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Surveying various works of travel literature, this text argues that travel writing redefines the myriad genres it often comprises.
Escaping his ghosts, AIDS widower David Masiello accepts a one-year position at a Western medical clinic in Beijing. Lonely but excited, he sets out to explore the city—both its bustling street life and its clandestine gay subculture. David chronicles his adventures in China as he wrestles with cultural dislocation, loneliness, and sexual and spiritual longing. After a series of both comic and poignant encounters with gay Chinese men, he meets Bosheng, a handsome young artist. Though the attraction is strong, a difficult courtship ensues, during which Bosheng returns to his ancestral village to marry the girl his parents have chosen for him. Eventually, and quite unexpectedly, David and Bo...
Frank Marshall Davis was a prominent poet, journalist, jazz critic, and civil rights activist on the Chicago and Atlanta scene from the 1920s through 1940s. He was an intimate of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and an influential editor at the Chicago Evening Bulletin, the Chicago Whip, the Chicago Star, and the Atlanta World. He renounced his writing career in 1948 and moved to Hawaii, forgotten until the Black Arts Movement rediscovered him in the 1960s. Because of his early self-exile from the literary limelight, Davis's life and work have been shrouded in mystery. Livin' the Blues offers us a chance to rediscover this talented poet and writer and stands as an important example of black autobiography, similar in form, style, and message to those of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. "Both a social commentary and intellectual exploration into African American life in the twentieth century."—Charles Vincent, Atlanta History
“This engaging, eye-opening book covers everything anyone would ever want to know about social media influencers." —Booklist, Starred Review Unpacks and pulls the curtain back on what happens to our brains and our behaviors each time we addictively engage social media and the influencers we encounter there. Individuals seeking to widen their tribes of friends, fans, and followers have an abundance of resources for building their digital footprints and social media popularity. All of this seems well and good from the perspective of revenue, exposure, and perhaps ego-building, but what is the impact of this on the human brain and our behavior? Is anyone paying attention to the lurking side...
In Dark Laughter, Juan F. Egea provides a remarkable in-depth analysis of the dark comedy film genre in Spain, as well as a provocative critical engagement with the idea of national cinema, the visual dimension of cultural specificity, and the ethics of dark humor. Egea begins his analysis with General Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s—a regime that opened the country to new economic forces while maintaining its repressive nature—exploring key works by Luis García Berlanga, Marco Ferreri, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, and Luis Buñuel. Dark Laughter then moves to the first films of Pedro Almodóvar in the early 1980s during the Spanish political transition to democracy before examining Alex de la Iglesia and the new dark comedies of the 1990s. Analyzing this younger generation of filmmakers, Egea traces dark comedy to Spain's displays of ultramodernity such as the Universal Exposition in Seville and the Barcelona Olympic Games. At its core, Dark Laughter is a substantial inquiry into the epistemology of comedy, the intricacies of visual modernity, and the relationship between cinema and a wider framework of representational practices.
How are culturally constructed stereotypes about appropriate sex-based behavior formed? If a person who is biologically female behaves in a stereotypically masculine manner, what are the social, political, and cultural forces that may police her behavior? And how will she manage her gendered image in response to that policing? Finally, how do race, ethnicity, or sexuality inform the way that sex-based roles are constructed, policed, or managed? The chapters in this book address such questions from social science perspectives and then examine personal stories of reinvention and transformation, including discussions of the lives of dancers Isadora Duncan and Bill T. Jones, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and surrealist artist Claude Cahun.Writers from fields as diverse as history, art, psychology, law, literature, sociology, and the activist community look at gender nonconformity from conceptual, theoretical, and empirical perspectives. They emphasize that gender nonconformists can be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or anyone else who does not fit a model of Caucasian heterosexual behavior characterized by binary masculine and feminine roles.
Best known for Goodbye to Berlin -- the inspiration for the Tony and Oscar award-winning musical Cabaret -- Christopher Isherwood has always been considered both a literary and a gay pioneer. That is truer now than ever. Readers of his plays, novels, and diaries continue to discover Isherwood's lasting contribution to twentieth-century culture, literature, autobiographical fiction, and memoir, to gay rights, and to twentieth-century culture.
Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey looks inside four of Doris Humphrey’s major choreographic works—Water Study (1928), The Shakers (1931), With My Red Fires (1936), and Passacaglia (1938)—with an eye to how directorial strategies applied in recent contemporized stagings in the United States and Europe could work across the modern and contemporary dance genre. Author Lesley Main, a seasoned practitioner of Doris Humphrey choreography, stresses to the reader the need to balance respect for classical works from the modern dance repertory with the necessity for fresh directorial strategies, to balance between traditional practices and a creative role for the reconstructor. Drawin...
Starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, Albuquerque examines the way the Modernist movement both fueled and inhibited the use of gay imagery in Brazilian drama. This elegant and fluid study ultimately becomes an examination of a whole Latin society, and the ways in which Latin theatre has absorbed and reflected the culture's own changing sensibilities, that will intrigue anyone interested in Latin American culture, literature, or theater. Winner, 2008 Elizabeth A. Steinberg Prize
This edition of Dwight Allen’s acclaimed story collection, The Green Suit, ends with a new story, rounding out a dozen interlinked tales about a well-to-do Kentucky family called the Sackriders. The stories cover a period of forty years, from the Vietnam War to the Age of Foreclosure. Chief among the Sackriders is Peter, son of a judge and a vitamin-pill-popping mother, brother to a sister whose troubles with boys take her far from Kentucky. He is a writer perhaps more in love with women (and, intermittently, men) than he is with words, whose eagerness to be loved leads him into alarming circumstances. He is a man with a yearning for transcendence and a penchant for betrayal. The new story finds Sackrider in his mid-fifties, married for a second time, the father of a small child, and all tangled up with his next-door neighbor, an artist who likes to use the corpses of animals in his collages.