Search results for ""syracuse university press""

Garth Andrew Myers' work makes a significant contribution to a long tradition of research on colonial cities and a multidisciplinary body of literature on urban legacies of colonialism. He examines both colonial rule and postcolonial inheritance in these cities, tracing the legacies of colonialism in different and divergent postcolonial settingsa revolutionary left-wing socialist state (Zanzibar) and a reactionary right-wing dictatorship (Malawi). In addition to the examination of urban plans and the African urban majority's responses to them, the book traces the experience of the urban planning process through three different ""verandahs of power,"" or levels of class depiction: the colonial power, the colonized middle, and the urban majority. Interspersed with personal stories, this book illuminates our understanding of the workings of power in African cities by addressing human experiences of that power.

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As universities rethink their approach to student and faculty mental health, this book showcases academics who proudly embrace the label of the mad scholar. The volume explores the infinite richness of neurodivergent scholars' lived experiences, centering their stories in opposition to hegemonic sanism and ableism in the academy.

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As universities rethink their approach to student and faculty mental health, this book showcases academics who proudly embrace the label of the mad scholar. The volume explores the infinite richness of neurodivergent scholars' lived experiences, centering their stories in opposition to hegemonic sanism and ableism in the academy.

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Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile focuses on two centers of Western Armenian literary production following the Armenian genocide to examine the intersection of violence and art, displacement and language vitality. In looking at the work of a post WWI Paris-based, short-lived transnational literary movement called Menk [We], it explores how the politically violent origins of dispersion informed the aesthetic development of a new literature and the articulation of literary belonging in exile. In looking at the post WWII activities and publications of the Writers’ Association of Syria and Lebanon, it traces how the Armenian diaspora’s literature was nationalized in the absence of state institutions. It shows that when Beirut took over as the nucleus of the diaspora’s literary activity and intellectuals began to construct a unified and coherent narrative of the diaspora, the city came to be positioned as the thread that connected the current activities to the pre-1915 literary tradition and the Menk generation was excluded from the modern Armenian literary canon due to its writers’ attempts to understand diasporic experience as interrupted time. Ultimately, it argues that the adoption of the category of the "national" as the organizing logic of literary production in a diaspora setting limited the long-term vitality of this stateless language, for it ignored the multifarious composition of diaspora communities.

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In the past two decades, the consumption of beauty services and cosmetic surgery in Turkey has developed from an elite phenomenon to an increasingly common practice, especially among younger and middle-aged women. Turkey now ranks among the top countries worldwide with the highest number of cosmetic procedures, and with its cultural and economic capital, Istanbul has become a regional center for the beauty and fashion industries. Istanbul Appearances shows the profound effects of this growing market on urban residents’ body images, gendered norms, and practices. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork carried out in beauty salons and clinics in different parts of the city, Liebelt explores how standards of femininity and female desire have shifted since the consolidation of power and authoritarian rule of the conservative, pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party.Arguing that the politics of beauty are intricately bound up with the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Liebelt shows that female bodies have become a major site for the negotiation of citizenship. It is in the numerous beauty salons and clinics that the heteronormative ideals and images of gendered bodies become real, embodied in a complex array of emotional desires of who and what is considered not only beautiful but also morally proper.

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Little is known in the West about the division of the Islamic world into Shiites and Sunnites and even less about the stratification of these two groups, with most of the attention going to the Sunnites. Moosa's comprehensive study of the origins and cultural aspects of the different extremist, or Ghulat, Shiite sects in the Middle East is a ground-breaking work. These sects whose 'extremism' is essentially religious are generally a peaceful people and, except for the Nusayris of Syria, are not political activists.

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On the night of August 6, 1930, Joseph Force Crater, a newly appointed judge and prominent figure in many circles of Manhattan, hailed a taxi in the heart of Broadway and vanished into thin air. Despite a decades-long international manhunt led by the New York Police Department's esteemed Missing Persons Bureau, the reason for Crater's disappearance remains a confounding mystery. In the early months of the investigation, evidence implicated and imperiled New York's top officials, including then-Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mayor Jimmy Walker, as well as the city's Tammany Hall political machine, lawyers and judges, and a theater mogul.Drawing on new sources, including NYPD case files and court records, and overlooked evidence discovered years later, Riegel pieces together the puzzle of what likely happened to Joseph Crater and why. To uncover the mystery, he delves into Crater's ascension into the scintillating and corrupt world of Manhattan in the Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age. In turn, the story of the judge's vanishing in the first year of the Great Depression unfolds as a harbinger of the disappearance of his lost metropolis and its transformation into modern-day New York City.

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Despite their common heritage, Jews born and raised on opposite sides of the Polish-Soviet border during the interwar period acquired distinct beliefs, values, and attitudes. Variances in civic commitment, school lessons, youth activities, religious observance, housing arrangements, and perceptions of security deeply influenced these adolescents who would soon face a common enemy.Set in two cities flanking the border, Grodno in the interwar Polish Republic and Vitebsk in the Soviet Union, Borderland Generation traces the prewar and wartime experiences of young adult Jews raised under distinct political and social systems. Each cohort harnessed the knowledge and skills attained during their formative years to seek survival during the Holocaust through narrow windows of chance.Antisemitism in Polish Grodno encouraged Jewish adolescents to seek the support of their peers in youth groups. Across the border to the east, the Soviet system offered young Vitebsk Jews opportunities for advancement not possible in Poland, but only if they integrated into the predominantly Slavic society. These backgrounds shaped responses during the Holocaust. Grodno Jews deported to concentration camps acted in continuity with prewar social behaviors by forming bonds with other prisoners. Young survivors among Vitebsk’s Jews often looked to survive by posing under false identities as Belarusians, Russians, or Tatars. Tapping archival resources in six languages, Borderland Generation offers an original and groundbreaking exploration of the ways in which young Polish and Soviet Jews fought for survival and the complex impulses that shaped their varying methods.

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Demands for freedom, justice, and dignity have animated protests and revolutions across the Middle East in recent years, from the Iranian Green Movement and the Arab Spring uprisings to Turkey's March for Justice and the ongoing struggle in Palestine. Although expectations raised by the Arab Spring were largely disappointed and protests that toppled entrenched rulers unleashed vicious counterrevolutionary forces, there is no doubt that the landscape of the Middle East has changed. Drawing from diverse disciplines, this volume offers critical perspectives on these changes, covering politics, religion, gender dynamics, human rights, media, literature, and music. What ultimately has changed in ""the new Middle East""? Who are the actors pushing the direction of change? How are aspirations for change being expressed through media and the arts? With extensive analysis and thoughtful reflection, this book gives readers an in-depth portrayal of a modernizing Middle East.

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American Indian reservation planning is one of the most challenging and poorly understood specializations within the American planning profession. Charged with developing a strategy to protect irreplaceable tribal homelands that have been repeatedly diminished over the ages through unjust public policy actions, it is also one of the most imperative. For centuries tribes have faced historical bigotry, political violence, and an unrelenting resistance to self-governance. Aided by a comprehensive reservation planning strategy, tribes can create the community they envisioned for themselves, independent of outside forces.In Planning the American Indian Reservation, Zaferatos presents a holistic and practical approach to explaining the practice of Native American planning. The book unveils the complex conditions that tribes face by examining the historic, political, legal, and theoretical dimensions of the tribal planning situation in order to elucidate the context within which reservation planning occurs. Drawing on more than thirty years of professional practice, Zaferatos presents several case studies demonstrating how effective tribal planning can alter the nature of the political landscape and help to rebalance the uneven relationships that have been formed between tribal governments and their nontribal political counterparts. Tribal planning’s overarching objective is to assist tribes as they transition from passive objects of historical circumstances to principle actors in shaping their future reservation communities.

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Radical in its dayand long overdue in Englishthis rare French classic traces the journey of fictional British Lord Clarisdall to the exotic island nation of Icaria. To his delight, Clarisdell discovers an ideal utopian democracy prospering amid peace and harmony. Devoid of competition or property, Icaria triumphs over the social evils of nineteeth-century capitalism. Clarisdell's amazement is constant. Foreign affairs are conducted by the community. Money and domestic commerce do not exist. Everyone gives to and draws from the common pot in equal measure. No pastoral idyll, the narrative describes a modern machine-age economy with social policiesfree education, equality for the sexes, strict family/moral tiesthat reflect enlightenment. Crime here is a myth; arts and culture are treasured commodities. Cabet described a totally integrated ""community of goods"" in the fifty years following the great revolution of 1782. Published at personal risk, his bold allegory gave birth to a real Icarian community that lasted into the late 1800s.

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This volume seeks to honour the memory and legacy of Martin Buber, one of the most illustrious members of the faculty of the Hebrew University and of the world of philosophy. The book is based on the proceedings of a conference held at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, of which Buber was a founding president, in recognition of the man's contribution to the renaissance of Jewish studies.

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Allah's Spacious Earth is a stunningly fresh and timely political dystopia that depicts the tragic yet very real consequences of tensions between majority populations and Muslim minorities in the Western world. The novel is set in an imagined future where anti-Muslim sentiment and political pressure lead to a community being cut off from the rest of society. Told from the perspective of Nasim, a young Muslim living in the Zone—an urban area within one of the states forming the Pan-European Federation—the story follows his journey as he struggles with the restrictions imposed upon him along with the expectations of his community. In the tradition of Michel Houellbecq's Submission and Boualem Sansal's 2084, Allah’s Spacious Earth is a powerful novel of ideas that brilliantly captures a growing fear in Western societies and its devastating fallout.

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Contrary to popular notions, today’s LGBT movement did not begin with the Stonewall riots in 1969. Long before Stonewall, there was Franklin Kameny (1925-2011), one of the most significant figures in the gay rights movement. Beginning in 1958, he encouraged gay people to embrace homosexuality as moral and healthy, publicly denounced the federal government for excluding homosexuals from federal employment, openly fought the military’s ban against gay men and women, debated psychiatrists who depicted homosexuality as a mental disorder, identified test cases to advance civil liberties through the federal courts, acted as counsel to countless homosexuals suffering state-sanctioned discrimination, and organized marches for gay rights at the White House and other public institutions. In Gay Is Good, Long collects Kameny’s historically rich letters, revealing some of the early stirrings of today’s politically powerful LGBT movement.These letters are lively and colorful because they are in Kameny’s inimitable voice—a voice that was consistently loud, echoing through such places as the Oval Office, the Pentagon, and the British Parliament, and often shrill, piercing to the federal agency heads, military generals, and media personalities who received his countless letters. This volume collects approximately 150 letters from 1958 to 1975, a critical period in Kameny’s life during which he evolved from a victim of the law to a vocal opponent of the law, to the voice of the law itself. Long situates these letters in context, giving historical and biographical data about the subjects and events involved. Gay Is Good pays tribute to an advocate whose tireless efforts created a massive shift in social attitudes and practices, leading the way toward equality for the LGBT community.

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1943: Polish underground fighter John Wiernicki is captured and beaten by the Gestapo, then shipped to Auschwitz. In this chilling memoir, Wiernicki, a Gentile, details "life" in the infamous death camp, and his battle to survive, physically and morally, in the face of utter evil. The author begins by remembering his aristocratic youth, an idyllic time shattered by German invasion. The ensuing dark days of occupation would fire the adolescent Wiernicki with a burning desire to serve Poland, a cause that led him to valiant action and eventual arrest.As a young non-Jew, Wiernicki was acutely sensitive to the depravity and injustice that engulfed him at Auschwitz. He bears witness to the harrowing selection and extermination of Jews doomed by birth to the gas chambers, to savage camp policies, brutal SS doctors, and rampant corruption with the system. He notes the difference in treatment between Jews and non-Jews. And he relives fearful unexpected encounters with two notorious "Angels of Death": Josef Mengele and Heinz Thilo. War in the Shadow of Auschwitz is an important historical and personal document. Its vivid portrait of prewar and wartime Poland, and of German concentration camps, provides a significant addition to the growing body of testimony by gentile survivors and a heartfelt contribution to fostering comprehension and understanding.

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Walid Masoud disappears. A Palestinian intellectual, he has been living in Baghdad since the first Israeli War of 1948. Suspicion arises that he has gone underground as part of a political movement. He leaves behind a lengthy but disconnected tape recording of garbled utterances through which the author artfully crafts the basis for his novel.

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In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna O’Brien, Philip Roth describes her writing as ""a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction."" The phrase ""fine meshwork"" not only captures the essence of O’Brien’s writing, but also suggests the multiple connective threads that bind her work to others’, including, most illuminatingly, Roth’s. Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and O’Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In Fine Meshwork, Dan O’Brien investigates these shared concerns of the two authors, now regarded as literary icons of their respective countries. He traces their forty-year literary friendship and the striking parallels in their books and reception, bringing together what, at first glance, seem to be quite disparate milieus: the largely feminist and Irish scholarship on O’Brien and the American Jewish perspective on Roth. In doing so, and in considering them in a transnational context, he argues that the intertwined nature of their writing symbolizes the far-ranging symbiosis between Irish literature and it’s American—particularly Jewish-American—counterpart.

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Since W. B. Yeats wrote in 1890 that "the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula," the anti-scientific bent of Irish literature has often been taken as a given. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism brings together leading and emerging scholars of Irish modernism to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change. The collection spotlights authors ranging from James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett to less-studied writers like Emily Lawless, John Eglinton, Denis Johnston, and Lennox Robinson. With chapters on naturalism, futurism, dynamite, gramophones, uncertainty, astronomy, automobiles, and more, this book showcases the far-reaching scope and complexity of Irish writers’ engagement with innovations in science and technology.Taken together, the fifteen original essays in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism map a new literary landscape of Ireland in the twentieth century. By focusing on writers' often-ignored interest in science and technology, this book uncovers shared concerns between revivalists, modernists, and late modernists that challenge us to rethink how we categorize and periodize Irish literature.

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Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue vividly captures the experiences of prominent Indian intellectual and scholar Shibli¯ Nu‘ma¯ni¯ (1857–1914) as he journeyed across the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in 1892. A professor of Arabic and Persian at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College at Aligarh, Nu‘ma¯ni¯ took a six-month leave from teaching to travel to the Ottoman Empire in search of rare printed works and manuscripts to use as sources for a series of biographies on major figures in Islamic history. Along the way, he collected information on schools, curricula, publishers, and newspapers, presenting a unique portrait of imperial culture at a transformative moment in the history of the Middle East. Nu‘ma¯ni¯ records sketches and anecdotes that offer rare glimpses of intellectual networks, religious festivals, visual and literary culture, and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. First published in 1894, the travelogue has since become a classic of Urdu travel writing and has been immensely influential in the intellectual and politicalhistory of South Asia. This translation, the first into English, includes contemporary reviews of the travelogue, letters written by the author during his travels, and serialized newspaper reports about the journey, and is deeply enriched for readers and students by the translator's copious multilingual glosses and annotations. Nu‘ma¯ni¯ 's chronicle offers unique insight into broader processes of historical change in this part of the world while also providing a rare glimpse of intellectual engagement and exchange across the porous borders of empire.

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A true ""intersection"" of Arab women's texts that challenges and rewrites the traditional boundaries of nation, gender, and community. This rigorously documented collection brings together for the first time original essays by leading authorities in the field on nine contemporary Arab women novelists from Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. The work focuses on texts available in English translation and explores with great theoretical sophistication the relationship of these authors' texts to contemporary phenomena of feminism, nationalism, post-colonialism, war, transnationalism, and societal change.

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Both a summative description of the field and an exploration of new directions, this multidisciplinary reader addresses issues central to the fields of Arab American, US Muslim, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA)-American studies. Taking a broad conception of the Americas, this collection simultaneously registers and critically reflects upon major themes in the field, including diaspora, migration, empire, race and racialization, securitization, and global South solidarity. The collection will be essential reading for scholars in Arab/SWANA American studies, Asian American studies, and race, ethnicity, and indigenous studies, now and well into the future.Contributors include:Evelyn Alsultany, Carol W. N. Fadda, Akram Khater, Nadine Naber, Therí Pickens, Steven Salaita, Ella Shohat and Sarah Gualtieri.

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Sumud, meaning steadfastness in Arabic, is central to the issues of survival and resistance that are part of daily life for Palestinians. Although much has been written about the politics, leaders, and history of Palestine, less is known about how everyday working-class Palestinians exist day to day, negotiating military occupation and shifting social infrastructure. Wick’s powerful ethnography opens a window onto the lives of Palestinians, exploring specifically the experience of giving birth. Drawing upon oral histories, Wick follows the stories of mothers, nurses, and midwives in villages and refugee camps. She maps the ways in which individuals narrate and experience birth, calling attention to the genre and form of these stories.Placing these oral histories in context, the book looks at the history of the infrastructure surrounding birth and medicine in Palestine, from large hospitals to village clinics, to private homes. As the medical landscape changed from centralized urban hospitals to decentralized independent caregivers, women increasingly carved a space for themselves in public discourse and employed the concept of sumud to relate their everyday struggles.

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Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women’s work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their "war stories." Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.

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In New York in 1907, a group of avant-garde Yiddish poets came together to transform Yiddish literature. Seeking a pure artistic expression, they would rid Yiddish poetry of foreign influences and overbearing political and religious rhetoric. Although influenced by their Eastern European heritage, these poets were uniquely American in their focus on exploring the individual. Calling themselves Di Yunge (The young ones), this group was led in part by Reuben Iceland. From Our Springtime is Iceland’s memoir as well as a reflection on the lives of the Di Yunge poets. With its vivid characters, beautifully crafted descriptions, and snippets of poetry, this book is a work of art in its own right and an essential resource for anyone interested in Yiddish American poetry.Translated into English for the first time, From Our Springtime brings this period in New York literary history to life and tells the story of how these poets transformed Yiddish poetry from an expression of working-class struggles to a form of Yiddish high art.

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Over the last three decades, Hezbollah has developed from a small radical organization into a major player in the Lebanese, regional, and even international political arenas. Its influence in military issues is well known, but its role in shaping cultural and political activities has not received enough attention. Kanaaneh sheds new light on the organization's successful evolution as a counterhegemonic force in the region's resistance movement, known as "Maqawama". Founded on the idea that Islam is a resisting religion, whose real heroes are the poor populations who have finally decided to take action, Hezbollah has shifted its focus to advocate for social justice issues and to attract ordinary activists to its cause. From the mid-1990s on, Hezbollah has built alliances that allow it to pursue soft power in Lebanon, fighting against both the dominant Shi‘ite elites and the Maronite-Sunni, as well as Israeli and US influence in the region. Kanaaneh argues that this perpetual resistance - military as well as cultural and political - is fundamental to Hezbollah's continued success.

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Jad traces the transformation of the Palestinian women's movement from the 1930s to the post-Oslo period and through the Second Intifada to examine the often-fraught relationship between women and nationalism in Palestine. Offering one of the first intensive studies of Islamist women's activism, Jad also explores the impact of emerging feminist NGOs in depoliticizing the secular Palestinian women's movement. Studying these two developments together illuminates the nature of women's engagement in the Palestinian space, challenging myths of gender roles' ""immutability"" under Islamand the supposed ""modernizing"" benefits of Western-style activism.

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Since 2011, the Arab world has seen a number of autocrats, including leaders from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, fall from power. Yet, in the wake of these political upheavals, only one state, Tunisia, transitioned successfully from authoritarianism to democracy. Opposition parties forged a durable and long-term alliance there, which supported democratization. Similar pacts failed in Morocco and Mauritania, however. In Why Alliances Fail, Buehler explores the circumstances under which stable, enduring alliances are built to contest authoritarian regimes, marshaling evidence from coalitions between North Africa's Islamists and leftists. Buehler draws on nearly two years of Arabic fieldwork interviews, original statistics, and archival research, including interviews with the first Islamist prime minister in Moroccan history, Abdelilah Benkirane. Introducing a theory of alliance durability, Buehler explains how the nature of an opposition party's social base shapes the robustness of alliances it builds with other parties. He also examines the social origins of authoritarian regimes, concluding that those regimes that successfully harnessed the social forces of rural isolation and clientelism were most effective at resisting the pressure for democracy that opposition parties exerted. With fresh insight and compelling arguments, Why Alliances Fail carries vital implications for understanding the mechanisms driving authoritarian persistence in the Arab world and beyond.

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The Adirondacks have been an Indigenous homeland for millennia, and the presence of Native people in the region was obvious but not well documented by Europeans, who did not venture into the interior between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, by the late nineteenth century, historians had scarcely any record of their long-lasting and vibrant existence in the area. With Rural Indigenousness, Otis shines a light on the rich history of Algonquian and Iroquoian people, offering the first comprehensive study of the relationship between Native Americans and the Adirondacks. While Otis focuses on the nineteenth century, she extends her analysis to periods before and after this era, revealing both the continuity and change that characterize the relationship over time. Otis argues that the landscape was much more than a mere hunting ground for Native residents; rather, it a ""location of exchange,"" a space of interaction where the land was woven into the fabric of their lives as an essential source of refuge and survival. Drawing upon archival research, material culture, and oral histories, Otis examines the nature of Indigenous populations living in predominantly Euroamerican communities to identify the ways in which some maintained their distinct identity while also making selective adaptations exemplifying the concept of ""survivance."" In doing so, Rural Indigenousness develops a new conversation in the field of Native American studies that expands our understanding of urban and rural indigeneity.

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In New York in 1907, a group of avant-garde Yiddish poets came together to transform Yiddish literature. Seeking a pure artistic expression, they would rid Yiddish poetry of foreign influences and overbearing political and religious rhetoric. While influenced by their Eastern European heritage, these poets were nonetheless uniquely American in their focus on the exploration of the individual. Calling themselves di Yunge (the Young Ones), this group was led in part by Reuben Iceland. From Our Springtimeis Iceland’s memoir as well as a reflection on the lives of the di Yunge poets. With its vivid characters, beautifully crafted descriptions, snippets of poetry, and clear analysis of the poems, this book is a work of art in its own right, and an essential resource for anyone interested in Yiddish American poetry. Translated into English for the first time, From Our Springtime brings this period in New York literary history to life and tells the story of how these poets transformed Yiddish poetry from an expression of working class struggles to a form of Yiddish high art.

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In ""Seven Generations of Iroquois Leadership"", Laurence M. Hauptman traces the past 200 years of the Six Nations' history through the lens of the remarkable leaders who shaped it. Focusing on the distinct qualities of Iroquois leadership, Hauptman reveals how the Six Nations have survived in the face of overwhelming pressure. Employing a biographical approach and extensive research, the author explores how leaders use the past to enable cultural, economic, and political survival.Celebrated figures such as Governor Blacksnake, Cornelius Cusick, and Deskaheh are juxtaposed with less well-known but nonetheless influential champions of Haudenosaunee culture and sovereignty such as Dinah John. Hauptman's survey includes many female leaders including 35 contemporary women, highlighting the important role women have played in Iroquois survival throughout history to the present day.Including leaders from all six Iroquois nations and all regions of modern-day Iroquoia, the book offers both historical and contemporary portraits. Hauptman's lucid prose and unrivaled authority make this an accessible and indispensable volume.

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This groundbreaking volume takes an insightful look at how entire households, families, and individuals "cope," negotiate their lives, and plan to achieve goals in Occupied Palestine. Contributors raise critical questions about such issues as tradition vs. modernity and the socio-cultural consequences of emigration. Living Palestine posits that household dynamics (i.e., kin-based marriage, fertility decisions, children's education, and living arrangements) cannot be fully grasped unless linked to the traumas of the past and worries of the present. Likewise, that family strategies for survival and social mobility under occupation are swept up in the tide of history that engulfs the world in which Palestinians live and struggle as individuals, households, and as a society. Living Palestine is drawn from an expansive 1999 research project of the Institute for Women's Studies at Birzeit University in which two thousand households in nineteen communities were surveyed with an aim to examining the Palestinian household from multiple angles.

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An English translation of one of the most fascinating works in medieval Hebrew letters. A rarity, this refurbished Hebrew translation of an Arthurian romance is the only known text of its kind in existence. Based on the writings of an anonymous Italian Jew in 1279, the author presents two stories. The first relates Merlin's role in the seductions of Igerna by Pendragon and the consequent birth of Arthur. The second tells of Arthur's rise to royal glory, of Lancelot's affair with Guinevere, his meeting with the maid of Askalot and his skill at a jousting tournament. This romance exists in a unique copy at the Vatican Library, which Curt Leviant personally examined. He offers a readable version of that text in corrected Hebrew with English transliteration on facing pages and an analysis of Jewish aspects of the piece. He also traces its origins to an old French tale.

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During the Middle Ages, travelers in Africa and Asia reported that monstrous races thrived beyond the boundaries of the known world. This work offers an introspective look at these races and their interaction with Western art, literature and philosophy.

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In the last twenty-five years, there has been a revolution in literary study in the English-speaking world involving two related shifts in understanding. One is the recognition that the study of literature requires a theoretical grounding, and the other is an acknowledgement that such a grounding is contingent upon the realization that ours is a postmodernist world. Despite much resistance from traditional literary historians and formalist critics, both of these assumptions influence many of today's most forceful and insightful academic literary analyses.Yet, Yeats scholarship has remained largely embedded in traditional modes of critical theory. For the first time, this collection of original essays applies a wide spectrum of contemporary critical theories to major works in the Yeats canon, serving as models of how to read and work with Yeats from a postmodernist/poststructuralist perspective.R. B. Kershner, for example, uses Bakhtin and medical/psychological studies of dyslexia to consider the written versus the oral and the inner dialogization of Yeats's writing; Cheryl Herr provides a juxtaposition of the major concepts of Foucault's work, especially the notion of the episteme from The Order of Things as applied to Yeats's Vision; and Ronald Schleifer considers the designing gestures of postmodern rhetoric found in Yeats, using the work of Lyotard, Jameson, O'Hara, and Derrida.These and other provocation essays, which challenge us to rethink out most basic notions of how to read Yeats, offer ample evidence of the remarkable new perceptions that can be gained from applying poststructuralist criticism to Yeats.

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The works of Gjekë Marinaj, Albania’s leading poet, have been praised, translated, published, and discussed in over twenty languages and countries. His most celebrated poem, "Horses," drew the attention of the dictatorship’s censors when it was published and forced Marinaj to escape his country pursued by armed men. Later, the poem became the anthem for the democratic forces that freed the country. He has won several of the world’s most prestigious prizes for his poetry and criticism, but his remarkable body of passionate, profound, and wildly original poetry is only now translated and published in English for the first time.Frederick Turner, a prizewinning Anglo-American poet, critic, and translator, has translated this generous collection of Marinaj’s major poems into English with the close collaboration of the poet himself. Gathered into nine sections—Home, Albania, Amor, Admonitions, Acheron, Heroines, Metaphysics, Poets, and The Earth—the volume concludes with an extraordinary long poem, "The Lost Layers of Vyasa’s Skin." With his fascinating introductory essay, Turner contextualizes Marinaj’s work, describing the ways in which Albanian history, culture, and politics have energized Marinaj’s poetry and its poetics.

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A riveting novel exploring the human psyche amidst the turbulent aftermath of the Arab Spring in Tunisia. Through the experiences of three friends, Mosbahi narrates the profound impact of violence and cultural change in Tunisian society and the ways in which those shifts are reflected in their personal lives.

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This extraordinary novel is part of Grigory Kanovich’s "Litvak saga," his tribute to Jewish life before the Holocaust. Set in a small Lithuanian town in the late nineteenth century, the story begins with the arrival of a stranger who sets everyone on edge and seems to know their secrets. Is he a messenger from God, a long-lost son, a saint, or a madman? As the stranger in the velvet yarmulke makes his rounds, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters—Rabbi Uri, the aged rabbi; Itsik Magid, the strapping young woodcutter; the resourceful widow Golda; Markus Fradkin, the wealthy timber merchant, and his beautiful daughter Zelda; Yeshua Mandel, the tavern keeper, his troubled son Simeon, and their devoted servant girl Morta. A work of realism as well as a parable, Kanovich’s novel illuminates the most intimate fears, dreams, and longings of the shtetl’s inhabitants.

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The historic lakeside village of Cazenovia in the scenic Finger Lakes region is one of the jewels of Central New York, and yet very few books have told its story. Cazenovia is a town founded by wealthy men, and much of what has been written about it has focused on the elite and the grand lakeshore mansions in which they lived. In contrast, Barnes and Emerson's new book chronicles the story of everyday Cazenovia: the fascinating people, places, and history of this 225-year-old community.The Bear Tree and Other Stories from Cazenovia's History explores the unheralded, inaccurately told, and long-forgotten tales of the town. Readers will encounter historical characters such as elephant and lion tamer Lucia Zora Card, "The Bravest Woman in the World"; educator Susan Blow, "The Mother of American Kindergarten"; and World War I soldier Cecil Donovan, whose letters home vividly depicted the experience of war for those awaiting his return in Cazenovia.

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The world view of the Iroquois League or Confederacy—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations—is based on a strong cosmological belief system. This is especially evident in Iroquois medical practices, which connect man to nature and the powerful forces in the supernatural realm. Iroquois Medical Botany is the first guide to understanding the use of herbal medi­cines in traditional Iroquois culture. It links Iroquois cosmology to cultural themes by showing the inherent spiritual power of plants and how the Iroquois traditionally have used and continue to use plants as remedies. After an introduction to the Iroquois doctrine of the cosmos, authors James Herrick and Dean Snow examine how ill health directly relates to the balance and subsequent dis­turbance of the forces in one’s life. They next turn to general perceptions of illness and the causes of imbalances, which can result in physical manifestations from birthmarks and toothaches to sunstroke and cancer. In all, they list close to 300 phenomena. Finally, the book enumerates specific plant regimens for various ailments with a major compilation from numerous Iroquois authorities and sources of more than 450 native names, uses, and preparations of plants.

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Reflected in these writings from twenty-one Irish Americans are the themes common to all immigrant literature, but from the authors’ own ethnic point of view. The struggle for success forms the underlying structure in the stories by O’Hara, Curran, and McCarthy; and the changing values the New World imposes on the individual are seen in Edwin O’Connor’s Grand Day for Mr. Garvey.Irish wit and black humor pepper all the stories, as represented by Dunn’s bartender-philosopher, Dooley, and Donleavy’s Fairy Tale of New York. Catholicism is omnipresent and is often characterized by the priest, as in Fitzgerald’s Benediction, Power’s Bill, and Flaherty’s Fogarty. Themes that have an immense effect on the characters’ relationships are their difficulties in communicating with one another, which Gill captures succinctly in The Cemetery, and the repositioning of gender roles, so evident in Cullinan’s Life After Death and in Costello’s Murphy’s Xmas.Finally, there are the intense, often contradictory, feelings the characters have toward their "homeland:" Hamill’s Gift illustrates the desire to rid Ireland of British rule; Gordon’s "neighborhood" shows the immigrants’ embarrassment over their origins.Editors Casey and Rhodes have organized these pieces chronologically, beginning at the turn of the century. Thus, the selections illustrate the progression of Irish-American literature and also fulfill the word of William Kennedy, who said of his own writing: "those who came before helped to show me how to turn experience into literature."

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If the surface of Turkish politics has changed dramatically over the decades, the vocabulary for sorting these changes remains constant: Europe, Islam, minorities, the military, the founding father (Atatürk). This familiar vocabulary functions as more than a set of descriptors of institutions, phenomena, or issues to debate in public. These five primary "figures" emerge from national identity, public discourse, and scholarship about Turkey to represent Turkish history and political authority while also shaping history and political authority. These figures unify disparate phenomena into governable categories and index historical relations of power that define Turkish politics. As these concepts circulate, they operate as a shorthand for complex networks and histories of authority, producing and limiting ways of knowing Turkish modernity, democracy, and political culture. These figures not only are spoken and discussed in public, but they also produce the context into which they are projected, in a sense speaking on their own. In Figures That Speak, deTar explores the diverse mobilization and production of history and power in the primary figures that circulate in discourse about Turkey.

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At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as "the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time . . . in so far as she let herself be known to the public at all." An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of Southeast Asia and onto the deserts of the Middle East, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain.After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring. Unaccompanied Traveler, with its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, retrieves these remarkable accounts from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.

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The Best of Hard Times explores the gendered identities of two generations of men in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. Gustavo Barbosa compares the fida'iyyin, the men who served as freedom fighters to reconquer Palestine in the 1970s, to the shabab, their sons who lead seemingly mundane lives with limited access to power. While the fida'iyyinn displayed their masculinity through active resistance and fighting to return to their homeland, the shabab have a more nuanced relationship to Palestine and articulate their gender belonging in alternative ways.Through vivid ethnographic stories, Barbosa critically engages with certain trends in feminism, calling attention to their limits and considering nimble views on gender. Instead of presenting the shabab as emasculated or experiencing a crisis of masculinity, the book shows the pliability of masculinity in time and space and argues that ""gender"" has limited purchase to capture the experiences of today's youth from Shatila. Based on two years of fieldwork, The Best of Hard Times answers the burgeoning demand for anthropological literature on Arab masculinities and portrays refugees as inventive actors rather than agentless victims of circumstances beyond their control. The Best of Hard Times is a tour de force combining highbrow theory with gripping ethnography, challenging many of the stereotypes on gender, power, statehood, and the role of Islam in the Middle East.

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