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53 books match the query 'Bodies' and 4 start with t

cover of Tattoo: Bodies, Art, and Exchange in the Pacific and the West

Tattoo

Bodies, Art, and Exchange in the Pacific and the West

Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole, and Bronwen Douglas, eds.

Duke University Press, 2005

The history of tattooing is shrouded in controversy. Citing the Polynesian derivation of the word “tattoo,” many scholars and tattoo enthusiasts have believed that the modern practice of tattooing originated in the Pacific, and specifically in the contacts between Captain Cook’s seamen and the Tahitians. Tattoo demonstrates that while the history of tattooing is far more complex than this, Pacific body arts have provided powerful stimuli to the West intermittently from the eighteenth century to the present day. The essays collected here document the extraordinary, intertwined histories of processes of cultural exchange and Pacific tattoo practices. Art historians, anthropologists, and scholars of Oceania provide a transcultural history of tattooing in and beyond the Pacific.

The contributors examine the contexts in which Pacific tattoos were “discovered” by Europeans, track the history of the tattooing of Europeans visiting the region, and look at how Pacific tattooing was absorbed, revalued, and often suppressed by agents of European colonization. They consider how European art has incorporated tattooing, and they explore contemporary manifestations of Pacific tattoo art, paying particular attention to the different trajectories of Samoan, Tahitian, and Maori tattooing and to the meaning of present-day appropriations of tribal tattoos. New research has uncovered a fascinating visual archive of centuries-old tattoo images, and this richly illustrated volume includes a number of those—many published here for the first time—alongside images of contemporary tattooing in Polynesia and Europe. Tattoo offers a tantalizing glimpse into the plethora of stories and cross-cultural encounters that lie between the blood on a sailor’s backside in the eighteenth century and the hammering of a Samoan tattoo tool in the twenty-first.

Contributors. Peter Brunt, Anna Cole, Anne D’Alleva, Bronwen Douglas, Elena Govor, Makiko Kuwahara, Sean Mallon, Linda Waimarie Nikora, Mohi Rua, Cyril Siorat, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Nicholas Thomas, Joanna White

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cover of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives

The Bodies of Others

Drag Dances and Their Afterlives

Selby Wynn Schwartz

University of Michigan Press, 2019

The Bodies of Others explores the politics of gender in motion. From drag ballerinas to faux queens, and from butoh divas to the club mothers of modern dance, the book delves into four decades of drag dances on American stages. Drag dances take us beyond glittery one-liners and into the spaces between gender norms. In these backstage histories, dancers give their bodies over to other selves, opening up the category of realness. The book maps out a drag politics of embodiment, connecting drag dances to queer hope, memory, and mourning. There are aging étoiles, midnight shows, mystical séances, and all of the dust and velvet of divas in their dressing-rooms. But these forty years of drag dances are also a cultural history, including Mark Morris dancing the death of Dido in the shadow of AIDS, and the swans of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo sketching an antiracist vision for ballet. Drawing on queer theory, dance history, and the embodied practices of dancers themselves, The Bodies of Others examines the ways in which drag dances undertake the work of a shared queer and trans politics.
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cover of The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and the History of Racial Power

The Inner Life of Race

Souls, Bodies, and the History of Racial Power

Leerom Medovoi

Duke University Press, 2024

In The Inner Life of Race, Leerom Medovoi turns away from conventional views of race as a politics of the phenotypical body to theorize race instead as a politics of populational threat. Racism’s genealogy, argues Medovoi, invokes longstanding theological distinctions between the body and the soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening interiorities: dangerous intentions, beliefs, or desires. Race is the power-effect of reading the body in order to police the political threat of the soul. Medovoi’s genealogy begins with medieval deployments of inquisition and confession to wage war against heretics, infidels, and their threat to the salvation of souls. In early modern Spain, these pastoral technologies of power catalyzed the invention of race as a language for the danger of formerly Jewish and Muslim converts. Medovoi shows how this discourse expanded into anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity throughout the colonial world and modern Europe, laying the foundation for racialized capitalism and liberal governmentality. Medovoi weaves histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anticommunism into a pathbreaking account of the political work populational racism accomplishes.
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cover of The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted For in Southeast Asia

The Remains of War

Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted For in Southeast Asia

Thomas M. Hawley

Duke University Press, 2005

The ongoing effort of the United States to account for its missing Vietnam War soldiers is unique. The United States requires the repatriation and positive identification of soldiers’ bodies to remove their names from the list of the missing. This quest for certainty in the form of the material, identified body marks a dramatic change from previous wars, in which circumstantial evidence often sufficed to account for missing casualties. In The Remains of War, Thomas M. Hawley considers why the body of the missing soldier came to assume such significance in the wake of the Vietnam War. Illuminating the relationship between the effort to account for missing troops and the political and cultural forces of the post-Vietnam era, Hawley argues that the body became the repository of the ambiguities and anxieties surrounding the U.S. involvement and defeat in Southeast Asia.

Hawley combines the theoretical insights of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Levinas with detailed research into the history of the movement to recover the remains of soldiers missing in Vietnam. He examines the practices that constitute the Defense Department’s accounting protocol: the archival research, archaeological excavation, and forensic identification of recovered remains. He considers the role of the American public and the families of missing soldiers in demanding the release of pows and encouraging the recovery of the missing; the place of the body of the Vietnam veteran within the war’s legacy; and the ways that memorials link individual bodies to the body politic. Highlighting the contradictions inherent in the recovery effort, Hawley reflects on the ethical implications of the massive endeavor of the American government and many officials in Vietnam to account for the remains of American soldiers.

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