Results by title

179 books match the query 'Past' and 13 start with r

Sort by

RE-FORMING THE PAST

HISTORY, THE FANTASTIC, & THE POSTMODERN SLAVE NARRATIVE

A. Timothy Spaulding

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative’s reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives.

In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.

[more]

RETHINKING HISTORY

Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past

Edited by Jonathan D. Hill

University of Illinois Press, 2000

Rethinking History and Myth explores narrative and ritual expressions of mythic and historical modes of consciousness among indigenous peoples of the Andean, Amazonian, and intermediate lowland regions of South America. Focusing on indigenous perspectives of South American interaction with Western colonial and national societies, the authors trace the interrelationships between myth and history to demonstrate how these peoples have developed a dynamic interpretive framework that enables them to understand their past.

Examining specific cultural and linguistic traditions that shape the social consciousness of native South Americans, the authors show that historical and mythic consciousness work together in forming new symbolic strategies that allow indigenous peoples to understand their societies as at least partially autonomous groups within national and global power structures. This complex process is used to interpret the history of interethnic relations, allowing both individuals and groups to change themselves and alter their own circumstances.

[more]

Race and Romance

Coloring the Past

Margo Hendricks

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021

This study brings race and the literary tradition of romance into dialogue.

Race and Romance: Coloring the Past explores the literary and cultural genealogy of colorism, white passing, and white presenting in the romance genre. The scope of the study ranges from Heliodorus’ Aithiopika to the short novels of Aphra Behn, to the modern romance novel Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins. This analysis engages with the troublesome racecraft of “passing” and the instability of racial identity and its formation from the premodern to the present. The study also looks at the significance of white settler colonialism to early modern romance narratives. A bridge between studies of early modern romance and scholarship on twenty-first-century romance novels, this book is well-suited for those interested in the romance genre.

[more]

Radio's Second Century

Past, Present, and Future Perspectives

John Allen Hendricks

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 2022 Broadcast Education Association Book Award

One of the first books to examine the status of broadcasting on its one hundredth anniversary, Radio’s Second Century investigates both vanguard and perennial topics relevant to radio’s past, present, and future. As the radio industry enters its second century of existence, it continues to be a dominant mass medium with almost total listenership saturation despite rapid technological advancements that provide alternatives for consumers. Lasting influences such as on-air personalities, audience behavior, fan relationships, and localism are analyzed as well as contemporary issues including social and digital media. Other essays examine the regulatory concerns that continue to exist for public radio, commercial radio, and community radio, and discuss the hindrances and challenges posed by government regulation with an emphasis on both American and international perspectives. Radio’s impact on cultural hegemony through creative programming content in the areas of religion, ethnic inclusivity, and gender parity is also explored. Taken together, this volume compromises a meaningful insight into the broadcast industry’s continuing power to inform and entertain listeners around the world via its oldest mass medium--radio.

[more]

Recasting the Past

History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa

Derek R. Peterson

Ohio University Press, 2009

The study of intellectual history in Africa is in its infancy. We know very little about what Africa’s thinkers made of their times. Recasting the Past brings one field of intellectual endeavor into view. The book takes its place alongside a small but growing literature that highlights how, in autobiographies, historical writing, fiction, and other literary genres, African writers intervened creatively in their political world.

The past has already been worked over by the African interpreters that the present volume brings into view. African brokers—pastors, journalists, kingmakers, religious dissidents, politicians, entrepreneurs all—have been doing research, conducting interviews, reading archives, and presenting their results to critical audiences. Their scholarly work makes it impossible to think of African history as an inert entity awaiting the attention of professional historians. Professionals take their place in a broader field of interpretation, where Africans are already reifying, editing, and representing the past.

The essays collected in Recasting the Past study the warp and weft of Africa’s homespun historical work. Contributors trace the strands of discourse from which historical entrepreneurs drew, highlighting the sources of inspiration and reference that enlivened their work. By illuminating the conventions of the past, Africa’s history writers set their contemporary constituents on a path toward a particular future. History writing was a means by which entrepreneurs conjured up constituencies, claimed legitimate authority, and mobilized people around a cause. By illuminating the spheres of debate in which Africa’s own scholars participated, Recasting the Past repositions the practice of modern history.

[more]

Reckoning with the Past

National Geographic and the Limits of Social Justice Rhetoric

Leland G. Spencer

Michigan State University Press, 2026

For over a century, National Geographic has shaped American visual culture, captivating audiences with stunning photography and compelling storytelling. Yet behind its iconic yellow border lies a fraught legacy of gender bias, racial misrepresentation, and colonialist narratives.In this incisive study, Leland G. Spencer examines the brand's recent attempts to reckon with that legacy across its magazine and television platforms. From special issues spotlighting transgender lives, to a public acknowledgment of past racism, to a magazine edition created entirely by women, these efforts signal a move toward inclusivity. But as Spencer reveals through rigorous rhetorical analysis, these gestures often fall short. The texts themselves frequently echo the same systemic inequalities they seek to redress. National Geographic's progressive rebranding, he argues, remains tangled in the very histories it aims to transcend.

[more]

Regulatory Barriers and the Principle of Non-discrimination in World Trade Law

Past, Present, and Future

Thomas Cottier and Petros C. Mavroidis, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce the second volume in an annual series, the World Trade Forum. The Forum's members include scholars, lawyers, and government and business practitioners working in the area of international trade, law, and policy. They meet annually to discuss integration issues in international economic relations, focusing on a new theme each year.

The World Trade Forum 1998 deals with the issue of regulatory barriers. Contributors focus their attention on the implications that government intervention has on the principle of nondiscrimination, the cornerstone of the World Trade Organization. The chapters, which cover both the positive and the normative level, deal in particular with the issue of "like product" definition, and with mutual recognition agreements. The relevant WTO case law is presented and analyzed, and the roundtable discussions are primarily aimed at clarifying to what extent a constitutional function should be assigned to the WTO organs, if at all.

Contributors include: Christoph Bail, Jacques Bourgeois, Marco Bronckers, Thomas Cottier, William Davey, Paul Demaret, Piet Eeckhout, Crawford Falconer, Olivier Guillod, Meinhard Hilf, Gary Horlick, Robert Howse, Robert Hudec, Patrick Low, Aaditya Mattoo, Petros C. Mavroidis, Patrick Messerlin, Damien Neven, Kalypso Nicolaidis, David Palmeter, Ernst Ulrich Petresmann, Andre Sapir, and Michel Waelbroeck.

Thomas Cottier is Professor of Law, Institute of European and International Economic Law, University of Bern Law School. Petros C. Mavroidis is Professor of Law, University of Neuchâtel.

[more]

Religion and the Authority of the Past

Tobin Siebers, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Religion and the Authority of the Past looks at how the past has influenced religious authority, and demonstrates that authority has been, and continues to be, prevalent in all religions and cultures. This book shows, in a fascinating variety of ways, how religious doctrine, interpretation, behavior, and expression are affected by those in power.

The contributors—distinguished scholars from the fields of history, religion, classics, art, and Asian studies—find authority not only in places where one might expect it—in Islamic doctrine, Hindu religious texts, and the dogma of the Roman Catholic church, for example—but also in unimagined and intriguing locations: in the first U.S. archaeological expedition to the ancient Near East; in representations of heroic action in the Homeric epics and early Chinese classics; in the transmission of religious stereotypes from the Old World to the New; in the poetry of Paul Celan and Dan Pagis; and in a sculptor's attempts to create art for houses of worship, where architects, bishops, priests, and the laity assert a variety of forms of religious authority of their own.

[more]

Reparations and Reparatory Justice

Past, Present, and Future

Edited by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Mary Frances Berry, and V. P. Franklin

University of Illinois Press, 2024

Changes at the global, federal, state, and municipal level are pushing forward the reparations movement for people of African descent. The distinguished editors of this volume have gathered works that chronicle the historical movement for reparations both in the United States and around the world.

Sharing a focus on reparations as an issue of justice, the contributors provide a historical primer of the movement; introduce the philosophical, political, economic, legal and ethical issues surrounding reparations; explain why government, corporations, universities, and other institutions must take steps to rehabilitate, compensate, and commemorate African Americans; call for the restoration of Black people’s human and civil rights and material and psychological well-being; lay out specific ideas about how reparations can and should be paid; and advance cutting-edge interpretations of the complex long-lasting effects that enslavement, police and vigilante actions, economic discrimination, and other behaviors have had on people of African descent.

Groundbreaking and innovative, Reparations and Reparatory Justice offers a multifaceted resource to anyone wishing to explore a defining moral issue of our time.

Contributors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Hilary McDonald Beckles, Mary Frances Berry, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Chuck Collins, Ron Daniels, V. P. Franklin, Danny Glover, Adom Gretachew, Charles Henry, Kamm Howard, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Jesse Jackson, Sr., Brian Jones, Sheila Jackson Lee, James B. Stewart, the Movement 4 Black Lives, the National African American Reparations Commission, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization/Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

[more]

Representing the Past

Essays in Performance Historiography

Charlotte M. Canning

University of Iowa Press, 2010

How do historians represent the past? How do theatre historians represent performance events? The fifteen challenging essays in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography focus on the fundamental epistemological conditions and procedures that serve as the foundational ideas that guide all historians in their endeavors. Unified by their investigations into how best to understand and then represent the past, this diverse group of scholars in the field of theatre history and performance studies offers insights into the abiding issues that all historians face in the task of representing human events and actions.

Five primary ideas provide the topics as well as the intellectual parameters for this book: archive, time, space, identity, and narrative. Taking these as the conceptual framework for historical research and analysis, the essayists cover an expansive range of case studies and problems in the historical study of performance from the Americas to Africa and from Europe to India and China. Considering not only how historians think about these concepts in their research and writing but more pointedly—and historiographically—how they think with them, the essayists demonstrate the power and centrality of each of these five ideas in historical scholarship from initial research to the writing of essays and books.

Performance history has a diversity of identities, locations, sources, and narratives. This compelling engagement with the concepts essential to historical understanding is a valuable contribution to the historiography of performance—for students, teachers, and the future of the discipline itself. Expanding upon its classic predecessor, Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, this exciting new collection illustrates the contemporary richness of historical thinking and writing in the field of performance history.

[more]

Restaging the Past

Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain

Edited by Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, and Alexander Hutton

University College London, 2020

Restaging the Past is the first collection devoted to the study of pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. In the twentieth century, people all across Britain succumbed to “pageant fever.” Thousands of people dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from local history, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between 1900 and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns, and tiny villages, and engaged a wide range of organizations and social groups, from Women’s Institutes to political parties, schools to churches, and even youth organizations.

Pageants were community events, bringing people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians, and other writers, and as a result were featured repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, the contributors argue that it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change—and, they show, because of its former prominence, some lingering signs of “pageant fever” can still be seen in Britain today.

[more]

Rituals of the Past

Prehispanic and Colonial Case Studies in Andean Archaeology

Silvana Rosenfeld

University Press of Colorado, 2017

Rituals of the Past explores the various approaches archaeologists use to identify ritual in the material record and discusses the influence ritual had on the formation, reproduction, and transformation of community life in past Andean societies. A diverse group of established and rising scholars from across the globe investigates how ritual influenced, permeated, and altered political authority, economic production, shamanic practice, landscape cognition, and religion in the Andes over a period of three thousand years.

Contributors deal with theoretical and methodological concerns including non-human and human agency; the development and maintenance of political and religious authority, ideology, cosmologies, and social memory; and relationships with ritual action. The authors use a diverse array of archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic data and historical documents to demonstrate the role ritual played in prehispanic, colonial, and post-colonial Andean societies throughout the regions of Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. By providing a diachronic and widely regional perspective, Rituals of the Past shows how ritual is vital to understanding many aspects of the formation, reproduction, and change of past lifeways in Andean societies.

Contributors: Sarah Abraham, Carlos Angiorama, Florencia Avila, Camila Capriata Estrada, David Chicoine, Daniel Contreras, Matthew Edwards, Francesca Fernandini, Matthew Helmer, Hugo Ikehara, Enrique Lopez-Hurtado, Jerry Moore, Axel Nielsen, Yoshio Onuki, John Rick, Mario Ruales, Koichiro Shibata, Hendrik Van Gijseghem, Rafael Vega-Centeno, Verity Whalen

[more]