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22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 4007 start with t

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The Fate of Rural Hell

Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand

Benedict Anderson

Seagull Books, 2012

In 1975, when political scientist Benedict Anderson reached Wat Phai Rong Wua, a massive temple complex in rural Thailand conceived by Buddhist monk Luang Phor Khom, he felt he had wandered into a demented Disneyland. One of the world’s most bizarre tourist attractions, Wat Phai Rong Wua was designed as a cautionary museum of sorts; its gruesome statues depict violent and torturous scenes that showcase what hell may be like. Over the next few decades, Anderson, who is best known for his work, Imagined Communities, found himself transfixed by this unusual amalgamation of objects, returning several times to see attractions like the largest metal-cast Buddha figure in the world and the Palace of a Hundred Spires. The concrete statuaries and perverse art in Luang Phor’s personal museum of hell included, “side by side, an upright human skeleton in a glass cabinet and a life-size replica of Michelangelo’s gigantic nude David, wearing fashionable red underpants from the top of which poked part of a swollen, un-Florentine penis,” alongside dozens of statues of evildoers being ferociously punished in their afterlife.

In The Fate of Rural Hell, Anderson unravels the intrigue of this strange setting, endeavoring to discover what compels so many Thai visitors to travel to this popular spectacle and what order, if any, inspired its creation. At the same time, he notes in Wat Phai Rong Wua the unexpected effects of the gradual advance of capitalism into the far reaches of rural Asia.

Both a one-of-a-kind travelogue and a penetrating look at the community that sustains it, The Fate of Rural Hell is sure to intrigue and inspire conversation as much as Wat Phai Rong Wua itself.

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The Fate of Rural Hell

Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand, New Edition

Benedict Anderson

Seagull Books, 2016

A new edition of Benedict Anderson's masterpiece of political and social interpretation, which asks what a rural Thai “hell temple” reveals about Buddhism and modern life.

In 1975, political scientist Benedict Anderson encountered Wat Phai Rong Wua, a vast temple complex conceived by the monk Luang Phor Khom. Built as a cautionary museum, it uses striking tableaux, hell scenes, didactic statues, and eclectic displays, to imagine karmic consequence and to draw steady flows of Thai visitors.
Returning to the temple over several decades, Anderson treats the site as a travelogue, an ethnographic puzzle, and a social commentary. He asks what kinds of piety, hierarchy, and desire are staged there, and what local community sustains it. The temple also becomes his lens on how capitalism and rural change reshape religious practice in Thailand.

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The Fear of Child Sexuality

Young People, Sex, and Agency

Steven Angelides

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Continued public outcries over such issues as young models in sexually suggestive ads and intimate relationships between teachers and students speak to one of the most controversial fears of our time: the entanglement of children and sexuality. In this book, Steven Angelides confronts that fear, exploring how emotional vocabularies of anxiety, shame, and even contempt not only dominate discussions of youth sexuality but also allow adults to avoid acknowledging the sexual agency of young people. Introducing case studies and trends from Australia, the United Kingdom, and North America, he challenges assumptions on a variety of topics, including sex education, age-of-consent laws, and sexting. Angelides contends that an unwillingness to recognize children’s sexual agency results not in the protection of young people but in their marginalization.

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The Feast of the Sorcerer

Practices of Consciousness and Power

Bruce Kapferer

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Sorcery has long been associated with the "dark side" of human development. Along with magic and witchcraft, it is assumed to be irrational and antithetical to modern thought. But in The Feast of the Sorcerer, Bruce Kapferer argues that sorcery practices reveal critical insights into how consciousness is formed and how human beings constitute their social and political realities.

Kapferer focuses on sorcery among Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka to explore how the art of sorcery is in fact deeply connected to social practices and lived experiences such as birth, death, sickness, and war. He describes in great detail the central ritual of exorcism, a study which opens up new avenues of thought that challenge anthropological approaches to such topics as the psychological forces of emotion and the dynamics of power. Overcoming both "orientalist" bias and postmodern permissiveness, Kapferer compellingly reframes sorcery as a pragmatic, conscious practice which, through its dynamic of destruction and creation, makes it possible for humans to reconstruct repeatedly their relation to the world.

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The Feeling of Forgetting

Christianity, Race, and Violence in America

John Corrigan

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A provocative examination of how religious practices of forgetting drive white Christian nationalism.

The dual traumas of colonialism and slavery are still felt by Native Americans and African Americans as victims of ongoing violence toward people of color today. In The Feeling of Forgetting, John Corrigan calls attention to the trauma experienced by white Americans as perpetrators of this violence. By tracing memory’s role in American Christianity, Corrigan shows how contemporary white Christian nationalism is motivated by a widespread effort to forget the role race plays in American society. White trauma, Corrigan argues, courses through American culture like an underground river that sometimes bursts forth into brutality, terrorism, and insurrection. Tracing the river to its source is a necessary first step toward healing.

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The Feeling of Forgetting

Christianity, Race, and Violence in America

John Corrigan

University of Chicago Press, 2023

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

A provocative examination of how religious practices of forgetting drive white Christian nationalism.

The dual traumas of colonialism and slavery are still felt by Native Americans and African Americans as victims of ongoing violence toward people of color today. In The Feeling of Forgetting, John Corrigan calls attention to the trauma experienced by white Americans as perpetrators of this violence. By tracing memory’s role in American Christianity, Corrigan shows how contemporary white Christian nationalism is motivated by a widespread effort to forget the role race plays in American society. White trauma, Corrigan argues, courses through American culture like an underground river that sometimes bursts forth into brutality, terrorism, and insurrection. Tracing the river to its source is a necessary first step toward healing.

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The Feeling of History

Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia

Charles Hirschkind

University of Chicago Press, 2021

In today’s world, the lines between Europe and the Middle East, between Christian Europeans and Muslim immigrants in their midst, seem to be hardening. Alarmist editorials compare the arrival of Muslim refugees with the “Muslim conquest of 711,” warning that Europe will be called on to defend its borders. Violence and paranoia are alive and well in Fortress Europe.

Against this xenophobic tendency, The Feeling of History examines the idea of Andalucismo—a modern tradition founded on the principle that contemporary Andalusia is connected in vitally important ways with medieval Islamic Iberia. Charles Hirschkind explores the works and lives of writers, thinkers, poets, artists, and activists, and he shows how, taken together, they constitute an Andalusian sensorium. Hirschkind also carefully traces the various itineraries of Andalucismo, from colonial and anticolonial efforts to contemporary movements supporting immigrant rights. The Feeling of History offers a nuanced view into the way people experience their own past, while also bearing witness to a philosophy of engaging the Middle East that experiments with alternative futures.

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The Feeling of Kinship

Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy

David L. Eng

Duke University Press, 2010

In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of “queer liberalism”—the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our “colorblind” age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and progress, one constituted by both the racialization of intimacy and the forgetting of race. Through a startling reading of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark legal decision overturning Texas’s antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism.

Eng develops the concept of “queer diasporas” as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms. The Feeling of Kinship makes a major contribution to American studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.

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The Female Complaint

The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

Lauren Berlant

Duke University Press, 2008

The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension.

Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodrama Now, Voyager; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay for A Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer, avant-garde film Showboat 1988–The Remake. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.

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The Female as Subject

Reading and Writing in Early Modern Japan

P. F. Kornicki, Mara Patessio, and G. G. Rowley, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2010

The Female as Subject presents 11 essays by an international group of scholars from Europe, Japan, and North America examining what women of different social classes read, what books were produced specifically for women, and the genres in which women themselves chose to write. The authors explore the different types of education women obtained and the levels of literacy they achieved, and they uncover women’s participation in the production of books, magazines, and speeches. The resulting depiction of women as readers and writers is also enhanced by thirty black-and-white illustrations.

For too long, women have been largely absent from accounts of cultural production in early modern Japan. By foregrounding women, the essays in this book enable us to rethink what we know about Japanese society during these centuries. The result is a new history of women as readers, writers, and culturally active agents.

The Female as Subject is essential reading for all students and teachers of Japan during the Edo and Meiji periods. It also provides valuable comparative data for scholars of the history of literacy and the book in East Asia.

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The Female in Aristotle's Biology

Reason or Rationalization

Robert Mayhew

University of Chicago Press, 2004

While Aristotle's writings on biology are considered to be among his best, the comments he makes about females in these works are widely regarded as the nadir of his philosophical oeuvre. Among many claims, Aristotle is said to have declared that females contribute nothing substantial to generation; that they have fewer teeth than males; that they are less spirited than males; and that woman are analogous to eunuchs. In The Female in Aristotle's Biology, Robert Mayhew aims not to defend Aristotle's ideas about females but to defend Aristotle against the common charge that his writings on female species were motivated by ideological bias.

Mayhew points out that the tools of modern science and scientific experimentation were not available to the Greeks during Aristotle's time and that, consequently, Aristotle had relied not only on empirical observations when writing about living organisms but also on a fair amount of speculation. Further, he argues that Aristotle's remarks about females in his biological writings did not tend to promote the inferior status of ancient Greek women.

Written with passion and precision, The Female in Aristotle's Biology will be of enormous value to students of philosophy, the history of science, and classical literature.

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The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism

Judith A. Allen

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Famous for her short fiction—most notably “The Yellow Wallpaper”—Charlotte Perkins Gilman also produced a vast body of nonfiction in tandem with her work as a Progressive-era feminist reformer. Rooted in groundbreaking research on Gilman’s extensive correspondence, publications, and speeches, this keenly argued intellectual biography reconstructs her controversial output and the heady context in which she produced it.

Judith Allen provides the first comprehensive assessment of Gilman’s complicated feminism by exploring the renowned writer’s theories of sexuality and evolutionary analyses of androcentric—or male-dominated—culture. These ideas, Allen shows, informed Gilman’s many contributions to the suffrage movement, the fight to abolish regulated prostitution, and efforts to legalize birth control. Restoring a previously overlooked public intellectual to her preeminent place in Progressive-era politics and the history of feminism at home and abroad, Allen’s landmark study provides the fullest account available of Gilman’s consequential life and profoundly influential work.

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The Feminism of Uncertainty

A Gender Diary

Ann Snitow

Duke University Press, 2015

The Feminism of Uncertainty brings together Ann Snitow’s passionate, provocative dispatches from forty years on the front lines of feminist activism and thought. In such celebrated pieces as "A Gender Diary"—which confronts feminism’s need to embrace, while dismantling, the category of "woman"—Snitow is a virtuoso of paradox. Freely mixing genres in vibrant prose, she considers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and offers self-reflexive accounts of her own organizing, writing, and teaching. Her pieces on international activism, sexuality, motherhood, and the waywardness of political memory all engage feminism’s impossible contradictions—and its utopian hopes.

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The Feminist Avant-Garde In American Poetry

Elisabeth A. Frost

University of Iowa Press, 2005

The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry offers a historical and theoretical account of avant-garde women poets in America from the 1910s through the 1990s and asserts an alternative tradition to the predominantly male-dominated avant-garde movements. Elisabeth Frost argues that this alternative lineage distinguishes itself by its feminism and its ambivalence toward existing avant-garde projects; she also thoroughly explores feminist avant-garde poets' debts and contributions to their male counterparts.

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The Feminist Bookstore Movement

Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability

Kristen Hogan

Duke University Press, 2016

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. KA Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability. At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, and Old Wives’ Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people’s lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

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The Feminist Memoir Project

Voices from Women's Liberation

DuPlessis, Rachel B

Rutgers University Press, 2007

The women of The Feminist Memoir Project give voice to the spirit, the drive, and the claims of the Women's Liberation Movement they helped shape, beginning in the late 1960s. These thirty-two writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in the late twentieth century. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation.

What made these particular women rebel? And what experiences, ideas, feelings, and beliefs shaped their activism? How did they maintain the will and energy to keep such a struggle going for so long, and continuing still?

Memoirs and responses by Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, Eve Ensler, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Roxanne Dunbar, Naomi Weisstein, Alice Wolfson and many more embody the excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from within. Their stories trace the ways the world has changed.

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The Feminist Spectator as Critic

Jill Dolan

University of Michigan Press, 2012

The Feminist Spectator as Criticbroke new ground as one of the pioneering books on feminist spectatorship, encouraging resistant readings to generate feminist meanings in performance. Approaching live spectatorship through a range of interdisciplinary methods, the book has been foundational in theater studies, performance studies, and gender/sexuality/women's studies. This updated and enlarged second edition celebrates the book's twenty-fifth anniversary with a substantial new introduction and up-to-the-moment bibliography, detailing the progress to date in gender equity in theater and the arts, and suggesting how far we have yet to go.

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The Feminization of Famine

Expressions of the Inexpressible?

Margaret Kelleher

Duke University Press, 1997

Contemporary depictions of famine and disaster are dominated by female images. The Feminization of Famine examines these representations, exploring, in particular, the literature arising from the Irish "Great Famine" of the 1840s and the Bengali famine of the 1940s. Kelleher illuminates recurring motifs: the prevalence of mother and child images, the scrutiny of women’s starved bodies, and the reliance on the female figure to express the largely "inexpressible" reality of famine. Questioning what gives these particularly feminine images their affective power and analyzing the responses they generate, this historical critique reveals striking parallels between these two "great" famines and current representations of similar natural disasters and catastrophes.
Kelleher begins with a critical reading of the novels and short stories written about the Irish famine over the last 150 years, from the novels of William Carleton and Anthony Trollope to the writings of Liam O’Flaherty and John Banville. She then moves on to unveil a lesser-known body of literature—works written by women. This literature is read in the context of a rich variety of other sources, including eye-witness accounts, memoirs, journalistic accounts, and famine historiography. Concluding with a reading of the twentieth-century accounts of the famine in Bengal, this book reveals how gendered representations have played a crucial role in defining notions of famine.

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The Femme Fatale

Julie Grossman

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Ostensibly the villain, but also a model of female power, poise, and intelligence, the femme fatale embodies Hollywood’s contradictory attitudes toward ambitious women. But how has the figure of the femme fatale evolved over time, and to what extent have these changes reflected shifting cultural attitudes toward female independence and sexuality?

This book offers readers a concise look at over a century of femmes fatales on both the silver screen and the TV screen. Starting with ethnically exoticized silent film vamps like Theda Bara and Pola Negri, it examines classic film noir femmes fatales like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, as well as postmodern revisions of the archetype in films like Basic Instinct and Memento. Finally, it explores how contemporary film and television creators like Fleabag and Killing Eve’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge have appropriated the femme fatale in sympathetic and surprising ways.

Analyzing not only the films themselves, but also studio press kits and reviews, The Femme Fatale considers how discourses about the pleasures and dangers of female performance are projected onto the figure of the femme fatale. Ultimately, it is a celebration of how “bad girl” roles have provided some of Hollywood’s most talented actresses opportunities to fully express their on-screen charisma.

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The Fernando Coronil Reader

The Struggle for Life Is the Matter

Fernando Coronil

Duke University Press, 2019

In The Fernando Coronil Reader Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil challenges us to rethink our approaches to key contemporary epistemological, political, and ethical questions. Consisting of work written between 1991 and 2011, this posthumously published collection includes Coronil's landmark essays “Beyond Occidentalism” and “The Future in Question” as well as two chapters from his unfinished book manuscript, "Crude Matters." Taken together, the essays highlight his deep concern with the Global South, Latin American state formation, theories of nature, empire, and postcolonialism, and anthrohistory as an intellectual and ethical approach. Presenting a cross section of Coronil's oeuvre, this volume cements his legacy as one of the most innovative critical social thinkers of his generation.

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The Fertility Revolution

A Supply-Demand Analysis

Richard A. Easterlin and Eileen M. Crimmins

University of Chicago Press, 1985

For most of human history a "natural fertility" regime has prevailed throughout the world: there has been almost no conscious limitation of family size within marriage, and women have spent their reproductive lives tied to the "wheel of childbearing." Only recently in developed countries has fertility been brought under conscious control by individual couples and childbearing fallen to an average of two births per woman. The explanation of this "fertility revolution" is the main concern of this book.

Richard A. Easterlin and Eileen M. Crimmins present and test a fertility theory that has gained increasing attention over the last decade, a "supply-demand theory" that integrates economic and sociological approaches to fertility determination. The results of the tests, which draw on data from four developing countries—Colombia, India, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan—are highly consistent, though a number of the conclusions are likely to arouse controversy. For example, couples' motivation for fertility control appears to be the prime mover in the fertility revolution, rather than access to family planning services or unfavorable attitudes toward such services.

The interdisciplinary approach and nontechnical exposition of this study will attract a wide readership among economists, sociologists, demographers, anthropologists, statisticians, biologists, and others.

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The Fetish Revisited

Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make

J. Lorand Matory

Duke University Press, 2018

Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.

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The Fierce Tribe

Masculine Identity and Performance in the Circuit

Mickey Weems

Utah State University Press, 2008

Mickey Weems applies overtly interdisciplinary interpretation to a subject that demands such a breakdown of intellectual boundaries. This is an ethnography that documents the folk nature of popular culture. The Circuit, an expression of Gay culture, comprises large dance events (gatherings, celebrations, communions, festivals). Music and dance drive a complex, shared performance at these events—electronic house music played by professional DJs and mass ecstatic dancing that engenders communitas. Other types of performance, from drag queens and concerts to contests, theatrics, and the individual display of muscular bodies also occur. Body sculpting through muscle building is strongly associated with the Circuit, and masculine aggression is both displayed and parodied. Weems, a participant-observer with a multidisciplinary background in anthropology, folklore, religious studies, cultural studies, and somatic studies, considers the cultural and spiritual dimensions of what to outsiders might seem to be just wild, flamboyant parties. He compares the Circuit to other traditions of ecstatic and communal dance, and uses his grounding in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and in religious studies to illuminate the spiritual dimensions of the Circuit. And, a former U.S Marine, he offers the nonviolent masculine arrogance of circuiteers as an alternative philosophy to the violent forms of masculine aggression embedded in the military and much of western culture.

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The Fiercest Kind

Five Black Women in Art, Performance, and Resistance, 1937–1965

H. Zahra Caldwell

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026

Artists fighting racism and sexism from the end of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights era

In 1943, the production of the Columbia Pictures film The Heat’s On halted for three days due to an on-set protest by featured performer Hazel Scott. Appalled by the racially demeaning and stereotypical depictions of Black women extras and dancers, Scott—one of the top African American performers of the era—forced the studio to relent. But her protest of Hollywood racism angered powerful white men in the industry, and despite her rising career, she was soon banished from American film.

Scott was far from the only Black woman in a creative field to use her professional success as leverage against prejudice. In The Fiercest Kind, cultural historian H. Zahra Caldwell explores the biographical narratives of five Black women at the top of their artistic crafts in the mid-20th century to understand how they pushed back against racism and sexism. From 1937–1965, pianist Hazel Scott, dancer Katherine Dunham, cartoonist Jackie Ormes, multihyphenate fine artist (graphic artist, painter, and sculptor) Elizabeth Catlett, and singer Lena Horne were among the most popular and nationally known Black women in their respective fields, spanning film, television, print media, and fine art. Generating creative works at the end of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights era, they used their professional and personal lives to confront seemingly insurmountable repression through what Caldwell defines as “layered resistance.”

A Black feminist practice, layered resistance consists of four tactics: claiming and adapting cultural spaces for Black women; strategically crafting positive images of Black womanhood that directly challenge white supremacy; combining performance and/or visual representation with social and political activism; and choosing unconventional lifestyles that defy rigid gender and racial norms. These artists also lived in, worked in, and supported important Black spaces such as Harlem and Black Chicago. Using a methodology that combines textual analysis, archival research, and oral history, Caldwell understands this strategy within larger movements for Black freedom and equality that spanned the twentieth century and continue to the present day.

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The Fifth Dimension

An After-School Program Built on Diversity

Michael Cole

Russell Sage Foundation, 2006

The significant increase in the number of working mothers over the last twenty years has led to widespread worries about the plight of "latchkey kids," who return from school each day to empty homes. Concerned that unsupervised children might be at greater risk of delinquency, schools and communities across the nation began providing after-school activities. But many of these programs were hastily devised with little understanding of what constitutes a quality program that meets children's developmental needs. The Fifth Dimension explores and evaluates one of the country's most successful and innovative after-school programs, providing insightful and practical lessons about what works and doesn't work after-school. The Fifth Dimension program was established in the 1980s as a partnership between community centers and local colleges to establish an educational after-school program. With an emphasis on diversity and computer technology, the program incorporates the latest theories about child development and gives college students the opportunity to apply their textbook understanding of child development to real learning environments. The Fifth Dimension explores the design, implementation, and evaluation of this thriving program. The authors attribute the success of the Fifth Dimension to several factors. First, the program offers a balance of intellectually enriching exercises with development enhancing games. Second, by engaging undergraduates as active participants in both learning and social activities, the program gives local community organizations a large infusion of high-quality help for their educational efforts. Third, by rewarding children for their achievements and good behavior with greater flexibility in choosing their own schedules, the Fifth Dimension acts as a powerful, enduring motivator. The Fifth Dimension program serves as a model for what an enriching after-school program can be. The product of years of innovation and careful assessment, The Fifth Dimension is a valuable resource for all who are interested in developing successful community-based learning programs.

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The Fight Against Platform Capitalism

An Inquiry into the Global Struggles of the Gig Economy

Jamie Woodcock

University of Westminster Press, 2021

“The book rewards readers with interesting first-hand accounts of protests and pickets that are typically absent from academic discussions of the digital economy.” - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2021/03/17/book-review-the-fight-against-platform-capitalism-an-inquiry-into-the-global-struggles-of-the-gig-economy-by-jamie-woodcock/

So far, platform work has been an important laboratory for capital. Management techniques, like the use of algorithms, are being tested with a view to exporting across the global economy and it is argued that automation is undermining workers’ agency. Although the contractual trick of self-employment has allowed platforms to grow quickly and keep their costs down, yet it has also been the case also that workers have also found they can strike without following the existing regulations.

This book develops a critique of platforms and platform capitalism from the perspective of workers and contributes to the ongoing debates about the future of work and worker organising. It presents an alternative portrait returning to a focus on workers’ experience, focusing on solidarity, drawing out a global picture of new forms of agency. In particular, the book focuses on three dynamics that are driving struggles in the platform economy: the increasing connections between workers who are no longer isolated; the lack of communication and negotiation from platforms, leading to escalating worker action around shared issues; and the internationalisation of platforms, which has laid the basis for new transnational solidarity.

Focusing on transport and courier workers, online workers and freelancers author Jamie Woodcock concludes by considering how workers build power in different situations. Rather than undermining worker agency, platforms have instead provided the technical basis for the emergence of new global struggles against capitalism.

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The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights

Liberal Protestant Activism, 1900-1950

Sarah M Griffith

University of Illinois Press, 2018

From the early 1900s, liberal Protestants grafted social welfare work onto spiritual concerns on both sides of the Pacific. Their goal: to forge links between whites and Asians that countered anti-Asian discrimination in the United States. Their test: uprooting racial hatreds that, despite their efforts, led to the shameful incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. Sarah M. Griffith draws on the experiences of liberal Protestants, and the Young Men's Christian Association in particular, to reveal the intellectual, social, and political forces that powered this movement. Engaging a wealth of unexplored primary and secondary sources, Griffith explores how YMCA leaders and their partners in the academy and distinct Asian American communities labored to mitigate racism. The alliance's early work, based in mainstream ideas of assimilation and integration, ran aground on the Japanese exclusion law of 1924. Yet their vision of Christian internationalism and interracial cooperation maintained through the World War II internment trauma. As Griffith shows, liberal Protestants emerged from that dark time with a reenergized campaign to reshape Asian-white relations in the postwar era.

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The Film Music of John Williams

Reviving Hollywood's Classical Style

Emilio Audissino

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

From the triumphant “Main Title” in Star Wars to the ominous bass line of Jaws, John Williams has penned some of the most unforgettable film scores—while netting more than fifty Academy Award nominations. This updated and revised edition of Emilio Audissino’s groundbreaking volume takes stock of Williams’s creative process and achievements in music composition, including the most recent sequels in the film franchises that made him famous. Audissino discusses Williams’s unique approach to writing by examining his neoclassical style in context, demonstrating how he revived and revised classical Hollywood music. This volume details Williams’s lasting impact on the industry and cements his legacy as one of the most important composers in movie history. A must for fans and film-music lovers alike.

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The Films of Bong Joon Ho

Nam Lee

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Bong Joon Ho won the Oscar® for Best Director for Parasite (2019), which also won Best Picture, the first foreign film to do so, and two other Academy Awards. Parasite was the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. These achievements mark a new career peak for the director, who first achieved wide international acclaim with 2006’s monster movie The Host and whose forays into English-language film with Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) brought him further recognition.

As this timely book reveals, even as Bong Joon Ho has emerged as an internationally known director, his films still engage with distinctly Korean social and political contexts that may elude many Western viewers. The Films of Bong Joon Ho demonstrates how he hybridizes Hollywood conventions with local realities in order to create a cinema that foregrounds the absurd cultural anomie Koreans have experienced in tandem with their rapid economic development. Film critic and scholar Nam Lee explores how Bong subverts the structures of the genres he works within, from the crime thriller to the sci-fi film, in order to be truthful to Korean realities that often deny the reassurances of the happy Hollywood ending. With detailed readings of Bong’s films from Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) through Parasite (2019), the book will give readers a new appreciation of this world-class cinematic talent.

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The Films of Denys Arcand

Jim Leach

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Denys Arcand is best known outside Canada for three films that were nominated for Academy Awards for Best Foreign-Language Film: The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Jesus of Montreal (1989), and The Barbarian Invasions (2003), the last of which won the Award. Yet Arcand has been making films since the early 1960s. When he started making films, Quebec was rapidly transforming from a relatively homogeneous community, united by its Catholic faith and French language and culture, into a more fragmented modern society. The Films of Denys Arcand sheds light on how Arcand addressed the impact of these changes from the 1960s, when the long-drawn-out debate on Quebec's possible separation from the rest of Canada began, to the present, in which the traditional cultural heritage has been further fragmented by the increasing presence of diasporic communities. His career and films offer an ideal case study for exploring the contradictions and tensions that have shaped Quebec cinema and culture in a period of increasing globalization and technological change.

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The Films of the Eighties

A Social History

William J. Palmer

Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

In this remarkable sequel to his Films of the Seventies: A Social History, William J. Palmer examines more than three hundred films as texts that represent, revise, parody, comment upon, and generate discussion about major events, issues, and social trends of the eighties.

Palmer defines the dialectic between film art and social history, taking as his theoretical model the "holograph of history" that originated from the New Historicist theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. Combining the interests and methodologies of social history and film criticism, Palmer contends that film is a socially conscious interpreter and commentator upon the issues of contemporary social history. In the eighties, such issues included the war in Vietnam, the preservation of the American farm, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, changes in Soviet-American relations, neoconservative feminism, and yuppies.

Among the films Palmer examines are Platoon, The Killing Fields, The River, Out of Africa, Little Drummer Girl, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Silkwood, The Day After, Red Dawn, Moscow on the Hudson, Troop Beverly Hills, and Fatal Attraction. Utilizing the principles of New Historicism, Palmer demonstrates that film can analyze and critique history as well as present it.

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The Fine Art of Persuasion

Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan

Gennifer Weisenfeld

Duke University Press, 2025

Commercial art is more than just mass-produced publicity; it constructs social and political ideologies that impact the public’s everyday life. In The Fine Art of Persuasion, Gennifer Weisenfeld examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic design from the early 1900s through the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a pivotal design event that rebranded Japan on the world stage. Through richly illustrated case studies, Weisenfeld tells the story of how modern corporations and consumer capitalism transformed Japan’s visual culture and artistic production across the pre- and postwar periods, revealing how commercial art helped constitute the ideological formations of nation- and empire-building. Weisenfeld also demonstrates, how under the militarist regime of imperial Japan, national politics were effectively commodified and marketed through the same mechanisms of mass culture that were used to promote consumer goods. Using a multilayered analysis of the rhetorical intentions of design projects and the context of their production, implementation, and consumption, Weisenfeld offers an interdisciplinary framework that illuminates the importance of Japanese advertising design within twentieth-century global visual culture.

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The Fine Line

Eviatar Zerubavel

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Eviatar Zerubavel argues that most of the distinctions we make in our daily lives and in our culture are social constructs. He questions the notion that a clear line can be drawn to separate one time or object or concept from another, and presents witty and provocative counterexamples in defense of ambiguity and anomaly.

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The Fire of the Jaguar

Terence S. Turner

HAU, 2017

Not since Clifford Geertz’s “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” has the publication of an anthropological analysis been as eagerly awaited as this book, Terence S. Turner’s The Fire of the Jaguar. His reanalysis of the famous myth from the Kayapo people of Brazil was anticipated as an exemplar of a new, dynamic, materialist, action-oriented structuralism, one very different from the kind made famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss. But the study never fully materialized. Now, with this volume, it has arrived, bringing with it powerful new insights that challenge the way we think about structuralism, its legacy, and the reasons we have moved away from it.

In these chapters, Turner carries out one of the richest and most sustained analysis of a single myth ever conducted. Turner places the “Fire of the Jaguar” myth in the full context of Kayapo society and culture and shows how it became both an origin tale and model for the work of socialization, which is the primary form of productive labor in Kayapo society. A posthumous tribute to Turner’s theoretical erudition, ethnographic rigor, and respect for Amazonian indigenous lifeworlds, this book brings this fascinating Kayapo myth alive for new generations of anthropologists. Accompanied with some of Turner’s related pieces on Kayapo cosmology, this book is at once a richly literary work and an illuminating meditation on the process of creativity itself.

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The First American Women Architects

Sarah Allaback

University of Illinois Press, 2007

By 1920, there were over two hundred women practicing architecture in the United States, actively working on major design and building projects before they were even given the right to vote. These women designed thousands of buildings nationwide: apartments in Kansas City, hotels in the nation's national parks, churches in Michigan, and mansions on the coast of California, to name a few. In The First American Women Architects, Sarah Allaback chronicles the lives and careers of more than seventy pioneering female architects practicing in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly all of whom have been forgotten--until now.

Organized alphabetically as a reference guide, this volume provides a biographical sketch of each architect's life, education, and professional career, and a list of known works and sources for further research. Many of these remarkable women have never before appeared in any other history, making The First American Women Architects a unique and invaluable reference for students and scholars interested in women's history and architecture. As an instructive record of the legacy of women in architectural history, this book will also serve as a stimulating indicator of the broadening potential for women and other minorities within the field of architecture.

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The First Black Actors on the Great White Way

Susan Curtis

University of Missouri Press, 1998

On April 5, 1917, Three Plays for a Negro Theater by Ridgely Torrence opened at the Garden Theatre in New York City. This performance was a monumental event in American stage history. Not only was this the first dramatic production to portray African American life beyond the cliché, it was also the first production on Broadway to feature an all-black cast. The morning after the three plays were performed, newspapers were filled with praise for the cast, crew, and playwright. Audience member W. E. B. Du Bois declared the show "epoch making." Despite such early critical acclaim, Three Plays for a Negro Theater closed before the end of the month and received little attention thereafter.

Why was a nation, so fascinated with firsts, able to forget these black actors and this production so quickly? It is this question that Susan Curtis addresses in The First Black Actors on the Great White Way.

Set against the backdrop of transforming theater conventions in the early 1900s and the war in 1917, this important study relates the stories of the actors, stage artists, critics, and many others—black and white—involved in this groundbreaking production. Curtis explores in great depth both the progress in race relations that led to this production and the multifaceted reasons for its quick demise.

Three Plays for a Negro Theater opened on the eve of the United States' entrance into World War I. Curtis attributes the early closure of the three plays to this coincidence, but she does not settle for so simple an explanation. Rather, she investigates the heightened national self-consciousness that followed the United States' entry into the war. America was ready to "make the world safe for democracy," but it was not fully ready to accept democracy and equality in its own culture.

The First Black Actors on the Great White Way is not simply a study of African American theater and its entrance into American culture. By focusing on a single event at a critical moment in history, Curtis offers a unique glimpse into race relations in early-twentieth-century American society. The experience of these pioneering artists reveals an unexplored aspect of the painfully slow evolution of racial equality.

A remarkable story about people who waged an extraordinary campaign against racism, The First Black Actors on the Great White Way will be of special interest to scholars of American studies, race relations, and cultural history, as well as the general reader.

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The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699

B. E. Gent

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2010

It’s a shame that so many very apt words fall out of common use over time, like “blobber-lippd,” which means having lips that are very thick, hanging down, or turning over; and “chounter”, which is to talk pertly, and sometimes angrily. Both words can be found in The First English Dictionary of Slang, originally published in 1699 as A New Dictionary of Terms, Ancient and Modern, of the Canting Crew by B. E. Gentleman. Though a number of early texts, beginning in the sixteenth century, codified forms of cant—the slang language of the criminal underworld—in word lists which appeared as appendices or parts of larger volumes, the dictionary of 1699 was the first work dedicated to slang words and their meanings. It aimed to educate the more polite classes in the language and, consequently, the methods of thieves and vagabonds, protecting the innocent from cant speakers and their activities.

This dictionary is also the first that attempts to show the overlap and integration between canting words and common slang words. Refusing to distinguish between criminal vocabulary and the more ordinary everyday English of the period, it sets canting words side by side with terms used in domestic culture and those used by sailors and laborers. With such a democratic attitude toward words, this text is genuinely a modern dictionary, as well as the first attempt by dictionary makers to catalog the ever-changing world of English slang.

Reproduced here with an introduction by John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, describing the history and culture of canting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the evolution of English slang, this is a fascinating volume for all who marvel at words and may wish to reclaim a few—say, to dabble in the parlance of a seventeenth-century sailor one day and that of a vagabond the next.

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The First Fifteen

How Asian American Women Became Federal Judges

Susan Oki Mollway

Rutgers University Press, 2022

In 1998, an Asian woman first joined the ranks of federal judges with lifetime appointments. It took ten years for the second Asian woman to be appointed. Since then, however, over a dozen more Asian women have received lifetime federal judicial appointments.

This book tells the stories of the first fifteen. In the process, it recounts remarkable tales of Asian women overcoming adversity and achieving the American dream, despite being the daughters of a Chinese garment worker, Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II, Vietnamese refugees, and penniless Indian immigrants. Yet The First Fifteen also explores how far Asian Americans and women still have to go before the federal judiciary reflects America as a whole.

In a candid series of interviews, these judges reflect upon the personal and professional experiences that led them to this distinguished position, as well as the nerve-wracking political process of being nominated and confirmed for an Article III judgeship. By sharing their diverse stories, The First Fifteen paints a nuanced portrait of how Asian American women are beginning to have a voice in determining American justice.

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The First Rocky Mountaineers

Coloradans before Colorado

Marcel Kornfeld

University of Utah Press, 2013

Based on archaeological research in Colorado’s Middle Park—a high mountain basin initially encountered by Europeans in the early 1800s and occupied for centuries by the Ute people—The First Rocky Mountaineers is a prehistory of the earliest people of the region at the conclusion of the Ice Age. The Utes and their predecessors lived and thrived for 12,000 years in this high mountain setting, an environment that demanded unique adaptive strategies because of cold stress and hypoxic conditions. People of Middle Park coped with some of the most extreme conditions of any prehistoric population in North America, dealing with the stressors of high elevations and low temperatures by intensifying food acquisition, constructing shelters, and tailoring sophisticated warm clothing. The archaeological record of these early Coloradans, while still meager, provides a wealth of information about lifeways in the Rocky Mountain high country.

The first inhabitants of Rocky Mountain high country left a rich record of shelters, tools, and projectile points as well as food residues in the form of bison bone, all dating between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago. This record provides a robust database for interpreting their lifeways and unique adaptations. Kornfeld offers the first treatment of the original Middle Park and Rocky Mountain human populations from a biocultural perspective. This approach suggests that both biological and cultural processes frame the outcome of a successful human adaptation. While such a process may be resisted by some anthropologists investigating low-elevation groups, it is essential when trying to understand the dynamics of those living in the high country.

Chosen by Foreword as the 2014 bronze winner in science.

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The First Suburban Chinatown

The Remaking of Monterey Park, California

Timothy P. Fong

Temple University Press, 1994

Monterey Park, California, only eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles, was dubbed by the media as the "First Suburban Chinatown." The city was a predominantly white middle-class bedroom community in the 1970s when large numbers of Chinese immigrants transformed it into a bustling international boomtown. It is now the only city in the United States with a majority Asian American population. Timothy P. Fong examines the demographic, economic, social, and cultural changes taking place there, and the political reactions to the change.

Fong, a former journalist, reports on how pervasive anti-Asian sentiment fueled a series of initiatives intended to strengthen "community control," including a movement to make English the official language. Recounting the internal strife and the beginnings of recovery, Fong explores how race and ethnicity issues are used as political organizing tools and weapons.

In the series Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.

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The First Texas News Barons

By Patrick Cox

University of Texas Press, 2005

Newspaper publishers played a crucial role in transforming Texas into a modern state. By promoting expanded industrialization and urbanization, as well as a more modern image of Texas as a southwestern, rather than southern, state, news barons in the early decades of the twentieth century laid the groundwork for the enormous economic growth and social changes that followed World War II. Yet their contribution to the modernization of Texas is largely unrecognized.

This book investigates how newspaper owners such as A. H. Belo and George B. Dealey of the Dallas Morning News, Edwin Kiest of the Dallas Times Herald, William P. Hobby and Oveta Culp Hobby of the Houston Post, Jesse H. Jones and Marcellus Foster of the Houston Chronicle, and Amon G. Carter Sr. of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram paved the way for the modern state of Texas. Patrick Cox explores how these news barons identified the needs of the state and set out to attract the private investors and public funding that would boost the state's civic and military infrastructure, oil and gas industries, real estate market, and agricultural production. He shows how newspaper owners used events such as the Texas Centennial to promote tourism and create a uniquely Texan identity for the state. To balance the record, Cox also demonstrates that the news barons downplayed the interests of significant groups of Texans, including minorities, the poor and underemployed, union members, and a majority of women.

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The First Twenty-Five

An Oral History of the Desegregation of Little Rock’s Public Junior High Schools

LaVerne Bell-Tolliver

University of Arkansas Press, 2018

“It was one of those periods that you got through, as opposed to enjoyed. It wasn’t an environment that . . . was nurturing, so you shut it out. You just got through it. You just took it a day at a time. You excelled if you could. You did your best. You felt as though the eyes of the community were on you.”—Glenda Wilson, East Side Junior High

Much has been written about the historical desegregation of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American students in 1957. History has been silent, however, about the students who desegregated Little Rock’s five public junior high schools—East Side, Forest Heights, Pulaski Heights, Southwest, and West Side—in 1961 and 1962.

The First Twenty-Five gathers the personal stories of these students some fifty years later. They recall what it was like to break down long-standing racial barriers while in their early teens—a developmental stage that often brings emotional vulnerability. In their own words, these individuals share what they saw, heard, and felt as children on the front lines of the civil rights movement, providing insight about this important time in Little Rock, and how these often painful events from their childhoods affected the rest of their lives.

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The First Year Out

Understanding American Teens after High School

Tim Clydesdale

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager’s first year after high school. But the reality is really quite different. As Tim Clydesdale reports in The First Year Out, teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after graduation effectively. But, like many good things, this comes at a cost.

Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, Clydesdale reveals how teens settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But Clydesdale finds that teens also stow away their identities—religious, racial, political, or otherwise—during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur.

The First Year Out is an invaluable resource for anyone caught up in the storm and stress of working with these young adults.

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The Fisher Site

Archaeological, Geological and Paleobotanical Studies at an Early Paleo-Indian Site in Southern Ontario, Canada

Peter L. Storck

University of Michigan Press, 1997

A detailed, multidisciplinary report on a large Early Paleoindian site in the Georgian Bay region.

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The Fixer

Visa Lottery Chronicles

Charles Piot with Kodjo Nicolas Batema

Duke University Press, 2019

In the West African nation of Togo, applying for the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery is a national obsession, with hundreds of thousands of Togolese entering each year. From the street frenzy of the lottery sign-up period and the scramble to raise money for the embassy interview to the gamesmanship of those adding spouses and dependents to their dossiers, the application process is complicated, expensive, and unpredictable. In The Fixer Charles Piot follows Kodjo Nicolas Batema, a Togolese visa broker—known as a “fixer”—as he shepherds his clients through the application and interview process. Relaying the experiences of the fixer, his clients, and embassy officials, Piot captures the ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game between the embassy and the hopeful Togolese as well as the disappointments and successes of lottery winners in the United States. These detailed and compelling stories uniquely illustrate the desire and savviness of migrants as they work to find what they hope will be a better life.

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The Fixers

Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990

Julia Rabig

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Stories of Newark’s postwar decline are easy to find. But in The Fixers, Julia Rabig supplements these tales of misery with the story of the many imaginative challenges to the city’s decline mounted by Newark’s residents and suburban neighbors. In these pages, we meet the black nationalists whose dynamic organizing elected African American candidates in unprecedented numbers. There are tenants who mounted a historic rent strike to transform public housing and renegade white Catholic priests who joined black laywomen to pioneer the construction of low-income housing and influence housing policy. These are just a few of the “fixers” we meet—people who devised ways to work with limited resources and pull together the threads of a patchwork welfare state.

Rabig argues that fixers play dual roles. They support resistance, but also mediation; they fight for reform, but also more radical and far-reaching alternatives; they rally others to a collective cause, but sometimes they broker factions. Fixers reflect longer traditions of organizing while responding to the demands of their times. In so doing, they end up fixing (like a fixative) a new and enduring pattern of activist strategies, reforms, and institutional expectations—a pattern we continue to see today.

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The Flesh of Animation

Bodily Sensations in Film and Digital Media

Sandra Annett

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

How animation can reconnect us with bodily experiences

Film and media studies scholarship has often argued that digital cinema and CGI provoke a sense of disembodiment in viewers; they are seen as merely fantastic or unreal. In her in-depth exploration of the phenomenology of animation, Sandra Annett offers a new perspective: that animated films and digital media in fact evoke vivid embodied sensations in viewers and connect them with the lifeworld of experience.

Starting with the emergence of digital technologies in filmmaking in the 1980s, Annett argues that contemporary digital media is indebted to the longer history of animation. She looks at a wide range of animation—from Disney films to anime, electro swing music videos to Vocaloids—to explore how animation, through its material forms and visual styles, can evoke bodily sensations of touch, weight, and orientation in space. Each chapter discusses well-known forms of animation from the United States, France, Japan, South Korea, and China, examining how they provoke different sensations in viewers, such as floating and falling in Howl’s Moving Castle and My Beautiful Girl Mari, and how the body is mediated in films that combine animation and live action, as seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Song of the South. These films set the stage for an exploration of how animation and embodiment manifest in contemporary global media, from CGI and motion capture in Disney’s “live action remakes” to new media installations by artists like Lu Yang.

Leveraging an array of case studies through a new approach to film phenomenology, The Flesh of Animation offers an enlightening discussion of why animation provides a sensational experience for viewers not replicable through other media forms.

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