You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
“Political Disappointment is an abundant text, overflowing with Sara Marcus’s considerable gifts. She is adept at presenting history and narrative with equal clarity; her writing is urgent but also optimistic. This is a book that is sometimes painful but never sacrifices hope or beauty.” —Hanif Abdurraqib Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and activists turned political disappointment—the unfulfilled desire for change—into a basis for solidarity. Sara Marcus argues that the defining texts in twentieth-century American cultural history are records of political disappoint...
"Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era is an ethnographic study of young singers in the Brooklyn Hasidic community who look to the gramophone-era cantorial golden age for the stylistic basis of their own aesthetic explorations. The book proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice within the conservative contemporary Hasidic community. Hasidic cantorial revivalists call upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to stage a disruption in the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their community and the aesthetics of prayer in contemporary American Jewish synagogue life outside the Hasidic world. Beyond its role as a desir...
Living Genres in Late Modernity rehears the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations of works, people, practices, institutions, technologies, money, conventions, forms, ideas, and multisensory experiences. What these genres share is a significant cultural moment: they arrive just after “the sixties” and are haunted by a sense of belatedness, loss, or doubt, even as they embrace narratives of progress or abundance. These genres give us reasons—and means—to examine our culture’s self-understandings. Through close readings and large-scale mappings of cultural and stylistic patterns, the book’s five linked studies reveal how genres help construct personal and cultural identities that are both partial and overlapping, that exist in tension with one another, and that we experience in ebbs and flows.
The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang’s trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an “odd girl” from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang’s singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot’s Fool, with a leap of faith.
It is tempting to affirm that on and about November 2022 (post)human character changed. The revolution in A.I. simulations certainly calls for an update of the ancient realization that humans are imitative animals, or homo mimeticus. But the mimetic turn in posthuman studies is not limited to A.I.: from simulation to identification, affective contagion to viral mimesis, robotics to hypermimesis, the essays collected in this volume articulate the multiple facets of homo mimeticus 2.0. Challenging rationalist accounts of autonomous originality internal to the history of Homo sapiens, this volume argues from different—artistic, philosophical, technological—perspectives that the all too human tendency to imitate is, paradoxically, central to our ongoing process of becoming posthuman.
From the late eighteenth century, the hinterlands of Northern Luzon and its Indigenous people were in the crosshairs of imperial and capitalist extraction. Combining the breadth of global history with the intimacy of biography, Adrian De Leon follows the people of Northern Luzon across space and time, advancing a new vision of the United States's Pacific empire that begins with the natives and migrants who were at the heart of colonialism and its everyday undoing. From the emergence of Luzon's eighteenth-century tobacco industry and the Hawaii Sugar Planters' Association's documentation of workers to the movement of people and ideas across the Suez Canal and the stories of Filipino farmworkers in the American West, De Leon traces "the Filipino" as a racial category emerging from the labor, subjugation, archiving, and resistance of native people. De Leon's imaginatively constructed archive yields a sweeping history that promises to reshape our understanding of race making in the Pacific world.
The memory of Cloudland at Boyd Street, Bowen Hills, Brisbane, Queensland, dredges up wonderful and scintillating images from our past. Who could ever forget Cloudland's beautiful pink dome nestled high against a twinkling and starry sky?
Community planning is starting to include a broader food systems focus, spanning topics such as nutrition and health outcomes, sustainable farming practices, economic and social implications of local food production, distribution, and consumption. Together, these issues are a driving force for the passions of those seeking positive change in their communities through healthy food. The purpose of this book is to explore how and where local food and farms, as part of a local or regional food system, can positively impact both economic development and overall well-being of communities. Across North America, there are good examples of the ways in which innovative local food systems provide oppor...
None