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The book explores the role of communication technologies in American cultural practice over the last 150 years. Communication technologies are here understood to include audio and visual reproduction technologies, analogue telecommunications such as traditional telephony, radio and television broadcasts, digital telecommunications, computer-mediated communications, telegraphy, and computer networks. The study of the impact of such technologies is a way to explore the various flows and tensions of American culture. How has American society molded communication technologies? How have they, in turn, shaped American history? Are Americans still, in the words of Thoreau, "tools of their tools"? More so or less than during the philosopher's Walden days? How do America's cultural, ethical, and economic assumptions determine and limit the ways in which telecommunications function in American society? Fascinating questions abound.
New essays providing fresh insights into the great 20th-century American poet Lowell, his writings, and his struggles.
This book explores our changing relationship with meat as food. Half storytelling and half historic work, it analyzes the way in which humans have dealt with the idea of eating animals in the Western world, from 1900 to the present. The story part of the book follows the rise and fall of meat, and illustrates how this type of food has become a problem in a more emotional way. The historical component informs and offers readers key data. The author draws on theories of circular societies, smart cities and smart countries to explain how and why forms of meat production that were common in the past have since all but disappeared. Both components, however, explain why meat has been important and...
How American Protestant missionaries created a new worldwide religious network Among a wide spectrum of American Protestants, the horrors of World War II triggered grave concern for Europe’s religious future. They promptly mobilised resources to revive Europe’s Christian foundation. Saving the Overlooked Continent reconstructs this surprising redirection of Western missions. For the first time, Europe became the recipient of America’s missionary enterprise. The American missionary impulse matched the military, economic, and political programs of the U.S., all of which positioned the United States to become Europe’s dominant partner and point of cultural reference. One result was the ...
This compilation of essays by 20 scholars trained in comparative literatures, art history, critical theory, and American cultural studies further explores and expands the spirited and energetic field of visual cultural studies and its cognate or supplemental projects of “visual practices” and “visual literacy.” Their topics and perspectives engage contemporary re-theorizations of “text,” of “word” and “image,” while their alignments, ruptures, slippages and aporias fall across a range of media practices and institutions. These include photography and exhibition, film, television, entertainment, journalism, poetry and literature as visual and spectacular performances, and graphic narratives, but also their discursive intersections with “race” and ethnicity, their conjugations of gender, their tense and constitutive relations within multiple public spheres and (post)modernities.
"Places of risk" and "sites of modernity" refer not merely to physical locations, but also objects and institutions that stand at the center of contemporary debates on security and risk. These are social and political domains where energy and infrastructure are produced, where domestic security is pursued and maintained, and where citizens encounter the state in its punitive or monitory roles. Taking a wide view of the period from the 1970s to today, this volume brings together innovative, interdisciplinary case studies of sites of modernity that promise to provide security and safety, yet at the same time are deemed responsible for creating new risks. With a particular contemporary interest in the technocratic changes of security and risk control the contributors to Sites of Modernity -- Places of Risk position the 1970s as a turning point in the path from industrial to post-industrial modernity.
Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage is a pioneering collection of commissioned critical essays on the work of the highly relevant Canadian writer. With four acclaimed novels and scattered short fictions, the Lebanese-born Hage has become a formidable literary force. The volume is an attempt to situate his fiction not only in the context of Lebanese diasporic writing, but that of trans-geographical literature, as well as to emphasize his progressive dissociation from the realist paradigm. The goal is also to correct an imbalance of critical attention by refocusing on Hage’s more recent, equally challenging work. The richness of Hage’s fiction is attested to by the diversity of thematic concerns and critical approaches. The volume reflects the worldwide range of Canada-oriented research, and places European perspectives alongside North American and Lebanese ones. Significantly, it features an original essay authored by Hage’s literary peer, Madeleine Thien. Contributors: F. Elizabeth Dahab, André Forget, Kyle Gamble, Syrine Hout, Ewa Macura-Nnamdi, Krzysztof Majer, Lisa Marchi, Judit Molnár, Alex Ramon, Rita Sakr, Dima Samaha, Madeleine Thien, Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka
Beyond Imagined Uniqueness: Nationalisms in Comparative Perspectives is a collection of essays from a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives that explore the contentious issue of nationalism in historical and contemporary settings. They adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of nationalism and its permutations and modes of expression. The unspoken context of these essays is the trends subsumed under the processes of globalization. Though the world may be becoming more integrated economically, these essays suggest social, cultural, and political forces, historically rooted, keep the nation and national identity alive and well. The comparative perspectives offered by the...
While in the last twenty years perceptions of Europe have been subjected to detailed historical scrutiny, American images of the Old World have been almost wantonly neglected. As a response to this scholarly desideratum, this pioneering study analyzes neoconservative images of Europe since the 1970s on the basis of an extensive collection of sources. With fresh insight into the evolution of American images of Europe as well as into the history of U.S. neoconservatism, the book appeals to readers familiar and new to the subject matters alike. The study explores how, beginning in the early 1970s, ideas of the United States as an anti-Europe have permeated neoconservative writing and shaped their self-images and political agitation. The choice of periodization and investigated personnel enables the author to refute popular claims that widespread Euro-critical sentiment in the United Studies during the early 21st century – considerably ignited by neoconservatives – was a distinct post-Cold War phenomenon. Instead, the analysis reveals that the fiery rhetoric in the context of the Iraq War debates was merely the climax of a decade-old development.
Jewish masculinity as a diverse set of adaptive reactions to masculine hegemony and the political, religious, and social realities of American Jews throughout the twentieth century. For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, but some have also...