Культурология

Различные книги в жанре Культурология

Celebrity

Andrea McDonnell

Fantasies of Identification

Ellen Samuels

In themid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult todistinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodiedor disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define theseidentities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in aliterally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visualculture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy ofidentification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed,verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks andfingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy hascirculated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to becomeone of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society. Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasydistorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language forclaimed objective fact. Fromits early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slavesin the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question ofsex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification exploresthe roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.

Difficult Diasporas

Samantha Pinto

Winner of the 2013 Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature In this comparative study of contemporary Black Atlantic women writers, Samantha Pinto demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, Difficult Diasporas brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrative Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length, non-narrative poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African Diaspora.Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship in her study of authors such as Jackie Kay, Elizabeth Alexander, Erna Brodber, Ama Ata Aidoo, among others, Pinto argues for the critical importance of cultural form and demands that we resist the impulse to prioritize traditional notions of geographic boundaries. Locating correspondences between seemingly disparate times and places, and across genres, Pinto fully engages the unique possibilities of literature and culture to redefine race and gender studies.

The Digital Edge

S. Craig Watkins

How black and Latino youth learn, create, and collaborate onlineThe Digital Edge examines how the digital and social-media lives of low-income youth, especially youth of color, have evolved amidst rapid social and technological change. While notions of the digital divide between the “technology rich” and the “technology poor” have largely focused on access to new media technologies, the contours of the digital divide have grown increasingly complex. Analyzing data from a year‐long ethnographic study at Freeway High School, the authors investigate how the digital media ecologies and practices of black and Latino youth have adapted as a result of the wider diffusion of the internet all around us–in homes, at school, and in the palm of our hands. Their eager adoption of different technologies forge new possibilities for learning and creating that recognize the collective power of youth: peer networks, inventive uses of technology, and impassioned interests that are remaking the digital world.Relying on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and hundreds of hours of observation in technology classes and after school programs, The Digital Edge carefully documents some of the emergent challenges for creating a more equitable digital and educational future. Focusing on the complex interactions between race, class, gender, geography and social inequality, the book explores the educational perils and possibilities of the expansion of digital media into the lives and learning environments of low-income youth. Ultimately, the book addresses how schools can support the ability of students to develop the social, technological, and educational skills required to navigate twenty-first century life.

Homegrown

Piotr M. Szpunar

An insightful study of how identity is mobilized in and for war in the face of homegrown terrorism. [b][/b]“You are either with us, or against us” is the refrain that captures the spirit of the global war on terror. Images of the “them” implied in this war cry—distinct foreign “others”—inundate Americans on hit television shows, Hollywood blockbusters, and nightly news. However, in this book, Piotr Szpunar tells the story of a fuzzier image: the homegrown terrorist, a foe that blends into the crowd, who Americans are told looks, talks, and acts “like us.” Homegrown delves into the dynamics of domestic counterterrorism, revealing the complications that arise when the terrorist threat involves Americans, both residents and citizens, who have taken up arms against their own country. Szpunar examines the ways in which identities are blurred in the war on terror, amid debates concerning who is “the real terrorist.” He considers cases ranging from the white supremacist Sikh Temple shooter,,to the Newburgh Four, ex-convicts caught up in an FBI informant-led plot to bomb synagogues, to ecoterrorists, to the Tsarnaev brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing. Drawing on popular media coverage, court documents, as well as “terrorist”-produced media, Szpunar poses new questions about the strategic deployment of identity in times of conflict. The book argues that homegrown terrorism challenges our long held understandings of how identity and difference play out in war—beyond “us versus them”—and, more importantly, that the way in which it is conceptualized and combatted has real consequences for social, cultural, and political notions of citizenship and belonging. The first critical examination of homegrown terrorism, this book will make you question how we make sense of the actions of ourselves and others in global war, and the figures that fall in between.

Unbecoming Blackness

Antonio López M.

In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in theU.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Bonds of Citizenship

Hoang Gia Phan

In this study of literature and law from the Constitutional founding through the Civil War, Hoang Gia Phan demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. Bonds of Citizenship illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. Phan argues that in the age of Emancipation the cultural attributes of free personhood became identified with the legal rights and privileges of the citizen, and that individual freedom thus became identified with the nation-state. He situates the emergence of American citizenship and the American novel within the context of Atlantic slavery and Anglo-American legal culture, placing early American texts by Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Brockden Brown alongside Black Atlantic texts by Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano. Beginning with a revisionary reading of the Constitution’s “slavery clauses,” Phan recovers indentured servitude as a transitional form of labor bondage that helped define the key terms of modern U.S. citizenship: mobility, volition, and contract. Bonds of Citizenship demonstrates how citizenship and civic culture were transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national Union, while analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville alongside a wide-ranging archive of lesser-known antebellum legal and literary texts in the context of changing conceptions of constitutionalism, property, and contract. Situated at the nexus of literary criticism, legal studies, and labor history, Bonds of Citizenship challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.

The Five Roles of a Master Herder

Linda Kohanov

Includes Assessment Tool for Analyzing Your Leadership Style and Becoming a Better Leader In The Five Roles of a Master Herder, Linda Kohanov adapts horse-inspired insights into powerful tools for developing collaborative leadership and managing change. Over thousands of years, Kohanov writes, “master herders” of nomadic herding cultures developed a multi-faceted, socially intelligent form of leadership combining the five roles of Dominant, Leader, Sentinel, Nurturer / Companion, and Predator . The fluid interplay of these roles allowed interspecies communities to move across vast landscapes, dealing with predators and changing climates, protecting and nurturing the herd while keeping massive, gregarious, often aggressive animals together — without the benefit of fences and with very little reliance on restraints. She includes an innovative assessment tool to help you determine which roles you currently overemphasize and which roles you may be ignoring — or even actively avoiding. Through this powerful and surprising book, Kohanov will show you how to recognize, cultivate, and utilize all five roles in the modern tribes of your workplace, family, and other social organizations.