A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY360 start with C start with C
The textbook features:
"Authentic readings to foster vocabulary development, show successful techniques, and serve as a jumping-off point for free writing.
"A "learning log" in which students write to practice the writing lessons and tips presented.
"A two-track system in which students simultaneously work with the writing of other students as they work on their own compositions.
"Toolbox mini-lessons to review common grammar trouble spots.
This mid-level writing text is appropriate for high school, community college, or university course
With the prevalence of disinformation geared to instill doubt rather than clarity, Creating Chaos Online unmasks disinformation when it attempts to pass as deliberation in the public sphere and distorts the democratic processes. Asta Zelenkauskaitė finds that repeated tropes justifying Russian trolling were found to circulate across not only all analyzed media platforms’ comments but also across two analyzed sociopolitical contexts suggesting the orchestrated efforts behind messaging. Through a dystopian vision of publics that are expected to navigate in the sea of uncertain both authentic and orchestrated content, pushed by human and nonhuman actors, Creating Chaos Online offers a concept of post-publics. The idea of post-publics is reflected within the continuum of treatment of public, counter public, and anti-public. This book argues that affect-instilled arguments used in public deliberation in times of uncertainty, along with whataboutism constitute a playbook for chaos online.
Research article introductions are central to Creating Contexts: Writing across Genres with the CaRS (creating a research space) model used as a starting point. This volume focuses on introductions for other kinds of texts that are also part of the graduate student writing experience such as course papers and critiques, proposals, and dissertations.
This volume represents a revision and expansion of the material on introductions that appeared in English in Today's Research World.
The material presented in this volume is appropriate for graduate students and others already working in their chosen academic fields. The material has, in fact, been used with each of these groups in both writing courses and writing workshops. We believe that the material would also be suitable for those wishing to pursue a course of self-study. To target these different possible uses, we have included a variety of topics and tasks that we hope will deepen users’ understanding of how to create a writing context for their work. Tasks range from evaluating text commentaries to open-ended questions and have been designed to generate lively classroom or workshop discussion as well as thoughtful consideration by an individual user.
Beamer identifies six factors that influence legislators' decisions: accountability, dependability, equity, obscurability, and horizontal and vertical transferability. Within the context created by citizen demands, intergovernmental politics, policy histories, court interventions, and state constitutions, this study analyzes how legislators employ these principles to develop and enact policies.
In addition to modeling state politics within the context of federalism, Creative Politics, reflecting the author's extensive interviews with legislators, is novel in its focus on politicians' views about public services, the strategies to finance them, and efforts to develop and maintain political support for them.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, economics, and public administration, and, more specifically, of federalism, state politics and policy, and legislative decision-making.
Glenn Beamer is Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research, University of California, Berkeley, and Assistant Professor of Government, University of Virginia.
“Creativity” is a word that excites and dazzles us. It promises brilliance and achievement, a shield against conformity, a channel for innovation across the arts, sciences, technology, and education, and a mechanism for economic revival and personal success. But it has not always evoked these ideas. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly. Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary K-12 education, and even modern electoral politics. Ultimately, The Creativity Complex asks how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling.
By closely examining the ways that disabled girls represent themselves, Anastasia Todd goes beyond a critique of the figure of the privileged, disabled girl subject in the national imagination to explore how disabled girls circulate their own capacious re-envisioning of what it means to be a disabled girl. In analyzing a range of cultural sites, including YouTube, TikTok, documentaries, and GoFundMe campaigns, Todd shows how disabled girls actively upend what we think we know about them and their experience, recasting the meanings ascribed to their bodyminds in their own terms. By analyzing disabled girls’ self-representational practices and cultural productions, Todd shows how disabled girls deftly theorize their experiences of ableism, sexism, racism, and ageism, and cultivate communities online, creating archives of disability knowledge and politicizing other disabled people in the process.
Shumate draws on a wide range of literary and nonliterary representations of conversion in order to establish a useful theoretical framework. The Metamorphoses is exposed as a text anticipating later narratives in its concern with world-building, with the narrator's subjective reality, and with the invocation and critique of religious experience.
Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' "Metamorphoses" will be of interest to classicists and scholars of Silver Latin and of the increasingly popular ancient novel, as well as to students of psychology and the sociology of religious experience.
Nancy Shumate is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literatures, Smith College.
The main thread of the book follows the life and works of a remarkable figure of the period, Li Yü (1611-80), whose vast array of accomplishments and experiences mirror seventeenth-century China in all its complexity and excitement. Li Yü's China was a world of unprecedented changes in almost all spheres of life. A thriving commercial and industrial economy, stupendous population growth, and the emergence of a new age of science and technology were accompanied by intense urbanization, radical views on money, wealth, and luxury, liberal attitudes toward sexuality, and developments that would change the nature of the literary and intellectual world. The Changs' exhaustive exploration of Chinese historical and literary sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is combined with a selective application of interpretive insights and analytic techniques from the major theoretical schools.
An important resource for scholars in history, literature, and Asian studies, Crisis and Transformation extends its appeal to those interested in the history of science, issues of gender and social transformation, and popular culture movements.
Chun-shu Chang is Professor of History, University of Michigan, and Honorary Professor of Chinese History, China. Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang is Visiting Associate Professor of History and Research Associate, Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan.
Peterson offers a comprehensive analysis of the domestic politics of crisis bargaining. She uses differences in state structure to explain variations in foreign policy processes and outcomes. By introducing domestic structure as a crucial intervening variable between the international environment and a state's foreign policy during an acute conflict, Peterson shows how existing cognitive and bureaucratic approaches provide complementary, not competing, explanations of crisis bargaining.
Crisis Bargaining and the State: The Domestic Politics of International Conflict applies recent research in the field of international political economy on the relationship between ideas, institutions, and the international environment to the issue of crisis bargaining. It will appeal to students, scholars, and policymakers interested in crisis bargaining, international security, and international relations.
Susan Peterson is Assistant Professor, Department of Government, The College of William & Mary.
This volume facilitates teacher self-reflection and enables readers to better understand the motivations and pedagogical implications--especially for L2 writing--of a more openly pedagogical approach.
Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students explains what it means to commit to an academic pedagogy, in terms of form, self, content, and community--and what it can accomplish in the L2 writing classroom. It's a guide for writing teachers who wish to embark on a journey toward increased critical awareness of the role they play, or potentially could play, in the lives of their students.
This book foregrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage. The book is framed by a substantial introduction that sets forth the critical vision and structure of the book as a whole, and an afterword that points toward emerging currents in and expansions of the contemporary field of playwriting by women on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Within this frame, the twenty-eight chapters that form the main body of the book, each focusing on a single play of critical significance, together constitute a multi-faceted, inevitably partial, yet nonetheless integral picture of the work of women playwrights since 2000 as they engage with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Some of these issues include the continuing oppression of and violence against women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and ethnic minorities; the ongoing processes of decolonization; the consequences of neoliberal capitalism; the devastation and enduring trauma of war; global migration and the refugee crisis; the turn to right-wing populism; and the impact of climate change, including environmental disaster and species extinction.
The book is structured into seven sections: Replaying the Canon; Representing Histories; Staging Lives; Re-imagining Family; Navigating Communities; Articulating Intersections; and New World Order(s). These sections group clusters of plays according to the broad critical actions they perform or, in the case of the final section, the new world orders that they capture through their stagings of the seeming impasse of the politically and environmentally catastrophic global present moment. There are many other points of resonance among and across the plays, but this seven-part structure foregrounds the broader actions that drive the plays, both in the Aristotelian dramaturgical sense and in the larger sense of the critical interventions that the plays creatively enact. In this way, the seven-part structure establishes correspondences across the great diversity of dramatic material represented in the book while at the same time identifying key methods of critical approach and areas of focus that align the book’s contributors across this diversity. The structure of the book thus parallels what the playwrights themselves are doing, but also how the contributors are approaching their work. Plays featured in the book are from Canada, Australia, South Africa, the US, the UK, France, Argentina, New Zealand, Syria, Brazil, Italy, and Austria; the playwrights include Margaret Atwood, Leah Purcell, Yaël Farber, Paula Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, debbie tucker green, Lisa Loomer, Hélène Cixous. Anna Deavere Smith, Lola Arias, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, Marie Clements, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Alia Bano, Holly Hughes, Whiti Hereaka, Julia Cho, Liwaa Yazji, Grace Passô, Dominique Morisseau, Emma Dante, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Lynn Nottage, Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Colleen Murphy, and Lucy Kirkwood.
Encompassing several generations of playwrights and scholars, ranging from the most senior to mid-career to emerging voices, the book will be essential reading for established researchers, a valuable learning resource for students at all levels, and a useful and accessible guide for theatre practitioners and interested theatre-goers.
Critical Theory and Performance presents a broad range of critical and theoretical methods and applies them to contemporary and historical performance genres—from stage plays, dance-dramas, performance art, cabaret, stand-up comedy, and jazz to circus, street theater, and shamanistic ritual. As the first comprehensive introduction to critical theory’s rich and diverse contributions to the study of drama, theater, and performance, the book has been highly influential for more than a decade in providing fertile ground for academic investigations in the lively field of performance studies.
This updated and expanded edition presents nineteen new essays by the field’s leading scholars and practitioners as well as new critical introductions by editors Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Reflecting recent trends in performance studies, this revised edition now includes discussions of critical race theory, postcolonial studies, gender and sexualities, and mediatized cultures. The resulting volume is a unique and indispensable tool for critics, teachers, and students that paves the way for future scholarship.
Janelle G. Reinelt is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Reinelt and Roach
Joseph R. Roach is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Theater and English at Yale University.
Drawing on multi-sited ethnography and in-depth interviews with a broad community of aspiring millionaires, Critically Capitalist illuminates how contemporary capitalism thrives by channeling discontent into financial and real estate markets, which in turn, has cemented critical capitalism as the cultural and affective backbone of South Korea’s economy.
The Critics and the Prioress responds to a critical stalemate between the demands of ethics and the entailments of methodology. The book addresses key moments in criticism of the Prioress’s Tale—particularly those that stage an encounter between historicism and ethics—in order to interrogate these critical impasses while suggesting new modes for future encounters. It is an effort to identify, engage, and reframe some significant—and perennially repeated—arguments staked out in this criticism, such as the roles of gender, aesthetics, source studies, and the appropriate relationship between ethics and historicism.
The Critics and the Prioress will be an essential resource for Chaucer scholars researching as well as teaching the Prioress’s Tale. Scholars and students of Middle English literature and medieval culture more generally will also be interested in this book’s rigorous analysis of contemporary scholarly approaches to expressions of antisemitism in Chaucer’s England.
Ilan Stavans has been a lightning rod for cultural discussion and criticism his entire career. In A Critic's Journey, he takes on his own Jewish and Hispanic upbringing with an autobiographical focus and his typical flair with words, exploring the relationship between the two cultures from his own and also from others' experiences.
Stavans has been hailed as a voice for Latino culture thanks to his Hispanic upbringing, but as a Jew and a Caucasian, he's also an outsider to that culture---something that's sharpened his perspective (and some of his critics' swords). In this book of essays, he looks at the creative process from that point of view, exploring everything from the translation of Don Quixote to the Hispanic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Latin America.
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. A native of Mexico, he received his doctorate in Latin American Literature from Columbia University. Stavans's books include The Hispanic Condition, On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, Love & Language (with Verónica Albin), Resurrecting Hebrew, and Mr. Spic Goes to Washington, and he has edited books including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories and the upcoming Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. His story "Morirse está en Hebreo" was made into the award-winning movie My Mexican Shivah.
Stavans has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award, an Emmy nomination, the Latino Book Award, Chile's Presidential Medal, the Rubén Darío Distinction, and the Cátedra Roberto Bolaño. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.
The critique uses a novel device in that the same set of ethnographic “facts” are looked at through different theories. This reveals a good deal about the different theories. By the same token, of course, this critique goes into the question of what a “fact” of “kinship” might be and how to recognize one either at home or in the field.
Schneider’s critique also uses history to raise cogent questions about how kinship has been studied. But it is not as 20/20 hindsight that history is used. Due respect is paid to the climate of the time, as well as the climatic changes and the ways in which these helped to create the emperor’s clothes. Right, wrong, or indifferent, Schneider’s study of how the emperor “kinship” was dressed and then redressed as the winds of change threatened disarray, proves challenging to the theories by which anthropology lives, as well as to the specifically privileged domain of “kinship.” The implications of this study for a wide range of problems within theoretical anthropology are striking.
--Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic
"A Crooked Line brilliantly captures the most significant shifts in the landscape of historical scholarship that have occurred in the last four decades. Part personal history, part insightful analysis of key methodological and theoretical historiographical tendencies since the late 1960s, always thoughtful and provocative, Eley's book shows us why history matters to him and why it should also matter to us."
--Robert Moeller, University of California, Irvine
"Part genealogy, part diagnosis, part memoir, Eley's account of the histories of social and cultural history is a tour de force."
--Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois
"Eley's reflections on the changing landscape of academic history in the last forty years will interest and benefit all students of the discipline. Both a native informant and an analyst in this account, Eley combines the two roles superbly to produce one of most engaging and compelling narratives of the recent history of History."
--Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe
Using his own intellectual biography as a narrative device, Geoff Eley tracks the evolution of historical understanding in our time from social history through the so-called "cultural turn," and back again to a broad history of society.
A gifted writer, Eley carefully winnows unique experiences from the universal, and uses the interplay of the two to draw the reader toward an organic understanding of how historical thinking (particularly the work of European historians) has evolved under the influence of new ideas. His work situates history within History, and offers students, scholars, and general readers alike a richly detailed, readable guide to the enduring value of historical ideas.
Geoff Eley is Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
"A definitive study of an extremely important, though curiously neglected, Supreme Court decision, Pierce v. Society of Sisters."
---Robert O'Neil, Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Virginia School of Law
---Richard W. Garnett, Professor of Law and Associate Dean, Notre Dame Law School
"A well-written, well-researched blend of law, politics, and history."
---Joan DelFattore, Professor of English and Legal Studies, University of Delaware
In 1922, the people of Oregon passed legislation requiring all children to attend public schools. For the nativists and progressives who had campaigned for the Oregon School Bill, it marked the first victory in a national campaign to homogenize education---and ultimately the populace. Private schools, both secular and religious, vowed to challenge the law. The Catholic Church, the largest provider of private education in the country and the primary target of the Ku Klux Klan campaign, stepped forward to lead the fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the court declared the Oregon School Bill unconstitutional and ruled that parents have the right to determine how their children should be educated. Since then, Pierce has provided a precedent in many cases pitting parents against the state.
Paula Abrams is Professor of Constitutional Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.
Teachers are often in the forefront of today’s cross-cultural contact, whether in the language classroom or in the K–12 or university/college classroom, but they are not always prepared to handle the various issues that can arise in terms of cross-cultural communication. The intent of this book is to make education in cross-cultural awareness accessible to a broad range of teachers working in a variety of educational settings.
Crossing Cultures in the Language Classroom attempts to balance theory and practice for pre-service and in-service teachers in general education programs or in ESL/EFL, bilingual, and foreign language teacher training programs, as well as cross-cultural awareness workshops. This book is unique in that it combines theory with a wide range of experiential activities and projects designed to actively engage users in the process of understanding different aspects of cross-cultural awareness. The goals of the book are to help readers:
- expand cultural awareness of one’s own culture and that of others
- achieve a deeper understanding of what culture is and the relationship between culture and language
- acquire the ability to observe behaviors in order to draw conclusions based on observation rather than preconceptions
- understand and implement observations of cultural similarities and differences
- develop an attitude of tolerance toward cultural differences and move away from the “single story.”
--William Stafford
A plain-spoken but eminently effective poet, the late William Stafford (1914-1993) has managed to shape part of the mainstream of American poetry by distancing himself from its trends and politics. Though his work has always inspired controversy, he was widely admired by students and poetry lovers as well as his own peers. His fascination with the process of writing joined with his love of the land and his faith in the teaching power of nature to produce a unique poetic voice in the last third of the twentieth century.
Crossing Unmarked Snow continues--in the tradition of Stafford's well-loved collections Writing the Australian Crawl and You Must Revise Your Life-- collecting prose and poetry on the writer's profession. The book includes reviews and reflections on poets from Theodore Roethke to Carolyn Forche, from May Sarton to Philip Levine; conversations on the making of poems; and a selection of Stafford's own poetry. The book also includes a section on the art of teaching, featuring interviews, writing exercises, and essays on the writer's vocation.
William Stafford authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose during his lifetime, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation and You Must Revise Your Life.
In this important study, Fergus Millar explores the development of the Roman Republic, which, as it drew to a close in the middle decades of the first century B.C.E., had come to cover most of Italy. There were nearly a million adult male voters in the time of Cicero, but there were no constituencies, and no absentee ballots. To exercise their rights, voters had to come in person to Rome and to meet in the Forum. Millar takes the period from the dictatorship of Sulla to Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon and shows how the politics of the crowd was central to the great changes that took place year after year, and altered the Republic forever.
The originality of Millar's highly accessible work lies first in its serious treatment of the importance of open-air oratory in Roman public life, and second, in its use of the narratives of events that evidence provides. Third, it refuses to interpret these narratives in the light of modern theories about the importance of the client-patron system, or the domination of the Senate. This work questions how we should understand the Roman Republic: as a network of aristocratic families dominating the people, or an erratic and volatile democracy in which power was exercised by the tiny proportion of citizens who actually came to listen to speeches and to vote.
This work speaks to those interested in ancient history and its consequences in the modern world.
Fergus Millar is Camden Professor of Ancient History, Brasenose College, Oxford University.
Across seven semi-autonomous essays, Cue Tears looks at the mechanisms of tear production, internal and external techniques that actors use to weep, and the effects of tears in performance situations on the stage, in the gallery, and in the classroom. The writing moves with a light touch between theory and criticism of a broad range of instances from literature, theater, performance art, visual art, and cinema, while also embracing a strong autobiographical and personal slant. Author Daniel Sack’s father was a biochemist who studied tears and collected his son’s tears for research during his childhood. These “reflex tears” were produced as a physical response to irritation—an eye stretched past the point of blinking, a cotton swab up the nose. This childhood occupation coincided with his first years taking acting classes, trying to learn how to cry “emotional tears” onstage through psychological stimulation and the recollection of memory. Cue Tears investigates these memories and methods, finding that tears both shore up and dissolve distinctions between truth and artifice, emotional and physical, private and public, sad and humorous.
“McCloskey and Ziliak have been pushing this very elementary, very correct, very important argument through several articles over several years and for reasons I cannot fathom it is still resisted. If it takes a book to get it across, I hope this book will do it. It ought to.”
—Thomas Schelling, Distinguished University Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, and 2005 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics
“With humor, insight, piercing logic and a nod to history, Ziliak and McCloskey show how economists—and other scientists—suffer from a mass delusion about statistical analysis. The quest for statistical significance that pervades science today is a deeply flawed substitute for thoughtful analysis. . . . Yet few participants in the scientific bureaucracy have been willing to admit what Ziliak and McCloskey make clear: the emperor has no clothes.”
—Kenneth Rothman, Professor of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Health
The Cult of Statistical Significance shows, field by field, how “statistical significance,” a technique that dominates many sciences, has been a huge mistake. The authors find that researchers in a broad spectrum of fields, from agronomy to zoology, employ “testing” that doesn’t test and “estimating” that doesn’t estimate. The facts will startle the outside reader: how could a group of brilliant scientists wander so far from scientific magnitudes? This study will encourage scientists who want to know how to get the statistical sciences back on track and fulfill their quantitative promise. The book shows for the first time how wide the disaster is, and how bad for science, and it traces the problem to its historical, sociological, and philosophical roots.
Stephen T. Ziliak is the author or editor of many articles and two books. He currently lives in Chicago, where he is Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University. Deirdre N. McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of twenty books and three hundred scholarly articles. She has held Guggenheim and National Humanities Fellowships. She is best known for How to Be Human* Though an Economist (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and her most recent book, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006).
Chapters on Lionel Trilling, H. L. Mencken and Irving Babbitt, Ralph Ellison, Dwight Macdonald, Diana Trilling, and Edmund Wilson affirm the continuing pertinence of their work to today's concerns. Seaton then turns to the careers of Leslie Fiedler and Susan Sontag to explore the impact of the cultural radicalism of the sixties on literary criticism. Subsequent chapters analyze the successes and failures of contemporary cultural studies through the writings of Richard Rorty, Edward Said, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson.
Separately, these chapters provide provocative readings of the individual critics; together they make a case for the tradition exemplified by these critics as an alternative to contemporary cultural studies. The issues the book discusses extend beyond literary criticism and the academic world to the political-religious- cultural conflicts of today's culture wars.
"These lively, closely argued essays explain very clearly what the issues are, how they arose, and why they are important." --Christopher Lasch
"A forceful argument about the relationship between literary studies and politics that will add something important to the vigorous, and often fierce, discussion of the canon, the politics of literature, and educational reform."--William Cain, Wellesley College
James Seaton is Professor of English, Michigan State University. He is co-editor, with William K. Buckley, of Beyond Cheering and Bashing: New Perspectives on the Closing of the American Mind.
Natasha Barnes traces the use of cultural arguments in the making of Caribbean modernity, looking at the cultural performances of the Anglophone Caribbean—cricket, carnival, dancehall, calypso, and beauty pageants—and their major literary portrayals. Barnes historicizes the problematic linkage of culture and nation to argue that Caribbean anticolonialism has given expressive culture a critical place in the region’s identity politics. Her provocative readings of foundational thinkers C. L. R. James and Sylvia Winters will engender discussion and debate among the Caribbean intellectual community. This impressively interdisciplinary study will make important contributions to the fields of Afro-diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, literary studies, performance studies, and sociology.
--Simon Gikandi, Princeton University
Natasha Barnes is Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.
The contributors are Elizabeth Clark, Lauren Berlant, Dorothy Roberts, Georg Lipsitz, and Kenneth Karst.
"For a lucid and thorough 'real-world' analysis of the movement from the ground-up--including its history, aesthetics, and culture, there is surely no better place to start than Somers-Willett's trailblazing book."
--- Jerome Sala, Pleiades
"Finally, a clear, accurate, and thoroughly researched examination of slam poetry, a movement begun in 1984 by a mixed bag of nobody poets in Chicago. At conception, slam poetry espoused universal humanistic ideals and a broad spectrum of participants, and especially welcome is the book's analysis of how commercial marketing forces succeeded in narrowing public perception of slam to the factionalized politics of race and identity. The author's knowledge of American slam at the national level is solid and more authentic than many of the slammers who claim to be."
---Marc Kelly Smith, founder/creator of the International Poetry Slam movement
The cultural phenomenon known as slam poetry was born some twenty years ago in white working-class Chicago barrooms. Since then, the raucous competitions have spread internationally, launching a number of annual tournaments, inspiring a generation of young poets, and spawning a commercial empire in which poetry and hip-hop merge.
The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry is the first critical book to take an in-depth look at slam, shedding light on the relationships that slam poets build with their audiences through race and identity performance and revealing how poets come to celebrate (and at times exploit) the politics of difference in American culture.
With a special focus on African American poets, Susan B. A. Somers-Willett explores the pros and cons of identity representation in the commercial arena of spoken word poetry and, in doing so, situates slam within a history of verse performance, from blackface minstrelsy to Def Poetry. What's revealed is a race-based dynamic of authenticity lying at the heart of American culture. Rather than being mere reflections of culture, Somers-Willett argues, slams are culture---sites where identities and political values get publicly refigured and exchanged between poets and audiences.
Susan B. A. Somers-Willett is a decade-long veteran of slam and teaches creative writing and poetics as an Assistant Professor of English at Montclair State University. She is the author of two books of poetry, Quiver and Roam. Visit the author's website at: http://www.susansw.com/.
Photo by Jennifer Lacy.
The late Dwight Conquergood’s research has inspired an entire generation of scholars invested in performance as a meaningful paradigm to understand human interaction, especially between structures of power and the disenfranchised. Conquergood’s research laid the groundwork for others to engage issues of ethics in ethnographic research, performance as a meaningful paradigm for ethnography, and case studies that demonstrated the dissolution of theory/practice binaries.Cultural Struggles is the first gathering of Conquergood’s work in a single volume, tracing the evolution of one scholar’s thinking across a career of scholarship, teaching, and activism, and also the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies.
The collection begins with an illuminating introduction by E. Patrick Johnson and ends with commentary by other scholars (Micaela di Leonardo, Judith Hamera, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Lisa Merrill, Della Pollock, and Joseph Roach), engaging aspects of Conquergood’s work and providing insight into how that work has withstood the test of time, as scholars still draw on his research to inform their current interests and methods.
On the basis of rich empirical analyses of East and Southeast Asia, and with theoretical insights from different approaches in the social sciences, Culture and Economy addresses these issues in both macroscopic and microscopic terms. Specific topics discussed range from the use and reinvention of Confucian and Islamic legacies in South Korea and Malaysia to promote a particular vision of the economy, to the role of family- and network-structured firms and the reliance on trust-based personal networks in Southeast Asia, to the cultures of labor and management in Chinese village enterprises and Vietnamese ceramics firms, as well as in South Korean export processing zones and the current Chinese labor market.
These careful case studies suggest that it is inevitable that Eastern Asia will shape, even remake, capitalism into a system of production and consumption beyond its original definition.
Timothy Brook is Professor of History, Stanford University. Hy V. Luong is Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto.
The authors of this compelling book argue that before suitable solutions can be found to pressing environmental problems, we need a way to gather information on the human dimensions of global changes. How do small and everyday individual actions add up to the intricate networks of global interactions? What are our rights and responsibilities as humans toward the planet and its natural resources?
The Lacandon rain forest in Mexico provides a vivid example of an environmental challenge that will demand the concerted efforts of many different groups, and not only technical solutions, to resolve successfully. Using data taken largely from in-depth interviews with landowners, farm workers, cattle raisers, housewives, professionals, and civil servants, the authors draw a rich portrait of the varied perceptions and positions these groups and individuals hold. At issue are the social, rather than psychological, bases of their perspectives.
Culture and Global Change offers a model for how the social sciences, and anthropology in particular, can lead the way in developing comprehensive understandings of the interrelationships between groups at the local, regional, and international levels that affect perceptions of the environment and thus the viability of solutions. It is required reading for anthropologists and environmental activists alike.
Lourdes Arizpe is Assistant Director-General for Culture, UNESCO. Fernanda Paz and Margarita Vel´zquez work for the Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México.
Culture in the Anteroom introduces an English-speaking readership to the full range of Siegfried Kracauer's work as novelist, architect, journalist, sociologist, historian, exile critic, and theorist of visual culture. This interdisciplinary anthology---including pieces from Miriam Bratu Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, Noah Isenberg, Lutz Koepnick, Eric Rentschler, and Heide Schlüpmann---brings together literary and film scholars, historians and art historians, sociologists, and architects to address the scope and current relevance of a body of work dedicated to investigating all aspects of modernism and modernity. The contributors approach Kracauer's writings from a variety of angles, some by placing them in dialogue with his contemporaries in Weimar Germany and the New York Intellectuals of the 1940s and '50s; others by exploring relatively unknown facets of Kracauer's oeuvre by considering his contributions to architectural history, the history of radio as well as other new media, and museum and exhibition culture.
A goal of this book is to help readers strike a balance between minimizing cultural differences and assuming similarities across cultures on one hand, and exoticizing other cultures or accentuating surface differences on the other.
The myths about culture as it relates to the classroom that are explored in this book are:
- We are all human beings, so how different can we really be?
- The goal of education is to develop each individual’s potential.
- Focusing on conversational skills in the classroom is overrated.
- Not looking at the teacher shows disrespect.
- How something is said is not as important as what is said.
- Everyone knows what a good instructional environment is.
- By the time students get to middle or high school, they know how to be a student.
Jay M. Smith argues that the early modern nobility instinctively drew a correlation between the meaning of merit and an image of the "sovereign's gaze." In the early seventeenth century, merit meant the qualities traditionally associated with aristocratic values: generosity, fidelity, and honor. Nobles sought to display those qualities before the appreciative gaze of the king himself. But the expansion of the monarchy forced the routinization of the sovereign's gaze, and Louis XIV began to affirm and reward new qualities--talent and application--besides those thought innately noble.
The contradictions implicit within the absolute monarchy's culture of merit are demonstrated by the eighteenth-century French army, which was dominated by the nobility, but also committed to efficiency and expertise. Smith shows that the army's continuous efforts to encourage and reward "merit" led to a clash of principles. The ever-growing emphasis on talent and discipline led reformers--the great majority of them noble--to attack the most egregious examples of privilege and favoritism in the army. Smith's analysis of the long-term evolution in conceptions of royal service suggests a new explanation for the shift in values signified by the French Revolution. The transition away from the "personal" gaze of the king toward the "public" gaze of the monarchy and nation foretold the triumph of a new culture of merit in which noble birth would have no meaning.
The Culture of Merit will interest historians and other social scientists concerned with issues of aristocratic identity, state formation, professionalization, and the changing political culture of pre-Revolutionary France.
Jay M. Smith is Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Piero della Francesca has remained an enigma because of the contradictions observed in his life and art. Banker's archival research has enabled him to clear away some of the obscurities. This book situates Piero in the earliest social and intellectual worlds within which he moved. Heretofore, writers on Piero have begun his putative formation in Florence in 1439. Banker demonstrates that the young painter's formation began prior to 1439, when he was surrounded by his family and the local artisans' community.
The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca integrates social and art history in order to better understand the formation of a Renaissance artist. It will be vital to scholars and historians of the Italian Renaissance city states, as well as to art historians and those interested in the relationship of art and society.
James R. Banker is Professor of History, North Carolina State University.
"Irene Taviss Thomson gives us a nuanced portrait of American social politics that helps explain both why we are drawn to the idea of a 'culture war' and why that misrepresents what is actually going on."
---Rhys H. Williams, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago
"An important work showing---beneath surface conflict---a deep consensus on a number of ideals by social elites."
---John H. Evans, Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego
The idea of a culture war, or wars, has existed in America since the 1960s---an underlying ideological schism in our country that is responsible for the polarizing debates on everything from the separation of church and state, to abortion, to gay marriage, to affirmative action. Irene Taviss Thomson explores this notion by analyzing hundreds of articles addressing hot-button issues over two decades from four magazines: National Review, Time, The New Republic, and The Nation, as well as a wide array of other writings and statements from a substantial number of public intellectuals.
What Thomson finds might surprise you: based on her research, there is no single cultural divide or cultural source that can account for the positions that have been adopted. While issues such as religion, homosexuality, sexual conduct, and abortion have figured prominently in public discussion, in fact there is no single thread that unifies responses to each of these cultural dilemmas for any of the writers.
Irene Taviss Thomson is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, having taught in the Department of Social Sciences and History at Fairleigh Dickinson University for more than 30 years. Previously, she taught in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University.
Cultures of Modernism explores how the structure and location of literary communities significantly influence who writes, what they write about, and their openness to formal experimentation. These influences particularly affect women writers. Author Cristanne Miller notes striking patterns of similarity in the concerns and lives of women living in geographically distant centers of modernist production. She looks at three significant poets---the American Marianne Moore, the British expatriate Mina Loy, and the German Else Lasker-Schüler---in the context of cultural, national, and local elements to argue that location significantly affected their performances of subjectivity, gender, race, and religion. The first book of its kind, Cultures of Modernism breaks new ground while it contributes to the ongoing reconception of the modernist period.
"A fascinating, provocative, and genuinely original study of a 'different' modernism in poetry---namely, the Modernism of women poets."
---Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
"An important and ambitious work that makes major contributions to the fields of gender studies and modernist studies, and to the study of modernist poetry."
---Robin Schulze, Pennsylvania State University
"Offers a welcome corrective to the unreflective critical tendency . . . to make broad claims about the historical experiences and cultural conundrums of 'women,' and particularly 'women writers.' Miller offers tour-de-force comparative readings . . . threading together the world-historical with the personal, poetics with the political, and wielding the instruments of scansion as deftly as a surgeon."
---Modernism/modernity, The Official Journal of the Modernist Studies Association
Cristanne Miller is Edward H. Butler Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York.
Curating Community is a book for academics, artists, curators, and constitutional designers interested in legacies of violence, transitional justice, and democracy.
"Rosas's compelling theory and wide-ranging empirical evidence yield a persuasive but surprising conclusion in light of the financial meltdown of 2008–9. In the event of banking crises, not only do elected governments treat taxpayers better and force bankers and their creditors to pay more for their mistakes, but bankers in democracies are more prudent as a consequence . . . essential reading for all interested in the political economy of crisis and in the future of banking regulation."
---Philip Keefer, Lead Economist, Development Research Group, The World Bank
"Rosas convincingly demonstrates how democratic accountability affects the incidence and resolution of banking crises. Combining formal models, case studies, and cutting-edge quantitative methods, Rosas's book represents a model for political economy research."
---William Bernhard, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois
"When the financial crises of the 1990s hit Asia, Russia, and Latin America, the U.S. scolded them about the moral hazard problems of bailing out the banks. Now, the shoe is on the other foot, with the U.S. struggling to manage an imploding financial sector. Rosas's study of bank bailouts could not be more timely, providing us with both a framework for thinking about the issue and some sobering history of how things go both right and badly wrong. Democratic accountability proves the crucial factor in making sure bailouts are fair, a point that is as relevant for U.S. policy as for an understanding of the emerging markets."
---Stephan Haggard, Krause Professor, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego
Banking crises threaten the stability and growth of economies around the world. In response, politicians restore banks to solvency by redistributing losses from bank shareholders and depositors to taxpayers, and the burden the citizenry must bear varies from case to case. Whereas some governments stay close to the prescriptions espoused by Sir Walter Bagehot in the nineteenth century that limit the costs shouldered by taxpayers, others engage in generous bank bailouts at great cost to society. What factors determine a government's response?
In this comparative analysis of late-twentieth-century banking crises, Guillermo Rosas identifies political regime type as the determining factor. During a crisis, powerful financial players demand protection of their assets. Rosas maintains that in authoritarian regimes, government officials have little to shield them from such demands and little incentive for rebuffing them, while in democratic regimes, elected officials must weigh these demands against the interests of the voters---that is, the taxpayers. As a result, compared with authoritarian regimes, democratic regimes show a lower propensity toward dramatic, costly bailouts.
Guillermo Rosas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Fellow at the Center in Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis.
While the book will have immediate appeal for students of writing, it will also be of interest to general readers for its in-depth reading of contemporary fiction and for its take on important issues of the day: Should writers try to be more uplifting? How is emotion best conveyed in fiction? Why are serious writers in North America wedded to the realist tradition?
When she was only twenty-three, Debra Spark's best-selling anthology 20 Under 30 introduced readers to some of today's best writers, including David Leavitt, Susan Minot, Lorrie Moore, Ann Patchett, and Mona Simpson. Almost twenty years later, Spark brings this same keen critical eye to Curious Attractions, discussing a broad range of authors from multiple genres and generations.
A collection of essays in the belles-lettres tradition, Curious Attractions offers lively and instructive discussions of craft flavored with autobiographical reflections and commentary on world events. Throughout, Spark's voice is warm, articulate, and engaging as it provides valuable insights to readers and writers alike.
In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to rethink contemporary news, arguing that rather than setting out from the assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its publics, we should explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice.
"A thoughtful and engaging contribution to the field that will have a sustained and lasting impact on the way feminist performance is defined and understood, as well as on how feminist histories and historiographies continue to challenge and transform the larger field of performance."
---Charlotte Canning, The University of Texas at Austin
"Harding forcefully challenges and destabilizes the male-centered Eurocentric genealogy of the avant-garde, which he claims is an uncontested, linear, positivistic history, unproblematized by theory. Then he argues that this gendered biased version of the European avant-garde is carried over into American historiography . . . A forceful case for a revisionist history."
---Daniel Gerould, The City University of New York Graduate Center
Cutting Performances challenges four decades' worth of scholarship on the American avant-garde by offering a provocative reconceptualization of the history of avant-garde performance along feminist lines. Focusing on five women artists (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Valerie Solanas) whose performance aesthetics made prominent use of collage techniques, James M. Harding sheds light on the cultural history of the avant-garde and the role that experimental women artists played in that history. He investigates the prominent position that collage technique occupied within the artists' performance aesthetic, and the decisively feminist inflection that their work gives to collage as a mode of avant-garde expression. The radical juxtapositions in their works produce the powerful effects of making the familiar strange and establishing contexts from which new understandings may emerge.
Harding examines the performative dimensions of collage in experimental, feminist redefinitions of the literary, graphic, and theatrical arts, filling a void in a scholarly discourse that, while ostensibly about the vanguard, has lagged well behind other significant theoretical and historiographical currents. Cutting Performances not only challenges assumptions that have governed scholarship on the American avant-garde but also establishes a context to rethink the history of American avant-garde performance along feminist lines. It will appeal to audiences interested in theater history and performance studies as well as those interested in the cultural history of the avant-garde and the role that feminist experimental artists have played in it.
James M. Harding is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. His other books include Not the Other Avant-Garde: Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (with John Rouse); Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies (with Cindy Rosenthal); and Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality.
Illustration: Carolee Schneemann in Eye Body-36 Transformative Actions (1963) Action for camera (Photograph by Erró). Reproduced by permission of Carolee Schneemann.
For more than three years after the implosion of the Communist regime in 1989, the Czechs and Slovaks negotiated the terms of a new relationship to succeed the centralized federation created under communism. After failing to agree to the terms of a new union, the parties agreed on an orderly breakup.
In the background of the narrative loom general issues such as: What are the sources of ethnic conflict and what is the impact of nationalism? Why do ethnic groups choose secession and what makes for peaceful rather than violent separation? What factors influence the course of postcommunist constitutional negotiations, which are inevitably conducted in the context of institutional and societal transformation? The author explores these issues and the reasons for the breakup.
Eric Stein, a well-known scholar of comparative law and a native of Czechoslovakia, was invited by the Czechoslovak government to assist in the drafting of a new constitution. This book is based on his experiences during years of work on these negotiations as well as extensive interviews with political figures, journalists, and academics and extensive research in the primary documents. It will appeal to historians, lawyers, and social scientists interested in the process of transformation in Eastern Europe and the study of ethnic conflict, as well as the general reader interested in modern European history.
Eric Stein is Hessel E. Yntema Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan Law School. He previously served with the United States Department of State in the Legal Advisor's Office. He is the author of many books and articles on comparative law and the law of the European Community.
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