You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
From debates about reparations to the rise of the welfare state, the decades following World War I saw a widespread turn across disciplines to questions about the nature and role of gifts: What is a gift? What do gifts mean and do? Which individuals and institutions have the authority to give? Marshalling wide-ranging interdisciplinary research, Returning the Gift argues that these questions centrally shaped literary modernism. The book begins by revisiting the locus classicus of twentieth-century gift theory -- the French sociologist Marcel Mauss's 1925 essay, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. His title notwithstanding, the gift Mauss envisions is not primitiv...
In a work that captures and reconfigures the passing moments of art, history, and philosophy, Mary Ann Doane shows how the cinema, representing the singular instant of chance and ephemerality in the face of the increasing rationalization and standardization of the day, participated in the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity.
Analyzes twelve strategic planning efforts in higher education in eight countries in Asia and Africa. Drawing on over fifty years of on-the-ground experience, Fred M. Hayward’s Transforming Higher Education in Asia and Africa analyzes change processes in higher education in eight Asian and African countries. The twelve cases range from the push to upgrade and transform higher education in Afghanistan in the midst of a war, to the successful struggle against apartheid in South African institutions, as well as thwarted efforts in Sierra Leone and Madagascar. Providing both practical lessons learned and hope for communities globally, Hayward demonstrates that higher education change and even ...
A feminist approach to the Anthropocene that recovers the relevance of sensation and phenomenology. Earthly Encounters develops a fuller account of the lived experience of racialized gender formation as it exists on this planet, earth. It analyzes sensations: the chill of winter, the warm embrace of the wind, the feeling of being immersed in water, and a stifling sense of containment. Through this analysis in settler colonial and colonial contexts, in twentieth-century North America and Africa, Stephanie D. Clare shows how sensation is unevenly distributed within social worlds and productive of racial, national, and gendered subjectivities. From revealing the relevance of phenomenology, espe...
Angel on a Freight Train examines the experiences of Samuel Edward Warren (1831–1909), a teacher and college professor in Troy, New York, who struggled to reconcile his same-sex erotic desires with his commitment to a Christian life. Unlike twenty-first-century evangelicals who try to "pray the gay away," Warren discerned no fundamental conflict between his faith and his attraction to younger males. Growing up in the antebellum Northeast, in a culture that permitted and even celebrated emotional bonds between men, he strove to build emotionally intense relationships in many overlapping forms—friendship, pedagogy, evangelism, and romance—which allowed him to enjoy intimacy with little e...
Poetics of the Local considers contemporary Irish poetry in light of transnational forces of globalization and financialization, showing how these conditions have shaped poetic innovation in Ireland from the 1960s to the present. The book is organized around different sites caught in the growing pains of a rapidly globalizing Ireland—from the "ghost estates," or housing projects abandoned after the economic boom of the 1990s, to the urban "regeneration" of Belfast after the Troubles, to the transformation of Dublin into a hub for creative economy programs like the UNESCO City of Literature. In readings of works by Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Ciaran Carson, Leontia Flynn, Alan Gillis, Sinéad Morrissey, and Paul Muldoon, Shirley Lau Wong argues that the enduring centrality of place in Irish poetry should be seen not as a hangover of nostalgic nationalism but rather as an exploration of the material and emplaced effects of the seemingly faraway processes of global capitalism.
Feminist Spiritualities aims to complicate contemporary debates surrounding Black/Latinx experiences within a critical framework of decolonial thought, women of color feminisms, politicized emotional structures, and anti-imperial politics. Joshua R. Deckman considers literary and cultural productions from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and their diasporas in the United States, exploring epistemic spaces that have historically been marked as irrational and inconsequential for the production of knowledge—including social media posts, song lyrics, public writings, speeches, and personal interviews. Analyzing works by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana...
Ángel Rama was among the most prominent Latin American literary and cultural critics of the twentieth century. This volume brings together—and makes available in English for the first time—some of his most influential writings from the 1960s up until his death in 1983. Meticulously curated and translated by José Eduardo González and Timothy R. Robbins, Spanish American Literature in the Age of Machines and Other Essays will give readers a new, deeper appreciation of how Rama's views on Latin American literary history reflect the dynamic between the region and the rest of the world. His rich meditations on the relation between narrative technique, social class, and group behavior—from the point of view of the periphery of capitalism—make this volume an important contribution to the study of world literature.
Relational sociology was conceived by theorists frustrated by what they viewed as an incomplete accounting of social reality. Torn between notions of structural rigidity, on the one hand, and rational choice individualism, on the other, relational sociologists have sought new units of analysis. Social reality, they have argued, is manufactured through relationships. People are who they are, and society is what it is, not because of some individual or collective "essence" but because of the networks that social beings build among one another. Relational Sociology and Research on Schools, Colleges, and Universities demonstrates the value of introducing new relational methods and epistemologies in educational research. The contributors examine the roles and significance of ongoing transactions among connected social actors—students, peers, families, teachers—in a variety of institutional contexts. The book explores various uses and applications of relational sociology in education, while highlighting its promise to provide fresh insight into intractable problems of inequity in US schools.
The book presents a new study of the visual arts and poetry in the work of three well-known French writers and artists from the mid-twentieth century—Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Henri Michaux. Each was fiercely independent, belonging to no school, academy, or political persuasion. What do they have in common? While the book's three central essays do not initially set out to establish comparisons between these writers, common ground emerges: a shared combat against culture, a shared non-representational artistic practice. Their writing, poetry, and painting offer not a portrayal of things or ideas but rather an emanation or apparition of the unknown and the infinite, one charged with deepening art's relation to life.