front cover of Corridors
Corridors
Passages of Modernity
Roger Luckhurst
Reaktion Books, 2019
We spend our lives moving through passages, hallways, corridors, and gangways, yet these channeling spaces do not feature in architectural histories, monographs, or guidebooks. They are overlooked, undervalued, and unregarded, seen as unlovely parts of a building’s infrastructure rather than architecture.

This book is the first definitive history of the corridor, from its origins in country houses and utopian communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through reformist Victorian prisons, hospitals, and asylums, to the “corridors of power,” bureaucratic labyrinths, and housing estates of the twentieth century. Taking in a wide range of sources, from architectural history to fiction, film, and TV, Corridors explores how the corridor went from a utopian ideal to a place of unease: the archetypal stuff of nightmares.
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Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood
Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990
Anastasia N. Karakasidou
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Deftly combining archival sources with evocative life histories, Anastasia Karakasidou brings welcome clarity to the contentious debate over ethnic identities and nationalist ideologies in Greek Macedonia. Her vivid and detailed account demonstrates that contrary to official rhetoric, the current people of Greek Macedonia ultimately derive from profoundly diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Throughout the last century, a succession of regional and world conflicts, economic migrations, and shifting state formations has engendered an intricate pattern of population movements and refugee resettlements across the region. Unraveling the complex social, political, and economic processes through which these disparate peoples have become culturally amalgamated within an overarchingly Greek national identity, this book provides an important corrective to the Macedonian picture and an insightful analysis of the often volatile conjunction of ethnicities and nationalisms in the twentieth century.

"Combining the thoughtful use of theory with a vivid historical ethnography, this is an important, courageous, and pioneering work which opens up the whole issue of nation-building in northern Greece."—Mark Mazower, University of Sussex
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Keeping An Open Door
Passages in a University Presidency
Keith Brodie and Leslie Banner
Duke University Press, 1996
During the 1980s, many of America’s most respected colleges and universities suffered financial crises, athletic scandals, a troubling upsurge of racial conflict, and the divisiveness of political correctness “wars.” Yet Duke University not only avoided these dangers but changed dramatically from a very good regional university to one of the nation’s top research institutions. Its undergraduate campus was hailed as a “hot college”; its Blue Devils basketball team was pronounced a model for student athletes; its graduate and professional schools gained new national prominence; and its scholars were quoted frequently in the popular press on both sides of the political correctness debates.
In Keeping an Open Door, Duke chancellor (1982-1985) and president (1985-1993) Keith Brodie and coauthor Leslie Banner recount what it was like to lead Duke during an era of change for research universities across the country: how Brodie reached some of his most controversial decisions, including the “Black Faculty Initiative”; his strategy for precluding abuse in Division I athletics at Duke; how his training as a psychiatrist shaped his leadership style and influenced how he dealt with trustees, deans, faculty, and students; and the avenues of power still open to today’s university presidents. The history and feeling of life on the Duke campus during the Brodie era are vividly evoked in photographs and key speeches introduced by the former president’s personal recollections.
Keeping an Open Door provides an insider’s view of issues critical to modern research universities and will interest anyone concerned with the history and future of higher education.
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Midlife Crisis
The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché
Susanne Schmidt
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The phrase “midlife crisis” today conjures up images of male indulgence and irresponsibility—an affluent, middle-aged man speeding off in a red sports car with a woman half his age—but before it become a gendered cliché, it gained traction as a feminist concept. Journalist Gail Sheehy used the term to describe a midlife period when both men and women might reassess their choices and seek a change in life. Sheehy’s definition challenged the double standard of middle age—where aging is advantageous to men and detrimental to women—by viewing midlife as an opportunity rather than a crisis. Widely popular in the United States and internationally, the term was quickly appropriated by psychological and psychiatric experts and redefined as a male-centered, masculinist concept.
 
The first book-length history of this controversial concept, Susanne Schmidt’s Midlife Crisis recounts the surprising origin story of the midlife debate and traces its movement from popular culture into academia. Schmidt’s engaging narrative telling of the feminist construction—and ensuing antifeminist backlash—of the midlife crisis illuminates a lost legacy of feminist thought, shedding important new light on the history of gender and American social science in the 1970s and beyond.
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Passages and Afterworlds
Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean
Maarit Forde and Yanique Hume, editors
Duke University Press, 2018
The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean.

Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen
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Passages
Moving beyond Liminality in the Study of Literature and Culture
Edited by Elizabeth Kovach, Jens Kugele, and Ansgar Nünning
University College London, 2022
An interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of passages.

The study of literature and culture is marked by various distinct understandings of passages—as both phenomena and critical concepts. These include the anthropological notion of rites of passage, the shopping arcades (Passagen) theorized by Walter Benjamin, the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, present-day forms of migration and resettlement, and understandings of translation and adaptation. This book explores passages as contexts and processes within which liminal experiences and encounters are situated. Based on the premise that concepts travel through times, contexts, and discursive settings, the volume enables a meaningful exchange regarding passages across disciplinary, national, and linguistic boundaries. Contributions from senior scholars and early-career researchers whose work focuses on areas such as cultural memory, performativity, space, media, (cultural) translation, ecocriticism, gender, and race utilize specific understandings of passages and liminality, reflecting on their value and limits for their research.
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Toward a Grammar of Passages
Richard M. Coe
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988

Richard M. Coe has developed such a “grammar,” one which uses a simple graphic instrument to analyze the meaningful relationships between sentences in a passage and to clarify the function of structure in discourse. Working in the tradition of Christensen’s generative rhetoric, Coe presents a two-dimensional graphic matrix that effectively analyzes the logical relations between statements by mapping coordinate, subordinate, and superordinate relationships.

Coe demonstrates the power of his discourse matrix by applying it to a variety of significant problems, such as how to demonstrate discourse differences between cultures (especially between Chinese and English), how to explain precisely what is “bad” about the structure of passages that do not work, and how best to teach structure. This new view of the structure of passages helps to articulate crucial questions about the relations between form and function, language, thought and culture, cognitive and social processes.

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