MLL Faculty Publications

This book explores dance and choreography as sites for the articulation of new theoretical and historical paradigms in inter-Asia cultural studies.

The chapters in this volume cover a wide range of dance works, artists, genres, and media, from Kathak to K-pop flash mob dance, from Cold War diplomacy to avant-garde dance collaborations, and from festival dance to dance on screen. Working against the Western-centric category of “Asian dance” and Western-centric theorizations of intercultural performance that foreground “East-West” relationships, each contribution shows how dances in Asia make one another as their key aesthetic references beyond Eurocentric influences, as well as how inter-Asia relations emerge from cultural, geographical, and aesthetic diversity within the region. This book is the first of its kind in both cultural studies and dance studies. It will contribute greatly to readers’ understanding of how performance shapes and transforms the cultural and political dynamics of inter-Asia, with a focus on dance circulations in and across East, South, and Southeast Asia.

Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Dance Studies, Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, International Relations and Politics, History, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

Putin ~ Culture deserves brief clarification. The title (~) conveys several meanings. In everyday discourse, it means ‘approximately’, as we know from Euclidian geometry. In logic, it means ‘negation of’. In economics, it signals the consumer indifference to this or that product. In medieval Western European and Cyrillic manuscripts (from Greek τίτλος and Russian titlo), it is a scribal abbreviation, standing in for a missing letter or word, usually one of the five nomina sacra (God, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Spirit).11 One additional ascription is the sign’s common Latin meaning: ‘signature’ or ‘warrant’.

In this last sense, the issue’s conceptual idea is ‘Culture under the Sign of Putin’, a title with some appropriate horoscopic resonances. All the same, the editors of Putin ~ Culture take any of these choices—approximation, negation, indifference, sacral absence, certifying warrant—as adequate to stand as the conjunction between ‘Putin’ and ‘culture’.

Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China’s unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity.

Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China’s changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker’s desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual’s longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman’s craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption—exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal—revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible.

A highly interdisciplinary work that combines theoretical nuance with masterful close analyses, The Art of Useless is an innovative rethinking of the emergence of China’s middle-class consumer culture.

Published by Columbia University Press | More information

Through the lens of "corporeal politics"—the close attention to bodily acts in specific cultural contexts—each study in this book challenges existing dance and theater histories to re-investigate the performer's role in devising the politics and aesthetics of their performance, as well as the multidimensional impact of their lives and artistic works. Corporeal Politics addresses a wide range of performance styles and genres, including dances produced for the concert stage, as well as those presented in popular entertainments, private performance spaces, and street protests.

Find the book here!

This book rethinks the history of colonisation by focusing on the formation of the European aesthetic ideas of indigeneity and blackness in the Caribbean, and how these ideas were deployed as markers of biopolitical governance. Using Foucault’s philosophical archaeology as method, this work argues that the European formation of indigeneity and blackness was based on aesthetically casting Aboriginal and African peoples in the Caribbean as monsters yet with a similar degree of Western civilisation and ‘culture’. By focusing on the aesthetics of the first racial imageries that produced indigeneity and blackness this work takes a radical departure from the current Social Darwinian theorisations of race and racism. It reveals a new connection between the global origins of colonisation and local post-Enlightenment histories. 

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One hundred years before Freud’s psychoanalytic case-histories, the narrative psychological case-history emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany, cutting across the disciplines of medicine, philosophy, law, psychology, anthropology and literature. An avalanche of such case histories from 1750-1800, programmatic writings on their theory and practice, as well as the controversies surrounding their validity and function for an envisioned ‘science of the soul’ attest to the advent of a culture of the 'case' still very much present today. As one reviewer has noted, the book represents "a groundbreaking contribution to the history of psychology [...] an important continuation and refinement of Foucault's investigations into the inventions of the self."

Published by DeGruyter.

The Maids is a jewel: an astonishing complement to The Makioka Sisters, set in the same house, in the same turbulent decades, but among the servants as much as the masters. The Maids concerns all the young women who work—before, during, and after WWII—in the pampered, elegant household of the famous author Chikura Raikichi, his wife Sanko, and her younger sister.

Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source–based history of concert dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Emily Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field. The digital edition of this title includes nineteen embedded videos of selected dance works discussed by the author.

Find the book here!

Ge Zhaoguang, an eminent historian of traditional China and a public intellectual, takes on fundamental questions that shape the domestic and international politics of the world’s most populous country and its second largest economy. What Is China? offers an insider’s account that addresses sensitive problems of Chinese identity and shows how modern scholarship about China — whether conducted in China, East Asia, or the West — has attempted to make sense of the country’s shifting territorial boundaries and its diversity of ethnic groups and cultures.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737143

Lexical Borrowing and Deborrowing in Spanish in New York City provides a sociodemographic portrait of lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York City. The volume offers new and important insights into research on lexical borrowing. In particular, it presents empirical data obtained through quantitative analysis to answer the question of who is most likely to use English lexical borrowings while speaking Spanish, to address the impact that English has on Spanish as spoken in the city and to identify the social factors that contribute to language change.

The book also provides an empirical, corpus-based-approach to distinguishing between borrowing and other contact phenomena, such as codeswitching, which will be of interest to scholars of language contact and bilingualism.

https://www.routledge.com/Lexical-borrowing-and-deborrowing-in-Spanish-in-New-York-City-Towards/Varra/p/book/9781138222052

“Lexical Borrowing and Deborrowing in Spanish in New York City” is available to read online until Oct 23, 2018: https://rdcu.be/4fqh

In Visible Dissent, Teresa Longo proposes that North America's dissident literature has its roots in the Latin American literary tradition. Locating the work of artists and writers alongside that of scholars and legal advocates, Visible Dissent unveils the staying-power of committed writing and honors the cross-currents and on-the-ground implications of humane political engagement.

https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609385699/visible-dissent

In his first book of original poetry, Nathan Rabalais presents a layered and poignant account of the process of handling memories and trauma. Accompanying photographs of haunting images — from the cemeteries of New Orleans to the beaches of Nova Scotia — make this work visually striking. Written in a French deeply rooted in Louisiana, Rabalais's unique imagery and wordplay represent a new voice in francophone Louisiana literature.

https://french.centenary.edu/editions/nouveautes.html

The Cinema of Cuba examines the close relationship between film and nation and the often-fraught attachments to national identity in the era of late socialism, emergent capitalism, and globalism. The essays reflect on the historical and ambivalent attachments that constitute the Cuban national project almost two decades into the twenty-first century. They also address the tensions in late socialist national identity, tensions frequently expressed as those between faithfulness to history and to memory and openness to inevitable change, or what one author refers to as the “specter of capitalism” (p. 151).

“These varied and vibrant essays at the cutting edge of Cuban cinema research offer important accounts of film directors…, analysis of headline themes…, and insider information to complement the assessments coming from abroad. A highly recommended collection!” –Stephen M. Hart, University College London

Delving deeply into the archives, Pasado de Moda is an interdisciplinary project that tells the story of Argentine fashion and consumption practices. It has been heralded by the Argentine national press as a "must read" and, in the eyes of one critic, one of "the most astute cultural histories published in some time". The book's launch has been accompanied by a fashions past exhibit.

Citizens of Memory explores efforts at recollection in post-dictatorship Argentina and the hoped-for futures they set in motion. The material, visual, narrative, and pedagogical interventions it analyzes address the dark years of state repression (1976-1983) while engaging ongoing debates about how this traumatic past should be transmitted to future generations.

Images of the city in literature and film help constitute the experience of modern life. Studies of the Japanese city have focused on Tokyo, but a fuller understanding of urban space and life requires analysis of other cities, beginning with Osaka. Japan’s “merchant capital” in the late sixteenth century, Osaka remained an industrial center—the “Manchester of the East”—into the 1930s, developing a distinct urban culture to rival Tokyo’s. It therefore represents a critical site of East Asian modernity. Osaka Modern maps the city as imagined in Japanese popular culture from the 1920s to the 1950s, a city that betrayed the workings of imperialism and asserted an urban identity alternative to—even subversive of—national identity.

Osaka Modern brings an appreciation of this imagined city’s emphatic locality to: popular novels by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, favorite son Oda Sakunosuke, and best-seller Yamasaki Toyoko; films by Toyoda Shirō and Kawashima Yūzō; and contemporary radio, television, music, and comedy. Its interdisciplinary approach creates intersections between Osaka and various theoretical concerns—everyday life, coloniality, masculinity, translation—to produce not only a fresh appreciation of key works of literature and cinema, but also a new focus for these widely-used critical approaches.

 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975187

Mención de honor [Honorable Mention], Premio Roggiano de la Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 2018.  Awarded by the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana (IILI) to an outstanding monograph on Latin American Literature & Culture published in Spanish or Portuguese during 2016 & 2017.

Against the normative proto-Mexican and criollista reading of Grandeza mexicana (1604), El imperio de la virtud positions Bernardo de Balbuena's work in an Atlantic context and hence interprets it as a political assertion of the natural right of peninsular émigrés to rule New Spain.

The book offers an updated biography of Balbuena that reminds us of his ties to the Iberian Peninsula, and traces the pre-modern rhetorical, scientific, geopolitical, and economic paradigms upon which Grandeza mexicana is designed. Thus, the work analyzes Balbuena's encomium of Mexico City as a political prise de position in favor of peninsular émigrés like Balbuena himself, who are allegedly endowed with the moral and intellectual virtues needed to direct the spiritual and temporal life of the viceroyalty, and against the morally deficient criollos and the barbaric Indians.

El imperio de la virtud invites us to reassess the role that Balbuena and Grandeza mexicana play in the cultural history of present-day Mexico.

https://boydellandbrewer.com/el-imperio-de-la-virtud-hb.html

 Professors Alexander Prokhorov and Elena Prokhorova have published a pioneering book that examines Soviet film and television of the 1970s as mature industries articulating diverse cultural values via new genre models. During the 1970s, Soviet cinema and television developed a parallel system of genres where television texts celebrated conservative consensus while films manifested symptoms of ideological and social crises. The book examines the genres of state-sponsored epic films, police procedural, comedy and melodrama, and outlines how television gradually emerged as the major form of Russo-Soviet popular culture. Through close analysis of well-known film classics of the period as well as less familiar films and television series, this groundbreaking work helps to deconstruct the myth of this era as a time of cultural and economic stagnation and also helps us to understand the persistence of this myth in the collective memory of Putin-era Russia. This monograph is the first book-length English-language study of film and television genres of the late Soviet era.

 http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/film-and-television-genres-of-the-late-soviet-era-9781441177292/

The innovative French media artist and prankster provocateur Fred Forest first gained notoriety in 1972 when he inserted a small blank space in Le Monde, called it 150 cm² of Newspaper (150 cm² de papier journal), and invited readers to fill in the space with their own work and mail their efforts to him. In 1977, he satirized speculation in both the art and real estate markets by offering the first parcel of officially registered “artistic square meters” of undeveloped rural land for sale at an art auction. Although praised by leading media theorists- Vilem Flusser lauded Forest as “the artist who pokes holes in media” – Forest’s work has been largely ignored by the canon making authorities. Forest calls himself “France’s most famous unknown artist.” In this book, Michael Leruth offers the first book-length consideration of this iconoclastic artist, examining Forest’s work from the 1960’s to the present.

Leruth shows that Forest chooses alternative platforms (newspapers, mock commercial ventures, video-based interactive social interventions, media hacks and hybrids, and, more recently, the Internet) that are outside the exclusive precincts of the art world. A fierce critic of the French contemporary art establishment, Forest famously sued the Centre Pompidou in 1994 over its opaque acquisition practice. After making foundational contributions to Sociological Art in the 1970’s and the Aesthetics of Communication in the 1980’s, the pioneering Forest saw the Internet as another way for artists to bypass the art establishment in the 1990’s. Arguing that there is a strong utopian quality in Forest’s work, Leruth sees this utopianism not as naïve or conventional but as reverse utopianism: rather than envisioning an impossible ideal, Forest reenvisions and probes the quasi-utopia of our media-augmented everyday reality. The interface is the symbolic threshold to be crossed with an open mind.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fred-forests-utopia

 Using a process-writing approach, this third-year composition text helps students master writing skills, gain confidence as writers, discover that writing -- even in a foreign language -- can be a pleasure. The text is set up in a workbook format and is written entirely in French, except for the first chapter. Students broaden their repertoire of related speech acts, vocabulary, grammatical structures, and stylistic elements through three major sections. Each chapter features a model text -- a literary piece, journalistic selection, or informal writing -- that represents the Francophone world. The book ends with an introduction to “research papers.”

In today’s world, we all live entre culturas; that is, we live around and among people and influences from a variety of cultures. As we live, learn, work, and play in our communities and abroad, we interact in person and online with people whose experiences and perspectives may be different from our own.

Those who are willing to learn how to demonstrate empathy, tolerance, sensitivity, flexibility, and respect when communicating with people from other cultures can truly become global citizens, valued at home and across the world.

Wayside Publishing’s teacher-authors designed the learning materials in the EntreCulturas program to help students communicate Spanish, and to develop the attitudes and habits of mind to interact appropriately with Spanish speakers. Respecting differences and recognizing the many things we all share as human beings.

https://waysidepublishing.com/titles/spanish/entreculturas-2

 The birth of photography coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the Middle East, and some of the medium's earliest images are Orientalist pictures taken by Europeans in such places as Cairo and Jerusalem—photographs that have long shaped and distorted the Western visual imagination of the region. But the Middle East had many of its own photographers, collectors, and patrons. In this book, Stephen Sheehi presents a groundbreaking new account of early photography in the Arab world.

The Arab Imago concentrates primarily on studio portraits by Arab and Armenian photographers in the late Ottoman Empire. Examining previously known studios such as Abdullah Frères, Pascal Sébah, Garabed Krikorian, and Khalil Raad, the book also provides the first account of other pioneers such as Georges and Louis Saboungi, the Kova Brothers, Muhammad Sadiq Bey, and Ibrahim Rif'at Pasha—as well as the first detailed look at early photographs of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. In addition, the book explores indigenous photography manuals and albums, newspapers, scientific journals, and fiction.

Featuring extensive previously unpublished images, The Arab Imago shows how native photography played an essential role in the creation of modern Arab societies in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon before the First World War. At the same time, the book overturns Eurocentric and Orientalist understandings of indigenous photography and challenges previous histories of the medium.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10695.html

 Since its economic boom in the late 1950s, Italy has grappled with the environmental legacy of rapid industrial growth and haphazard urban planning. One notable effect is a preponderance of interstitial landscapes such as abandoned fields, polluted riverbanks, and makeshift urban gardens. Landscapes in Between analyses authors and filmmakers – Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gianni Celati, Simona Vinci, and the duo Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco – who turn to these spaces as productive models for coming to terms with the modified natural environment.

Considering the ways in which sixty years’ worth of Italian literary and cinematic representations engage in the ongoing dialogue between nature and culture, Monica Seger contributes to the transnational expansion of environmental humanities. Her book also introduces an ecocritical framework to Italian studies in English. Rejecting a stark dichotomy between human construction and unspoilt nature, Landscapes in Between will be of interest to all those studying the fraught relationship between humanity and environment.

http://www.utppublishing.com/Landscapes-in-Between-Environmental-Change-in-Modern-Italian-Literature-and-Film.html

Japan's so-called 'peace constitution' renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation, and bans the nation from possessing any war potential. Yet Japan also maintains a large, world-class military organization, namely the Self-Defence Forces (SDF). In this book, Tomoyuki Sasaki explores how the SDF enlisted popular support from civil society and how civil society responded to the growth of the SDF. 
Japan's Postwar Military and Civil Society details the interactions between the SDF and civil society over four decades, from the launch of rearmament in 1950. These interactions include recruitment, civil engineering, disaster relief, anti-SDF litigation, state financial support for communities with bases, and a fear-mongering campaign against the Soviet Union. By examining these wide-range issues, the book demonstrates how the militarization of society advanced as the SDF consolidated its ideological and socio-economic ties with civil society and its role as a defender of popular welfare. While postwar Japan is often depicted as a peaceful society, this book challenges such a view, and illuminates the prominent presence of the military in people's everyday lives.

 http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/japans-postwar-military-and-civil-society-9781350024823/

Visualizing Violence in Francophone Cultures brings together two complex and powerful loci of meaning: violence and the visual. As such, it offers a comprehensive overview from which one can gain a better understanding of the complexity of the visual rhetoric of violence. The visual representations of violence explored in this volume include both fictional works, including, for example, narrative films, graphic novels, and theatre, and non-fictional genres, such as news media and cultural artifacts. This volume’s strength is also grounded in its interdisciplinary approach; by bringing together scholars from a variety of academic fields to examine a broad range of visual artifacts, such as photography, graphic novel, films, paintings, objects, the book offers a substantive corpus focusing on the rhetoric of violence. The essays collected in this volume explore the ways in which visual expressions of violence have infiltrated diverse narrative forms, and, as such, how they both construct and challenge general understandings of contemporary violence. They all chart, with cultural and historical specificity, the way in which images of violence shape the visual imaginary of ethical worlds.

 http://www.cambridgescholars.com/visualizing-violence-in-francophone-cultures

Applying a broad geographical approach to comparative Latino literary and cultural studies, Continental Shifts illuminates how the discursive treatment of Latinos changed dramatically following the enactment of NAFTA—a shift exacerbated by 9/11. While previous studies of immigrant representation have focused on single regions (the US/Mexico border in particular), specific genres (literature vs. political rhetoric), or individual groups, Continental Shifts unites these disparate discussions in a provocative, in-depth examination.

 Bringing together a wide range of groups and genres, this intercultural study explores novels by Latin American and Latino writers, a border film by Tommy Lee Jones and Guillermo Arriaga, “viral” videos of political speeches, popular television programming (particularly shows that feature incarceration and public shaming), and user-generated YouTube videos. These cultural products reveal the complexity of Latino representations in contemporary discourse. While tropes of Latino migrants as threatening, diseased foreign bodies date back to the nineteenth century, Continental Shifts marks the more pernicious, recent images of Latino laborers (legal and not) in a variety of contemporary media. Using vivid examples, John Riofrio demonstrates the connections between rhetorical and ideological violence and the physical and psychological violence that has more intensely plagued Latino communities in recent decades. Culminating with a consideration of the “American” identity, this eye-opening work ultimately probes the nation’s ongoing struggle to uphold democratic ideals amid dehumanizing multiethnic tension.

 https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/riofrio-continental-shifts

This is the first broad treatment of German genre fiction, containing innovative new essays on a variety of genres and foregrounding concerns of gender, environmentalism, and memory in the genres of science fiction, detective fiction and poplit. Some of the most exciting research and teaching today in the field of German Studies is being done on "genre fiction," including detective fiction, science fiction, and what is often called "poplit," to name but a few. Such non-canonical literature has long been marginalized by the German tradition of Bildung and the disciplinary practice of German literary studies (Germanistik). Even today, when the examination of non-canonical texts is well established and uncontroversial in other academic contexts, such texts remain understudied in German, not least because of the German concept of “Bildung” and its influence on the standard canon. . And yet, the trend toward "German Studies" and "cultural studies" approaches within the field has raised considerable interest in the analysis of genre fiction, resulting in both a great deal of new scholarship and a range of new courses. Written in accessible English, it speaks to a wide variety of disciplines beyond German Studies.

Contributors: Bruce B. Campbell, Ray Canoy, Kerry Dunne, Sonja Fritzsche, Maureen O. Gallagher, Adam R. King, Molly Knight, Vibeke Rützou Petersen, Evan Torner, and Ailsa Wallace.

https://boydellandbrewer.com/detectives-dystopias-and-poplit-hb.html

Exposer l'" autre". Essai sur la Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration et le Musée du quai Branly. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2014.  In 2006 and 2007 two new museums were inaugurated in Paris: the Musée du Quai Branly and the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l‘Immigration. They were promising a renewal of the museum landscape in Paris. Both present the Other through a collection of artefacts and art objects: the Quai Branly  with objects from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and through the history of immigration to France from the 19^th-century to the 21^st-century for the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l‘Immigration. Both lie at the crossing of today’s globalization, the age of memory and the age of mediatization. How is the Other represented? Do these museums contribute to a rewriting of a shared world history? And of a transnational and transcultural French national history? Which discourses construct those museums? Does a real dialog between the various cultures exist? How do these museums explain and celebrate transversal, transnational and transcultural influences in the creation of national and international histories and patrimonies — or do they in fact do something else?

While these museums apparently honor and celebrate in gorgeous settings the Other (immigrants and non-western art), they end up dominating and controlling them because they offer only a partial image of them. Both museums in their permanent exhibits reveal a deep unease which France still has towards different cultures (for example, daily objects are exhibited without mention of their origin, their creator, their function or the reason they ended it up in the Musée du Quai Branly; or very little is explained about the reasons why immigrants came to France, or what a positive impact they had or are having on France). Paradoxically, these museums end up putting France on stage rather than their ostensible subjects; they portray France’s military and colonial history, and display a civilization that is afraid of others and wedded to appearances.

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“The editors of this timely and comprehensive overview of fashion studies have done an outstanding job of creating a valuable and cohesive work from the contributions of more than thirty respected scholars. This well-integrated work addresses a broad range of contemporary issues central to academics, independent scholars and other practitioners working in disciplines and professions related to fashion studies. It is a welcome resource.” –  Phyllis Tortora, The City University of New York, USA,

“The Handbook of Fashion Studies will be an extremely useful resource for students, and for their teachers.  With new and insightful essays from an impressive and international range of contributors, the Handbook offers definition to, and critique of, the developing field of Fashion Studies.  This volume includes essential reading for anyone interested in the significance of the study of fashion to our times.” – Hazel Clark, Research Chair of Fashion, Parsons the New School for Design, New York, USA,

“The Handbook of Fashion Studies is a well assembled collection of essays that establishes the and builds upon scholarship in this field.  It is a wonderful starting point for both new and established academicians, as well as practitioners who are interested in broadening their understandings to the globality of fashion and how it impacts our lives.” –  Joseph H. Hancock, II, Drexel University, USA.,

Trees and tree products have long been central to human life and culture, taking on intensified significance during the long eighteenth century. As basic raw material they were vital economic resources, objects of international diplomatic and commercial exchange, and key features in local economies. In an age of ongoing deforestation, both individuals and public entities grappled with the complex issues of how and why trees mattered.

In this interdisciplinary volume, contributors build on recent research in environmental history, literary and material culture, and postcolonial studies to develop new readings of the ways trees were valued in the eighteenth century. They trace changes in early modern theories of resource management and ecology across European and North American landscapes, and show how different and sometimes contradictory practices were caught up in shifting conceptions of nature, social identity, physical health and moral wellbeing.

In an innovative and thought‐provoking exploration of the human relationship with trees, contributors to Invaluable trees: cultures of nature, 1660–1830 argue for new ways of understanding the long eighteenth century and its values, and help re‐frame the environmental challenges of our own time.

Este libro ofrece un detallado análisis de la producción cultural realizada dentro de los campos de concentración en Francia para refugiados españoles a raíz de la guerra civil española. Recupera la compleja memoria cultural de una población de refugiados de guerra cuyas historias como internos en campos franceses no han sido tan ampliamente difundidas ni han recibido la atención detenida de la crítica y tiene como centro de su investigación la función discursiva de los campos en el terreno simbólico del imaginario nacional del exilio, lo cual, por un lado, produce un lugar conmemorativo dentro de la memoria colectiva y, por otro, expresa la legitimidad y la autoridad moral de una comunidad política desarraigada.

http://www.anthropos-editorial.com/DETALLE/CULTURAS-DEL-EXILIO-ESPANOL-ENTRE-LAS-ALAMBRADAS-MR-050

 Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims examines the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments in the West following the end of the Cold War through GW Bush’s War on Terror to the Age of Obama. Using “Operation Desert Storm” as a watershed moment, Stephen Sheehi examines the increased mainstreaming of Muslim-bating rhetoric and explicitly racist legislation, police surveillance, witch-trials and discriminatory policies towards Muslims in North America and abroad.

The book focuses on the various genres and modalities of Islamophobia from the works of rogue academics to the commentary by mainstream journalists, to campaigns by political hacks and special interest groups. Some featured Islamophobes are Bernard Lewis. Fareed Zakaria,Thomas Friedman, David Horowitz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. Their theories and opinions operate on an assumption that Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, suffer from particular cultural lacuna that prevent their cultures from progress, democracy and human rights. While the assertion originated in the colonial era, Sheehi demonstrates that it was refurbished as a viable explanation for Muslim resistance to economic and cultural globalization during the Clinton era. Moreover, the theory was honed into the empirical basis for an interventionist foreign policy and propaganda campaign during the Bush regime and continues to underlie Barack Obama’s new internationalism.

If the assertions of media pundits and rogue academics became the basis for White House foreign policy, Sheehi also demonstrates how they were translated into a sustained domestic policy of racial profiling and Muslim-baiting by agencies from Homeland Security to the Department of Justice. Furthermore, Sheehi examines the collusion between non-governmental agencies, activist groups and lobbies and local, state and federal agencies in suppressing political speech on US campuses critical of racial profiling, US foreign policy in the Middle East and Israel. While much of the direct violence against Muslims on American streets, shops and campuses has subsided, Islamophobia runs throughout the Obama administration. Sheehi, therefore, concludes that Muslim and Arab-hating emanate from all corners of the American political and cultural spectrum, serving poignant ideological functions in the age of economic, cultural and political globalization.

 http://www.claritypress.com/Sheehi.html

The third edition of this process-oriented composition text is enhanced with many new features such as pair and group activities, a Student Companion Website (including a brief grammar review, associated practice activities and a list of common mistakes for each chapter and their corrections), a new chapter addressing the politics of ecology, a chapter on “commentaire composé” and a guide for writing research papers.

A vous de voir ! De l’idée au projet filmique (Paris : Casteilla, 2010) is a multimedia work written in French and designed to teach both film analysis and the active, step by step process of film production, starting with the initial subject, the synopsis and storyboard in pre-production, to the production and post-production. Each chapter is comprised of the critical analyses of three French/Francophone films (by, among others, Raja Amari, Yamina Benguigui, Luc Besson, Sylvain Chomet,  Agnès Jaoui, Bertrand Tavernier, Moufida Tlatli, François Truffaut, and  Agnès Varda) and explains and illustrates a specific stage in movie-making.

Volume 1 focuses on the analysis of the synopsis, the characters and the script, as well as a glossary of key concepts (1. Professions in the cinema industry, 2. technical concepts and  3. critical concepts). For lecture preparations, the instructor’s CD-Rom contains answers to all exercises, various case studies, suggestions for essay assignments and lectures (e.g. the analysis of various well-known paintings, or “how to write a film analysis,” and a list of internet sites related to the cinema industry).

Volume 2 (forthcoming in 2011) approaches the storyboard, the mise en scène, the shooting, editing and the promotion and marketing tools through the analysis of works by French and Francophone directors not included in the first volume, such as Jeunet, Haneke, Belmont, Clouzot.

In Couture and Consensus, Regina A. Root shows how politics emerged from dress to disrupt authoritarian practices and stimulate creativity in a newly independent nation following Argentina’s revolution in 1810. An insightful presentation of the discourse of fashion, Couture and Consensus also paints a riveting portrait of Argentine society in the nineteenth century—its politics, people, and creative forces.

In her brilliantly argued book, Regina A. Root writes Argentine history through material culture. Tracing the highly symbolic and coded role of fashion beyond the domestic world, she convincingly argues for its centrality as a path for understanding collective identity. In a fascinating study that ranges from flaunted ‘peinetones,’ to uniforms in their highly coded colors, encasing male and female citizens as agents or objects of control, Root locates the many and varied elements of clothing in the centre of national history. Beautifully written and robustly anchored in the archive, the book’s many discoveries will attract students and faculty alike.

--Diana Sorensen, Harvard University

Stock focuses on what she calls Street Filmmaking--the production of emerging audiovisual artists who work outside the state film industry--to examine the island's transformation and changing notions of Cuban identity. Employing entrepreneurial approaches to producing art and to negotiating the exigencies of globalization, this younger generation of filmmakers offers fresh perspectives on what it means to be Cuban in an increasingly complex and connected world.

Although aimed at ephemeral gratification, the French novel of the 1980-1990s stresses openness to the other and provokes enduring questions. It no longer reflects a quest for cultural coherence or linguistic purity, but a multiplicity of trajectories that demonstrate strategies of coexistence.

The visual image both influences and competes with the written text in some novels: Toussaint decries the era of the spectacle and the reign of idolatry; Duras translates the un-representable. Other texts fight against oblivion: Lê re-members the colonial past and evokes the integration of immigrants in France; Ernauxdelineates the commemorative traces of working-class identity. Others focus on the private sphere: Redonnet unfolds a utopic imagination in order to overcome a conflictual present dominated by technology and profit ; Sebbar creates nomadic characters in order to narrate hybridity in daily life. All display a dissident writing practice.

The literary production of landscape in the French-writing world, whether in Quebec, Morocco or Mauritius, is not new, but over the past fifty years it has developed added significance. As the dynamics of globalization continue to displace bodies around the world and deterritorialize its subjects, the relevance of land and landscape as a potent source for cultural identity, nationalist aspirations, and alternative post-nationalist subjectivities continues to grow. The essays in this collection examine contemporary literature in French from and in multiple spaces around the world, and consider the ways the vernacular and the local-as well as the virtual and transnational-re-claim, re-map and re-fashion post-colonial, national, cultural and ethnic landscapes while also questioning both the limits and challenges to this imagination. Contributors address landscape as an imaginary, constructed, and negotiated literary space rather than an unproblematic transcription of an external geographic reality, and through this prism explore images of dispossession, resistance, and re-appropriation. These essays link the literary conquest of nature to the process of writing/righting a history of imperialism and neocolonialism, locate in nature the rhythms of a material identity and metaphysical reality beyond urban and industrial capitalism, use landscape to explore the psychic disturbances of displacement, and call for a reinvention of places of memory. The collection aims to illuminate what can best be described as a Francographie that traces in multiple hands tenuous if not altogether uncertain geographies and unfinished maps. Katarzyna Pieprzak is an Assistant Professor at Williams College in the Department of Romance Languages and Program in Comparative Literature. Magali Compan is an Assistant Professor at William & Mary, Williamsburg, where she teaches Francophone Literatures and Cultures. Cover image courtesy of Jennyfer Machuca.

From Amazon.com: Best-selling INTERACTION is a complete program offering unparalleled support for the study of culture, literature, and language at the intermediate level. This edition continues to offer a systematic and unified presentation of intermediate structures and functions. A one-book format combines the best of a complete grammar text and a literary and cultural reader in one convenient, easy-to-use manual. 

Winner of the 2006 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize, awarded by the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, and shortlisted for the national 2006 Milia L. Davenport Award, this volume received honorable mention at the Costume Society of America 2006 symposium. Elle Magazine in Argentina chose it as book of the month in June 2005, with reviews later appearing in Foreign Affairs, Journal of American Studies, among others. From the tango-inspired dress of Argentina and guerilla chic in downtown Buenos Aires to swimwear on Copacabana Beach and the rainbow that adorns Mayan women, Latin America has long been a source of inspiration for designers throughout the world. This book examines the significance of textiles and dress to Latin American culture and the reasons behind it - from fashion history to popular culture and the (re)making of traditional garments, such as the poncho, the guayabera and maguey cactus fiber sandals. It also considers Latin American fashion's global impact, visible in chains and mass-produced fashions, and the international worship of fashion icons such as Frida Kahlo and Eva Perón.

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A Journal of Medieval Spanish Language, Literature and Cultural Studies sponsored by the MLA Division on Medieval Spanish. An award winning publication in its 33rd year, and 11th under the Editorship of George Greenia, it publishes over 500 pages of scholarly work each year in English and Spanish. La corónica awards two prizes of its own, the John K. Walsh Award for best article published in each volume and an annual International Book Award for the best monograph published in any country on the research interests of this sector of Medieval Studies.

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Written and designed for advanced learners of Chinese, this book and its accompanying audio program focus on the variety of linguistic strategies that are essential in real-life communications. The lessons include texts that are representative of current life in China and that are authentic works of literature. Five types of discourse are considered in detail—narration, description, persuasion, exposition, and lyrical expression.

With carefully crafted vocabulary, grammar, and exercise sections in each lesson, the book assists learners in improving writing and speaking skills, recognizing the difference between colloquial discourse and more formal discourse, and acquiring a sophisticated understanding of the meanings and nuances of the language. The authors also include a useful list of supplementary readings that may be used to enhance the texts in the book. An mp3 CD is included with the book.

http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300104639/advanced-chinese

 "Examines a crucial period in Arabic literature which has received insufficient attention previously--the pre-modern writers of the 19th century . . . whose journalism and fiction not only shaped contemporary opinion but also subtly molded the contours and boundaries of discourse for the generations that followed."--Michael Beard, University of North Dakota

Dynamic and original, this study of the formation of modern Arab identity discusses the work of "pioneers of the Arab Renaissance," both renowned and forgotten--a pantheon of intellectuals, reformers, and journalists whose writing until now has been mostly untranslated.

Against the backdrop of European imperialism in the Arab world, these literati planted the roots of modernity though their experiments in language, rhetoric, and literature. In both fiction and nonfiction they generated a radically new sense of Arab identity. At the same time, Sheehi argues, they created the terrain that produced an Arab preoccupation with "failure" and a perception of Western "superiority"--the terms intellectuals themselves used in the 19th century in diagnosing their cultural crisis.

Neglected by historians, this ambivalent and contradictory state of consciousness is at the heart of the ideology of Arab identity, Sheehi says, and it describes a variety of subjective positions that Arabs would adopt throughout the 20th century. It became the intellectual quicksand for the Arab world's confrontation with colonialism, capitalist expansion, and individual state formation.

Using psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, Sheehi looks at texts by writers such as Butrus al-Bustani, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, and Muhammad Abduh. His analysis deconstructs popular and academic perceptions--especially prevalent after 9/11--that Arabs have failed to internalize modernity. Indeed, he says, Christian secularists, Islamic modernists, and romantic nationalists alike have produced a body of knowledge and shared an epistemology that constitute modernity in the Arab world.

Starting in Middle Eastern literature and intellectual history and ending in postcolonial studies, this groundbreaking work offers a sophisticated counter-theoretical framework for understanding and reevaluating modern Arabic literature and also the history and historiography of Arab nationalism. 

 http://upf.com/book.asp?id=SHEEHS04

Author Nelly Richard is one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America today. As a participant in Chile's neo-avantgarde, Richard worked to expand the possibilities for cultural debate within the constraints imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), and she has continued to offer incisive commentary about the country's transition to democracy. Well known as the founder and director of the influential Santiago-based journal Revista de crítica cultural, Richard has been central to the dissemination throughout Latin America of work by key contemporary thinkers, including Néstor García Canclini, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, and Diamela Eltit. Her own writing provides rigorous considerations of Latin American identity, postmodernism, gender, neoliberalism, and strategies of political and cultural resistance. (excerpted from Amazon.com) Co-translated with Alice Nelson.  

The first of a three-volume illustrated encylopedia on the authors of Medieval Castilian, Latin and Hebrew. Co-Editor: Frank Domínguez (UNC-Chapel Hill). The entire project embraces articles by a hundred authors totaling over a million words.

The senior editor of "Juntos" , Josef Hellebrandt, finds inspiration in the following challenge to higher education: "Our great universities simply cannot afford to remain islands of affluence, self-importance and horticultural beauty in seas of squalor, violence and despair" (Harkavay). Hellebrandt, Lucía T. Varona (my fellow co-editor) and I set out to discover how faculty in Spanish and Hispanic Studies across the country traverse disciplinary boundaries, use technology and adapt new theories of learning as they design service-learning courses. It is our hope that this volume will help others develop their praxis, make our universities less insular, and develop the skills and intellect of students in the Humanities so they become engaged citizens who can work with Latino communities.  

Translation, with Alice Nelson, of Nelly Richard's La insubordinacion de los signos.

Second edition of a process-oriented composition text with new literary pieces, a new organisation, new writing assignments differentiating between four phases of the writing process. Each chapter ends with essays written by students from universities in the US : five of the eight essays have been written by students from William & Mary in FR 305!

2005 "Honorable Mention" recipient of the Modern Language Association's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for outstanding book published in English in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures & cultures. --"A remarkable research project on an important and neglected topic, this book makes public the record of Spanish refugees who had crossed the border following the Civil War, only to find themselves interned in concentration campus during World War II. It is impressive as a historical document, but it is also the work of a sensitive, analytical, and theoretically informed reader of literature. The combination of these elements and the diverse gifts of the author make the study spellbinding and moving, in short, an impeccable work of scholarship. Its historical and literary gap-filling merits close attention and acclaim."--Citation by MLA Selection Committee.  

This book gathers critical and poetic voices to analyze the politics of packaging and marketing Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the U.S. The ground swell of enthusiasm in the U.S., the contributors argue, has relied upon a vastly oversimplified, romanticized, and depoliticized interpretation of Neruda as panacea -- offering healing visions of community, hope, and wonder. The essays gathered here rediscover the richness to be found in Neruda and challenge the poet's commodification in the U.S. marketplace.

Death Squads are killing people today. They may be found around the world, and in many different types of states. Campbell and Brenner have gathered scholars from several countries and disciplines to produce the first global comparison of death squads, and the first to put them in historical perspective. Available in hardcover and paperback.

"Springtime for Soviet Cinema" explores the role of the film industry in the destalinization of Soviet culture. The volume pays special attention to the rise of auteurism as a cultural and industrial phenomenon in the Soviet cinema of the 1960s.

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Poetry. In Spanish. Contact author for availability. De la Contra-portada: En su primer poemario...Tandeciarz se desliza de la muerte a la vida y de la negación ("la soledad es infinita/la vida no") a la afirmación. La poesía de Tandeciarz niega--exorcisa--la soledad. Sobre los espacios en blanco que marcan las separaciones de su vida, ha inscrito amor, "un amor que a veces muerde," y "un amor que se vuelca en ternura." Sus exorcismos son a la vez "un tango que necesita aprender a bailar sola" y "un abrazo interminable." Sus poemas llenan las ausencias con el lenguaje de la vida: "erizos, caracoles, estrellas, soles, dientes de tiburón, algas, aguas vivas." Es, finalmente, esta tensión poética--el acto de escribir en la encrucijada del amor y la muerte, de la ausencia y la comunión--la que transporta a Tandeciarz del espacio en blanco hacia la liberación por medio de las palabras. (Teresa Longo)

No part of the Nazi movement contributed more to Hitler's success than the Sturmabteilung (SA) -- the notorious Brown Shirts. Bruce Campbell offers the first in-depth study in English of the men who held the three highest ranks in the SA. Organized on military lines and fired by radical nationalism, the Brown Shirts saw themselves as Germany's paramilitary saviors.

"Arguing for a 'postnational critical praxis,' Stock has gathered twelve essays on audiovisual culture in Latin America which, taken together, examine the geopolitical assumptions often underlying audiovisual criticism and the politics of production and reception across cinema's first century." --Kathleen Newman review 

Generaciones is an advanced composition and conversation text for college Spanish. It features a process approach to writing through which students gather ideas by reading from current articles in the Spanish press worldwide. Brainstorming exercises, vocabulary building, collaborative writing and peer review are key elements in this book which has been used at colleges and universities - and not a few advanced secondary schools - throughout the country. It includes a special "Appéndice" on Advanced Placement Spanish from ETS with official scoring rubrics and actual essay questions from past AP national exams. It also offers suggestions for college teachers on how to draw on writing skills developed in high school AP Spanish programs. The title Generaciones alludes to the multiple generations among which Hispanics live, the generations or stages of our own lives, our growing maturity as writers, and the successive generations our own drafts go through as we generate ideas and fresh ways to express them.

Volume II of La Civilisation....introduces the reader to post-war France and continues up to the Chirac presidency. It contains many authentic texts with background information to help set the stage for the readings. Articles from Le Nouvel Observateur, Midi Libre, Le Monde, and excerpts from Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous and Alain Peyrefitte offer first-hand insights into modern French culture.

La Civlisation française en évolution, Vol. 1 is a modern and provocative look at French history and civilization from pre-history to the Fifth Republic. Organized into six dossiers, each dossier examines a particular facet of France's development. The text includes useful timelines, glossing, authentic texts and thought-provoking questions.

This book is a process-oriented composition text intended for students who have completed two years of college-level study of French. The goals of the book are two-fold: improving students' written expression, in terms of both accuracy and content; and reducing writing anxiety so that students can write with more ease and less fear of the teacher's or another reader's corrective feedback. It was conceived with a variety of teaching contexts in mind. It thus contains a wide range of exercise and writing formats, including form-focused, teacher-initiated exercises, partner and small-group creative and editing activities, as well as structured and free writing assignments for individual work.

In the early and mid 18th century, interpretation of texts was conceived as the rational and charitable representation of the author's ideas in accordance with the rules of reason, rhetoric, and semiotics. Around 1770, however, this model of interpretation is eclipsed by a theory of hermeneutic reading that stresses the historical position of the hermeneutic agent, the claims made by the text on the interpretive structure of the reader, and the constitutive incomprehensibility of the text. Analyzing works of G.E. Lessing, J.G. Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, as well as the institutional conditions created by the Philological Seminar in Goettingen under Christian Gottlob Heyne, this book attempts to trace this turning point in the history of textual hermeneutics.

Reading After Foucault presents new readings of German literature, letters, and culture from 1750 to 1830, based upon the pioneering work of the late Michel Foucault. Discussing the structures of historical-thought systems, the emergence of the human sciences, modern institutions of reading and writing, and technologies of self-fashioning, the authors extend Foucault's research into the system of writing technologies and power relations and reexamine the canon and the disciplines and institutions which make it possible. The book seeks to contribute to a "history of the present" by analyzing the networks in and through which literary modernity has been manufactured. New readings of Wezel, Kleist, Reinhold, Herder, Schiller, Campe, Goethe, the story of Kaspar Hauser, Hölderlin, Hamann, and Novalis by Joel Black, Linda Brooks, Ken Calhoon, David Wellbery, Ruediger Campe, Franz Fuetterknecht, Friedrich Kittler, Dorothea von Muecke, Rob Leventhal, and Ian Hacking are featured.

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