Search results for ""Author Dom"
John Wiley & Sons Inc PID Control System Design and Automatic Tuning using MATLAB/Simulink
Covers PID control systems from the very basics to the advanced topics This book covers the design, implementation and automatic tuning of PID control systems with operational constraints. It provides students, researchers, and industrial practitioners with everything they need to know about PID control systems—from classical tuning rules and model-based design to constraints, automatic tuning, cascade control, and gain scheduled control. PID Control System Design and Automatic Tuning using MATLAB/Simulink introduces PID control system structures, sensitivity analysis, PID control design, implementation with constraints, disturbance observer-based PID control, gain scheduled PID control systems, cascade PID control systems, PID control design for complex systems, automatic tuning and applications of PID control to unmanned aerial vehicles. It also presents resonant control systems relevant to many engineering applications. The implementation of PID control and resonant control highlights how to deal with operational constraints. Provides unique coverage of PID Control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including mathematical models of multi-rotor UAVs, control strategies of UAVs, and automatic tuning of PID controllers for UAVs Provides detailed descriptions of automatic tuning of PID control systems, including relay feedback control systems, frequency response estimation, Monte-Carlo simulation studies, PID controller design using frequency domain information, and MATLAB/Simulink simulation and implementation programs for automatic tuning Includes 15 MATLAB/Simulink tutorials, in a step-by-step manner, to illustrate the design, simulation, implementation and automatic tuning of PID control systems Assists lecturers, teaching assistants, students, and other readers to learn PID control with constraints and apply the control theory to various areas. Accompanying website includes lecture slides and MATLAB/ Simulink programs PID Control System Design and Automatic Tuning using MATLAB/Simulink is intended for undergraduate electrical, chemical, mechanical, and aerospace engineering students, and will greatly benefit postgraduate students, researchers, and industrial personnel who work with control systems and their applications.
£109.95
John Wiley & Sons Inc Road to Power: How GM's Mary Barra Shattered the Glass Ceiling
Follow a pioneer's journey from factory floor to CEO Road to Power is the story of how Mary Barra drove herself to the pinnacle of a company that steers the nation's wealth. Beginning as a rare female electrical engineer and daughter of a General Motors die maker, Barra spent more than thirty years building her career before becoming the first woman to ever lead a global automaker. With $155 billion in sales and 200,000 employees, GM is widely considered to be a proxy for the U.S. economy, making Barra's position arguably the most important corporate role a woman has ever held. This book describes the personal character, choices, and leadership style that enabled her to break through the glass ceiling. When 52-year-old Mary Barra was named CEO of General Motors in 2013, only people outside of the company were surprised. She had done everything from working on the factory floor to overseeing manufacturing, from improving union relations to paring down bureaucracy, and from running human resources to helping drag the company back from its 2009 bankruptcy. This book details each step of her career, and the lessons she learned along the way. Learn how Mary Barra's willingness to take on diverse assignments helped steer her career trajectory Examine the fine details of Barra's management style and her ability to relate to colleagues Discover the qualities and experiences Barra had that drove her to lead this male-dominated profession Study the valuable lessons Barra learned at each stage in her professional life, and why they stuck with her throughout her journey to the top Barra is most certainly a pioneer for women in business, but she's also a living lesson as to how far the right outlook, skills, and drive can take you in your career. Road to Power explores the talent and the mindset that got her all the way to the top.
£22.50
Duke University Press The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere
Politics today is dominated by business news and the stock market. But those in support of green politics ask whether human profit should continue to be the bottom line of political deliberations or if it is time for the interests of the natural world to combine with or even displace the interests of business. In The Promise of Green Politics Douglas Torgerson offers a survey of different schools of ecological thought, discusses their implications for the larger political sphere, and advances a three-dimensional concept of politics that emphasizes ethics and discourse as well as strategy.Arguing that the environmental movement has the potential to contribute to contemporary developments in political theory and social action by changing discursive practices both at the grassroots level and along the corridors of power, Torgerson draws on the theories of Hannah Arendt and others to advocate a performative type of political debate that values multiple opinions and is not always oriented toward reaching a single conclusion. Torgerson argues that in a world stuck in administrative and scientific gridlock, the theatrical, comic aspects of green politics are as important as other, more goal-oriented, aspects. Gestures of the carnivalesque—such as protestors sleeping in hammocks slung from trees targeted for destruction or funeral processions held for dying rivers—could be the key to the creation of what Torgerson refers to as a “green public sphere,” one that promises a reconfiguration of the relationship between human creativity and the natural world. While offering a number of concrete policy suggestions, his focus remains on the complexity and heterogeneity of green thinking and on the transformative promise implicit in green politics. In creating new ways to speak about the environment, Torgerson argues, the green movement offers a creative way to reconsider many larger issues of political theory and action. The Promise of Green Politics will serve as a gateway to new thinking about green politics and the emerging possibilities of a diverse and vital green public sphere. As such, it will be valued by those interested in environmental and public policy, political theory, social activism, and the future of political action.
£19.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture
In recent decades, popular culture - from television and film to newspapers, magazines, and best-selling fiction - has focused an enormous amount of attention on mothers. Through feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary, and cultural studies perspectives, the twenty chapters in this book examine an array of current and relevant contemporary topics related to maternal identities such as working, stay-at-home, ambivalent, absent, good, bad, single, teen, elder, celebrity, and lesbian mothers; and issues such as the mommy wars, self-care, pregnancy, abortion, contraception, infanticide, adoption, sex and sexuality, breastfeeding, post-partum depression, fertility, genetics, and reproductive technologies. Contributors from Canada, the United States, Britain, and Australia engage critically and theoretically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture media, and chart some of the provocative and liberating ways that we can use and interpret this media to encourage and promote alternative and transformative maternal readings, identities, and practices. Mediating Moms looks at mothers as imaged by and in the media; how mothers mediate or negotiate these images according to their historical, corporeal, and lived personhoods; and how scholars mediate the popular and academic discourses of motherhood as a way of registering, strengthening, and alleviating the tensions between representation and reality. Mediating Moms engages critically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture, while mapping some of the provocative and liberating ways that mothers can use the media to transform and reaffirm their identities. Contributors include Jennifer Bell (Alberta), H. Louise Davis (Miami), Irene Gammel (Ryerson), Nicola Goc (Tasmania), Fiona Joy Green (Winnipeg), Latham Hunter (Mohawk), Joanne Ella Johnson, Hosu Kim (Staten Island), Beth O'Connor (Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing), Debra Langan (Wilfrid Laurier), Sally Mennill (British Columbia), Stuart J. Murray (Ryerson), Kathryn Pallister (Red Deer), Maud Perrier (Bristol), Lenora Perry (Texas), Dominique Russell, Jocelyn Stitt (Minnesota), Stephanie Wardrop (Western New England), Imelda Whelehan (Tasmania).
£31.00
Taylor & Francis Ltd White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock
To what extent do indie masculinities challenge the historical construction of rock music as patriarchal? This key question is addressed by Matthew Bannister, involving an in-depth examination of indie guitar rock in the 1980s as the culturally and historically specific production of white men. Through textual analysis of musical and critical discourses, Bannister provides the first book-length study of masculinity and ethnicity within the context of indie guitar music within US, UK and New Zealand 'scenes'. Bannister argues that past theorisations of (rock) masculinities have tended to set up varieties of working-class deviance and physical machismo as 'straw men', oversimplifying masculinities as 'men behaving badly'. Such approaches disavow the ways that masculine power is articulated in culture not only through representation but also intellectual and theoretical discourse. By re-situating indie in a historical/cultural context of art rock, he shows how masculine power can be rearticulated through high, avant-garde, bohemian culture and aesthetic theory: canonism, negation (Adorno), passivity, voyeurism and camp (Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground), and primitivism and infantilism (Lester Bangs, Simon Reynolds). In a related vein, he also assesses the impact of Freud on cultural theory, arguing that reversing binary conceptions of gender by associating masculinities with an essentialised passive femininity perpetuates patriarchal dualism. Drawing on his own experience as an indie musician, Bannister surveys a range of indie artists, including The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and The Go-Betweens; from the US, R.E.M., The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü, Nirvana and hardcore; and from NZ, Flying Nun acts, including The Chills, The Clean, the Verlaines, Chris Knox, Bailter Space, and The Bats, demonstrating broad continuities between these apparently disparate scenes, in terms of gender, aesthetic theory and approaches to popular musical history. The result is a book which raises some important questions about how gender is studied in popular culture and the degree to which alternative cultures can critique dominant representations of gender.
£39.99
Princeton University Press The Blue-Eyed Enemy: Japan against the West in Java and Luzon, 1942-1945
The Blue-Eyed Enemy is a comprehensive account of the interwoven histories of the three major archipelago-nations of the West Pacific during the years of the Second World War. Theodore Friend examines Japanese colonialism in Indonesia and the Philippines as an example of recurring patterns of domination and repression in that region. He depicts Japanese rule in Greater East Asia as expressive of the folly of the general who exhorted his troops "to annihilate the blue-eyed enemy and their black slaves." At the same time he clearly shows where the return of Western power aimed at new links between conqueror and conquered, or lords and bondsmen. Throughout the work one encounters an infectious sympathy for those afflicted by imperialism and racism from whatever source, at whatever time. The book is based on documentary research in Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as in the United States and the Netherlands, and on over one hundred interviews with major actors and key observers of the era. The analysis balances an eclectic use of social science perspectives with a humanistic concreteness, and leads to new understanding of leaders like Sukarno and Hatta, Jose P. Laurel and Benigno Aquino, Sr., and Generals Yamashita and MacArthur. As comparative tropical history, it elucidates the contrasting cultural traditions and political psychologies of Indonesia and the Philippines and explains why 1945 was a year of dramatic contrast: "reoccupation" and revolution for the first country, and "liberation" and restoration for the latter. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
£46.80
WW Norton & Co Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars
Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade and progressive projects on matters ranging from women’s rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath. In Against the World, a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century. The air went out of the globalist balloon with the First World War as quotas were put on immigration and tariffs on trade, not only in the United States but across Europe, where war and disease led to mass societal upheaval. The “Spanish flu” heightened anxieties about porous national boundaries. The global impact of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression amplified a quest for food security in Europe and economic autonomy worldwide. Demands for relief from the instability and inequality linked to globalisation forged democracies and dictatorships alike, from Gandhi’s India to America’s New Deal and Hitler’s Third Reich. Immigration restrictions, racially constituted notions of citizenship, anti-Semitism, and violent outbursts of hatred of the “other” became the norm—coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War. Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment: new movements emerged focused on homegrown and local foods, domestically produced clothing and other goods and back-to-the-land communities. Rich with astonishing detail gleaned from Zahra’s unparalleled archival research in five languages, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalization. With anti-globalism a major tenet of today’s extremist agendas, Zahra's arrestingly clearsighted and wide-angled account is essential reading to grapple with our divided present.
£27.99
University of Notre Dame Press La Raza: Forgotten Americans
Today in five Southwestern states there are more than four million Spanish-speaking Americans. It is the largest ethnic group in the five-state area of California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado and among the largest minorities in the United States. The action potential of this group is so great that area politicians refer to it as the "sleeping giant."The purpose of this book is to bring together a summary of material about this group in the related subjects of religion, political activity, civil rights, and the emerging middle class. This compilation attempts a general assessment of the current status of the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest and implication of their future growth and development. The circumstances of history formed this minority. The colonizing efforts of Spain in North and South America, the mission chains, Indian resistance, the assimilation of the conquerors, the open Mexican Border, and the elements of resistance and aggression were so strongly persistent that sixteenth-century Spain and modern Mexico survive today in the Southwest. Isolation was geographic as well as ethnic, and the main stream of Anglo-American political thought and historical evolution bypasses this part of the world. Through the Mexican War the United States acquired a substantial part of Mexican territory. Although the Spanish-speaking people have gone through a triple integration of essentially Spanish-Mexican and are still in many instances highly resistant to complete acculturation. The plan of presentation in this study includes the areas of history, church participation, labor problems, living conditions, education, civil rights status, and the difficulty minority groups encounter in participating in the politics of a dominant society. In this research in one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States today, past, present, and future are thoroughly examined and the conclusion is one of current activity and future development. The results of this study indicate that the Spanish-speaking people are achieving a new sophistication in terms of education, the labor market, action programs, minority status, and language.
£15.99
Columbia University Press Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti
Rosi Braidotti's nomadic theory outlines a sustainable modern subjectivity as one in flux, never opposed to a dominant hierarchy yet intrinsically other, always in the process of becoming, and perpetually engaged in dynamic power relations both creative and restrictive. Nomadic theory offers an original and powerful alternative for scholars working in cultural and social criticism and has, over the past decade, crept into continental philosophy, queer theory, and feminist, postcolonial, techno-science, media, and race studies, as well as into architecture, history, and anthropology. This collection provides a core introduction to Braidotti's nomadic theory and its innovative formulations, which playfully engage with Deleuze, Foucault, Irigaray, and a host of political and cultural issues. Arranged thematically, essays begin with such concepts as sexual difference and embodied subjectivity and follow with explorations in technoscience, feminism, postsecular citizenship, and the politics of affirmation. Braidotti develops a distinctly positive critical theory that rejuvenates the experience of political scholarship. Inspired yet not confined by Deleuzian vitalism, with its commitment to the ontology of flows, networks, and dynamic transformations, she emphasizes affects, imagination, and creativity and the politics of radical immanence. Incorporating ideas from Nietzsche and Spinoza as well, Braidotti establishes a critical-theoretical framework equal parts critique and creation. Ever mindful of the perils of defining difference in terms of denigration and the related tendency to subordinate sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, she explores the eco-philosophical implications of nomadic theory, feminism, and the irreducibility of sexual difference and sexuality. Her dialogue with technoscience is crucial to nomadic theory, which deterritorializes the established understanding of what counts as human, along with our relationship to animals, the environment, and changing notions of materialism. Keeping her distance from the near-obsessive focus on vulnerability, trauma, and melancholia in contemporary political thought, Braidotti promotes a politics of affirmation that has the potential to become its own generative life force.
£25.20
HarperCollins Publishers Inc Extraordinary Wing Women: True Stories of Life-Altering, World-Changing Sisterhood
A beautifully illustrated gift book celebrating the beauty, power, and joy of female friendship. Wingman: a pilot who flies behind and outside the leader of a flying formation.While researching her first book, That’s What She Said, Kimothy Joy discovered that the famous women she was profiling were not alone in their success. Each of them were propelled forward by a supporter—a wing woman—a sister, a mom, a best friend, a close confidant. The remarkable partnerships they shared were as multifaceted and complex as the individual women themselves. Extraordinary Wing Women is Joy’s tribute to the importance of female camaraderie. This collection features 33 stories, each varying in length, accompanied by watercolor portraits, illustrations, and hand-lettered quotes. Some will be familiar power duos—Oprah and Gayle, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, Venus and Serena Williams. Others are less known though just as inspiring such as the friendship of Julia Child and her editor Avis DeVoto, Junko Tabei and her all-women mountaineering team, and the Mariposas—the Mirabel sisters who overthrew a dictator in the Dominican Republic. The women featured are from across the world and from diverse periods of history. They are activists, artists, scientists, politicians, athletes, musicians, writers, and more—role models for every woman.Joy dedicates Extraordinary Wing Women to the generations of women who are dismantling the myth that we must compete with one another to pursue and achieve our dreams. History and fiction have shown that we are stronger when we support one another. Joy hopes to inspire and teach us that we, too, have our own wings and can soar higher than ever before with our wing women beside us.The book includes a blank spread at the end which readers can use to honor the Extraordinary Wing Woman in their own lives by writing or drawing their own tribute story.
£22.50
Oro Editions Frank L. Wright and the Architects of Steinway Hall: A Study of Collaboration
"This book celebrates teamwork and collaboration over the individual, a refreshing take on a practice which is given to celebrating starchitects." —Peter H. Miller, Traditional Building In 1897, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Spencer, Dwight Perkins, and Myron Hunt, all young architects just starting out in practice, shared office space in Chicago. This book is both a history of that brief period and an attempt to assess the extent to which they collaborated on their architectural designs and on the creation of architectural theory which would impact a half century of architectural design. While there is little firsthand documentation of the time spent in their shared loft office in Steinway Hall, this study engages in a side by side comparison of projects they each designed while working there. Overlapping ideas, design similarities, and an analysis of their subsequent work, all suggest that these men formed a creative “collaborative circle” of friends, who jointly developed ideas later claimed as the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. This is a book about artistic collaboration at a time when discussions of art and architectural history are still largely dominated by the belief that significant works are created by the lone artistic genius. At the turn of the last century Spencer, Perkins, Hunt, and Wright were part of a community of architects who were all active members of the Chicago Architectural. Steinway Hall, an office building designed by Dwight Perkins, became a home to Chicago’s architectural community with as many as 50 different architects renting space in that building at the turn of the last century. Based on Real Estate Directories from 1897 through 1910 the book includes a listing of the architects that worked and interacted there. Also included are brief biographies of Spencer, Perkins, and Hunt. Excepting Hunt, none of these men have been the subject of individual publications. While Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and work have been extensively chronicled, this book reexamines the period between Wright’s arrival in Chicago in 1887 and his move into the loft office in Steinway Hall in 1897.
£24.26
Siglio Press John Cage Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
Now available in an expanded paperback edition, Diary registers Cage's assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny portents about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from the domestic minutiae of everyday life to ideas about how to feed the world. He used chance operations to determine not only the word count and the application of various typefaces but also the number of letters per line, the patterns of indentation, and in the case of Part Three, originally published by Something Else Press color. The unusual visual variances on the page become almost musical as language takes on a physical and aural presence.While Cage used chance operations to expand the possibilities of creating and shaping his work beyond the limitations of individual taste, Diary nonetheless accumulates into a complex reflection of Cage's sensibilities as a thinker and citizen of the world, illuminating his social and political awareness, as well as his idealism and sense of humor: it becomes an oblique but indelible portrait of one the most influential figures of the 20th-century American avant-garde.Collecting all eight parts into a single volume, co-editors Joe Biel and Richard Kraft also used chance operations to render the entire text in various combinations of the red and blue (used by Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles for Part Three) as well as to apply a single set of 18 fonts to the entire work. In the editors' note, Kraft and Biel elucidate the procedure of chance operations and demonstrate its application, giving readers a rare opportunity to see how the text is transformed.This expanded paperback edition reproduces the 2015 hardback edition, with a new essay by mycologist and Cage aficionado David Rose and, most important, with a significant addendum that includes many facsimile pages of Cage's handwritten notebook of a ninth part in progress, bringing the reader into compelling proximity to Cage's process and the raw material from which Diary was made.
£21.00
Thinkers Publishing Understanding before Moving - Volume 1 - Revised & Extended Second Edition
Although my first book in this new series was well received, it turned out that a new updated and revised edition would not be an unnecessary luxury. This was partly due to the fact that it did not seem a bad idea to add more comments to a sub-variant in the Italian Game, the Max Lange Attack, which had received little attention in the first edition, but could be further explored. That has happened in this edition. Furthermore, it turned out from practice that the part in the Ruy Lopez where White can choose to close the center with d4-d5 needed further explanation. This closed position with a pawn chain arisen in the center, as we know that from the King’s Indian Defense, contains some hidden secrets that could be explored a little more. That is why I have compiled several extra pages in which the most important strategic (and also tactical) details of this type of positions are presented. Of course, two model games had to be added for both colors. These have now become the games Sutovsky – Stefanova, Hoogeveen 2015 (for White) and Bruzon Batista – Morozevich, Biel 2006 (for Black), which I have provided with a broad analysis and will be added right behind this strategic overview. Because this book has also become available on the internet platform chessable.com, it seemed a good idea to generate some extra exercises on top. These should of course not be missing in the printed edition. Since in the original version mainly the tactics were dominant, I have now chosen to split the chapter with the exercises into two parts: • Section 1: Tactical exercises • Section 2: Strategic exercises I offer sixteen extra exercises, divided in both sections and adding more than 80 pages to the previous edition. All in all, with this new edition, I hope to have fulfilled the expectations raised in some reviews. I wish the reader a lot of reading and playing fun while working through this book! Herman Grooten, December 2020.
£20.69
Harvard Business Review Press Good Charts, Updated and Expanded: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations
The ultimate guide to data visualization and information design for business.Making good charts is a must-have skill for managers today. The vast amount of data that drives business isn't useful if you can't communicate the valuable ideas contained in that data—the threats, the opportunities, the hidden trends, the future possibilities.But many think that data visualization is too difficult—a specialist skill that's either the province of data scientists and complex software packages or the domain of professional designers and their visual creativity.Not so. Anyone can learn to produce quality "dataviz" and, more broadly, clear and effective information design. Good Charts will show you how to do it.In this updated and expanded edition, dataviz expert Scott Berinato provides all you need for turning those ordinary charts kicked out of a spreadsheet program into extraordinary visuals that captivate and persuade your audience and for transforming presentations that seem like a mishmash of charts and bullet points into clear, effective, persuasive storytelling experiences.Good Charts shows how anyone who invests a little time getting better at visual communication can create an outsized impact—both in their career and in their organization. You will learn: A framework for getting to better charts in just a few minutes Design techniques that immediately make your visuals clearer and more persuasive The building blocks of storytelling with your data How to build teams to bring visual communication skills into your organization and culture This new edition of Good Charts not only provides new visuals and updated concepts but adds an entirely new chapter on building teams around the visualization part of a data science operation and creating workflows to integrate visualization into everything you do.Graphics that merely present information won't cut it anymore. Make Good Charts your go-to resource for turning plain, uninspiring charts and presentations into smart, effective visualizations and stories that powerfully convey ideas.
£22.50
The Catholic University of America Press Catechesis for the New Evangelization: Vatican II, John Paul II, and the Unity of Revelation and Experience
Popes Francis, Benedict XVI, and John Paul II have called the present a time of New Evangelization for the Church and have stressed the importance of catechesis for this mission. John Paul II claimed that this renewal of the Church’s mission is grounded in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. Nevertheless, approaches to catechesis in the conciliar and postconciliar era have varied greatly, as evidenced by the shifts in catechetical practice effected by the modern catechetical movement. Just as the dominant forms of theology changed from neo-scholastic to anthropological approaches so, too, did catechesis move from catechism-based approaches to more anthropological models based upon human experience. In light of this context, Catechesis for the New Evangelization examines the theological foundations of catechesis in the Church’s understanding of divine revelation and its reception by the human person, especially as found in the conciliar constitutions, Dei Verbum and Gaudium et Spes. After drawing norms on divine revelation from these documents, it traces the history of the modern catechetical movement in order to compare this history with the conciliar norms, highlighting the renewal’s strengths and weaknesses.These steps prepare the way for the main part of the book: an examination of the anthropology of Karol Wojty?a/Pope John Paul II. Ultimately, his anthropology provides an understanding of the person that can unite divine revelation and human experience in a way that takes what is best from the modern catechetical movement, while developing the ministry in a way that can be fruitful for the New Evangelization.Pedraza’s book is not only an incisive look at modern catechetical history and theory. It also touches upon some of the most important theological topics of the past century, including the neo-scholastic crisis, the proper interpretation of the Council, the relationship of nature and grace, and the modern understanding of the imago dei, with the research and competency appropriate for scholarly interest and the accessibility needed for educated practitioners in catechesis.
£31.46
WW Norton & Co Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science
In the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, economics seems anything but a science. In this sharp, masterfully argued book, Dani Rodrik, a leading critic from within, takes a close look at economics to examine when it falls short and when it works, to give a surprisingly upbeat account of the discipline. Drawing on the history of the field and his deep experience as a practitioner, Rodrik argues that economics can be a powerful tool that improves the world—but only when economists abandon universal theories and focus on getting the context right. Economics Rules argues that the discipline's much-derided mathematical models are its true strength. Models are the tools that make economics a science. Too often, however, economists mistake a model for the model that applies everywhere and at all times. In six chapters that trace his discipline from Adam Smith to present-day work on globalization, Rodrik shows how diverse situations call for different models. Each model tells a partial story about how the world works. These stories offer wide-ranging, and sometimes contradictory, lessons—just as children’s fables offer diverse morals. Whether the question concerns the rise of global inequality, the consequences of free trade, or the value of deficit spending, Rodrik explains how using the right models can deliver valuable new insights about social reality and public policy. Beyond the science, economics requires the craft to apply suitable models to the context. The 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers challenged many economists' deepest assumptions about free markets. Rodrik reveals that economists' model toolkit is much richer than these free-market models. With pragmatic model selection, economists can develop successful antipoverty programs in Mexico, growth strategies in Africa, and intelligent remedies for domestic inequality. At once a forceful critique and defense of the discipline, Economics Rules charts a path toward a more humble but more effective science.
£15.86
Pen & Sword Books Ltd Robert Baden-Powell: A Biography
Robert Baden-Powell was Britain's first celebrity. A conflicted character - militarist and pacifist, macho man and drag artist, elitist and socialist - he was one of the 20th century's most influential and, latterly, controversial Englishmen, finding fame not once, but twice - and for two very different reasons. Before donning his trademark shorts, the man known for inventing the Scouts is hailed a hero of the Second Boer War, the first military conflict covered in great detail by the media. Reports of his unconventional methods of holding a Boer army at bay, despite being woefully outnumbered, at the South African town of Mafeking, make global headlines and when he returns home to England, hordes of adoring fans pack London's streets, waving flags and declaring him the Hero of Mafeking. The same ingenuity, reconnaissance skills and spectacular eccentricity that win him this military acclaim become the foundations of his second mission, that of saving Victorian boys from poverty and despair, and himself from having to grow up, by teaching them scouting. A youth movement is born which today boasts 54 million members throughout the world. This book examines Baden-Powell's dual personality, or his two lives' as he called them, including his difficult childhood with a domineering and unaffectionate mother whom he loved even after she forced him into the army at 19, dashing his dreams of becoming an artist. It looks at his military career and his love of drama and at why protesters wanted to topple his statue on Poole Quay in the pandemic summer of 2020. It also considers a recently-discovered telegraph that adds fuel to the speculation over the nature of his relationship with a fellow-soldier that endured for 30 years - until he married a 22-year-old woman in secret when he was 55. Baden-Powell achieved great prominence, as well as notoriety, in both his military and scouting lives, driven largely by a constant yearning to win his mother's approval.
£22.50
Penguin Books Ltd Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State
SHORTLISTED FOR THE LONGMAN-HISTORY TODAY PRIZE 2018LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 'Makes a gripping human story out of the wisest and most progressive policy achievement of any government in the history of the world ... the welfare state deserves books this good' Stuart Maconie, New Statesman, Books of the Year'A brilliant book, full of little revelations' Jon Cruddas, Prospect'Carefully argued, deftly balanced and wittily written, with countless lovely details' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday TimesA landmark book from a remarkable new historian, on a subject that has never been more important - or imperilledToday, everybody seems to agree that something has gone badly wrong with the British welfare state. In the midst of economic crisis, politicians and commentators talk about benefits as a lifestyle choice, and of 'skivers' living off hard-working 'strivers' as they debate what a welfare state fit for the twenty-first century might look like. This major new history tells the story of one the greatest transformations in British intellectual, social and political life: the creation of the welfare state, from the Victorian workhouse, where you had to be destitute to receive help, to a moment just after the Second World War, when government embraced responsibilities for people's housing, education, health and family life, a commitment that was unimaginable just a century earlier. Though these changes were driven by developments in different and sometimes unexpected currents in British life, they were linked by one over-arching idea: that through rational and purposeful intervention, government can remake society. It was an idea that, during the early twentieth century, came to inspire people across the political spectrum. In exploring this extraordinary transformation, Bread for All explores and challenges our assumptions about what the welfare state was originally for, and the kinds of people who were involved in creating it. In doing so, it asks what the idea continues to mean for us today.
£10.99
Duke University Press Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill
In the 1940s chemists discovered that barbasco, a wild yam indigenous to Mexico, could be used to mass-produce synthetic steroid hormones. Barbasco spurred the development of new drugs, including cortisone and the first viable oral contraceptives, and positioned Mexico as a major player in the global pharmaceutical industry. Yet few people today are aware of Mexico’s role in achieving these advances in modern medicine. In Jungle Laboratories, Gabriela Soto Laveaga reconstructs the story of how rural yam pickers, international pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican state collaborated and collided over the barbasco. By so doing, she sheds important light on a crucial period in Mexican history and challenges us to reconsider who can produce science.Soto Laveaga traces the political, economic, and scientific development of the global barbasco industry from its emergence in the 1940s, through its appropriation by a populist Mexican state in 1970, to its obsolescence in the mid-1990s. She focuses primarily on the rural southern region of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, where the yam grew most freely and where scientists relied on local, indigenous knowledge to cultivate and harvest the plant. Rural Mexicans, at first unaware of the pharmaceutical and financial value of barbasco, later acquired and deployed scientific knowledge to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, lobby the Mexican government, and ultimately transform how urban Mexicans perceived them. By illuminating how the yam made its way from the jungles of Mexico, to domestic and foreign scientific laboratories where it was transformed into pills, to the medicine cabinets of millions of women across the globe, Jungle Laboratories urges us to recognize the ways that Mexican peasants attained social and political legitimacy in the twentieth century, and positions Latin America as a major producer of scientific knowledge.
£23.99
James Clarke & Co Ltd Doctor of Souls: Leslie D. Weatherhead 1893-1976
During the period after the Second World War, in which English Protestant non-conformity declined rapidly, a handful of exceptional names stand out, and one of the most remarkable was that of the Methodist minister Leslie Dixon Weatherhead. Both through his ministry at the City Temple, in the heart of London, and more generally through the massive sales of his books, Dr Weatherhead became a dominant figure, with an influence far beyond the British Isles. That the City Temple, a Congregationalist church, was widely seen at the time as the greatest English Free Church pulpit, ensured him a wide audience, while the quality of his preaching, combining emotional and intellectual power, wit and eloquence, won him admirers among all the churches, and led to offers from a number of American and Canadian universities and congregations, as well as numerous honorary degrees from British and American universities. Despite his Congregationalist call, he remained a Methodist minister, and indeed became President of the Methodist Conference. Perhaps even more important was that he was one of the earliest to recognise the value of the applications for the clergy of the insights of Freud and Jung. His seventy-odd publications, of which The Christian Agnostic and Psychology, Religion and Healing were the most influential, bring out not only the theological liberalism that made him suspect in some circles, but also his understanding of the value of healing and of psychological insights. The result was that his lay theology had a vast following. Although three other books have appeared about Weatherhead since his death, John Travell's explores all aspects of his life and portrays his historical, religious and theological context in greater depth.
£39.82
University of Washington Press Law and Trade Issues of the Japanese Economy: American and Japanese Perspectives
This volume presents the most recent studies on Japanese and American trade, antitrust, patent, and other laws and their effects on bilateral economic relations. The studies included, written by Japanese and American officials, lawyers, and economists, will be of interest to policy makers, scholars, and corporations concerned with or interested in bilateral trade, technology transfer, investment, and joint ventures. The studies also offer analyses and insights significant in examining the legal-economic issues involved in economic relations among all advanced industrial nations. The three foci of the book are Japan's laws and their enforcement which affect the practices and behavior of individuals, firms, and the government within its domestic economy; the effects of Japanese laws and legal administrative practices on foreign access to Japanese markets; and the roles American laws play in bilateral economic relations. Each article deals with specific Japanese and American laws affecting bilateral economic relations. Together they succeed in substantively increasing our understanding of the issues involved and in identifying the changes that are called for that will reduce the bilateral economic conflicts which now mar the otherwise friendly relations between the two nations. Resolution of these bilateral legal-economic issues will be difficult to attain because they arise in part from differences in legal traditions and in the roles government plays in each economy. However, only through studies such as those offered in this volume, prepared by individuals directly involved i n enforcement of the laws discussed and by scholars specializing in the legal-economic issues affecting bilateral economic relations, can we gain knowledge and insights essential in taking the necessary steps to reduce bilateral economic conflicts.
£107.15
Oxford University Press Inc Beer: A Global Journey through the Past and Present
A fascinating exploration of beer, ancient and contemporary, and its role in shaping human society Beer is and has always been more than an intoxicating beverage. Ancient beer produced in the Near East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas was a food that had a remarkable role in shaping the development of agriculture and some of the earliest state-level societies. Its invention 13,000 years ago was one of the fundamental motivations for the domestication of grains around the world. In early states, the control over the technological knowledge and resources to produce beer contributed to social hierarchies. Beer even likely provided the capital to motivate laborers to construct the ancient pyramids and other large-scale public works. The fermentation of beer also provided a healthy and safe alternative to the contaminated drinking water in early states and it continues to do so among rural Indigenous populations today. Beer is a social lubricant that brings people together and, in many Indigenous societies both past and present, is a gift connecting people to their ancestors. The same innovations pioneered by ancient brewers are transforming the types of ingredients and flavors produced by the global craft beer industry. In Beer, archaeologist John W. Arthur takes readers on an exciting global journey to explore the origins, development, and recipes of ancient beer. This unique book focuses on past and present non-industrial beers, highlighting their significance in peoples' lives through four themes: innovating new technologies, ensuring health and well-being, building economic and political statuses, and imbuing life with ritual and religious connections. As this book amply illustrates, beer has shaped our world in remarkable ways for the past 13,000 years.
£22.49
Liverpool University Press Medieval Jews and the Christian Past: Jewish Historical Consciousness in Spain and Southern France
The historical consciousness of medieval Jewry has engendered lively debate in the scholarly world. The focus in this book is on the historical consciousness of the Jews of Spain and southern France in the late Middle Ages, and specifically on their perceptions of Christianity and Christian history and culture. In his detailed analysis of Jews’ understanding of the history of the communities they lived among, Ram Ben-Shalom shows that in these southern European lands Jews experienced a relatively open society that was sensitive to and knowledgeable about voices from other cultures, and that this had significant consequences for shaping Jewish historical consciousness. Among the topics that receive special attention are what Jews knew of the significance of Rome, of Jesus and the early days of Christianity, of Church history, and of the history of the Iberian monarchies. Ben-Shalom demonstrates that, despite the negative stereotypes of Jewry prevalent in Christian literature and increasing familiarity with that literature, they were more influenced by their interactions with Christian society at the local level. Consequently there was no single stereotype that dominated Jewish thought, and frequently little awareness of the two societies as representing distinct cultures. This book contributes to medieval Jewish intellectual history on many levels, demonstrating that, in Spain and southern France, Jews of the later Middle Ages evinced a genuine interest in history, including the history of non-Jews, and that in some cases they were deeply familiar with Christian and sometimes also classical historiography. In providing a comprehensive survey of the multiple contexts in which historiographical material was embedded and the many uses to which it was put, it enriches our understanding of medieval historiography, polemic, Jewish-Christian relations, and the breadth of interests characterizing Provencal and Spanish Jewish communities.
£24.95
University of Minnesota Press The Birth of Computer Vision
A revealing genealogy of image-recognition techniques and technologies Today’s most advanced neural networks and sophisticated image-analysis methods come from 1950s and ’60s Cold War culture—and many biases and ways of understanding the world from that era persist along with them. Aerial surveillance and reconnaissance shaped all of the technologies that we now refer to as computer vision, including facial recognition. The Birth of Computer Vision uncovers these histories and finds connections between the algorithms, people, and politics at the core of automating perception today.James E. Dobson reveals how new forms of computerized surveillance systems, high-tech policing, and automated decision-making systems have become entangled, functioning together as a new technological apparatus of social control. Tracing the development of a series of important computer-vision algorithms, he uncovers the ideas, worrisome military origins, and lingering goals reproduced within the code and the products based on it, examining how they became linked to one another and repurposed for domestic and commercial uses. Dobson includes analysis of the Shakey Project, which produced the first semi-autonomous robot, and the impact of student protest in the early 1970s at Stanford University, as well as recovering the computer vision–related aspects of Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron as the crucial link between machine learning and computer vision.Motivated by the ongoing use of these major algorithms and methods, The Birth of Computer Vision chronicles the foundations of computer vision and artificial intelligence, its major transformations, and the questionable legacy of its origins. Cover alt text: Two overlapping circles in cream and violet, with black background. Top is a printed circuit with camera eye; below a person at a 1977 computer.
£87.30
University of Minnesota Press The Price of Nice: How Good Intentions Maintain Educational Inequity
How being “nice” in school and university settings works to reinforce racialized, gendered, and (dis)ability-related inequities in education and society Being nice is difficult to critique. Niceness is almost always portrayed and felt as a positive quality. In schools, nice teachers are popular among students, parents, and administrators. And yet Niceness, as a distinct set of practices and discourses, is not actually good for individuals, institutions, or communities because of the way it maintains and reinforces educational inequity. In The Price of Nice, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores Niceness in educational spaces from elementary schools through higher education to highlight how this seemingly benign quality reinforces structural inequalities. Grounded in data, personal narrative, and theory, the chapters show that Niceness, as a raced, gendered, and classed set of behaviors, functions both as a shield to save educators from having to do the hard work of dismantling inequity and as a disciplining agent for those who attempt or even consider disrupting structures and ideologies of dominance. Contributors: Sarah Abuwandi, Arizona State U; Colin Ben, U of Utah; Nicholas Bustamante, Arizona State U; Aidan/Amanda J. Charles, Northern Arizona U; Jeremiah Chin, Arizona State U; Sally Campbell Galman, U of Massachusetts; Frederick Gooding Jr., Texas Christian U; Deirdre Judge, Tufts U; Katie A. Lazdowski; Román Liera, U of Southern California; Sylvia Mac, U of La Verne; Lindsey Malcolm-Piqueux, California Institute of Technology; Giselle Martinez Negrette, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Amber Poleviyuma, Arizona State U; Alexus Richmond, Arizona State U; Frances J. Riemer, Northern Arizona U; Jessica Sierk, St. Lawrence U; Bailey B. Smolarek, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Jessica Solyom, Arizona State U; Megan Tom, Arizona State U; Sabina Vaught, U of Oklahoma; Cynthia Diana Villarreal, U of Southern California; Kristine T. Weatherston, Temple U; Joseph C. Wegwert, Northern Arizona U; Marguerite Anne Fillion Wilson, Binghamton U; Jia-Hui Stefanie Wong, Trinity College; Denise Gray Yull, Binghamton U.
£90.00
University of Minnesota Press The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil
An important new ethnographic study of São Paulo’s favelas revealing the widespread use of race-based police repression in Brazil While Black Lives Matter still resonates in the United States, the movement has also become a potent rallying call worldwide, with harsh police tactics and repressive state policies often breaking racial lines. In The Anti-Black City, Jaime Amparo Alves delves into the dynamics of racial violence in Brazil, where poverty, unemployment, residential segregation, and a biased criminal justice system create urban conditions of racial precarity. The Anti-Black City provocatively offers race as a vital new lens through which to view violence and marginalization in the supposedly “raceless” São Paulo. Ironically, in a context in which racial ambiguity makes it difficult to identify who is black and who is white, racialized access to opportunities and violent police tactics establish hard racial boundaries through subjugation and death. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in prisons and neighborhoods on the periphery of this mega-city, Alves documents the brutality of police tactics and the complexity of responses deployed by black residents, including self-help initiatives, public campaigns against police violence, ruthless gangs, and self-policing of communities.The Anti-Black City reveals the violent and racist ideologies that underlie state fantasies of order and urban peace in modern Brazil. Illustrating how “governing through death” has become the dominant means for managing and controlling ethnic populations in the neoliberal state, Alves shows that these tactics only lead to more marginalization, criminality, and violence. Ultimately, Alves’s work points to a need for a new approach to an intractable problem: how to govern populations and territories historically seen as “ungovernable.”
£22.99
Cornell University Press Hoping to Help: The Promises and Pitfalls of Global Health Volunteering
Overseas volunteering has exploded in numbers and interest in the last couple of decades. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people travel from wealthier to poorer countries to participate in short-term volunteer programs focused on health services. Churches, universities, nonprofit service organizations, profit-making "voluntourism" companies, hospitals, and large corporations all sponsor brief missions. Hoping to Help is the first book to offer a comprehensive assessment of global health volunteering, based on research into how it currently operates, its benefits and drawbacks, and how it might be organized to contribute most effectively. Given the enormous human and economic investment in these activities, it is essential to know more about them and to understand the advantages and disadvantages for host communities. Most people assume that poor communities benefit from the goodwill and skills of the volunteers. Volunteer trips are widely advertised as a means to "give back" and "make a difference." In contrast, some claim that health volunteering is a new form of colonialism, designed to benefit the volunteers more than the host communities. Others focus on unethical practices and potential harm to the presumed "beneficiaries." Judith N. Lasker evaluates these opposing positions and relies on extensive research—interviews with host country staff members, sponsor organization leaders, and volunteers, a national survey of sponsors, and participant observation—to identify best and worst practices. She adds to the debate a focus on the benefits to the sponsoring organizations, benefits that can contribute to practices that are inconsistent with what host country staff identify as most likely to be useful for them and even with what may enhance the experience for volunteers. Hoping to Help illuminates the activities and goals of sponsoring organizations and compares dominant practices to the preferences of host country staff and to nine principles for most effective volunteer trips.
£97.20
University of Nebraska Press Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818
Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 examines how Creek communities and their leaders remained viable geopolitical actors in the trans-Appalachian West well after the American Revolution. The Creeks pursued aggressive and far-reaching diplomacy between 1763 and 1818 to assert their territorial and political sovereignty while thwarting American efforts to establish control over the region. The United States and the Creeks fought to secure recognition from the powers of Europe that would guarantee political and territorial sovereignty: the Creeks fought to maintain their connections to the Atlantic world and preserve their central role in the geopolitics of the trans-Appalachian West, while the American colonies sought first to establish themselves as an independent nation, then to expand borders to secure diplomatic and commercial rights. Creeks continued to forge useful ties with agents of European empires despite American attempts to circumscribe Creek contact with the outside world. The Creeks’ solicitation of trade and diplomatic channels with British and Spanish colonists in the West Indies, Canada, and various Gulf Coast outposts served key functions for defenders of local autonomy. Native peoples fought to preserve the geopolitical order that dominated the colonial era, making the trans-Appalachian West a kaleidoscope of sovereign peoples where negotiation prevailed. As a result, the United States lacked the ability to impose its will on its Indigenous neighbors, much like the European empires that had preceded them. Hill provides a significant revisionist history of Creek diplomacy and power that fills gaps within the broader study of the Atlantic world and early American history to show how Indigenous power thwarted European empires in North America.
£48.60
New York University Press Dot-Com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web
From dial-up to wi-fi, an engaging cultural history of the commercial web industry In the 1990s, the World Wide Web helped transform the Internet from the domain of computer scientists to a playground for mass audiences. As URLs leapt off computer screens and onto cereal boxes, billboards, and film trailers, the web changed the way many Americans experienced media, socialized, and interacted with brands. Businesses rushed online to set up corporate “home pages” and as a result, a new cultural industry was born: web design. For today’s internet users who are more familiar sharing social media posts than collecting hotlists of cool sites, the early web may seem primitive, clunky, and graphically inferior. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, this pre-crash era was dubbed “Web 1.0,” a retronym meant to distinguish the early web from the social, user-centered, and participatory values that were embodied in the internet industry’s resurgence as “Web 2.0” in the 21st century. Tracking shifts in the rules of “good web design,” Ankerson reimagines speculation and design as a series of contests and collaborations to conceive the boundaries of a new digitally networked future. What was it like to go online and “surf the Web” in the 1990s? How and why did the look and feel of the web change over time? How do new design paradigms like user-experience design (UX) gain traction? Bringing together media studies, internet studies, and design theory, Dot-com Design traces the shifts in, and struggles over, the web’s production, aesthetics, and design to provide a comprehensive look at the evolution of the web industry and into the vast internet we browse today.
£24.99
New York University Press Dot-Com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web
From dial-up to wi-fi, an engaging cultural history of the commercial web industry In the 1990s, the World Wide Web helped transform the Internet from the domain of computer scientists to a playground for mass audiences. As URLs leapt off computer screens and onto cereal boxes, billboards, and film trailers, the web changed the way many Americans experienced media, socialized, and interacted with brands. Businesses rushed online to set up corporate “home pages” and as a result, a new cultural industry was born: web design. For today’s internet users who are more familiar sharing social media posts than collecting hotlists of cool sites, the early web may seem primitive, clunky, and graphically inferior. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, this pre-crash era was dubbed “Web 1.0,” a retronym meant to distinguish the early web from the social, user-centered, and participatory values that were embodied in the internet industry’s resurgence as “Web 2.0” in the 21st century. Tracking shifts in the rules of “good web design,” Ankerson reimagines speculation and design as a series of contests and collaborations to conceive the boundaries of a new digitally networked future. What was it like to go online and “surf the Web” in the 1990s? How and why did the look and feel of the web change over time? How do new design paradigms like user-experience design (UX) gain traction? Bringing together media studies, internet studies, and design theory, Dot-com Design traces the shifts in, and struggles over, the web’s production, aesthetics, and design to provide a comprehensive look at the evolution of the web industry and into the vast internet we browse today.
£66.60
New York University Press Homegrown: Identity and Difference in the American War on Terror
An insightful study of how identity is mobilized in and for war in the face of homegrown terrorism. “You are either with us, or against us” is the refrain that captures the spirit of the global war on terror. Images of the “them” implied in this war cry—distinct foreign “others”—inundate Americans on hit television shows, Hollywood blockbusters, and nightly news. However, in this book, Piotr Szpunar tells the story of a fuzzier image: the homegrown terrorist, a foe that blends into the crowd, who Americans are told looks, talks, and acts “like us.” Homegrown delves into the dynamics of domestic counterterrorism, revealing the complications that arise when the terrorist threat involves Americans, both residents and citizens, who have taken up arms against their own country. Szpunar examines the ways in which identities are blurred in the war on terror, amid debates concerning who is “the real terrorist.” He considers cases ranging from the white supremacist Sikh Temple shooter,,to the Newburgh Four, ex-convicts caught up in an FBI informant-led plot to bomb synagogues, to ecoterrorists, to the Tsarnaev brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing. Drawing on popular media coverage, court documents, as well as “terrorist”-produced media, Szpunar poses new questions about the strategic deployment of identity in times of conflict. The book argues that homegrown terrorism challenges our long held understandings of how identity and difference play out in war—beyond “us versus them”—and, more importantly, that the way in which it is conceptualized and combatted has real consequences for social, cultural, and political notions of citizenship and belonging. The first critical examination of homegrown terrorism, this book will make you question how we make sense of the actions of ourselves and others in global war, and the figures that fall in between.
£23.99
New York University Press Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation
Explores how Black Buddhist Teachers and Practitioners interpret Western Buddhism in unique spiritual and communal ways In Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition, Rima Vesely-Flad examines the distinctive features of Black-identifying Buddhist practitioners, arguing that Black Buddhists interpret Buddhist teachings in ways that are congruent with Black radical thought. Indeed, the volume makes the case that given their experiences with racism—both in the larger society and also within largely white-oriented Buddhist organizations—Black cultural frameworks are necessary for illuminating the Buddha’s wisdom. Drawing on interviews with forty Black Buddhist teachers and practitioners, Vesely-Flad argues that Buddhist teachings, through their focus on healing intergenerational trauma, provide a vitally important foundation for achieving Black liberation. She shows that Buddhist teachings as practiced by Black Americans emphasize different aspects of the religion than do those in white convert Buddhist communities, focusing more on devotional practices to ancestors and community uplift. The book includes discussions of the Black Power movement, the Black feminist movement, and the Black prophetic tradition. It also offers a nuanced discussion of how the Black body, which has historically been reviled, is claimed as a vehicle for liberation. In so doing, the book explores how the experiences of non-binary, gender non-conforming, and transgender practitioners of African descent are validated within the tradition. The book also uplifts the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer Black Buddhists. This unique volume shows the importance of Black Buddhist teachers’ insights into Buddhist wisdom, and how they align Buddhism with Black radical teachings, helping to pull Buddhism away from dominant white cultural norms.
£66.60
New York University Press Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics
How Latinx artists engage in sonic subcultures to reject neoliberal definitions of belonging What is the connection between the British rock star Morrissey and the Latinx culture of transnational “unbelonging”? What is the relevance of “dyke chords” in Chicana feminist punk and lesbian dissolution? In what ways can dissonant sounds challenge systems of dominance? Unbelonging answers these questions and more through an exploration into Mexican and US-based Latinx artists’, writers’, and creators’ use of the discordant sounds of punk, metal, and rock to give voice to the aesthetic of “unbelonging,” a rejection of consumerist and nationalist mentalities. Iván A. Ramos argues that racial identity and belonging have historically required legible forms of performance. Sound has been the primary medium that amplifies and is used to assign cultural citizenship and, for Latinx individuals, legibility is essential to music perceived as traditional and authentic to their national origins. In the context of twentieth-century neoliberal policies, which cemented the concept of “citizen” within logics of consumerism and capitalism, Ramos turns to focus on Latinx artists, writers, and audiences, who produce experimental and often “inauthentic” performances and installations in sonic subcultures to reject new definitions of economic citizenship. Organized around studies of a number of artists, all whom are explored through the methodological frameworks of sound studies, performance studies, and queer theory, Unbelonging unearths how their very different genres of music share a unifying theme of dissonance. With the backdrop of neoliberalism’s attempt to define citizenship in relation to economic and cultural legibility, Unbelonging offers an urgent analysis of how these oft-overlooked queer and feminist performers and fans used sonic illegibility to challenge gender norms, official definitions of citizenship, and narratives of assimilation. Ultimately, these forms of inauthenticity move beyond negation and become ways to imagine alternative realities.
£23.99
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Clinical Psychology: A Global Perspective
The first book to offer a truly global perspective on the theory and practice of clinical psychology While clinical psychology is practiced the world over, up to now there has been no text devoted to examining it within a global context. The first book of its kind, Clinical Psychology: A Global Perspective brings together contributions from clinicians and scholars around the world to share their insights and observations on the theory and practice of clinical psychology. Due partly to language barriers and entrenched cultural biases, there is little cultural cross-pollination within the field of clinical psychology. In fact, most of the popular texts were written for English-speaking European and Anglo-American audiences and translated for other countries. As a result, most psychologists are unaware of how their profession is conceptualized and practiced in different regions, or how their own practices can be enriched by knowledge of the theories and modalities predominant among colleagues in other parts of the world. This book represents an important first step toward rectifying that state of affairs. Explores key differences and similarities in how clinical psychology is conceptualized and practiced with children, adolescents and adults across different countries and cultures Addresses essential research methods, clinical interviews, psychometric testing, neuropsychological assessments, and dominant treatment modalities Follows a consistent format with each chapter focusing on a specific area of the practice of clinical psychology while integrating cultural issues within the discussion Includes coverage of how to adapt one’s practice to the differing cultures of individual clients, and how to work in multidisciplinary teams within a global context Clinical Psychology: A Global Perspective is a valuable resource for students, trainees, and practicing psychologists, especially those who work with ethnic minority groups or with interpreters. It is also a must-read for practitioners who are considering working internationally.
£34.95
Fordham University Press X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought
X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought offers an original account of matters African American, and by implication the African diaspora in general, as an object of discourse and knowledge. It likewise challenges the conception of analogous objects of study across dominant ethnological disciplines (e.g., anthropology, history, and sociology) and the various forms of cultural, ethnic, and postcolonial studies. With special reference to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Chandler shows how a concern with the Negro is central to the social and historical problematization that underwrote twentieth-century explorations of what it means to exist as an historical entity—referring to their antecedents in eighteenth-century thought and forward into their ongoing itinerary in the twenty-first century. For Du Bois, “the problem of the color line” coincided with the inception of a supposedly modern horizon. The very idea of the human and its avatars—the idea of race and the idea of culture—emerged together with the violent, hierarchical inscription of the so-called African or Negro into a horizon of commonness beyond all natal premises, a horizon that we can still situate with the term global. In ongoing struggles with the idea of historical sovereignty, we can see the working out of then new concatenations of social and historical forms of difference, as both projects of categorical differentiation and the irruption of originary revisions of ways of being. In a word, the world is no longer—and has never been—one. The world, if there is such—from the inception of something like “the Negro as a problem for thought”— could never be, only, one. The problem of the Negro in “America” is thus an exemplary instance of modern historicity in its most fundamental sense. It renders legible for critical practice the radical order of an ineluctable and irreversible complication at the heart of being—its appearance as both life and history—as the very mark of our epoch.
£25.99
Duke University Press Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique
Under modernity, time is regarded as linear and measurable by clocks and calendars. Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time” founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded. In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple “immiscible temporalities” that strain against the modern concept of homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study—encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang)—Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in secular terms while also exposing an untranslatable remainder, thereby undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception.Lim interweaves scholarship on visuality with postcolonial historiography. She draws on Henri Bergson’s understanding of cinema as both implicated in homogeneous time and central to its critique, as well as on postcolonial thought linking the ideology of progress to imperialist expansion. At stake in this project are more ethical forms of understanding time that refuse to domesticate difference as anachronism. While supernaturalism is often disparaged as a vestige of primitive or superstitious thought, Lim suggests an alternative interpretation of the fantastic as a mode of resistance to the ascendancy of homogeneous time and a starting-point for more ethical temporal imaginings.
£80.10
Duke University Press September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment?
Hours after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the idea that the September 11 attacks had “changed everything” permeated American popular and political discussion. In the period since then, the events of September 11 have been used to justify profound changes in U.S. public policy and foreign relations. Bringing together leading scholars of history, law, literature, and Islam, September 11 in History asks whether the attacks and their aftermath truly marked a transition in U.S. and world history or whether they are best understood in the context of pre-existing historical trajectories. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors to this collection scrutinize claims about September 11, in terms of both their historical validity and their consequences. Essays range from an analysis of terms like “ground zero,” “homeland,” and “the axis of evil” to an argument that the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay has become a site for acting out a repressed imperial history. Examining the effect of the attacks on Islamic self-identity, one contributor argues that Osama bin Laden enacted an interpretation of Islam on September 11 and asserts that progressive Muslims must respond to it. Other essays focus on the deployment of Orientalist tropes in categorizations of those who “look Middle Eastern,” the blurring of domestic and international law evident in a number of legal developments including the use of military tribunals to prosecute suspected terrorists, and the justifications for and consequences of American unilateralism. This collection ultimately reveals that everything did not change on September 11, 2001, but that some foundations of democratic legitimacy have been significantly eroded by claims that it did.ContributorsKhaled Abou el FadlMary L. DudziakChristopher L. EisgruberLaurence R. HelferSherman A. JacksonAmy B. KaplanElaine Tyler MayLawrence G. SagerRuti G. TeitelLeti VolppMarilyn B. Young
£76.50
Duke University Press Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture
A pioneering analysis of radio as both a cultural and material production, Communities of the Air explores radio’s powerful role in shaping Anglo-American culture and society since the early twentieth century. Scholars and radio writers, producers, and critics look at the many ways radio generates multiple communities over the air—from elite to popular, dominant to resistant, canonical to transgressive. The contributors approach radio not only in its own right, but also as a set of practices—both technological and social—illuminating broader issues such as race relations, gender politics, and the construction of regional and national identities. Drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, science studies and feminist theory, radio history, and the new field of radio studies, these essays consider the development of radio as technology: how it was modeled on the telephone, early conflicts between for-profit and public uses of radio, and amateur radio (HAMS), local programming, and low-power radio. Some pieces discuss how radio gives voice to different cultural groups, focusing on the BBC and poetry programming in the West Indies, black radio, the history of alternative radio since the 1970s, and science and contemporary arts programming. Others look at radio’s influence on gender (and gender’s influence on radio) through examinations of Queen Elizabeth’s broadcasts, Gracie Allen’s comedy, and programming geared toward women. Together the contributors demonstrate how attention to the variety of ways radio is used and understood reveals the dynamic emergence and transformation of communities within the larger society.Contributors. Laurence A. Breiner, Bruce B. Campbell, Mary Desjardins, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Nina Hunteman, Leah Lowe, Adrienne Munich, Kathleen Newman, Martin Spinelli, Susan Merrill Squier, Donald Ulin, Mark Williams, Steve Wurzler
£27.99
New York University Press The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader
A interdisciplinary collection of readings that answers the question: How do men and women practice consumer culture differently? What is the relationship between gender and consumerism? Jennifer Scanlon gathers a collection of readings and archival materials to explore the multiple and contradictory ways in which women and men consume. Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural in scope, The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader introduces the reader to some of the most compelling issues and arguments in this growing field of study. In questioning traditional ways of analyzing the relationships between gender and consumer culture, these essays analyze the liberatory and oppressive nature of consumer culture in both historical and contemporary contexts. The scholars gathered here look at the gendered relationship between the home and consumer culture, individual and group identity through purchasing, the supply side of consumer culture, and the ways in which consumers embrace, resist, and manipulate the messages and the activities of consumer culture. Topics range from white middle-class female shoplifters to the gendered depiction of Native Americans in nineteenth-century advertising, from gay men's acquisition of domestic space in early twentieth-century New York to black and Latino men's cultural resistance through dress. Archival materials link the essays in each section, creating a further historical context, and providing a connection between the readings and larger questions and issues currently being debated about gender and consumer culture. Contributors include Andrew Heinze, Erika Rappaport, George Chauncey, Steven M. Gelber, Jeffrey Steele, Ann McClintock, Robert E. Weems, Jr., Lillian Faderman, Malcolm Gladwell, Jennifer Scanlon, Lizabeth Cohen, Jane Bryce, Susan J. Douglas, Kenon Breazeale, Kathy Peiss, Elaine S. Abelson, Natasha B. Barnes, Danae Clark, Stuart Cosgrove.
£24.99
Rutgers University Press The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History
In the late 1890s, at the dawn of the automobile era, steam, gasoline, and electric cars all competed to become the dominant automotive technology. By the early 1900s, the battle was over and internal combustion had won. Was the electric car ever a viable competitor? What characteristics of late nineteenth-century American society led to the choice of internal combustion over its steam and electric competitors? And might not other factors, under slightly differing initial conditions, have led to the adoption of one of the other motive powers as the technological standard for the American automobile?David A. Kirsch examines the relationship of technology, society, and environment to choice, policy, and outcome in the history of American transportation. He takes the history of the Electric Vehicle Company as a starting point for a vision of an “alternative” automotive system in which gasoline and electric vehicles would have each been used to supply different kinds of transport services. Kirsch examines both the support—and lack thereof—for electric vehicles by the electric utility industry. Turning to the history of the electric truck, he explores the demise of the idea that different forms of transportation technology might coexist, each in its own distinct sphere of service.A main argument throughout Kirsch’s book is that technological superiority cannot be determined devoid of social context. In the case of the automobile, technological superiority ultimately was located in the hearts and minds of engineers, consumers and drivers; it was not programmed inexorably into the chemical bonds of a gallon of refined petroleum. Finally, Kirsch connects the historic choice of internal combustion over electricity to current debates about the social and environmental impacts of the automobile, the introduction of new hybrid vehicles, and the continuing evolution of the American transportation system.
£32.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America
A postcolonial study of the conceptualization of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America as medieval and oriental If Spain and Portugal were perceived as backward in the nineteenth century—still tainted, in the minds of European writers and thinkers, by more than a whiff of the medieval and Moorish—Ibero-America lagged even further behind. Originally colonized in the late fifteenth century, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were characterized by European travelers and South American elites alike as both feudal and oriental, as if they retained an oriental-Moorish character due to the centuries-long presence of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. So, Nadia R. Altschul observes, the Scottish metropolitan writer Maria Graham (1785-1842) depicted the Chile in which she found herself stranded after the death of her sea captain husband as a premodern, precapitalist, and orientalized place that could only benefit from the free trade imperialism of the British. Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888), the most influential Latin American writer and statesman of his day, conceived of his own Euro-American creole class as medieval in such works as Civilization and Barbarism: The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845) and Recollections of a Provincial Past (1850), and wrote of the inherited Moorish character of Spanish America in his 1883 Conflict and Harmony of the Races in America. Moving forward into the first half of the twentieth century, Altschul explores the oriental character that Gilberto Freyre assigned to Portuguese colonization in his The Masters and the Slaves (1933), in which he postulated the "Mozarabic" essence of Brazil. In Politics of Temporalization, Altschul examines the case of South America to ask more broadly what is at stake—what is harmed, what is excused—when the present is temporalized, when elements of "the now" are characterized as belonging to, and consequently imposed upon, a constructed and othered "past."
£71.10
University of Pennsylvania Press Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America
Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, pincushions and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Building on the distinctive practices of British antislavery and evangelical reform movements, the AASS utilized innovative business strategies to market its productions and developed a centralized distribution system to circulate them widely. In Selling Antislavery, Teresa A. Goddu shows how the AASS operated at the forefront of a new culture industry and, by framing its media as cultural commodities, made antislavery sentiments an integral part of an emerging middle-class identity. She contends that, although the AASS's dominance waned after 1840 as the organization splintered, it nevertheless created one of the first national mass markets. Goddu maps this extensive media culture, focusing in particular on the material produced by AASS in the decade of the 1830s. She considers how the dissemination of its texts, objects, and tactics was facilitated by the quasi-corporate and centralized character of the organization during this period and demonstrates how its institutional presence remained important to the progress of the larger movement. Exploring antislavery's vast archive and explicating its messages, she emphasizes both the discursive and material aspects of antislavery's appeal, providing a richly textured history of the movement through its artifacts and the modes of circulation it put into place. Featuring more than seventy-five illustrations, Selling Antislavery offers a thorough case study of the role of reform movements in the rise of mass media and argues for abolition's central importance to the shaping of antebellum middle-class culture.
£48.60
University of Pennsylvania Press Piety and Public Funding: Evangelicals and the State in Modern America
How is it that some conservative groups are viscerally antigovernment even while enjoying the benefits of government funding? In Piety and Public Funding historian Axel R. Schäfer offers a compelling answer to this question by chronicling how, in the first half century since World War II, conservative evangelical groups became increasingly adept at accommodating their hostility to the state with federal support. Though holding to the ideals of church-state separation, evangelicals gradually took advantage of expanded public funding opportunities for religious foreign aid, health care, education, and social welfare. This was especially the case during the Cold War, when groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals were at the forefront of battling communism at home and abroad. It was evident, too, in the Sunbelt, where the military-industrial complex grew exponentially after World War II and where the postwar right would achieve its earliest success. Contrary to evangelicals' own claims, liberal public policies were a boon for, not a threat to, their own institutions and values. The welfare state, forged during the New Deal and renewed by the Great Society, hastened—not hindered—the ascendancy of a conservative political movement that would, in turn, use its resurgence as leverage against the very system that helped create it. By showing that the liberal state's dependence on private and nonprofit social services made it vulnerable to assaults from the right, Piety and Public Funding brings a much needed historical perspective to a hotly debated contemporary issue: the efforts of both Republican and Democratic administrations to channel federal money to "faith-based" organizations. It suggests a major reevaluation of the religious right, which grew to dominate evangelicalism by exploiting institutional ties to the state while simultaneously brandishing a message of free enterprise and moral awakening.
£40.50
Cornell University Press Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia
Russia’s Great Reforms of 1861 were sweeping social and legal changes that aimed to modernize the country. In the following decades, rapid industrialization and urbanization profoundly transformed Russia’s social, economic, and cultural landscape. Barbara Alpern Engel explores the personal, cultural, and political consequences of these dramatic changes, focusing on their impact on intimate life and expectations and the resulting challenges to the traditional, patriarchal family order, the cornerstone of Russia’s authoritarian political and religious regime. The widely perceived "marriage crisis" had far-reaching legal, institutional, and political ramifications. In Breaking the Ties That Bound, Engel draws on exceptionally rich archival documentation—in particular, on petitions for marital separation and the materials generated by the ensuing investigations—to explore changing notions of marital relations, domesticity, childrearing, and intimate life among ordinary men and women in imperial Russia. Engel illustrates with unparalleled vividness the human consequences of the marriage crisis. Her research reveals in myriad ways that the new and more individualistic values of the capitalist marketplace and commercial culture challenged traditional definitions of gender roles and encouraged the self-creation of new social identities. Engel captures the intimate experiences of women and men of the lower and middling classes in their own words, documenting instances not only of physical, mental, and emotional abuse but also of resistance and independence. These changes challenged Russia’s rigid political order, forcing a range of state agents, up to and including those who spoke directly in the name of the tsar, to rethink traditional understandings of gender norms and family law. This remarkable social history is thus also a contribution to our understanding of the deepening political crisis of autocracy.
£23.99
Cornell University Press Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England
In 1668 Sarah Ahhaton, a married Native American woman of the Massachusetts Bay town of Punkapoag, confessed in an English court to having committed adultery. For this crime she was tried, found guilty, and publicly whipped and shamed; she contritely promised that if her life were spared, she would return to her husband and "continue faithfull to him during her life yea although hee should beat her againe." These events, recorded in the court documents of colonial Massachusetts, may appear unexceptional; in fact, they reflect a rapidly changing world. Native American marital relations and domestic lives were anathema to English Christians; elite men frequently took more than one wife, while ordinary people could dissolve their marriages and take new partners with relative ease. Native marriage did not necessarily involve cohabitation, the formation of a new household, or mutual dependence for subsistence. Couples who wished to separate did so without social opprobrium, and when adultery occurred, the blame centered not on the "fallen" woman but on the interloping man. Over time, such practices changed, but the emergence of new types of "Indian marriage" enabled the legal, social, and cultural survival of New England's native peoples. The complex interplay between colonial power and native practice is treated with subtlety and wisdom in Colonial Intimacies. Ann Marie Plane uses travel narratives, missionary tracts, and legal records to reconstruct a previously neglected history. Plane's careful reading of fragmentary sources yields both conclusive and fittingly speculative findings, and her interpretations form an intimate picture, moving and often tragic, of the familial bonds of Native Americans in the first century and a half of European contact.
£45.00
Harvard University Press Right Where We Belong: How Refugee Teachers and Students Are Changing the Future of Education
A leading expert shows how, by learning from refugee teachers and students, we can create for displaced children—and indeed all children—better schooling and brighter futures.Half of the world’s 26 million refugees are children. Their formal education is disrupted, and their lives are too often dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about what the future holds. Even kids who have the opportunity to attend school face enormous challenges, as they struggle to integrate into unfamiliar societies and educational environments.In Right Where We Belong, Sarah Dryden-Peterson discovers that, where governments and international agencies have been stymied, refugee teachers and students themselves are leading. From open-air classrooms in Uganda to the hallways of high schools in Maine, new visions for refugee education are emerging. Dryden-Peterson introduces us to people like Jacques—a teacher who created a school for his fellow Congolese refugees in defiance of local laws—and Hassan, a Somali refugee navigating the social world of the American teenager. Drawing on more than 600 interviews in twenty-three countries, Dryden-Peterson shows how teachers and students are experimenting with flexible forms of learning. Rather than adopt the unrealistic notion that all will soon return to “normal,” these schools embrace unfamiliarity, develop students’ adaptiveness, and demonstrate how children, teachers, and community members can build supportive relationships across lines of difference.It turns out that policymakers, activists, and educators have a lot to learn from displaced children and teachers. Their stories point the way to better futures for refugee students and inspire us to reimagine education broadly, so that children everywhere are better prepared to thrive in a diverse and unpredictable world.
£27.86
University of California Press The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion
Among maternal deities of the Greek pantheon, the Mother of the Gods was a paradox. She is variously described as a devoted mother, a chaste wife, an impassioned lover, and a virgin daughter; she is said to be both foreign and familiar to the Greeks. In this erudite and absorbing study, Mark Munn examines how the cult of Mother of the Gods came from Phrygia and Lydia, where she was the mother of tyrants, to Athens, where she protected the laws of the Athenian democracy. Analyzing the divergence of Greek and Asiatic culture at the beginning of the classical era, Munn describes how Kybebe, the Lydian goddess who signified fertility and sovereignty, assumed a different aspect to the Greeks when Lydia became part of the Persian empire. Conflict and resolution were played out symbolically, he shows, and the goddess of Lydian tyranny was eventually accepted by the Athenians as the Mother of the Gods, and as a symbol of their own sovereignty. This book elegantly illustrates how ancient divinities were not static types, but rather expressions of cultural systems that responded to historical change. Presenting a new perspective on the context in which the Homeric and Hesiodic epics were composed, Munn traces the transformation of the Asiatic deity who was the goddess of Sacred Marriage among the Assyrians and Babylonians, equivalent to Ishtar. Among the Lydians, she was the bride to tyrants and the mother of tyrants. To the Greeks, she was Aphrodite. An original and compelling consideration of the relations between the Greeks and the dominant powers of western Asia, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia is the first thorough examination of the way that religious cult practice and thought influenced political activities during and after the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.
£63.90
University of Washington Press Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid
The late Edward Said remains one of the most influential critics and public intellectuals of our time, with lasting contributions to many disciplines. Much of his reputation derives from the phenomenal multidisciplinary influence of his 1978 book Orientalism. Said's seminal polemic analyzes novels, travelogues, and academic texts to argue that a dominant discourse of West over East has warped virtually all past European and American representation of the Near East. But despite the book's wide acclaim, no systematic critical survey of the rhetoric in Said's representation of Orientalism and the resulting impact on intellectual culture has appeared until today. Drawing on the extensive discussion of Said's work in more than 600 bibliographic entries, Daniel Martin Varisco has written an ambitious intellectual history of the debates that Said's work has sparked in several disciplines, highlighting in particular its reception among Arab and European scholars. While pointing out Said's tendency to essentialize and privilege certain texts at the expense of those that do not comfortably it his theoretical framework, Varisco analyzes the extensive commentary the book has engendered in Oriental studies, literary and cultural studies, feminist scholarship, history, political science, and anthropology. He employs "critical satire" to parody the exaggerated and pedantic aspects of post-colonial discourse, including Said's profound underappreciation of the role of irony and reform in many of the texts he cites. The end result is a companion volume to Orientalism and the vast research it inspired. Rather than contribute to dueling essentialisms, Varisco provides a path to move beyond the binary of East versus West and the polemics of blame. Reading Orientalism is the most comprehensive survey of Said's writing and thinking to date. It will be of strong interest to scholars of Middle East studies, anthropology, history, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and literary studies.
£27.99