Americans recognize the names of Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland; activists took those cases public while many similar victims have been ignored by the news media. 

Concluding with an afterword on the coronavirus, Pool emphasizes the importance of collective responsibility for justice and why we ought to respond to tragedy in ways that are more politically inclusive.

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cover of Popular Music Ethnographies: Practice, Place and Identity

Popular Music Ethnographies

Practice, Place and Identity

Edited by Sarah Raine, Shane Blackman, Robert McPherson, and Iain A. Taylor

Intellect Books, 2025

An ethnographic approach to global pop music studies.

This edited collection offers evocative ways into an international selection of popular music, from the Ecuadorian indie scene to Chinese rock. In exploring the experiences of musicians, fans, industry professionals, and academics, the rich complexity of popular music is brought to life through ethnography as an immersive approach to both undertaking and communicating research.

Experimenting with ethnography through the joys and tribulations of musical production, fandom, and scholarship, the contributors critically consider what it means to be a popular music ethnographer and what it means to take an ethnographic approach to studying popular music.

In addition to the critical essays, shorter vignettes are provided by musicians, venue owners, music writers, live music photographers, and fans. Altogether, the book explores the practices, places, and identities behind the music.
 
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cover of Postnational Self: Belonging And Identity

Postnational Self

Belonging And Identity

Ulf Hedetoft

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A timely look at how our globalized era has reconfigured experiences of belonging.

What happens to a sense of belonging when national and regional governments, religious organizations, community groups, political parties, and corporations become unstable and incoherent, as they have in these nationalist and postnationalist times? From a richly interdisciplinary perspective, the authors examine notions of citizenship and cultural hybridization, migration and other forms of mobility, displacements and ethnic cleansing, and the nature of national belonging in a world turning ever more fluid, aided by transnational flows of capital, information, people, and ideas.

Contributors: Seyla Benhabib, Yale; John A. Hall, McGill U; Ulf Hannerz, Stockholm U; Jeffrey Herf, U of Maryland; Michael Herzfeld, Harvard; Richard Jenkins, U of Sheffield, UK; Mark Juergensmeyer, U of California, Santa Barbara; Riva Kastoryano, Center for International Studies and Research (CERI), Paris; Michèle Lamont, Princeton; Benjamin Lee, Rice U; Orvar Löfgren, U of Lund, Sweden; Philip Schlesinger, U of Stirling, Scotland; Yasemin Nuhõglu Soysal, U of Essex, UK; Ray Taras, Tulane U; James Tully, U of Victoria, British Columbia.
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cover of Power and Identity in Archaeological Theory and Practice: Case Studies from Ancient Mesoamerica

Power and Identity in Archaeological Theory and Practice

Case Studies from Ancient Mesoamerica

Eleanor Harrison-Buck

University of Utah Press, 2012

The contributions to this volume represent a diverse array of Mesoamerican archaeological studies that are all theo-retically rooted to larger, global debates concerning issues of power and identity—two logically paired concepts. While social identity has been the focus of more critical analysis in recent years, the concept of power has received far less attention. Most studies focus on large-scale, institutional forms of power and the ruling body. Here, the focus is on relations of power, addressing broader segments of society outside the dominant group, that often are ignored in traditional reconstructions of past societies.

Harrison-Buck has compiled works that address a common criticism of social theory in the field of anthropological archaeology—the lack of strong case studies and corroborating facts supporting the abstract and often complex social theoretical concepts presented by scholars. Each contributor offers innovative method and theory and provides alternative and varied approaches to understanding power and identity in the archaeological record. They draw from a wide range of related disciplines and theoretical frameworks, including feminism, queer theory, cognitive studies, and postcolonial theory. The provocative case studies and exciting theoretical applications presented here will stimulate lively debate among scholars working both in and outside of Mesoamerica.
 

[more]
cover of Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger

Prayer Has Spoiled Everything

Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger

Adeline Masquelier

Duke University Press, 2001

Bori, in the Mawri society of Niger, are mischievous and invisible beings that populate the bush. Bori is also the practice of taming these wild forces in the context of possession ceremonies. In Prayer Has Spoiled Everything Adeline Masquelier offers an account of how this phenomenon intervenes—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically—in human lives, providing a constantly renewed source of meaning for Mawri peasants confronted with cultural contradictions and socio-economic marginalization.
To explore the role of bori possession in local definitions of history, power, and identity, Masquelier spent a total of two years in Niger, focusing on the diverse ways in which spirit mediums share, transform, and contest a rapidly changing reality, threatened by Muslim hegemony and financial hardship. She explains how the spread of Islam has provoked irreversible change in the area and how prayer—a conspicuous element of daily life that has become virtually synonymous with Islamic practice in this region of west Africa—has thus become equated with the loss of tradition. By focusing on some of the creative and complex ways that bori at once competes with and borrows from Islam, Masquelier reveals how possession nonetheless remains deeply embedded in Mawri culture, representing more than simple resistance to Islam, patriarchy, or the state. Despite a widening gap between former ways of life and the contradictions of the present, it maintains its place as a feature of daily life in which villagers participate with varying degrees of enthusiasm and approval.
Specialists in African studies, in the anthropology of religion, and in the historical transformations of colonial and postcolonial societies will welcome this study.
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cover of Prayers and the Construction of Israelite Identity

Prayers and the Construction of Israelite Identity

Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher

SBL Press, 2019

Substantial insights into various identity discourses reflected in the biblical prayers

This collection of essays from an international group of scholars focuses on how biblical prayers of the Persian and early Hellenistic periods shaped identity, evoked a sense of belonging to specific groups, and added emotional significance to this affiliation. Contributors draw examples from different biblical texts, including Genesis, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Psalms, Jonah, and Daniel.

Features

  • Thorough study of prayers that play a key role for a biblical book’s (re)construction of the people’s history and identity
  • An examination of ways biblical figures are remodeled by their prayers by introducing other, sometimes even contradictory, discourses on identity
  • An exploration of different ways in which psalms from postexilic times shaped, reflected, and modified identity discourses
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cover of Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture

Primitivism and Identity in Latin America

Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture

Erik Camayd-Freixas

University of Arizona Press, 2000

Although primitivism has received renewed attention in recent years, studies linking it with Latin America have been rare. This volume examines primitivism and its implications for contemporary debates on Latin American culture, literature, and arts, showing how Latin American subjects employ a Western construct to "return the gaze" of the outside world and redefine themselves in relation to modernity.

Examining such subjects as Julio Cortázar and Frida Kahlo and such topics as folk art and cinema, the volume brings together for the first time the views of scholars who are currently engaging the task of cultural studies from the standpoint of primitivism. These varied contributions include analyses of Latin American art in relation to social issues, popular culture, and official cultural policy; essays in cultural criticism touching on ethnic identity, racial politics, women's issues, and conflictive modernity; and analytical studies of primitivism's impact on narrative theory and practice, film, theater, and poetry.

This collection contributes offers a new perspective on a variety of significant debates in Latin American cultural studies and shows that the term primitive does not apply to these cultures as much as to our understanding of them.

CONTENTS
Paradise Subverted: The Invention of the Mexican Character / Roger Bartra
Between Sade and the Savage: Octavio Paz’s Aztecs / Amaryll Chanady
Under the Shadow of God: Roots of Primitivism in Early Colonial Mexico / Delia Annunziata Cosentino
Of Alebrijes and Ocumichos: Some Myths about Folk Art and Mexican Identity / Eli Bartra
Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic / Fernando Valerio-Holguín
Dialectics of Archaism and Modernity: Technique and Primitivism in Angel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en América Latina / José Eduardo González
Narrative Primitivism: Theory and Practice in Latin America / Erik Camayd-Freixas
Narrating the Other: Julio Cortázar’s "Axolotl" as Ethnographic Allegory / R. Lane Kauffmann
Jungle Fever: Primitivism in Environmentalism; Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima and the Romance of the Jungle / Jorge Marcone
Primitivism and Cultural Production: Future’s Memory; Native Peoples’ Voices in Latin American Society / Ivete Lara Camargos Walty
Primitive Bodies in Latin American Cinema: Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca / Luis Fernando Restrepo
Subliminal Body: Shamanism, Ancient Theater, and Ethnodrama / Gabriel Weisz
Primitivist Construction of Identity in the Work of Frida Kahlo / Wendy B. Faris
Mi andina y dulce Rita: Women, Indigenism, and the Avant-Garde in César Vallejo / Tace Megan Hedrick
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cover of Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity

Prohibition in Turkey

Alcohol and the Politics of Identity

Emine Ö. Evered

University of Texas Press, 2024

A social history of alcohol, identity, secularism, and modernization from the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras to the present day.

Prohibition in Turkey investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates.

Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation.

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cover of Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation

Putting a Song on Top of It

Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation

David W. Samuels

University of Arizona Press, 2004

As in many Native American communities, people on the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona have for centuries been exposed to contradictory pressures. One set of expectations is about conversion and modernization—spiritual, linguistic, cultural, technological. Another is about steadfast perseverance in the face of this cultural onslaught. Within this contradictory context lies the question of what validates a sense of Apache identity.
 
For many people on the San Carlos reservation, both the traditional calls of the Mountain Spirits and the hard edge of a country, rock, or reggae song can evoke the feeling of being Apache. Using insights gained from both linguistic and musical practices in the community—as well as from his own experience playing in an Apache country band—David W. Samuels explores the complex expressive lives of these people to offer new ways of thinking about cultural identity.
 
Samuels analyzes how people on the reservation make productive use of popular culture forms to create and transform contemporary expressions of Apache cultural identity. As Samuels learned, some popular songs—such as those by Bob Marley—are reminiscent of history and bring about an alignment of past and present for the Apache listener. Thinking about Geronimo, for instance, might mean one thing, but “putting a song on top of it” results in a richer meaning. Samuels also proposes that the concept of the pun, as both a cultural practice and a means of analysis, helps us understand the ways in which San Carlos Apaches are able to make cultural symbols point in multiple directions at once. Through these punning, layered expressions, people on the reservation express identities that resonate with the complicated social and political history of the Apache community.
 
This richly detailed study challenges essentialist notions of Native American tribal and ethnic identity by revealing the turbulent complexity of everyday life on the reservation. Samuels’s work is a multifaceted exploration of the complexities of sound, of language, and of the process of constructing and articulating identity in the twenty-first century.
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