Format: Hardback
Pages: 228
ISBN: 9780813198767
Pub Date: 30 Jun 2024
Illustrations: 182 b&w illustrations
Description:
Although there are currently only a handful of members of the Shaker faith and one active community in the world today, Shakerism at its peak comprised thousands of members living in communal villages across the eastern United States. Kentucky's iconic Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill was one of these communities, and it remains an enduring cultural touchstone. The history of the Shakers is often reduced to the handmade objects they produced and sold, but their lives were so much more than their material culture.
Their efforts were suffused with their religious beliefs: each piece's sturdy simplicity memorializes the Believers' devotion to God and how it guided their every action.Shaker Made is photographer Carol Peachee's love letter to the cultural artifacts - the architecture, furniture, and crafts - of one of America's most influential utopian societies. Peachee has photographed Pleasant Hill for more than four decades - from small items such as eyeglasses, embroidered handkerchiefs, elixir bottles, and bonnets, to the distinguished furniture and architecture of the more than 260 buildings that the Shakers built at Pleasant Hill. The curator of collections at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Rebecca Soules, provides an informative foreword to the photos, while Peachee herself offers a lovingly written introduction explaining her personal connection to the subject. The attention to detail in the simple yet beautifully composed photographs evokes the "spirit of the maker" and serves as an elegant and respectful tribute to the history and legacy of the Pleasant Hill Shakers - an often-misunderstood people who sought to honor the divine in all aspects of life.
The Making of Dissidents
Hungary's Democratic Opposition and its Western Friends, 1973-1998
Format: Hardback
Pages: 300
ISBN: 9780822948254
Pub Date: 18 Jun 2024
Series: Russian and East European Studies
Illustrations: 50 b&w
Description:
Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989.
But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 257
ISBN: 9781463245870
Pub Date: 31 May 2024
Series: Gorgias Islamic Studies
Description:
Over the past half century, China has accomplished a great deal in the study of Islam, and established a certain academic system for its study. This book offers a history of contemporary Islamic research in China, analyzing the interdisciplinary research emerging from this system, from its background to the people involved, mechanisms, and their publications, scientific conferences, reference works and historical materials, and the branches of research: history, religion, philosophy, politics, and culture.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 431
ISBN: 9781463245412
Pub Date: 31 May 2024
Series: Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies
Description:
A Festschrift for Rifaat Ebied celebrating a lifetime of work in the field of Semitic Studies, in particular Syriac, Christian Arabic, and Mandaic.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9780813197029
Pub Date: 05 May 2024
Illustrations: 26 b&w halftones
Description:
During the early Hollywood sound era, studio director George Cukor produced nearly fifty films in as many years, famously winning the Best Director Oscar at the 1964 Academy Awards for My Fair Lady. His collaborations with so-called difficult actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe unsettled producers even as his ticket sales lined their pockets. Fired from Gone with the Wind for giving Vivien Leigh more screen time than Clark Gable, Cukor quickly earned a double-sided reputation as a "woman's director.
" While the label celebrated his ability to help actresses deliver their best performances, the epithet also branded the gay director as suitable only for work on female-centered movies such as melodramas and romantic comedies. Desperate for success after a failed drag film nearly ended his career, Cukor swore to work within Hollywood's constraints.Nevertheless, What Price Hollywood? Gender and Sex in the Films of George Cukor finds that Cukor continued to explore gender and sexuality on-screen. Drawing on a broad array of theoretical lenses, Elyce Rae Helford examines how Cukor's award-winning films—titles including My Fair Lady and The Philadelphia Story—as well as his lesser-known films engage Hollywood masculinity and gender performativity through camp, drag, and mixed genres. Blending biography with critical analysis of more than twenty-five films, What Price Hollywood? tells the story of a once-in-a-generation director who produced some of the best films in history.
Pages: 222
ISBN: 9789464262131
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2024
Illustrations: 170fc / 40bw
Pages: 222
ISBN: 9789464262124
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2024
Illustrations: 170fc / 40bw
Description:
During funerals of nobles in the Kuba kingdom (Democratic Republic of Congo), visitors used to theatrically offer so-called bongotols to the deceased and the mourning family. These highly appreciated valuables were either positioned under the corpse to support it or displayed on top of it.In addition to their religious meaning they displayed the status and wealth of both givers and takers.
Visitors would receive similar items in return. Afterwards the bongotols were stashed until, on occasion of a next burial, they would continue their cycles of gift and counter gift among the titled Kuba aristocracy.Death and display brings ethnographic research and archival sources to bear on these intriguing heirlooms. Their rich iconography offers a kaleidoscope of traditional Kuba sociality, cosmology and ritual.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822967149
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2024
Series: Composition, Literacy, and Culture
Description:
In this edited volume, authors seek to document and analyze how state and non-state actors leverage digital rhetoric as a twenty-first-century weapon of war. Rhet Ops offer readers a chance to focus on the human dimension of rhetorical practice within mobile technologies and social networks: to reflect not only on the durable question of what it means to conduct oneself ethically as a speaker or writer, but also what it means to learn the art of rhetoric as a means to engage adversaries in war and conflict.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9788869774294
Pub Date: 10 Apr 2024
Series: Politics
Description:
The volume examines the process of globalization from a genealogical point of view. By doing so, it offers a contribution to the understanding of the deep and critical spatial transformation reshaping our world from both a political and a conceptual point of view, taking into consideration recent developments including Brexit and the politics of Donald Trump. Focusing his analysis on the natural element of “air”, Vegetti provides an original approach to globalization.
Following in the the footsteps of the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, Vegetti defines our global age as characterized by the transformation of the air into a concrete social space, first through the advent of airplanes, radio waves, and radar and now in the present-day structure of global networks.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 1184
ISBN: 9780813197838
Pub Date: 31 Mar 2024
Illustrations: 578 b&w illustrations
Description:
In 1976 the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the legality of capital punishment in their ruling on Gregg v. Georgia. In the 46 years since the decision was handed down, 1,551 convicted prisoners have been executed.
The United States is the only Western nation - and one of four advanced democracies - that regularly applies the death penalty. While the death penalty is legal in 27 states, only 21 have the means to carry out death sentences. Of those states, Texas has executed the most prisoners in recent history, condemning 578 people to death since the 1976 ruling, beginning with the death of Charlie Brooks in 1982. Texas retains the third-largest death row population behind California and Florida. In the summer of 2020, the Trump administration broke a nearly 17-year stay during which the federal government did not sanction any executions when it put 13 inmates to death over six months. Seventeen of the 45 current federal death row inmates, the highest proportion of any state, are currently incarcerated in Texas. Final Words is a project that addresses the death penalty in the United States as a violation of human rights. Consisting of a collection of government documents relating to the 578 executed Texas inmates, each set of pages reveals a portrait of a life bookended by violence in which final moments are often spent expressing words of love for family and friends, sorrow for victims, and gratitude for life lived. The compilation stands as a stark indictment of a system built by institutions rampant with racism, classism, and sexism. Each entry, each story, each utterance will challenge readers to answer the question: is there room for humanity in the American justice complex?
Bound to the Fire
How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine
Format: Paperback
Pages: 184
ISBN: 9780813198545
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2024
Illustrations: 7 b&w illustrations
Description:
For decades, smiling images of "Aunt Jemima" and other historical and fictional black cooks could be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images were sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represented the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions, even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors.Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond.
She reveals how these men and women were literally "bound to the fire" as they lived and worked in the sweltering and often fetid conditions of plantation house kitchens. These highly skilled cooks drew upon knowledge and ingredients brought with them from their African homelands to create complex, labor-intensive dishes. However, their white owners overwhelmingly received the credit for their creations. Deetz restores these forgotten figures to their rightful place in American and Southern history by uncovering their rich and intricate stories and celebrating their living legacy with the recipes that they created and passed down to future generations.
Pages: 246
ISBN: 9780813199306
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2024
Series: Appalachian Futures: Black, Native, and Queer Voices
Illustrations: 1 b&w illustration
Pages: 246
ISBN: 9780813199337
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2024
Series: Appalachian Futures: Black, Native, and Queer Voices
Illustrations: 1 b&w illustration
Description:
Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future uses the lens of queer ecologies to explore environmental destruction in Appalachia while mapping out alternative futures that follow from critical queer perspectives on the United States' exploitation of the land. With essays by Lis Regula, Jessica Cory, Chet Pancake, Tijah Bumgarner, MJ Eckhouse, and other essential thinkers, this collection brings to light both emergent and long-standing marginalized perspectives that give renewed energy to the struggle for a sustainable future. A new and valuable contribution to the field of Appalachian studies, rural queer studies, Indigenous studies, and ethnographic studies of the United States, Deviant Hollers presents a much-needed objection to the status quo of academic work, as well as to the American exceptionalism and white supremacy pervading US politics and the broader geopolitical climate.
By focusing on queer critiques and acknowledging the status of Appalachia as a settler colony, Deviant Hollers offers new possibilities for a reimagined way of life.
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780813197739
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2024
Series: Place Matters: New Directions in Appalachian Studies
Illustrations: 1 b&w illustration
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780813198224
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2024
Series: Place Matters: New Directions in Appalachian Studies
Illustrations: 1 b&w illustration
Description:
Rural life and culture hold a practical and symbolic importance in American society. A central tenet to the survival of our cherished values—and of ourselves as a species—is the stewardship of cultural diversity and the places that foster it, like rural America. These may be the places that teach us to use land to make a living and to make a life, to forge and carry on our identities, and to feel history.
They may yield a harvest of policies for managing an environmental balancing act that will preserve essential resources for America's children's children.Power and Place: Preservation, Progress, and the Culture War over Land examines the ongoing culture wars that pit conservation against economic progress. For author Melinda Bollar Wagner, what began as a study of Appalachia's long-standing and continuing status as an energy sacrifice zone evolved into a twenty-four-year research project that sheds new light on the physical and emotional parameters of cultural attachment to land. Drawing on interviews with more than 220 residents from ten communities in five Appalachian counties, Power and Place gives voice to rural citizens whose place at the table is far from assured with regard to critical energy, environmental, and infrastructure decisions.
Pages: 234
ISBN: 9780813199214
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2024
Series: Asia in the New Millennium
Illustrations: 16 figures, 26 tables
Pages: 234
ISBN: 9780813199221
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2024
Series: Asia in the New Millennium
Illustrations: 16 figures, 26 tables
Description:
At the conclusion of WWII, no part of the world experienced a more dramatic transformation than East Asia. The region's political stability throughout the postwar period prompted exponential economic growth that ultimately established South Korea, Japan, and China as East Asia's most important powers. While many citizens of these nations now live in a time of unprecedented prosperity, the arrangement that supported this region's transformation is fragile.
With the second largest economy and a burgeoning military sector, China is widely acknowledged as the preeminent rising world power. The onus of maintaining balance in the region now rests primarily with South Korea and Japan in partnership with the United States. However, because of long-standing weaknesses in South Korea–Japan relations and an inconsistent US commitment to the region, the possibility that China could usher in a more uncertain era of revisionism has never been more likely.In Strengthening South Korea-Japan Relations: East Asia's International Order and a Rising China, Dennis Patterson and Jangsup Choi address the historical roots of this weak alliance. Combining decades of research with current public opinion data, the authors warn that the tendency of these nations to rely on the United States to maintain the status quo has become dangerously unstable. A new strategy, one of cooperation and collaboration, is needed to prevent China from upending the region's current liberal international order.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9788869774270
Pub Date: 29 Feb 2024
Series: Anthropology
Description:
This book highlights aspects of the spiritual culture within Islam that flourished along the 'Silk Roads' – the term coined by Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 to describe the web of caravan routes that connected China, South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. The movement of goods and of people was accompanied by the circulation of ideas, bringing about a vivid exchange in the cultural sphere – sufism, or tasawwuf, was one such idea. Focusing on this theme, these conference proceedings draw attention to the multiple dimensions embraced by tasawwuf, both in its temporal (i.
e. historical, ethnographical and social) context, as well as its atemporal one (i.e. concerning spirituality and the ways this is conveyed and transmitted, both in the past and in the present).
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9788869774218
Pub Date: 29 Feb 2024
Series: History
Illustrations: Illustrated
Description:
Unlike in English and French cultural fields, where fashion during WWII is widely debated, in Italy the relationship between fashion and Fascism is an under-researched topic, separated from the study of Fascist institutions and bureaucracy. The behind-the-scene history of the fashion magazine Bellezza, the Italian Vogue founded in 1941, has never been submitted to scholarly attention. Its utopian function in defining a new culture of fashion and code of glamour contributed to the totalitarian project of building a ‘new Italian woman’.
The current volume fills this gap, using the case of Bellezza as a kaleidoscope through which to examine Italian history and culture drawing on new primary sources and extraordinary iconography.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9788869774386
Pub Date: 29 Feb 2024
Series: Politics
Description:
How can we approach the world and guide our thinking in the face of profound, myriad challenges? This is the ambitious question that animates the current volume. The book seeks to formulate these challenges and develop ways to tackle them through a set of wide-ranging interviews with leading intellectuals of our times, including Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Michael Walzer and Etienne Balibar.
Contributing fresh perspectives on current events – from the liberation of women’s voices to the crisis of secularism; from populism, the pandemic, and the rise of conspiracy theories to new forms of resistance – these essays show a refusal to lapse into rigid and reductive oppositions, instead providing critically nuanced interpretations of contemporary events and struggles. The collection brings together original and accessible points of view, selected by researchers from the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, in the pursuit of and safeguarding intellectual freedom.