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Loving Music Till It Hurts explores how people's intense love and protectiveness of music can lead to interpersonal conflicts, societal injustices, and violence. But how might we love music, even embrace it as vital to human thriving, without weaponizing this love? What can we do when loving music and loving people seem at odds?
Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic tortu...
Video games open portals into fantastical worlds where imaginative play prevails. The virtual medium seemingly provides us with ample opportunities to behave and act out with relative safety and impunity. Or does it? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of our engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonic violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. Author William Cheng shows how the simulated environments of games empower designers, composers, players, and scholars to test and tinker with music, noise, speech, and silence in ways that might not be prudent or possible in the real world. In negotiating utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights from across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, and philosophy. With case studies that span Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, Fallout 3, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2, this book insists that what we do in there - in the safe, sound spaces of games - can ultimately teach us a great deal about who we are and what we value (musically, culturally, humanly) out here.
Drawing on ethnographic research and often deeply personal experiences with musical cultures, Queering the Field: Sounding out Ethnomusicology unpacks a history of sentiment that veils the treatment of queer music and identity within the field of ethnomusicology. The thematic structure of the volume reflects a deliberate cartography of queer spaces in the discipline-spaces that are strongly present due to their absence, are marked by direct sonic parameters, or are called into question by virtue of their otherness. As the first large-scale study of ethnomusicology's queer silences and queer identity politics, Queering the Field directly addresses the normativities currently at play in musica...
This collection of essays explores the origins and roles of Southeast Asian business groups, especially as they developed during the 1970s and 1980s. An important contribution to studies of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia. Includes a comprehensive introduction by the editor.
The national bestselling memoir of a woman’s resistance and struggles in Communist China—“an absorbing story of resourcefulness and courage” (The New York Times). A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In August 1966, a group of Red Guards ransacked the home of Nien Cheng. Her background made her an obvious target for the fanatics of the Cultural Revolution: educated in London, the widow of an official of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, and an employee of Shell Oil. When she refused to confess that any of this made her an enemy of the state, she was placed in solitary confinement, where she would remain for more than six years. Life and Death in Shanghai recounts the story of Nien Cheng’s imprisonment—a time of extreme deprivation which she met with heroic resistance—as well as her quest for justice when she was released. It is also the story of a country torn apart by Mao Zedong’s vicious campaign to topple party moderates. An incisive, personal account of a terrifying chapter in twentieth-century history, Life and Death in Shanghai is also an astounding portrait of one woman’s courage.
Willie Cheng has been sharing his take on the paradigms of 'doing good' in various publications. Some of these have rocked the charity scene. With the international charity scene moving from an era of 'simply doing good' to one of 'doing good, well', he has compiled and adapted these writings into this book.
This book examines how the economic survival strategies of former fighters in Liberia can help explain the trajectories of war-to-peace transitions.
Contemporary Chinese Philosophy features discussion of sixteen major twentieth-century Chinese philosophers. Leading scholars in the field describe and critically assess the works of these significant figures. Critically assesses the work of major comtemporary Chinese philosophers that have rarely been discussed in English. Features essays by leading scholars in the field. Includes a glossary of Chinese characters and definitions.
Cheng, a former McKinsey management consultant, reveals his proven, insider'smethod for acing the case interview.