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Jamaican Poet Laureate Lorna Goodison searches for answers for herself and other Caribbean-based descendants of enslaved Africans by examining and presenting different spiritualities in her poetry in the hope of providing alternatives to the psyche in need of healing after the traumatic events of the infamous transatlantic Middle Passage. The inclusion of Sufism in her poetry seems to have a dual purpose, in that it offers a “new” creative angle and a sincere belief in its power to provide relief from personal anguish. The fact that Sufism is similar to Jamaican-based religions works in its favor. Can Jamaicans, who are Goodison's primary subject, really relate to its message? She does not underestimate her audience's capacity for change or their willingness to accept the ideas of Sufism. Her role as facilitator is not a secret; she is openly promoting her ideas and her belief that healing is possible. This book is divided into three chapters. In Chapter One, a brief history of slavery in the Caribbean region with a focus on Jamaica is presented. The second chapter explicitly focuses on Lorna Goodison and her use of the written word to reveal her feelings about her ancestors'(and her own) traumatic past. It also defines Sufism, includes some examples of Sufi poems, and shows what aspects of Sufism resonate with Jamaican Revivalism and Rastafarianism. The final chapter first makes reference to how Sufi elements have been used by other writers such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Thomas Merton, and Doris Lessing, and then illustrates how, contrary to these others, Goodison is the only one to apply Sufi ideals to a Caribbean context, thus falling into her own creative category, that of a new Caribbean literary canon.

Reconceptualizing Mental Illness in the Viral Age: Souls in the Machine reframes the pop-culture milieu of the current state of mental illness and mental wellness in the post-COVID era. The profound psychological trauma left in the wake of the neuro-exhaustion engendered by this explosive epoch has created the perfect atmosphere, cybersphere, for another historical ‘Great Awakening'. Previously, infectious ideas infrequently led to moral and psychological upheaval. However, with mass, social, and popular media now comprising the psychosocial milieu from which emerge today's social contagions the speed, ease, and facility with which ideas infect and commandeer the cybersphere is so profound as to be mentally devastating. Techno-psychopathologies have hyper-evolved. In an age of overwhelming distraction and irresistible technology, the one certainty amid the chaos is that the current standard of conceptualizing mental illness, through checklist diagnostics, has been outdated since the digital era began. The human mind is now fundamentally different.

The words fear, risk and safety have come to define our contemporary age and have been construed as a dynamic background in the human sciences against which most risk narratives, imaginative or otherwise, can be read. This volume brings together original articles to investigate “cultures of fear” in post-millennial works and covers a wide variety of topics ranging from post-millennial political fictions, post-humanist and postcolonial rewritings to trauma narratives, risk narratives, literary disaster discourses and apocalyptic scenarios. Featuring theoretical and analytical approaches with insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, this book will be of interest for scholars and researchers working in the fields of literary and cultural studies, as well as the general reader.

Hokkaido Dairy Farm offers a historical and ethnographic examination of the rapid industrialization of the dairy industry in Tokachi, Hokkaido. It begins with a history of dairy farming and consumption in Hokkaido from a macro perspective, mapping the transition from survival to subsistence and then from mixed family farms to monoculture and'mega'industrial operations. It then narrows the focus to examine concrete changes in a Tokachi-area dairying community that has undergone rapid sociocultural upheaval over the last three decades, with shifts in human relationships alongside changes in human and cow connections through new technologies. In the final chapters, the scope is further narrowed to a detailed history and ethnography of a single industrializing dairy farm and the morphing cast of individuals attached to it, centering on their idiosyncratic searches for economic, social, and even ontological security in what is popularly considered a peripheral region and industry. The culmination of over fifteen years of ethnographic, policy, and historical research, Hokkaido Dairy Farm argues that the dairy industry in Japan has always been entwined with notions of Otherness and security seeking, notably in terms of frontiers.

Conversations with Tim Ingold offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the work of Tim Ingold, one of the leading anthropologists of our time. Presented as a series of interviews conducted by three anthropologists from the University of Glasgow over a period of two years, the book explores Ingold's key contributions to anthropology and other disciplines. In his responses, Ingold describes the significant influences shaping his life and career, and addresses some of the criticisms that have been made of his ideas. Following an introductory chapter, the book consists of five edited and annotated interviews, each focusing on a specific theme:'Life and Career,''Anthropology, Ethnography, Education and the University,''Environment, Perception and Skill,''Animals, Lines and Imagination,'and'Looking Back and Forward.'Each chapter ends with a'Further Reading'section, referencing Ingold's work and that of other scholars, to assist readers who want to follow up particular issues and debates. It concludes with an ‘Afterword'authored by Ingold himself.

Examining the convergence of cafés, their urban milieu, and Jewish creativity, Shachar Pinsker shows how cafés anchored a silk road of modern Jewish culture. He uncovers a network of interconnected cafés that were central to the modern Jewish experience in a time of migration and urbanization, from Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin to New York City, Tel Aviv, as well as cities in the Arab world. A Rich Brew explores the Jewish culture created in these social spaces, drawing on a vivid collection of newspaper articles, memoirs, archival documents, photographs, caricatures, and artwork, as well as stories, novels, and poems in many languages set in cafés. Pinsker shows how Jewish modernity was born in the café, nourished, and sent out into the world by way of print, politics, literature, art, and theater. What was experienced and created in the space of the coffeehouse touched thousands who read, saw, and imbibed a modern culture that redefined what it meant to be a Jew in the world.

This book is analytical and often critical about the subject it investigates, including literary and cultural aesthetics, social and political literatures, national identity speeches, and the psychoanalytic theory of language. Modernism in Settings attempts to reevaluate some important debates in those fields either from the 19th-20th centuries or otherwise Debates at that at the time often failed to take into consideration their full philosophical, social, theological or political implications. The book is primarily aimed at teachers and researchers interested in issues related to modernism within humanities and cultural studies. It discusses works by writers including James Joyce and Edgar Allan Poe, and philosophers and critics including Julia Kristeva and Wolf Lepenies; and covers issues including feminism, technology, and psychoanalysis.

The encyclopaedia highlights the South Asian country of India with its varied ramifications. As a rich country with all its diversity, it has played a significant role in world affairs for more than two thousand years. India is the most populous country in the world, and its economy is growing rapidly. It is marching ahead in science and technology. In the hundredth anniversary of its independence in 2047, it aspires to become a developed nation. One should be aware of this country in this globalized world. It is not only fascinating but also knowledge-enhancing. The encyclopaedia holds importance due to several reasons: information on a vast range of subjects, scientific methodology, accuracy, and reliability. It could be used as a starting point for further research. The book will be useful for general readers, serious researchers, graduate students, and academics.

This book is an original and international work that seeks to impart new perspectives on leisure studies, based on interdisciplinary dialogues that are, for the first time, brought together and made available in English. The present volume presents new perspectives on critical leisure theories, as well as an interdisciplinary perspective on leisure studies, departing from the traditional theoretical and practical viewpoint, with a political focus and in dialogue with fields of study such as politics, education, philosophy, urban space and others. The book differs from the most common approaches on leisure by presenting new theoretical and practical perspectives on leisure stemming from different realities in countries such as Brazil and Portugal, considering different aspects of each place and taking into account leisure as a political practice.

This volume brings together a range of views and arguments that healthily contribute to global conversations on media, culture and conflict in Africa. It explores how cultural practices, media practices, social movements, and the possibilities of emerging technologies could be ventilated and directed towards remediating the perilous state of affairs in political, social, and economic spaces in contemporary Africa. As the intersection of culture and conflict is relatively underexplored or under-researched in African media studies, this book makes an important contribution to the field.

Peranakan Chinese communities and their “hybrid” culture have fascinated many observers. This book, comprising fourteen chapters, was mainly based on papers written by the author in the last two decades. The chapters address Peranakan Chinese cultural, national and political identities in the Malay Archipelago, i.e., Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore (IMS). This book is divided into two parts. Part I which is on the regional dimension, contains nine chapters that discuss the three countries and beyond. Part II consists of five chapters which focus on one country, i.e., Indonesia. This book not only discusses the past and the present, but also the future of the Peranakan Chinese.

Il volume intende rappresentare le principali linee di ricerca sviluppate in ambito accademico italiano da studiosi nazionali e internazionali sulle aree caucasica e centroasiatica. In questa prospettiva, il volume presenta una serie di saggi che traggono spunto da interventi effettuati nell'ambito dei principali appuntamenti annuali incentrati sull'area: l'edizione del 2021 del Convegno annuale dell'Associazione per lo Studio in Italia dell'Asia centrale e del Caucaso (ASIAC) e la XV Giornata di Studi Armeni e Caucasici. Per sua natura, il volume ospita dunque contributi di differente matrice disciplinare, che spaziano da studi di carattere storico e filologico fino a studi di taglio linguistico, letterario e politologico.

This book is a theological reflection of Sheen's contribution to humanity and society. It analyzes the modern person from the Catholic doctrinal perspective, explores Fulton Sheen's perception of the contemporary individual, and demonstrates that global economic, religious, and political crises cannot be resolved by focusing only on the mundane. It further underscores some contemporary anthropological challenges and proposes a philosophy and theology of life that can enable contemporary humans to know themselves better and make life worth living. The authors argue that advancements in science and technology have failed to prolong happiness; people are still frustrated, disillusioned, cynical, bored, and suicidal.This book enters the landscape of Sheen's controversial pause before he was sanctified and provides a lengthy, liturgical extrapolation of Sheen's Christian anthropology, wrestling with other thinkers and general concerns surrounding human angst in modern society.

Musical vernaculars are a rare and challenging object of study. Their sound can include everything—from local folk and popular songs to random foreign hits and fragments of classic repertoire. It is an everchanging element—eclectic, whimsical, and resistant to regularity.Based on the author's multicultural experience, proficiency in Russian and Jewish music history, and interest in anthropology, this book explores the essential features of vernaculars. They can have varying degrees of changeability; some are quite stable, and exist in closed rural or immigrant communities (phylo-vernacular), while others are dynamic, like those of an urbanized population (onto-vernacular). These types of vernacular can turn into one another when communities migrate—that is, agricultural people move to cities, and the townspeople settle on the land. Understanding the changes in the vernacular repertoires as something natural, this book defends the value of urbanized folk music, disputing the traditional view of art-music composers of rural folk songs as only “authentic” and suitable for expressing nationalistic sentiments. The book also examines unexpected interconnections between Russian and Jewish music, both in their vernacular manifestations and the creative work of Sergei Slonimsky and Dmitry Shostakovich.

Welchen Platz nehmen die Kämpfe von Gewerkschaften und anderen sozialen Bewegungen in der kollektiven Erinnerung ein? Wie ist es um deren Errungenschaften bestellt? Was stärkt die Werte sozialer Demokratie in der Erinnerungskultur? Die Beiträger•innen des Bandes bieten erstmals ausführliche Einblicke in die Erinnerungsgeschichte sozialer Kämpfe und Auseinandersetzungen um Gleichheit, Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit. An wen oder an was erinnert wurde, erweist sich dabei immer auch als Machtfrage, als Kampf um Inklusion und Exklusion. Dieser Band stellt somit nicht nur einen ersten Schritt auf dem Weg zu einer Erinnerungsgeschichte sozialer Demokratie dar, sondern leistet auch einen Beitrag zur politischen Debatte der Gegenwart.

This volume brings together explorations of different aspects of Utopia studied from contemporary perspectives. Its main asset is its diversity and the broad scope of themes it covers and discusses. From literary utopias to media and philosophy, it offers a vista of approaches and contexts that testify to the book's interdisciplinary character. In the words of Lyman Towers Sargent, a leading authority on Utopia and Utopian Studies, an interview with whom is at the same time an Introduction to this collection, “Utopia has universal relevance, but the way it is applied and operationalized varies from country to country and over time.” Professor Sargent's observation can also serve as the leitmotif of the book and the current research on Utopia, its endless possibilities and varieties.

This book discusses a rich variety of voices from the margins and experiences of living in the postmillennial globalised world represented in selected novels by Irish-Canadian, British, American, Serbian, Australian, Iraqi and Māori authors. Contributions focus on illustrative examples of the contemporary novel that reflects acute awareness of globalizing processes and the rising tension between global and local identities, discourses and trends. In its diversity, the book serves to map voices from the new margins overshadowed by the intense pressure of globalization. Whether these new margins are ethnic minorities living in globalized centres of contemporary metropoles or authors whose national, local or regional voices are marginalized by works with more global ones, they are equally deserving of the attention of general readers, university students and literary scholars. The book will primarily appeal to scholars in the fields of literary, gender, postcolonial and food studies, but will also be of interest to a broader readership involved in explorations of literary works in the context of globalizing processes.

The appeal of this book hinges on a critical reading of the accounts of six literate early 19th century pioneer authors and their families, three from America's eastern coast and three from the UK. It highlights the struggles they faced as they attempted to shape and sustain a life and a future in the territorial wilderness in what was originally designated as America's “Northwest Territory,” but is now commonly identified as the “Old North-West,” which includes the present day states of Pennsylvania (west of the Alleghenies), Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. For all six pioneer authors, survival depended on the ability to sustain “grace under pressure” and to overcome unexpected existential challenges that demanded resourcefulness, ingenuity, and a sense of their own self-worth and their variant but embedded cultural identities that served to advance a deep-rooted sectionalism that, on occasion, continues to imperil fundamental American democratic ideals.

Il libro raccoglie i contributi presentati nel corso del primo Seminario internazionale METra (Mapping Epic in Tragedy – Epica e tragedia greca: una mappatura) svoltosi nel maggio del 2021 presso l'Università degli Studi di Verona. Il fine di questo volume – e del progetto da cui prende le mosse – è sondare i confini della ricca e frastagliata eredità dell'epica greca arcaica (in primis Omero) nel dramma attico. Tale eredità viene qui indagata secondo direttrici molteplici e multidisciplinari: dall'analisi linguistica e metrica all'esegesi filologica, stilistico-letteraria e drammaturgica, dalle prospettive della ricerca antropologica e storico-religiosa a quelle della storia culturale e delle idee. I saggi costituiscono – per quanto in modo inevitabilmente parziale – una prima, provvisoria ma già estesa mappatura delle fertili, continue e innovative rivisitazioni in chiave drammatica del patrimonio mitico, linguistico e culturale dell'epica messe in opera dai grandi tragediografi del V secolo a.C.

This book addresses the inherent ambiguities in ‘childhood', a widely familiar term. The main problem lies in the definition, duration and diverse socio-cultural implications of ‘childhood', which is a part of everyone's life. To explore the literary, artistic and cultural representation of this constantly evolving term, this book provides insights into a number of relevant issues relating to childhood. Explicitly rejecting the idea of childhood as an unambiguous monolith, it offers various critical approaches to the treatment of childhood with all its complexities in art and literature.

Modern America is an introduction to American Studies within the fields of history, culture, and society from a Scandinavian perspective. Its focus is on understanding important aspects of contemporary American society through discussions of political, historical, and cultural processes. The book aims to equip readers with knowledge of and insight into a complex and varied nation that wields tremendous power and influence on the wider world. Presented in an accessible and readable manner, the chapters seek to explore and explain the development of American society, covering topics such as immigration, ethnic minorities, religion, politics, foreign policy, and popular culture. The book is a joint venture between Norwegian and American authors, all specialists in their respective areas.

Key book on the debates surrounding the knowledge economy and decolonialization of African Studies, that brings the subject up to date for the 21st century.Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.

This volume highlights five critical key issues relevant to Colorado's Black and Brown communities. As a result of the recent activity around policing and equity, marijuana, education and biases, prisoner reintegration, and activism, it offers solutions to managing those problems. The book is a resource that must be read by K-12 educators, social workers, probation officers, grass roots leaders, adult educators, and university professors in the area of sociology, education, Black studies, and the non-traditional disciplines. Additionally, the volume contains essential tools for training professionals and teaching our youth by offering insights to problem solve in urban areas. It provides pertinent information vital to the development and success of our youth struggling in K-12, higher education, and the criminal justice system. Although Colorado's Black communities are the focus of the volume, it will also serve as a model for urban communities in different states.

This collection focuses on representations of Egypt between 1750 and 1956. Napoleon's Egyptian expedition of 1798-1801 failed in military terms, but succeeded in focusing Western attention on the country. The nation fascinated travellers because of its antiquity, its monuments, and its bazaars. In the nineteenth-century, the typical itinerary for travellers included Alexandria, Cairo, the Pyramids, and a journey by boat up the Nile to the temples of Luxor and others. Some of the essays included in this volume focus on fiction by writers like Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens, or travel works by Florence Nightingale, Lucie Duff-Gordon, and Gérard de Nerval. Others analyse representations of Egypt by explorers, American ex-soldiers, French painters, British colonial administrators and sociologists, and a Russian doctor investigating the efficacy of Muhammad Ali's reforms in relation to the plague. There is also a discussion of the changes in nineteenth-century Egyptian dress.

This collection of essays explores the changing history, rhetoric, politics and representation of crime and madness in modern Austria. From the emergence of Viennese modernism to the post-modern moment, the myths, metaphors and realities of crime and madness have unfolded in the shadow of larger cultural questions regarding cultural norms, gender, war, and national identity. Historically based contributions illuminate such diverse cultural realities as the evolution of psychiatry as medical practice, asylum practices in the early twentieth century, and Austrian participation in and responses to terror and war crimes. From these investigations proceeds the clear insight that cultural responses to crime and madness are often steeped in mythmaking as much as objective policy and practice. Conversely, literary and metaphorical representations of crime and madness reveal attitudes and cultural realities about the Austrian society that produced them and which they reflect. Specialists from the fields of Austrian history, literature and culture studies have collaborated to produce this truly interdisciplinary volume, which responses to crime and madness are often steeped in mythmaking as much as objective policy and practice. Conversely, literary and metaphorical representations of crime and madness reveal attitudes and cultural realities about the Austrian society that produced them and which they reflect.

Awareness of the role that physical difference plays in an individual's ability to negotiate personal and cultural spaces has spread into a variety of disciplines within the past two decades. This collection of essays adds to the growing corpus of work exploring the body as a site of cultural inscription by focusing exclusively on how this process plays out in the sphere of popular culture. The nine essays in this collection touch on a variety of topics of interest to both scholars and students of the body, ranging from contested issues within the discourse on fat and anorexia, to tattoos, domestic violence campaigns, mastectomy, neurasthenia, and gendered identity. By drawing on the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines within the social sciences and humanities, this collection provides models of how different disciplines approach the body. By incorporating perspectives from new and emerging fields like New Historicism, as well as Queer Theory, Fat, and Disability Studies, it simultaneously demonstrates how the use of a body perspective can expand and enliven understanding within these disciplines, and thus should be of interest to a wide variety of readers.

Echo and Narcissus: Echolocating the Spectator in the Age of Audience Research came about as a response to the recent shift of focus in the studies of cinema. While the seventies and the eighties were marked by increasingly complex theorisations of spectatorship, the last two decades have witnessed a turn towards ethnographic research into film reception. However, this long overdue turn towards the empirical viewer has not produced a genuinely broader scope of analysis. It has rather, all too hastily, consigned the spectator, a textually constructed viewing position, to oblivion, thanks to the concept's perceived hegemonic and totalising premise. Echo and Narcissus intervenes into this state of affairs by arguing for a productive nexus between theorisations of spectatorship and the currently more fashionable audience research. Petek maintains that an informed mapping of contemporary (and past) filmviewing practices still requires a spectatorial model and she offers such a model through a re-reading of Ovid's tale of Echo and Narcissus. She demonstrates that the myth's central role in traditional theorisations of spectatorship has not yet been properly reflected upon. Her critical recuperation of the Ovidian myth provides a revised model of the spectator—one with discursive access to all types of cinema, yet, flexible enough to accommodate a range of viewers'responses and their cultural diversity.

Language: Hebrew The book offers a fresh view on the life of Jews under National Socialism. Focusing on the spatial and temporal aspects of the changes brought about by the new regime, it highlights the “tactics” utilized by German Jews to cope with the new reality, make sense of it, and rethink their position vis-à-vis German nationality. Based on a rich theoretical framework from various fields in social and cultural studies (human geography, environmental psychology, sociology of time and so on) the book examines German Jews'reflections on their new experiences through the paradigms of'lived space'and'lived time.'In discussing two main types of sources—private (diaries, correspondences and memoirs) and public (Jewish press)—the book sheds new light on the topics of maintaining Jewish agency under Nazism; the possibility and forms of Jewish defiance; and scope (and limits) of Jewish awareness of the processes that reshaped Germany's approach to its Jewish population. The book's analysis of Jews'reflections on the spatial and temporal aspects of life under Nazism portrays an intricate endeavor to understand the new reality, adjust to it, and answer its increasing challenges.

Publikace se zabývá rolí tlumočení v Keni prvních dvou desetiletích 21. století. Jedná se o první práci, která na tlumočení v této zemi i regionu nahlíží z ucelené perspektivy a bere tudíž v potaz aspekty všech podstatných oblastí, které nezkoumá izolovaně, ale naopak integrovaně. Jedná se především o konferenční a komunitní tlumočení, didaktiku tlumočení a podstatné faktory, které tlumočení a roli tlumočníka v místních podmínkách výrazně ovlivňují (multikulturní a multietnické prostředí, role náboženství, migrace, genderové role, kulturní rozdílnosti, společenská tabu aj.). Monografie vychází ze zkoumání akademických zdrojů, které byly k problematice dosud vydány, autentických písemností zkoumaných přímo v Keni a především z dat získaných z rozhovorů s respondenty výzkumu, kteří zahrnovali keňské akademiky i aktivní tlumočníky a překladatele, kteří v zemi dlouhodobě působí a místní podmínky dobře znají.

All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon gathers thirteen representative essays from a wide array of fields into an interdisciplinary anthology that reveals the depth and extent of this fascinating, variegated cultural phenomenon. Contributors use the techniques of literary criticism, musicology, sociology, philosophy, business theory, and more to explore the meaning and significance of the music of the Grateful Dead, the implications of their artistic and commercial success, and the social dimensions of their following, the Deadheads.For scholars and students of American history and culture, this book makes a convincing case for why the Grateful Dead phenomenon is worthy of academic attention and what that study can offer. By focusing a wide array of critical approaches on a single, discrete subject, All Graceful Instruments provides a refreshing approach to interdisciplinary studies that should appeal to a wide audience.

The book of studies named Globalisation Trends in the Media contains an evaluation of the media culture in Slovakia. It deals with problems caused by globalisation and by the specific circumstances of media production. Whilst the post socialist states are, in many respects, in a similar situation, they each have their own specific attributes too. As this book features not only Slovak, but also Czech and Polish authors, the English reader will be able to gain an idea of the state of media production, and especially of the media culture, in Central Europe. The nature of media culture in Central Europe, when compared to that of countries situated further east, differs mainly in its inclination towards western Europe and, unfortunately, towards America too. The book contains theoretical and glozing articles dealing with radio and television production, as well as the Internet. Overall the book aims to introduce the reader to the state of the Slovak media culture, to its audience and also to its problems and successes since the year 1989. The book will probably attract the attention of experts in media production, academics of media culture and young people interested in radio and television production who would like to learn something about the culture of a small Central European country. They might have come across a similar phenomena in England. The book will help them find out how European culture influences Slovakia.

The anti-liberal turn in Central Europe aroused a lively scholarly discussion to which this book wishes to contribute by providing a novel perspective. The recent illiberal upsurge is often ascribed to weakly rooted liberalism in the context of an unfinished transition, or, conversely, to the completion of the transition process in which populists turn against their erstwhile mentors from the West. Without separating Central Europe from global trends, the authors of this book look at a change in the political dynamics of post-accession Central Europe through the prism of the culture wars. Conflicts over values, symbols and social norms have marked the 2010s in strikingly similar ways across Central Europe. To some extent they replace the older, socioeconomic right versus left cleavage, and, at the same time, they highlight topics like gender, identity, sovereignty and globalization. Every Central European country has undergone deeply polarizing episodes in the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis, and some even before. In certain nations, these are linked to a strong national-conservative project, to religion or to traumas of the past, but there is no simple pattern. The book studies culturalized politics in a broadly conceived Central Europe - Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Croatia - and shows the various forms that culture wars have taken in the 2010s as well as their underlying logic.

Crossing Places: New Research in African Studies brings together the work of twelve international research students, united by their interest in Africa. This new generation of scholars is questioning existing disciplinary frameworks and looking for new academic approaches to African history and culture in the twenty-first century. The volume explores the themes of crossing through time and space, encounters across generations and the renegotiation of identity for the future. Incorporating insights from the worlds of literary theory, history, anthropology and philosophy, the collection offers a sample of new research in African Studies with a wide geographical range, from Algeria to South Africa, from Cameroon to Zimbabwe. Crossing Places forms a useful introduction to African Studies for both undergraduates and masters students. It is of particular relevance to scholars interested in postcolonial studies, migration studies, comparative literature and the geography of identity.

City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair collects fourteen pathbreaking essays treating the panoramic oeuvre of novelist, poet, filmmaker and essayist Iain Sinclair. This book aims to reflect and develop the current strong interest in the work of Sinclair, who is widely recognized as one of the most significant figures in contemporary British literature and culture. The essays herein cover the key genres and periods of Sinclair's output, discussing his poetry, prose and filmmaking, and are developed from the proceedings of the first academic conference on Sinclair, which was held at the University of Greenwich in 2004.Following the introductory chapter, which includes a brief survey of Sinclair's career up until now, the collection is arranged thematically in four sections. The first part, ‘Contexts', features essays which comment on the critical categorization and definition of Sinclair's work. The second part, ‘Culture and Critique', includes essays which explore the political import and contexts of Sinclair's oeuvre. The articles in the third part, ‘Connections', look at the links between Sinclair and other writers, addressing the often noted intertextuality of his writing; and the final section, ‘Spaces', contains three considerations of Sinclair's treatment of London's urban spaces. This collection provides access to the latest research by the leading scholars working in this area, and will be a key point of reference for anyone interested in Sinclair's production.“To some, the field of `London writing'may increasingly look like an indifferent, over-populated wasteland. Iain Sinclair, however, remains pre-eminent, by virtue, not only of the amplitude of his knowledge of the city, but of the intensity and complexity of his thought about it. He is the redemptive memorialist of a host of disregarded London cultures that lie quite beyond the reach of contemporary pieties. In that respect, he is less our Blake, as he sometimes seems to believe, than our Pepys or our Defoe. At the same time, he is an audacious experimenter with prose forms in the modernist tradition from Joyce to Burroughs and beyond. Like the Sinclair phenomenon itself, this valuable collection of essays is multifaceted, illuminating its subject from a variety of different angles, whilst very well aware that it is part of a `work in progress'. It offers important testimony to the scope and power of a writer engaged in an original, serious and necessary project.”—Andrew Gibson, Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London“This is an important and timely collection about arguably the most significant living London writer who is increasingly being recognised as an important contemporary English author in every sense.”—Lawrence Phillips, Principal Lecturer in English, University of Northampton“At last, Iain Sinclair has the readers he deserves--at least on the ample, often provocative, and always fascinating evidence of City Visions, a collection of essays marked equally by panache and verve, awareness of alternative cultural history and theoretical sophistication. Over fourteen chapters, critics with wide-ranging interests gather their restless energies and obsessions in response to the scatter-gun agitprop and guerilla-intellectualism of Sinclair, to produce a necessary and necessarily edgy volume. In this admirably relentless collection Jenny Bavidge and Robert Bond offer an unnerving and inventive critical topography that uncovers the dark heart of a writer who is simultaneously the enfant terrible and éminence grise of English letters. Belles-lettrists and other dilettantes be warned, this is not a volume for the faint-hearted—these essays manifest an evangelical zeal equal to their subject's own; in doing so, they take us on an exhilarating intellectual adventure, so refreshing in the world of lit-crit, where the polite formulas of sensible reading make one want to faint from ennui.”

This book is composed of a selection of papers presented at a conference in Cambridge in December 2005. Cultural history is a relatively new sub-discipline. Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly apparent that a new generation of historians has emerged. These scholars have become concerned with research, sources and questions traditionally beyond the scope of the discipline of history. Indeed, recent monographs in history have demonstrated a growing awareness of the cultural imagination in analyses of patterns of change and continuity in the past. Such a movement has also encouraged the development of new networks between different disciplines in the Arts and Social Sciences.The authors of these chapters come from a wide range of academic backgrounds. While all are concerned with crucial issues of the past, they represent a substantial variety of disciplines. In addition to the historians are those trained and working in literary studies, art history, design, music and science. As early-career scholars, the research they present is cutting edge: these contributions represent the very latest trends in cultural studies and demonstrate the attempts of new researchers to answer the most current and challenging questions that are being proposed in this field.

Versions of Ireland brings a refined postcolonial theoretical optic to bear on many of the most urgent questions within contemporary Irish cultural studies. Drawing on, and extending, the most advanced critical work within the discipline, the book offers a subtle critical genealogy of the development of Ireland's diverse postcolonial projects. Furthermore, it reflects on the relevance and the effectiveness of postcolonial and subaltern historiographical methodologies in an Irish context, interrogating the ethical and political problematics of such discursive importation. Flannery's work highlights the operative dynamics of imperial modernity, together with its representational agents, in Ireland, and also divines moments of explicit and implicit resistance to modernity's rationalising and accumulative urges.The book is pioneering in the facility and ease with which it navigates the interdisciplinary terrain of Irish studies. Flannery provides enabling and challenging new readings of the poetry of the bi-lingual poet, Michael Hartnett; the politically imaginative vistas of the republican mural tradition in the North of Ireland; the gothic anxieties inherent in the fiction of Eugene McCabe and the semi-fictional writing of Seamus Deane, and the differential codes of visual surveillance apparent in Irish tourist posters and late nineteenth century photography in Ireland. Versions of Ireland does not dwell on the exclusively theoretical, but offers rich critical analyses of a range of Irish cultural artefacts in terms of Ireland's protracted colonial history and contested postcolonial condition.

This volume, Rhizomes, is a challenging path into a very multidisciplinary set of papers. Papers range across cultural studies and film, to applied linguistics to sociolinguistics; and as gathered in this one volume - the result of postgraduate student research of a very high order - they'force'readers to think critically of disciplines, their assumed boundaries and most importantly, the usefulness of assuming the enduring value of such boundaries. This is not to say that ‘anything goes', but the diversity of areas under scrutiny means that sharper re-thinking of one's own comfort zones is necessarily one key outcome when confronted with a volume like this. This is one advantage of the selected papers – besides the obvious one of having at your finger tips a simple way of delving into a challenging diversity.Brian Ridge, Campion College, SydneyThis is a wonderful collection of papers, which demonstrates the power and vitality of contemporary literary and cultural research. The scope of the papers, the diversity of the subject matter, and the willingness of their authors to work across disciplinary boundaries work together to create an exemplary collection of research for the twenty-first century – multidisciplinary, multigeneric, and multimodal, like 21st century texts and media.Greg Hainge's opening paper sets the stage for the diverse and engaging papers that follow. With his own examples of rhizomatics drawn from music, Greg immediately has the reader acknowledging the multidisciplinary – and multimodality – of contemporary texts – and so the need for research that can address the richness and complexity of these texts.In Part 1 we have two papers that address the issue of the limitations of conventional research methodology in their own fields (language acquisition, film studies) – and propose alternative and more productive methodologies. The exciting thing about this section is that these are fields normally considered very different and without much to say to one another – and yet the combination works to create a dialogue that extends across these and many other fields of research. Most importantly, both challenge the dichotomising of research and analytical methods that has worked to impoverish their fields and the research on which it is based. Part 2 presents papers on a range of marginalised social positionings and experiences – and in the process demonstrates both the power of research to uncover what has been ignored or elided in contemporary histories (how many westerners know of the long history of Chinese women in film? Or of an Aboriginal Taiwanese literature?) as well as the power of new perspectives, new ways of thinking the research subject, to open up areas of study such as dating manuals and country music, both conventionally dismissed as inherently trivial and/or sexist.In Part 3 the papers all play brilliantly with the notion of connectivity, demonstrating for readers the inextricability of texts and meaning systems (verbal, visual and other) with the cultural contexts in which they operate – and so the diverse ways they may be deployed. These papers banish forever any reliance on a formalist reading or methodology for the analysis of text and meaning! And, again, the range of subject-matter is breath-taking and argues the need for cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research practice.Part 4 takes the reader into the realm of transformations, challenging the ways in which textual and systemic changes articulate profound cultural changes in the societies that produce them. So we learn about grammatical interventions in the Chinese language as feminine and neuter pronouns are added to the gender-free Chinese language – and consider the major cultural change that both caused this change and is subsequently produced by it. We consider the ways in which cinema has evolved as an art-form, under the influence of its material and verbal technologies.

Das Space Race, der Wettlauf ins All, war ein zentraler Kampfplatz des Kalten Krieges. Nicht nur in der Sowjetunion, sondern auch in der DDR galt die Weltraumeroberung zudem als Verwirklichung einer sozialistischen Technik- und Gesellschaftsutopie. Gegenstand der vorliegenden Studie sind in der DDR entstandene Gemälde, Fotografien, Wandbilder, Plakate, Zeichnungen, Briefmarken und Grafiken in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften. In diesen Fallbeispielen arbeitet die Autorin heraus, wie ein imaginierter Weltraum auch nach dem Start der ersten Weltraumraketen erhalten blieb und neben dokumentarischen Zeugnissen koexistierte. Die Studie benennt, systematisiert und erläutert hierbei erstmals die (Bild-)Narrative der Raumfahrt in der visuellen Kultur in der DDR und untersucht deren politische Ikonografie.

In the beginning was – not the word – but the experience. This phenomenological approach provides the basis for this book, which focuses on how a person-in-situation experiences and constructs meaning from a variety of cultural visual events. This book presents video-based processual methods for researching experiences in a variety of settings ranging from the museum, to news photography, and interactive media. The research led to the development of a set of methodological tools and approaches we term the reflexivity lab. The interaction in the experimental situation between the media and body, dialogue, moods, values and narratives have been investigated qualitatively with more than sixty informants in a range of projects. The processual methodological insights are put into a theoretical perspective and also presented as pragmatic dilemmas. Researching Experiences is relevant not only for students and researchers in media and communication studies but also for practitioners within the fields of media, communication and experience design.

This volume brings together selected papers covering topics related to the contemporary cultural heritage research framework within the field of Digital Humanities (DH). Intended for scholars, students and practitioners, the book provides the reader with insights into the description and access, and digitization of cultural heritage. It also explores Croatian Glagolitic and Latin written heritage as a source for historiographic and linguistic research.It is organized into seven topics, each questioning one of the research areas within the DH framework, namely DH as a contemporary cultural heritage research framework; the description of, and access to, cultural heritage; the digitization of cultural heritage; written heritage as a source for historiographic and linguistic research; literary studies; research and communication of cultural heritage; and education in the field of DH.

Anthropology is more relevant than ever before to making sense of the constant intercultural encounters taking place around the world. Even though the discipline was born out of the need to understand the way humans interact, it had for decades been trapped in a counter-cultural stance that effectively disarmed it of any direct influence on public affairs. Recent global trends, however, have brought this academic discipline to the attention of governments, agencies, and social entrepreneurs, because of its capacity to create bridges of understanding between people of contrasting cultures. This ability is today more necessary than ever before in facing the challenges posed by the shrinking of our world. This volume provides reflections on what anthropological research can offer through its “thick” analyses. We are convinced that ethnographic research can contribute to a better understanding of social phenomena in our global times.

The concept of culture industry leads a double life. On the one hand, it appears as transparent, being used widely and freely in reference to a branch of business; on the other, it is a notion belonging to a critical tradition that wants to preserve the tension resulting from the juxtaposition of these two words. Culture Industry Today is a contribution to the latter trend, which takes into account the current prevalence of the former. By offering interpretations of the term in relation to philosophy, media, television, the Third World, the psyche and the culture of consumption, the book aims at showing the continued relevance of an expression whose muteness is the corroboration of its darkest content.

Culture as Text, Text as Culture represents a novel, interdisciplinary analysis of textuality as it pertains to Cultural Studies. More specifically, the work examines how the analysis of texts has shaped the most vital contemporary debate of Cultural Studies: the recognition that all texts and their contexts are constructs. Building upon a Post-structural/Post-modern understanding of truth as a construct, Cultural Studies has long since acknowledged the ability of texts to express the time and culture of their origin. This work, however, expands this idea, demonstrating not only how a culture is preserved in a text, but how that text can in turn define its culture, even redefine its history. This compendium is structured around four of the most prominent contemporary topics of Cultural Studies: the relationship between historical and fictional writing, the ability of authors to recreate or redefine history, the relationship between language and image, and the ability for traditionally marginalized groups to reassert their place in history. The book presents articles from a large spectrum of disciplinary fields and civilizations in order to demonstrate how the application of Cultural Studies can unite seemingly disparate disciplines.

This book highlights the various cultures and religions of Mediterranean countries, and discusses issues related to managing diversity and minority rights, and the role of intercultural and interreligious dialogue. It centers on the interconnectedness between culture, politics, religion, gender, race, migration, and language. To promote a fruitful exchange, the volume considers approaches that integrate social, economic, cultural, religious and political dimensions, and surveys the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of multiculturalism. The contributions gathered here also debate issues relating to history, modernity, cultural specificities of the region, and their role in the consolidation of peace, democracy, social justice, and development. The book uses an analytic framework coupled with a synthetic method, while providing a roadmap to achieve a better management of pluralism in the Mediterranean area, which will help different populations to live together in harmony and to continue their battle for broadmindedness, acceptance, and coexistence.

Transgression and Its Limits is a long overdue collection that reads the complex relationship between artistic transgressions and the limits of law and the subject. In mid-twentieth century theoretical understandings of transgressive culture, it is the existence of the limit that guarantees the possibility and success of the transgression. While the limit calls for obedience, it also tempts with the possibility of violation. To breach the limits of the acceptable is to simultaneously define them. However, this classical understanding of transgression may no longer apply under the conditions of post-modernity, late-capitalism, and the simulated or empty transgressions that this period of the simulacra encourages. Context becomes paramount in reading the myriad forms of transgression that encompass politics, aesthetics and the ethics of the obscene; while a range of theoretical perspectives are employed in order to elucidate the economies at work underneath the seemingly transgressive act. The essays selected include explorations of transgression in cinema, photography, art, law, music, philosophy, technology, and both classical and contemporary literature and drama. Professor Fred Botting's (co-author of Bataille and The Tarantinian Ethics) analysis of transgression from Bataille, to Baudrillard and Ballard compliments the collection's concerns about the status of transgression. Aside from fourteen critical essays on topics such as early-modern drama, George Bataille, J. G. Ballard, the female necrophilic, “torture-porn” cinema, and the art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Salvador Dali, there is also a new discussion of transgression between novelist Iain Banks and Professor Roderick Watson (Emeritus at the University of Stirling). With its focus on the paradoxical nature of the impulse to transgress, as well at its wide-ranging historical and artistic concerns, Transgression and Its Limits is a landmark book in a rapidly developing scholarly field.

Con il repentino passaggio, nei primi due decenni del Terzo millennio, dalla società-mondo a nuove forme di sociazione e di relazione bio-sociali tra esseri umani, altre specie biologiche, entità naturali e soprattutto dispositivi artificiali prodotti dalla rivoluzione informatica, occorre ripensare il ruolo e la funzione del politico nella nostra esistenza quotidiana. Fin dalle origini, infatti, Homo sapiens è stato soprattutto uno zoòn politikòn, e questa sua specificità ha subìto nel corso dei secoli una metamorfosi continua che oggi è arrivata ad un ennesimo punto di svolta. Dal declino della società politica all'avvento di nuove configurazioni come la sub-politica, la bio-politica, la tecno-politica, la multi-politica, il politico diventa oggi decisivo non solo per la sopravvivenza di Homo sapiens ma per la sua stessa capacità di controllare e condizionare l'esplosione della cibernetica, della robotica e dell'intelligenza artificiale. Se c'è una crisi è quella della vecchia politica, ormai incapace di rispondere sia alla domanda di partecipazione sociale dei cittadini del nostro pianeta, sia alle nuove sfide di una società sempre più ibridata tra umano e post-umano. Perciò è necessario riflettere sui rischi e le contraddizioni che la crescente automazione della vita associata può produrre sull'importanza e la centralità di un'agency politica autenticamente antropologica.

The essays collected in this volume form a multifaceted discourse on religious, philosophical, historical, ethnocultural and sociocultural, literary and linguistic issues. A multicultural approach to the problem of the soul allows the presentation of it on a microscale, focused on national and regional specificity, as well as on the macroscale, oriented toward universal values which can be observed in the cultures of peoples distant from each other in both time and space. The book consists of 28 chapters, addressing the fundamental themes of human existence, which find expression in cultural texts in both colloquial and artistic language, and which have a prominent place in anthropological, psychological, metaphysical and theological debates.

The book presents the phenomenon of the garden and its various cultural features. It compares historical aspects of the garden with its contemporary models and focuses on various cultural traditions and different ways of presentation of this problem, in the context of world literature, problems of visual arts, questions of architecture, ecology, universal aspects of language, as well as philosophical problems of axiology and aesthetics. All those contexts combine to form a picture of a phenomenon that could be called “the metaphor of the garden”, containing a universal anthropological image of “space” in which dynamic re-evaluation of rhetorical models take place and the order of Nature complements cultural models of human understanding of reality.

What is Englishness? Is there such a thing as a national temperament, is there a character or an identity which can be claimed to be specifically English? This collection of articles seeks to answer these questions by offering a kaleidoscopic vision of Englishness since the eighteenth century, a vision that acknowledges stereotypes while at the same time challenging them. Englishness is defined in contrast to Britishness, the Celtic fringe—Scotland in particular—Europe and the Continent at large. The effects of the Empire and of its loss are examined together with other socio-economic factors such as the two World Wars, de-industrialization and the different waves of immigration. Through a careful analysis of the arts, literature, philosophy, historiography, cultural and political studies produced in England and on the Continent over the last three centuries, a composite image of Englishness emerges, somewhere between centre and periphery, tradition and innovation, transience and timelessness, rurality and urbanity, commitment and isolation. Englishness is thus revealed as a protean concept, one which, whether it is a historical or political construct, a genuine emanation of a national desire or a simulacrum, retains its fascination and this volume offers keys to understanding its diverse expressions.