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12 books match the query 'Mirrors'

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Australian Post-War Documentary Film

Deane Williams

Intellect Books, 2008

The postwar period in Australian history was rife with critical debate over notions of nation-building, multiculturalism, and internationalization. Australian Post-War Documentary Film tackles these issues in a considered, wide-ranging analysis of three types of documentaries: governmental, institutional, and radical. Charting the rise of progressive film culture, this volume critiques key films of the era, including The Back of Beyond, and retells film history by placing these documentaries in an international context.

“A significant contribution to documentary history, the history of left-wing thought in the West, and Australian studies.”—Ian Henderson, Editor of Studies in Australasian Cinema

“Deane Williams re-evaluates Australian documentary film production after World War II, positioning it as part of an international left culture which can embrace producers as different as the Realist Film Unit, Cecil Holmes, John Heyer and Maslyn Williams. He invites readers on an always enlightening and often exciting journey through a complex web of people and films and events, to view Australian culture through the documentary film ‘arc of mirrors’.”—Ina Bertrand, University of Melbourne

“Australian Postwar Documentary Film: An Arc ofMirrors is a thoroughly and painstakingly researched study of its subject, which draws upon a wealth of new oral and other forms of historical resource related to the Australian labour movement and associated film-making.”—Ian Aitken, De Montfort University

“With erudition and insight, Deane Williams in this book reconstructs a previously obscured era of documentary cinema in Australia, shedding light on the network of affiliations and associations that underlay the making of a cluster of compelling, politically charged documentary films in the postwar era. . . . This is an immensely thoughtful and timely contribution to the growing literature on the history of documentary cinema.”—Charles Wolfe, University of California, Santa Barbara

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Beyond Smoke and Mirrors

Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration

Douglas S. Massey

Russell Sage Foundation, 2002

Migration between Mexico and the United States is part of a historical process of increasing North American integration. This process acquired new momentum with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, which lowered barriers to the movement of goods, capital, services, and information. But rather than include labor in this new regime, the United States continues to resist the integration of the labor markets of the two countries. Instead of easing restrictions on Mexican labor, the United States has militarized its border and adopted restrictive new policies of immigrant disenfranchisement. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors examines the devastating impact of these immigration policies on the social and economic fabric of the Mexico and the United States, and calls for a sweeping reform of the current system. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors shows how U.S. immigration policies enacted between 1986–1996—largely for symbolic domestic political purposes—harm the interests of Mexico, the United States, and the people who migrate between them. The costs have been high. The book documents how the massive expansion of border enforcement has wasted billions of dollars and hundreds of lives, yet has not deterred increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants from heading north. The authors also show how the new policies unleashed a host of unintended consequences: a shift away from seasonal, circular migration toward permanent settlement; the creation of a black market for Mexican labor; the transformation of Mexican immigration from a regional phenomenon into a broad social movement touching every region of the country; and even the lowering of wages for legal U.S. residents. What had been a relatively open and benign labor process before 1986 was transformed into an exploitative underground system of labor coercion, one that lowered wages and working conditions of undocumented migrants, legal immigrants, and American citizens alike. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors offers specific proposals for repairing the damage. Rather than denying the reality of labor migration, the authors recommend regularizing it and working to manage it so as to promote economic development in Mexico, minimize costs and disruptions for the United States, and maximize benefits for all concerned. This book provides an essential "user's manual" for readers seeking a historical, theoretical, and substantive understanding of how U.S. policy on Mexican immigration evolved to its current dysfunctional state, as well as how it might be fixed.

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Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors

Religion and the History of the CIA

Michael Graziano

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Reveals the previous underexplored influence of religious thought in building the foundations of the CIA.

Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fittingly, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. By braiding the development of the modern intelligence agency with the story of postwar American religion, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors delivers a provocative new look at a secret driver of one of the major engines of American power.

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Hall of Mirrors

Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico

Laura A. Lewis

Duke University Press, 2003

Through an examination of caste in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico, Hall of Mirrors explores the construction of hierarchy and difference in a Spanish colonial setting. Laura A. Lewis describes how the meanings attached to the categories of Spanish, Indian, black, mulatto, and mestizo were generated within that setting, as she shows how the cultural politics of caste produced a system of fluid and relational designations that simultaneously facilitated and undermined Spanish governance.

Using judicial records from a variety of colonial courts, Lewis highlights the ethnographic details of legal proceedings as she demonstrates how Indians, in particular, came to be the masters of witchcraft, a domain of power that drew on gendered and hegemonic caste distinctions to complicate the colonial hierarchy. She also reveals the ways in which blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos mediated between Spaniards and Indians, alternatively reinforcing Spanish authority and challenging it through alliances with Indians. Bringing to life colonial subjects as they testified about their experiences, Hall of Mirrors discloses a series of contradictions that complicate easy distinctions between subalterns and elites, resistance and power.

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In the Land of Mirrors

Cuban Exile Politics in the United States

Maria de los Angeles Torres

University of Michigan Press, 2001

In the Land of Mirrors is a journey through the politics of Cuban exiles since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It explores the development of Cuban exile politics and identity within a context of U.S. and Cuban realities, as well as within the broader inquiry of the changing nature of nation-states and its impact on the politics and identity of diaspora communities. Topics covered include: the origins of the post-revolution exile enclave of the 1960s; the evolution of the Cuban community over the 1960s; the pluralization of exile politics in the 1970s, particularly regarding the relationship with the island; the emergence of Cuban-American political action committees in the 1980s; post-Cold War developments; and the transition of Miami by the coming of age of a second generation of Cuban-Americans and the arrival of a new wave of exiles.

Interspersed with vignettes from the author's own experiences and political activism, In the Land of Mirrors explores the meanings and ramifications of exile, of belonging, and of seeing the self in the other. It will appeal to political scientists, Latin Americanists, and those studying the politics of exile.

María de los Angeles Torres was born in Cuba and came to the United States as a young child. She is Associate Professor of Political Science, DePaul University.

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Land of Smoke and Mirrors

A Cultural History of Los Angeles

Brook, Vincent

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Unlike the more forthrightly mythic origins of other urban centers—think Rome via Romulus and Remus or Mexico City via the god Huitzilopochtli—Los Angeles emerged from a smoke-and-mirrors process that is simultaneously literal and figurative, real and imagined, material and metaphorical, physical and textual. Through penetrating analysis and personal engagement, Vincent Brook uncovers the many portraits of this ever-enticing, ever-ambivalent, and increasingly multicultural megalopolis. Divided into sections that probe Los Angeles’s checkered history and reflect on Hollywood’s own self-reflections, the book shows how the city, despite considerable remaining challenges, is finally blowing away some of the smoke of its not always proud past and rhetorically adjusting its rear-view mirrors.

Part I is a review of the city’s history through the early 1900s, focusing on the seminal 1884 novel Ramona and its immediate effect, but also exploring its ongoing impact through interviews with present-day Tongva Indians, attendance at the 88th annual Ramona pageant, and analysis of its feature film adaptations.

Brook deals with Hollywood as geographical site, film production center, and frame of mind in Part II. He charts the events leading up to Hollywood’s emergence as the world’s movie capital and explores subsequent developments of the film industry from its golden age through the so-called New Hollywood, citing such self-reflexive films as Sunset Blvd.,Singin’ in the Rain, and The Truman Show.

Part III considers LA noir, a subset of film noir that emerged alongside the classical noir cycle in the 1940s and 1950s and continues today. The city’s status as a privileged noir site is analyzed in relation to its history and through discussions of such key LA noir novels and films as Double Indemnity, Chinatown, and Crash.

In Part IV, Brook examines multicultural Los Angeles. Using media texts as signposts, he maps the history and contemporary situation of the city’s major ethno-racial and other minority groups, looking at such films as Mi Familia (Latinos), Boyz N the Hood (African Americans), Charlotte Sometimes (Asians), Falling Down (Whites), and The Kids Are All Right (LGBT).

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Manufactured Light

Mirrors in the Mesoamerican Realm

Emiliano Gallaga

University Press of Colorado, 2015

Complex and time-consuming to produce, iron-ore mirrors stand out among Prehispanic artifacts for their aesthetic beauty, their symbolic implications, and the complexity and skill of their assembly. Manufactured Light presents the latest archaeological research on these items, focusing on the intersection of their significance and use and on the technological aspects of the manufacturing processes that created them.

The volume covers the production, meaning, and utilization of iron-ore mirrors in various Mesoamerican communities. Chapters focus on topics such as experimental archaeology projects and discussions of workshops in archaeological contexts in the Maya, Central Mexico, and northwest Mexico regions. Other chapters concentrate on the employment and ideological associations of these mirrors in Prehispanic times, especially as both sacred and luxury items. The final chapters address continuities in the use of mirrors from Prehispanic to modern times, especially in contemporary indigenous communities, with an emphasis on examining the relationship between ethnographic realities and archaeological interpretations.

While the symbolism of these artifacts and the intricacy of their construction have long been recognized in archaeological discussions, Manufactured Light is the first synthesis of this important yet under-studied class of material culture. It is a must-read for students and scholars of Mesoamerican archaeology, ethnography, religion, replicative experimentation, and lithic technology.

Contirbutors include: Marc G. Blainey, Thomas Calligaro, Carrie L. Dennett, Emiliano Gallaga, Julie Gazzola, Sergio Gómez Chávez, Olivia Kindl, Brigitte Kovacevich, Achim Lelgemann, José J. Lunazzi, John J. McGraw, Emiliano Melgar, Joseph Mountjoy, Reyna Solis, and Karl Taube.

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Maps and Mirrors

Topologies of Art and Politics

Steve Martinot

Northwestern University Press, 2001

Maps and Mirrors explores the links and gaps between the aesthetic and the political at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Testing the major voices of aesthetic and literary theory, it raises important questions about the implicit political contexts and commitments of thinkers from Kant to de Man. Taken together the essays provide a tour of the complexities and richness of contemporary modes of critique.

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Mirrors of Our Playing

Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama

Thomas R. Whitaker

University of Michigan Press, 1999

For centuries, theater has maintained a central role in the development and preservation of artistic, social, and political themes in society. Yet in recent decades, theater has taken an increasingly marginal role. In this book, Thomas R. Whitaker examines the reasons for the marginalization of this important and influential art form, considering not only histories of various dramatic forms, but also the individual histories of various playwrights and their times. In so doing, he explores the importance of perceiving drama in a different light: as a participatory tool, a mirror that reflects life as it unfolds and plays out before us. Whitaker's unique and comprehensive study of drama poses theater as a collaborative and interactive experience, an experience that involves not only the playwright, the text, and the artists, but the audience as well as the society and culture of that audience.Contrary to the common critical belief that drama can only be theorized as a “performed action,” Whitaker conceptualizes drama as an interaction between a “performed action” and an “action of performance.” The whole of Mirrors of Our Playing is founded on the understanding that a play is a manifold mirror of the “playing” that is our lives; therefore, the play is shaped by a complex interaction between the paradigms that make up our view of the world and the reflection of these paradigms in the “mirror” that is the play.Focusing on both scripts and performance, Mirrors of Our Playing takes a fresh look at modern English-speaking drama, from its Anglo-Irish beginnings to its contemporary cross-fertilizations and international dispersals. It shows how most important English-speaking theater has been shaped in accord with several major paradigms, while it examines four major presences in that theater: Lord Byron, Samuel Beckett, Wole Soyinka, and Peter Brook. Mirrors of Our Playing stands on the borderlands between text-oriented and performanceoriented criticism. It seeks to extend our knowledge of the history of modern drama in English as that drama has engaged certain paradigms of performance. It is therefore grounded in close textual analysis of a great many texts that are understood as scripts for performance. Its several chapters incorporate, as they proceed, a variety of subordinate strategies: the placing of theater in historical context, the comparison of closely related plays, the charting of historical sequences of development within a given genre or paradigm, examination of the influence of a historical figure or of contemporary works, and the tracing of the exploratory development of a major director.

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Swan Hammer

An Instructor’s Guide to Mirrors

Maggie Graber

Michigan State University Press, 2022

This collection chronicles coming of age as a queer millennial in a twenty-first century America defined by the internet, climate crisis, and a growing disconnection that the poems within work to resist. Here, everyone and everything serves as a potential reflection for something larger than the poet can understand: an unknown debit card thief, the cartoon teacher Ms. Frizzle, The Weather Channel, an RV park, a dead poet. These poems seek to make something of the spaces between and reach toward a sense of the ecstatic just beyond. They are poems of imagination and vision that strive to look rather than look away, that attempt to capture a nebulous feeling before it is gone for good. Swan Hammer is an instructor’s guide to connection-making, of seeing and then seeing again, in ways that have been redefined in the age of the internet. Here is one poet’s wandering relationship to their own sense of what it is to be alive and queer at a time when there is so much on the brink of disappearing—and what a queer experience it is.

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The Hall of Mirrors

Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound's Cantos

Peter Stoicheff

University of Michigan Press, 1995

An examination of a problematic text by one of America's most important poets

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The Play of Mirrors

The Representation of Self Mirrored in the Other

By Sylvia Caiuby Novaes

University of Texas Press, 1997

Focusing on the Bororo people of west-central Brazil, this book addresses the construction of self-identity through interethnic interaction. By presenting the images the Bororo have of themselves as well as the images of others who have interacted with them, Brazilian anthropologist Sylvia Caiuby Novaes argues convincingly that Bororo self-images are constructed with the aid of a peculiar looking-glass—it is in the images of others that they see themselves.

Incorporating contributions from psychology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and semiotics, Play of Mirrors focuses on symbols, images, discourse, and meanings rather than solely on the problem of acculturation. It thus reflects the thinking of a new generation of Brazilian anthropologists who have shifted their focus from native communities as isolated entities to an examination of their embeddedness within broader national and international arenas.

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