Search results for ""Syracuse University Press""

Treating the everyday as central to the study of regional and international politics, this book reconstructs the last two decades of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. It provides a unique and vivid look into the political dynamics that characterized the everyday lives of Libyans, offering a compelling counterargument to those who insist on framing the history of the country as a stateless, authoritarian, and rogue state. Based on the collection of oral histories, what sets the tempo of this journey is an extensive collection of personal anecdotes, moods and emotions, popular jokes and rumors. In weaving the threads that link these quotidian lives to Libya’s interaction with wider international and geopolitical dynamics, the book offers a unique and timely analysis of the 2011 events that witnessed the fall of the regime reaching the current state of violence, war, and hope.

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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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With an estimated population of 35 million, Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without an independent state of their own. The majority of Kurds live in Turkey, where they constitute 18 percent of the population. Since the foundation of the Turkish republic in 1923, the history of the Kurds in Turkey is marked by state violence against them and decades of conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdish fighters. Although the continuous struggle of the Kurdish people is well-known and the political actors involved in the conflict have received much scholarly attention, little has been written from the vantage point of the Kurds themselves.Alemdaroglu and Göçek’s volume develops a fresh approach by moving away from top-down, Turkish nationalist macro analyses to a micro-analysis of how Kurds and Kurdistan as historical and ethnic categories were constructed from the bottom up and how Kurds experience and resists marginalization, exclusion, and violence. Contributors looks beyond the politics of state actors to examine the role of civil society and the significant role women play in the negotiation of power. Kurds in Dark Times opens an essential window into the lives of Kurds in Turkey, generating meaningful insights not only into the political interactions with the Turkish state and society, but also the informal ways in which they negotiate within society that will be crucial in developing peace and reconciliation.

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The NBC series Hannibal has garnered both critical and fan acclaim for its cinematic qualities, its complex characters, and its innovative reworking of Thomas Harris's mythology so well-known from Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its variants. The series concluded late in 2015 after three seasons, despite widespread fan support for its continuation. While there is a healthy body of scholarship on Harris's novels and Demme's film adaptation, little critical attention has been paid to this newest iteration of the character and narrative.Hannibal builds on the serial killer narratives of popular procedurals, while taking them in a drastically different direction. Like critically acclaimed series such as Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, it makes its viewers complicit in the actions of a deeply problematic individual and, in the case of Hannibal, forces them to confront that complicity through the character of Will Graham. The essays in Becoming explore these questions of authorship and audience response as well as the show's themes of horror, gore, cannibalism, queerness, and transformation. Contributors also address Hannibal's distinctive visual, auditory, and narrative style. Concluding with a compelling interview with series writer Nick Antosca, this volume will both entertain and educate scholars and fans of Hannibal and its many iterations.

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The Western Sahara conflict has proven to be one of the most protracted and intractable struggles facing the international community. Pitting local nationalist determination against Moroccan territorial ambitions, the dispute is further complicated by regional tensions with Algeria and the geo-strategic concerns of major global players, including the United States, France, and the territory's former colonial ruler, Spain. For over twenty years, the UN Security Council has failed to find a formula that will delicately balance these interests against Western Sahara's long-denied right to a self-determination referendum as one of the last UN-recognized colonies. In the first book-length treatment of the issue in over two decades, Zunes and Mundy examine the origins, evolution, and resilience of the Western Sahara conflict, deploying a diverse array of sources and firsthand knowledge of the region gained from multiple research visits. Shifting geographical frames - local, regional, and international - provide for a robust analysis of the stakes involved.

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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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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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Traditional Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Chippewa) knowledge, like the knowledge systems of indigenous peoples around the world, has long been collected and presented by researchers who were not a part of the culture they observed. The result is a 'colonized' version of the knowledge, one that is distorted and trivialized by an ill-suited Eurocentric paradigm of scientific investigation and classification. In ""Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive"", Wendy Makoons Geniusz contrasts the way in which Anishinaabe botanical knowledge is presented in the academic record with how it is preserved in Anishinaabe culture. In doing so she seeks to open a dialogue between the two communities to discuss methods for decolonizing existing texts and to develop innovative approaches for conducting more culturally meaningful research in the future. As an Anishinaabe who grew up in a household practicing traditional medicine and who went on to earn a doctorate and become a professional scholar, Geniusz possesses the authority of someone with a foot firmly planted in each world. Her unique ability to navigate both indigenous and scientific perspectives makes this book an invaluable contribution to the field and enriches our understanding of all native communities.

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Founded in 1909 as a ""garden suburb"" of the Mediterranean port of Jaffa, Tel Aviv soon became a model of Jewish self-rule and was celebrated as a jewel in the crown of Hebrew revival. Over time the city has transformed into a lively metropolis, renowned for its architecture and culture, openness and vitality. A young city about to celebrate its 100th anniversery, the mythic Tel Aviv continues to represent a fundamental idea that transcends the physical texture of the city and the everyday experiences of its residents. Combining historical approach and cultural analysis, Maoz Azaryahu explores the different myths that have been part of the vernacular and perception of the city. He relates Tel Aviv's mythology to its physicality through buildings, streets, personal experiences, and municipal policies. With critical insight, he evaluates specific myths and their propagation in the spheres of both official and popular culture. Azaryahu explores three distinct stages in the history of the mythic Tel Aviv: ""The First Hebrew City"" assesses Tel Aviv as Zionist vision and seed of the actual city; ""Non-Stop City"" depicts trendy, global post-Zionist Tel Aviv; and ""The White City"" describes Tel Aviv's architectural landscape, created in the 1930s and imbued with nostalgia and local prestige. ""Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City"" will appeal to urban geographers, cultural historians, scholars of myth, and students of Israeli society and culture.

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Swedish Scholar Åke Hultkrantz is recognized as one of the foremost authorities on American Indian religions. This collection of fifteen of his essays on the religious attitudes and practices of a variety of North American Indian communities brings together some of his best work over the last twenty-five years.The essays are grouped into four areas: belief and myth, worship and ritual, ecology and religion, and persistence and change. Topics include the importance of myths and rituals; religious beliefs among the Plains Indians and Wind River Shoshoni; the cult of the dead; the Spirit Lodge, the Sun Dance Lodge, and the Ghost Dance; the spread of the peyote cult; feelings toward animals and natural phenomena; and the problem of Christian influence on Northern Algonkian eschatology.To students of American Indians Hultkrantz reveals the integrity of Indian religion as a subject in its own right, not divorced from culture, history, or ecology, but religion as an effective force in Indian life. To students of comparative religion he offers American Indian religious phenomena as a treasure trove of data to be mapped and related to the religions of the world.Christopher Vecsey’s introduction summarizes Hultkrantz’s major ideas and outlines the field work and research methods which distinguish his scholarship.Bibliography included.

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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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Leveling the Playing Field tells the story of the African American members of the 1969–70 Syracuse University football team who petitioned for racial equality on their team. The petition had four demands: access to the same academic tutoring made available to their white teammates; better medical care for all team members; starting assignments based on merit rather than race; and a discernible effort to racially integrate the coaching staff, which had been all white since 1898. The players’ charges of racial disparity were fiercely contested by many of the white players on the team, and the debate spilled into the newspapers and drew protests from around the country. Mistakenly called the "Syracuse 8" by media reports in the 1970s, the nine players who signed the petition did not receive a response allowing or even acknowledging their demands. They boycotted the spring 1970 practice, and Coach Ben Schwartzwalder, a deeply beloved figure on campus and a Hall of Fame football coach nearing retirement, banned seven of the players from the team. As tensions escalated, white players staged a day-long walkout in support of the coaching staff, and an enhanced police presence was required at home games. Extensive interviews with each player offer a firsthand account of their decision to stand their ground while knowing it would jeopardize their professional football career. They discuss with candor the ways in which the boycott profoundly changed the course of their lives. In Leveling the Playing Field, Marc chronicles this contentious moment in Syracuse University’s history and tells the story through the eyes of the players who demanded change for themselves and for those who would follow them.

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When the young narrator of Miriam Karpilove’s A Provincial Newspaper leaves New York to work for a new Yiddish newspaper in Massachusetts, she expects to be treated with respect as a professional writer. Instead, she finds herself underpaid and overworked. In this slapstick novella, Karpilove’s narrator lampoons the gaggle of blundering publishers and editors who put her through the ringer and spit her back out again.Along with A Provincial Newspaper, this captivating collection includes nineteen stories originally published in Forverts in the 1930s, during Karpilove’s time as a staff writer at that newspaper. In the stories, we find a large cast of characters—an older woman navigating widowhood, a writer rebuffed by dismissive audiences, American-born Jewish girls unable to communicate with Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and a painter so overcome with jealousy about his muse’s potential lover that he misses his opportunity with her—each portrayed with both sympathy and irony, in ways unexpected and delightful. Also included are Karpilove’s recollections of her arrival in Palestine in 1926, chronicled with the same buoyant cynicism and witty repartee that is beloved by readers of her fiction.

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The pure verbal energy characterizing Hungarian poetry may be regarded as one of the most striking components of Hungarian culture. More than 800 years ago, under the inspiration of classical and medieval Latin poetry, Hungarian poets began to craft a rich chain of poetic designs, much of it in response to the country’s cataclysmic history. With precision, depth, and great intensity, these verses give accounts of their authors’ vision of themselves as participants in history and their most personal experience in the world. Light within the Shade includes 135 of the most important Hungarian poems ranging from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Organized in chronological order, the poems are followed by an essay by Ozsváth providing the historical, biographical, and cultural background of the poets and the poetry. The book concludes with Turner’s essay on the special thematic and literary qualities of Hungarian poetry, as well as notes on translation practices. This essential volume exposes English-speaking readers to Hungarian poetry’s artistic achievement in history and culture, its evolutionary development as a tradition, and its significance within the context of world literature.

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With every touchdown, home run, and three-pointer, star athletes represent an American dream that only an elite group blessed with natural talent can achieve. However, Kimball concentrates on what happens once these modern warriors meet their untimely demise. As athletes die, legends rise in their place.The premature deaths of celebrated players not only capture and immortalize their physical superiority, but also jolt their fans with an unanticipated intensity. These athletes escape the inevitability of aging and decline of skill, with only the prime of their youth left to be remembered. But early mortality alone does not transform athletes into immortals. The living ultimately gain the power to construct the legacies of their fallen heroes. In Legends Never Die, Kimball explores the public myths and representations that surround a wide range of athletes, from Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio to Dale Earnhardt and Bonnie McCarroll. Kimball delves deeper than just the cultural significance of sports and its players; he examines how each athlete’s narrative is shaped by gender relations, religion, and politics in contemporary America. In looking at how Americans react to the tragic deaths of sports heroes, Kimball illuminates the important role sports play in US society and helps to explain why star athletes possess such cultural power.

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First published in 1959, The Autobiography of James Monroe collects the compelling fragments of Monroe’s unfinished autobiography, written after his retirement from the presidency. The memoirs trace his boyhood, education, and experiences during his long service as a public servant before becoming president.Monroe vividly recalls his military experience in the Revolution, his law studies at the College of William and Mary, and his service as aide to GovernorThomas Jefferson of Virginia. From the early days of his political career, Monroe writes with passion about his opposition to slavery and his support for the Westernfarmer. He discusses his controversial first mission to France as a young and inexperienced minister to a country in the throes of a revolution, as well as subsequent missions in which he served as the key negotiator with France for the purchase of the Louisiana Territory.Originally edited by Stuart Gerry Brown, this new edition includes an introduction by historian and documentary editor William Ferraro. Ferraro considers the lasting influence of Brown’s edition on Monroe scholarship and surveys themost recent research, detailing the ways this founding father’s legacy continues to unfold.

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Born in 1883 in New York City, Gemma La Guardia Gluck was the daughter of an American army bandleader and European mother of aristocratic Italian Jewish lineage. She was the sister of beloved New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Gemma and her Hungarian Jewish husband were living in Budapest in 1944 when Nazi troops stormed the city. The Gestapo arrested her as a political prisoner because she was La Guardia's sister. Gluck recounts the plight of Budapest's Jews, deportation to Mutthausen with her husband, and enslavement at Ravensbruck, a notorious concentration camp for women. With painful sensitivity she chronicles unspeakable evil, kindness at great risk, and courage among women in a prefeminist world. She also recalls her girlhood years spent in the Old West, Native Americans befriended by her mother, international travel with her father, and her brother's ambitions and rise to success. Her story, first published in 1961, has been out of print for decades. This revised edition contains a new prologue, epilogue, photos, and annotated material inspired by recently discovered notes and letters.

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Built in 1864 as the nation's first horse racing facility, Saratoga (New York) racecourse is one of the sport's hallowed sites. This text details the development and social history of Saratoga the resort, historically a magnet for the wealthy and famous.

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Thirty years ago, John Keats and his family purchased a two-acre island in the St. Lawrence River, at a time when boats were still lovingly crafted of wood and an island could be had for $4,000. Depending on the elements and on their own resourcefulness, the Keats family thrives in the rhythms of island life-fishing, learning to navigate the river and read the clouds for weather, acquiring an "Indian" view of time, maintaining a house, several boats, and three children on a windswept rock. But more than a book about a single family's adventures, this one is strong witness that we all need islands of our own in the midst of life. Originally published in 1974, Of Time and an Island was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection.

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Shahrokh Meskoob was one of Iran's leading intellectuals and a preeminent scholar of Persian literary traditions, language, and cultural identity. In The Ant's Gift, Meskoob applies his insight and considerable analytical skills to the Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran completed in 1010 by the poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi. Tracing Iran's history from its first mythical king to the fall of the Sasanian dynasty, the Shahnameh includes myths, romance, history, and political theory. Meskoob sheds new light on this seminal work of Persian culture, identifying the story as at once a historical and poetic work. While previous criticism of the Shahnameh has focused on its linguistic importance and its role in Iranian nationalism, Meskoob draws attention to the work's pre-Islamic cultural origins.

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The year 1995, when the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, marks a historical milestone in the development of the Chinese feminist movement. In the decades that followed, three distinct trends emerged: first, there was a rise in feminist NGOs in mainland China and a surfacing of LGBTQ movements; second, social and economic developments nurtured new female agency, creating a vibrant, women-oriented cultural milieu in China; third, in response to ethnocentric Western feminism, some Chinese feminist scholars and activists recuperated the legacies of socialist China's state feminism and gender policies in a new millennium. These trends have brought Chinese women unprecedented choices, resources, opportunities, pitfalls, challenges, and even crises. In this timely volume, Zhu and Xiao offer an examination of the ways in which Chinese feminist ideas have developed since the mid-1990s. By juxtaposing the plural ""feminisms"" with ""Chinese characteristics,"" they both underline the importance of integrating Chinese culture, history, and tradition in the discussions of Chinese feminisms, and, stress the difference between the plethora of contemporary Chinese feminisms and the singular state feminism.The twelve chapters in this interdisciplinary collection address the theme of feminisms with Chinese characteristics from different perspectives rendered from lived experiences, historical reflections, theoretical ruminations, and cultural and sociopolitical critiques, painting a panoramic picture of Chinese feminisms in the age of globalization.

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With an off-putting title and a decidedly retrograde premise, the CW dramedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a surprising choice for critical analysis. But, loyal viewers quickly came to appreciate the show's sharp cultural critique through masterful parody, and this strategy has made it a critical darling and earned it several awards throughout its run. In ways not often seen on traditional network television, the show transcends conventional genre boundaries-the Hollywood musical, the romantic comedy, the music video-while resisting stereotypes associated with contemporary life.The essays in this collection underscore the show's ability to distinguish itself within the current television market. Focusing on themes of feminism, gender identity, and mental health, contributors explore the ways in which the show challenged viewer expectations, as well as the role television critics play in identifying a show's "authenticity" or quality.

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The NBC series Hannibal has garnered both critical and fan acclaim for its cinematic qualities, its complex characters, and its innovative reworking of Thomas Harris's mythology so well-known from Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its variants. The series concluded late in 2015 after three seasons, despite widespread fan support for its continuation. While there is a healthy body of scholarship on Harris's novels and Demme's film adaptation, little critical attention has been paid to this newest iteration of the character and narrative.Hannibal builds on the serial killer narratives of popular procedurals, while taking them in a drastically different direction. Like critically acclaimed series such as Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, it makes its viewers complicit in the actions of a deeply problematic individual and, in the case of Hannibal, forces them to confront that complicity through the character of Will Graham. The essays in Becoming explore these questions of authorship and audience response as well as the show's themes of horror, gore, cannibalism, queerness, and transformation. Contributors also address Hannibal's distinctive visual, auditory, and narrative style. Concluding with a compelling interview with series writer Nick Antosca, this volume will both entertain and educate scholars and fans of Hannibal and its many iterations.

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Faith holds up a photo of the boarded-up, vacant house: ""It’s the first thing I see. And I just call it ‘the Homeless House’ ‘cause it’s the house that nobody fixes up."" Faith is one of fourteen women living on Syracuse’s Southside, a predominantly African-American and low-income area, who took photographs of their environment and displayed their images to facilitate dialogues about how they viewed their community. A Place We Call Home chronicles this photography project and bears witness not only to the environmental injustice experienced by these women but also to the ways in which they maintain dignity and restore order in a community where they have traditionally had little control. To understand the present plight of these women, one must understand the historical and political context in which certain urban neighbourhoods were formed: Black migration, urban renewal, white flight, capital expansion, and then bust. Ducre demonstrates how such political and economic forces created a landscape of abandoned housing within the Southside community. She spotlights the impact of this blight upon the female residents who survive in this crucible of neglect. A Place We Call Home is the first case study of the intersection of Black feminism and environmental justice, and it is also the first book-length presentation using Photovoice methodology, an innovative research and empowerment strategy that assesses community needs by utilising photographic images taken by individuals. The individuals have historically lacked power and status in formal planning processes. Through a cogent combination of words and images, this book illuminates how these women manage their daily survival in degraded environments, the tools that they deploy to do so, and how they act as agents of change to transform their communities.

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Here, in a pictorial history, Jim Shaughnessy turns an eloquent photographer's eye to the Delaware & Hudson, the line that began in 1823 as a canal system to transport Pennsylvania coal to New York State. The D&H extended from Montreal to the coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania. It was active for 170 years, when the route was sold in 1993 to the Canadian Pacific Railway Corporation. The line made early railroad fame by importing from England the famous Stourbridge Lion, the first steam locomotive in America. This occurred during a great expansion into gravity, an interesting phase which took advantage of the mountainous terrain.The nineteenth century saw a period of economic growth and amalgamation, which was shaped by extremely able and ambitiou company presidents. Eventually the D&H advertised itself as "the Bridge Line to New England and Canada." Mountainous terrain around the coal mines challenged the line with heavy grades, so it was natural for one of its presidents, L. F. Loree, to be fascinated with experimental traction power. The many Loree locomotives, leaders in progressive design, are pictured and described herein.Because a good railroad history is always an economic history of a region, this book will surely pleasehistorian, too. Delaware & Hudson is a definitive work, encompassing the mining of the region and detailingthe steamboat operations on Lakes George and Champlain. Syracuse University Press is pleased to reissue thisexemplary study of a railroad. Delaware & Hudson has—and will—continue to raise the standards for allfuture railroad books.

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More than a decade after the birth of contemporary social movements in the Middle East and North Africa scholars are asking what these movements have achieved and how we should evaluate their lasting legacies. The quiet encroachments of MENA counterrevolutionary forces in the post-Arab Spring era have contributed to the revival of an outdated Orientalist discourse of Middle East exceptionalism, implying that the region’s culture is exceptionally immune to democratic movements, values, and institutions. This volume, inspired by critical post-colonial/decolonial studies, and interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, challenges and demystifies the myth of "MENA Exceptionalism". Composted of three sections, the book first places MENA in the larger global context and sheds light on the impact of geopolitics on the current crises, showing how a postcolonial critique better explains the crisis of democratic social movements and the resilience of authoritarianism. The second section focuses on the unfinished projects of contemporary MENA social movements and their quest for freedom, social justice, and human dignity. Contributors examine specific cases of post-Islamist movements, the Arab youth, student, and other popular non-violent movements. In the final section, the book problematizes the exceptionalist idea of gender passivity and women’s exclusion, which reduces the reality of gender injustice to some eternal and essentialized Muslim/MENA mindset. Contributors address this theory by placing gender as an independent category of thought and action, demonstrating the quest for gender justice movements in MENA, and providing contexts to the cases of gender injustice to challenge simplistic, ahistorical and culturalist assumptions.

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Treating the everyday as central to the study of regional and international politics, this book reconstructs the last two decades of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. It provides a unique and vivid look into the political dynamics that characterized the everyday lives of Libyans, offering a compelling counterargument to those who insist on framing the history of the country as a stateless, authoritarian, and rogue state. Based on the collection of oral histories, what sets the tempo of this journey is an extensive collection of personal anecdotes, moods and emotions, popular jokes and rumors. In weaving the threads that link these quotidian lives to Libya’s interaction with wider international and geopolitical dynamics, the book offers a unique and timely analysis of the 2011 events that witnessed the fall of the regime reaching the current state of violence, war, and hope.

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In Stateless, Chahinian offers a rich exploration of Western Armenian literary history in the wake of the 1915 genocide that led to the dispersion of Armenians across Europe, North America, and beyond. Chahinian highlights two specific time periods—post-WWI Paris and post-WWII Beirut—to trace the ways in which literature developed in each diaspora community. In Paris, a literary movement known as Menk addressed the horrors Armenians experienced and focused on creating a new literary aesthetic centered on belonging while in exile. In Beirut, Chahinian shows how the literature was nationalized in the absence of state institutions. Over time, Armenian intellectuals constructed a unified and coherent narrative of the diaspora that returned to the pre-1915 literary tradition and excluded the Menk generation. Chahinian argues that the adoption of "national" as the literature’s organizing logic ultimately limited its vitality and longevity as it ignored the diverse composition of diaspora communities.

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More than a decade after the birth of contemporary social movements in the Middle East and North Africa scholars are asking what these movements have achieved and how we should evaluate their lasting legacies. The quiet encroachments of MENA counterrevolutionary forces in the post-Arab Spring era have contributed to the revival of an outdated Orientalist discourse of Middle East exceptionalism, implying that the region’s culture is exceptionally immune to democratic movements, values, and institutions. This volume, inspired by critical post-colonial/decolonial studies, and interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, challenges and demystifies the myth of "MENA Exceptionalism". Composted of three sections, the book first places MENA in the larger global context and sheds light on the impact of geopolitics on the current crises, showing how a postcolonial critique better explains the crisis of democratic social movements and the resilience of authoritarianism. The second section focuses on the unfinished projects of contemporary MENA social movements and their quest for freedom, social justice, and human dignity. Contributors examine specific cases of post-Islamist movements, the Arab youth, student, and other popular non-violent movements. In the final section, the book problematizes the exceptionalist idea of gender passivity and women’s exclusion, which reduces the reality of gender injustice to some eternal and essentialized Muslim/MENA mindset. Contributors address this theory by placing gender as an independent category of thought and action, demonstrating the quest for gender justice movements in MENA, and providing contexts to the cases of gender injustice to challenge simplistic, ahistorical and culturalist assumptions.

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Some of the most iconic, hard-boiled Irish detectives in fiction insist that they are not detectives at all. Hailing from a region with a cultural history of mistrust in the criminal justice system, Irish crime writers resist many of the stereotypical devices of the genre. These writers have adroitly carved out their own individual narratives to weave firsthand perspectives of history, politics, violence, and changes in the economic and social climate together with characters who have richly detailed experiences.Recognizing this achievement among Irish crime writers, Babbar shines a light on how Irish noir has established a new approach to a longstanding genre. Beginning with Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, who rejects the detective title in favor of "finder"—a reference to Saint Anthony of Padua in the context of a traditionally secular form—Babbar examines the ways Irish authors, including John Connolly, Tana French, Alex Barclay, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, Claire McGowan, Gerard Brennan, Stuart Neville, Steve Cavanagh, and Eoin McNamee, subvert convention to reclaim their stories from a number of powerful influences: Revivalism, genre snobbery, cultural literary standards, and colonialism. These writers assert their heritage while also assuming a vital role in creating a broader vision of justice.

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With an estimated population of 35 million, Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without an independent state of their own. The majority of Kurds live in Turkey, where they constitute 18 percent of the population. Since the foundation of the Turkish republic in 1923, the history of the Kurds in Turkey is marked by state violence against them and decades of conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdish fighters. Although the continuous struggle of the Kurdish people is well-known and the political actors involved in the conflict have received much scholarly attention, little has been written from the vantage point of the Kurds themselves.Alemdaroglu and Göçek’s volume develops a fresh approach by moving away from top-down, Turkish nationalist macro analyses to a micro-analysis of how Kurds and Kurdistan as historical and ethnic categories were constructed from the bottom up and how Kurds experience and resists marginalization, exclusion, and violence. Contributors looks beyond the politics of state actors to examine the role of civil society and the significant role women play in the negotiation of power. Kurds in Dark Times opens an essential window into the lives of Kurds in Turkey, generating meaningful insights not only into the political interactions with the Turkish state and society, but also the informal ways in which they negotiate within society that will be crucial in developing peace and reconciliation.

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Working Out Desire examines spor meraki as an object of desire shared by a broad and diverse group of Istanbulite women. Sehlikoglu follows the lat­est anthropological scholarship that defines desire beyond the moment it is felt, experienced, or even yearned for, and as something that is formed through a series of social and historical makings. She traces Istanbulite women's ever-increasing interest in exercise not merely to an interest in sport, but also to an interest in establishing a new self - one that attempts to escape from conventional feminine duties - and an investment in forming a more agentive, desiring, self. Working Out Desire develops a multilayered analysis of how women use spor meraki to take themselves out of the domestic zone physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively.Sehlikoglu pushes back against the conventional boundaries of scholarly interest in Muslim women as pious subjects. Instead, it places women's desiring subjectivity at its center and traces women's agentive aspirations in the way they bend the norms which are embedded in the multiple patriarchal ideologies (i.e. nationalism, religion, aesthetics) which operate on their selves. Working out Desire presents the ways in which women's changing habits, leisure, and self-formation in the Muslim world and the Middle East are connected to their agentive capacities to shift and transform their conditions and socio-cultural capabilities.

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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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Just as the new technology of photography was emerging throughout the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, it quickly caught hold in the scenic Adirondack region of upstate New York. Young men and a few women began to experiment with cameras as a way to earn their livings with local portrait work. From photographing individuals, some expanded their subject matter to include families and groups, homes, streetscapes, landmarks, workplaces, and important events: from town celebrations to presidential visits, train wrecks, floods, and fires. These photographers from within and just beyond the Park borders, as well as many who immigrated from other countries, have been central in defining the Adirondacks.Adirondack Photographers, 1850–1950 is a comprehensive look at the first one hundred years of photography through the lives of those who captured this unique rural region of New York State. Svenson’s fascinating biographical dictionary of over two hundred photographers is enriched with over seventy illustrations. While the popularity of some of these photographers’ images is reflected in public collections such as the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Getty Center, little is known about the diverse backgrounds of the men and women behind their work. A compilation of captivating stories, Adirondack Photographers provides a vivid, intimate account of the evolution of photography, as well as an unusual perspective on Adirondack history.

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The carefully crafted, subtle, and humorous stories in Packaged Lives show Zangana at her best as a fiction writer. She portrays her subjects keenly, sensitively, and lovingly but without compromise. Iraqis living in exile come to life in her narratives as men and women who are caught between two worlds. They cannot return to their homeland and are forced to wait for news of Iraq from afar. At the same time, they are unable to fully adjust to life in Britain and make a new home for themselves. The question "What is home?" is at the heart of each story in this collection. Her protagonists, who are stuck in ready-made lives, or "packaged lives," struggle to set themselves free from a web of relationships in which they are entangled. Art, poetry, and nature provide lines of escape. The relief may be fleeting, but the peace of mind and serenity are reached through the moment of epiphany at the end of each story, a much-needed balm.

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With an infectious blend of humor, satire, and biting social commentary, Yassin Adnan gives readers a portrait of contemporary Morocco - and the city of Marrakech - told through the eyes of the hapless Rahhal Laâouina, a.k.a. the Squirrel. Painfully shy, not that bright, and not all that popular, Rahhal somehow imagines himself a hero. With a useless degree in ancient Arabic poetry, he finds his calling in the online world, where he discovers email, YouTube, Facebook, and the news site Hot Maroc. Enamored of the internet and the thrill of anonymity it allows, Rahhal opens the Atlas Cubs Cyber Café, where patrons mingle virtually with politicians, journalists, hackers, and trolls. However, Rahhal soon finds himself mired in the dark side of the online world - one of corruption, scandal, and deception.Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017, Hot Maroc is a vital portrait of the challenges Moroccans, young and old, face today. Where press freedoms are tightly controlled by government authorities, where the police spy on, intimidate, and detain citizens with impunity, and where adherence to traditional cultural icons both anchors and stifles creative production, the online world provides an alternative for the young and voiceless. In this revolutionary novel that recalls Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Dave Eggers's The Circle, Adnan fixes his lens on young Rahhal and his contemporaries as they navigate the perilous and changing landscape of the real and virtual worlds they inhabit.

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November 1891, the heart of Gilded Age Manhattan. Thousands filled the streets surrounding Madison Square, fingers pointing, mouths agape. After countless struggles, Stanford White—the country's most celebrated architect was about to dedicate America's tallest tower, the final cap set atop his Madison Square Garden, the country's grandest new palace of pleasure. Amid a flood of electric light and fireworks, the gilded figure topping the tower was suddenly revealed—an eighteen-foot nude sculpture of Diana, the Roman Virgin Goddess of the Hunt, created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the country's finest sculptor and White's dearest pal.The Grandest Madison Square Garden tells the remarkable story behind the construction of the second, 1890, Madison Square Garden and the controversial sculpture that crowned it. Set amid the magnificent achievements of nineteenth-century American art and architecture, the book delves into the fascinating private lives of the era's most prominent architect and sculptor and the nature of their intimate relationship. Hinman shows how both men pushed the boundaries of America's parochial aesthetic, ushering in an era of art that embraced European styles with American vitality. Situating the Garden's seminal place in the history of New York City, as well as the entire country, The Grandest Madison Square Garden brings to life a tale of architecture, art, and spectacle amid the elegant yet scandal-ridden culture of Gotham's decadent era.

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On April 23, 1929, the second annual Transcontinental Foot Race across America, known as the Bunion Derby, was in its twenty-fifth day. Eddie "the Sheik" Gardner, an African American runner from Seattle, was leading the race across the Free Bridge over the Mississippi River. Along with the signature outfit that earned him his nickname—a white towel tied around his head, white shorts, and a white shirt—Gardner wore an American flag, a reminder to all who saw him run through the Jim Crow South that he was an American and the leader of the greatest footrace in the world.Kastner traces Gardner’s remarkable journey from his birth in 1897 in Birmingham, Alabama, to his success in Seattle, Washington, as one of the top long-distance runners in the region, and finally to his participation in two transcontinental footraces where he risked his life, facing a barrage of harassment for having the audacity to compete with white runners. Kastner shows how Gardner’s participation became a way to protest the endemic racism he faced, heralding the future of nonviolent efforts that would be instrumental to the civil rights movement. Shining a bright light on his extraordinary athletic accomplishments and his heroism on the dusty roads of America in the 1920s, Kastner gives Gardner and other black bunioneers the attention they so richly deserve.

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All Faces but Mine gathers selected poems from the acclaimed Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim (1934–2014). A contemporary of Mahmoud Darwish, Al-Qasim was a celebrated resistance poet whose passionate call for independence inspired a generation of poets.In this award-winning volume, poems are drawn from fourteen of the poet’s collections published over the last twenty years in addition to some of his final works. Lu’lu’a’s fluid translation captures both Al-Qasim’s innovative style and the emotional tenor of his poetry.

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While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish novels of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence in works of fiction. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they are reflecting and responding to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity.Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.

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Social commentators, psychologists, and journalists all point to the idea that in the new millennium, traditional masculinity is in crisis. In contemporary film and literature, this predicament is often portrayed as a problem of desire—particularly, heterosexual desire. Male libido, it appears, is especially vicious when it is misguided. Yet the genesis of this problem is not consistently diagnosed. While some texts may situate it in the unbridled expression of human sexuality and its associated discourses, others contend it is the perverse result of popular constructions of sex and gender.Addressing this conundrum, Errancies of Desire focuses on the intersections of phallocratic violence and masculine identity in contemporary works of fiction across three subcontinents: North America, Western Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, Messier details the ways in which male desire is predicated on mediated forms of predatory and misogynistic sexuality that cross national and cultural divides. Employing a comparative methodology, he interrogates common perceptions of national differences and masculine identities grounded in historical specificity. Errancies of Desire effectively argues that when associated symptoms of violent and sexist behavior are institutionalized and misguidedly construed as a masculine norm, all men can become monsters.

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Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White ushered in the era of the television antihero, with compelling narratives and complex characters. While critics and academics celebrated these characters, the antiheroines who populatedtelevision screens in the twenty-first century were pushed to the margins and dismissed as "chick TV."In this volume, Yael Levy advances antiheroines to the forefront of television criticism, revealing the varied and subtle ways in which they perform feminist resistance. Offering a retooling of gendered media analyses, Levy finds antiheroism not only in the morally questionable cop and tormented lawyer, but also in the housewife and nurse who inhabit more stereotypical feminine roles. By analyzing Girls, Desperate Housewives, Nurse Jackie, Being Mary Jane, Grey’s Anatomy, Six Feet Under, Sister Wives, and the Real Housewives franchise, Levy explores the narrative complexities of "chick TV" and the radical feminist potential of these shows.

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Commemoration is considered essential to any project of confronting a nation’s violent past. Opinions on commemoration tend to focus on representation and reception: how the commemoration narrates the violence and how the public responds to it. However, this focus ignores the reality of violence’s continuing presence, including in the very public spaces of commemoration. The urgency of rethinking this focus has been nowhere more salient than in the case of contemporary Turkey, whose image on the world stage has rapidly descended from a regional beacon of democratization and prosperity to a hotbed of conflict and oppression within the space of a few recent years.In Victims of Commemoration, Çayli explores both activist and official commemorations at sites of state-endorsed violence in Turkey. Çayli unpacks the reverberations of these commemorative acts and artifacts across the everyday life of the city where each site is located. The first comprehensive account of space’s centrality to confronting state-endorsed violence, this volume draws upon ethnographic research gathered throughout the first half of the 2010s, the period of Turkey’s quickly deteriorating global image. Victims of Commemoration challenges our tendency to understand the cultural practice of commemoration as distinct from violence, revealing the ways in which these memorial sites often exist alongside and at times exacerbate the violence itself.

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Latina Leadership focuses on the narratives, scholarly lives, pedagogies, and educational activism of established and emerging Latina leaders in K-16 educational environments. As the first edited collection foregrounding the voices of Latina educators who talk back to, with, and for themselves and the student communities with whom they work, this volume highlights the ways in which these leaders shape educational practices. Contributors illustrate, through their grounded stories, how they navigate institutionalized oppression while sustaining themselves and their communities both in and outside of the academy. The collection also outlines the many identities embedded within the term ""Latina,"" showcasing how Latina scholars grapple with various experiences while seeking to remain accountable to each other and to their families and communities. This book serves as a model and a source of support for emerging Latina leaders who can learn from the stories shared in this volume.

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