Download or read book Humor and Rumor in the Post Soviet Authoritarian State written by Anastasiya Astapova and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-02-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Belarus, an example of an authoritarian state, Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State presents over one hundred contemporary political jokes in the contexts of their performance. Throughout, Anastasiya Astapova demonstrates the salience of the joke genre, the multiplicity of humor manifestations, and the fundamental presence of intertextual links between jokes and another folk genre—rumor. Informed by real-life fieldwork in an authoritarian regime, Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State challenges many common theories of political humor, including the interpretation of political jokes as weapons of the weak. It illustrates how jokes and rumors remind communities of their fears, support paranoia, shape conformist behavior, and, consequently, reinforce the existing hegemony. In this rare study on everyday life in and reactions to repressive regimes, Astapova unveils political humor as it is lived.
Download or read book Humor and Power in Algeria 1920 to 2021 written by Elizabeth M. Perego and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In times of peace as well as conflict, humor has served Algerians as a tool of both unification and division. Humor has also assisted Algerians of various backgrounds and ideological leanings with engaging critically in power struggles throughout the country's contemporary history. By analyzing comedic discourse in various forms (including plays, jokes, and cartoons), Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021 demonstrates the globally informed and creative ways that civilians have made sense of moments of victory and loss through humor. Using oral interviews and media archives in Arabic, French, and Tamazight, Elizabeth M. Perego expands on theoretical debates about humor as a tool of resistance and explores the importance of humor as an instrument of war, peace, and social memory, as well as a source for retracing volatile, contested pasts. Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021 reveals how Algerians have harnessed humor to express competing visions for unity in a divided colonial society, to channel and process emotions surrounding a brutal war of decolonization and the forging of a new nation, and to demonstrate resilience in the face of a terrifying civil conflict"--
Download or read book De Gruyter Handbook of Humor Studies written by Thomas E. Ford and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-07-22 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The De Gruyter Handbook of Humor Studies consolidates the cumulative contributions in theory and research on humor from 57 international scholars representing 21 different countries in the widest possible diversity of disciplines. It organizes research in a unique conceptual framework addressing two broad themes: the Essence of Humor and the Functions of Humor. Furthermore, scholars of humor have recognized that humor is not only a universal human experience, it is also inherently social, shared among people and woven into the fabric of nearly every type of interpersonal relationship. Scholars across all academic disciplines have addressed questions about the essence and functions of humor at different "levels of analysis" relating to how narrowly or broadly they conceptualize the social context of humor. Accordingly, the editors have organized each broad thematic section into four subsections defined by "level of analysis." The book first addresses questions about individual psychological processes and text properties, then moves to questions involving broader conceptualizations of the social context addressing humor and social relations, and humor and culture. By providing a comprehensive review of foundational work as well as new research and theoretical advancements across academic disciplines, the De Gruyter Handbook of Humor Studies will serve as the foremost authoritative research handbook for experienced humor scholars as well as an essential starting point for newcomers to the field, such as graduate students seeking to conduct their own research on humor. Further, by highlighting the interdisciplinary interest of new and emerging areas of research the book identifies and defines directions for future research for scholars from every discipline that contributes to our understanding of humor.
Download or read book Uncertainty in Global Politics written by Anastasia Shesterinina and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages in a constructive, practical debate on the nature and effects of uncertainty in global politics. International contributors explore the processes associated with different forms of uncertainty in the context of environmental issues, diplomacy and international negotiations, and conflict and security. From the collapse of the Soviet Union to the 1997 and 2008 financial crises to the Arab Uprisings and the European migrant crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, assessments of many events with lasting consequences on the global order have begun with: “why didn’t we see this coming?” There is much to learn from how phenomena that affect the global order generate uncertainty and what effects such uncertainty has on actors and issues. Presenting perspectives from all corners of the discipline and emerging and established scholars the book provides an up-to-date overview of the state of the literature; a concise yet conceptually rich theoretical framework; a mix of regional and global contemporary issues; process-oriented empirical evidence and methodological tools to assess different forms of uncertainty and propose practical solutions to addressing uncertainty in diverse contexts. The book will be of interest to scholars of global politics, international security, global environmental politics, international organizations and institutions, social movements, and conflict studies.
Download or read book James Buchanan Elmore 1857 1942 written by Ronald L. Baker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Buchanan Elmore (1857–1942): Literary Ethnographer and Folk Poet details the life and work of Elmore as a “folk poet,” emphasizing the importance in the cultural understanding of the ethnographic insights he gave as a farmer in the midwestern region of the United States that experienced dramatic social change after the Civil War. In song and verse, folk poets write of community events and personalities associated with them and of manifestations of natural forces with effects upon society. Often about locations overlooked by national historians and anthropologists, these writings are valued for their interpretations as participants within the cultural expressions describing group feeling and thought. By many estimates, Elmore left the largest legacy of folk poetic material in the United States, but not until now has a folklorist analyzed this rich trove of documentation for understanding the shifting folklife of the Midwest amid cultural shifts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baker illustrates that Elmore shows more similarities to folk poets such as South Carolina's Bard of the Congaree, journeyman printer J. Gordon Coogler (1865–1901), than with academic poets Wallace Stevens or even James Whitcomb Riley. Aptly nicknamed the Bard of Alamo, Elmore was his community's laureate—the voice of the-people—living in Indiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a recorder of folklife from the 1830s on the frontier until after the Civil War when industrialization swept through the nation.
Download or read book Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality written by Ronald LaMarr Sharps and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-06-16 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Civil War, Emancipation purportedly brought physical freedom to African Americans. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, blacks continued to experience inequality in all phases of American life—social, cultural, political, and economic. In pursuit of equality, African American movements interpreted folklore to reveal in their rhetoric the soul of a race and a path toward civilization. This book provides a comprehensive chronicle of these competing initiatives and their reception starting with the folklore society organized by Hampton Institute in 1893 and continuing through the early 1940s with the American Negro Academy, Fisk University graduates, William Hannibal Thomas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Friends of Negro Freedom, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and blacks associated with the Communist Party USA. Disavowing a culture of fear, money, guns, and death, black folklorists in these movements exposed a racial inner life ranging from loving, loyal, and happy to imitative, tragic, spiritual, emotional, and creative. Each characterization of the race justified a distinct path and possible contributions to civilization. If unable to know their past, members of the movements and other folklorists were fearful that African Americans would be an anomaly among humanity.
Download or read book Spring Man written by Petr Janecek and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spring Man: A Belief Legend between Folklore and Popular Culture deconstructs the nationalistic myth of Spring Man that was created after the Second World War in visual culture and literature and presents his original form as an ambiguous, ghostly denizen of oral culture. Petr Janeček analyzes the archetypal character, social context, and cultural significance of this fascinating phenomenon with the help of dozens of accounts provided by period eyewitnesses, oral narratives, and other sources. At the same time, the author illustrates the international origin of the tales in the originally British migratory legend of Spring-heeled Jack that reaches back to the second-third of the nineteenth century, and Janeček also draws parallels between the Czech myth of Spring Man and similar urban phantom narratives popular in the 1910s Russia, 1940s United States and Slovakia, and 1950s Germany, as well as other parts of the world.
Download or read book Oral Traditions in Contemporary China written by Juwen Zhang and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation, Juwen Zhang provides a systematic survey of such oral traditions as folk and fairy tales, proverbs, ballads, and folksongs that are vibrantly practiced today. Zhang establishes a theoretical framework for understanding how Chinese culture has continued for thousands of years with vitality and validity, core and arbitrary identity markers, and folkloric identity. This framework, which describes a cultural self-healing mechanism, is equally applicable to the exploration of other traditions and cultures in the world. Through topics from Chinese Cinderella to the Grimms of China, from proverbs like “older ginger is spicier” to the life-views held by the Chinese, and from mountain songs and ballads to the musical instruments like the clay-vessel-flute, the author weaves these oral traditions across time and space into a mesmerizing intellectual journey. Focusing on contemporary practice, this book serves as a bridge between Chinese and international folklore scholarship and other related disciplines as well. Those interested in Chinese culture in general and Chinese folklore, literature, and oral tradition in particular will certainly delight in perusing this book.
Download or read book Perspectives on East and Southeast Asian Folktales written by Allyssa McCabe and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perspectives on East and Southeast Asian Folktales is a multidisciplinary examination of folktales that are unfamiliar to Western audiences. Examining folktales from countries like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, China, Japan, and Korea, the contributors consider various aspects: including identity issues, morals, collectivism, violence, scatological references, language socialization, representation of Buddhist values, emotional competence, as well as folktales' relationship to idioms and narrative structure. Highlighting differences and similarities between East and Southeast Asian and Western folktales, this volume promotes memorable understanding of East and Southeast Asian cultures and their oral traditions.
Download or read book Internet in the Post Soviet Area written by Sergey Davydov and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comparative perspective on the technological, economic, and political aspects of Internet development in the post-Soviet countries. In doing so, international experts analyze similarities and differences in various countries throughout the chapters. The volume consists of two parts. The chapters of the first part examine the post-Soviet area as a whole. The second part includes specific case studies on the development of the Internet, either in individual countries or in groups of countries. Countries analyzed are Estonia, Ukraine, Russia as well as three Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Topics covered in the volume include, but are not limited to measurement, dynamics, and structure of each national Internet audience; the history of the Internet in the post-Soviet countries; development of infrastructure; Internet regulation and institutional aspects; online markets such as telecommunications, online advertising, e-commerce, and digital content; social and cultural aspects; as well as the transformation of the national media systems. This book is a must-read for students, researchers, and scholars of political science and economics, as well as policymakers and practitioners interested in a better understanding of Internet development in the post-Soviet area.
Download or read book The Death of Expertise written by Tom Nichols and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.
Download or read book An American Engineer in Stalin s Russia written by Zara Witkin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1932 Zara Witkin, a prominent American engineer, set off for the Soviet Union with two goals: to help build a society more just and rational than the bankrupt capitalist system at home, and to seek out the beautiful film star Emma Tsesarskaia. His memoirs offer a detailed view of Stalin's bureaucracy—entrenched planners who snubbed new methods; construction bosses whose cover-ups led to terrible disasters; engineers who plagiarized Witkin's work; workers whose pride was defeated. Punctuating this document is the tale of Witkin's passion for Tsesarskaia and the record of his friendships with journalist Eugene Lyons, planner Ernst May, and others. Witkin felt beaten in the end by the lethargy and corruption choking the greatest social experiment in history, and by a pervasive evil—the suppression of human rights and dignity by a relentless dictatorship. Finally breaking his spirit was the dissolution of his romance with Emma, his "Dark Goddess." In his lively introduction, Michael Gelb provides the historical context of Witkin's experience, details of his personal life, and insights offered by Emma Tsesarskaia in an interview in 1989.
Download or read book State Formation in China and Taiwan written by Julia C. Strauss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious comparative study of regime consolidation in the 'revolutionary' People's Republic of China and 'conservative' Taiwan in the early 1950s.
Download or read book Killing Hope written by William Blum and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the military interventions by the US since WW2: Frank & detailed. Covers activities of CIA and US military.
Download or read book The First Book of Jewish Jokes written by Elliott Oring and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Works on Jewish humor and Jewish jokes abound today, but what formed the basis for our contemporary notions of Jewish jokes? How and when did these perceptions develop? In this groundbreaking study and translation, noted humor and folklore scholar Elliott Oring introduces us to the joke collections of Lippmann Moses Büschenthal, an enlightened rabbi, and an unknown author writing as "Judas Ascher." Originally published in German in 1812 and 1810, these books include jokes and anecdotes that play on stereotypes. The jokes depict Jews dealing with Gentiles who are bent on their conversion, Jews encountering government officials and institutions, newly propertied Jews attempting to demonstrate their acquisition of artistic and philosophical knowledge, and Jews engaged in trade and moneylending—often with the aim to defraud. In these jokes we see the antecedents of modern Jewish humor, and in Büschenthal's brief introduction we find perhaps the earliest theory of the Jewish joke. Oring provides helpful annotations for the jokes and contextualizing essays that examine the current state of Jewish joke scholarship and the situation of the Jews in France and Germany leading up to the periods when the two collections were published. Intended to stimulate the search for even earlier examples, Oring challenges us to confront the Jewish joke from a genuine historical perspective.
Download or read book Russian National Security written by Michael H. Crutcher and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an anthology of papers presented at a conference titled "Russian National Security: Perceptions, Policies, and Prospects" conducted from 4-6 December 2000. The book organizes the papers into six sections - The Russian National Security Community, Russia and Europe, Russian Policy Towards the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russia and Asia, Russia and the United States, and Russia's Military Transformation.
Download or read book Post Memes written by Daniel Bristow and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art-form, send-up, farce, ironic disarticulation, pastiche, propaganda, trololololol, mode of critique, mode of production, means of politicisation, even of subjectivation - memes are the inner currency of the internet's circulatory system. Independent of any one set value, memes are famously the mode of conveyance for the alt-right, the irony left, and the apoliticos alike, and they are impervious to many economic valuations: the attempts made in co-opting their discourse in advertising and big business have made little headway, and have usually been derailed by retaliative meming. POST MEMES: SEIZING THE MEMES OF PRODUCTION takes advantage of the meme's subversive adaptability and ripeness for a focused, in-depth study. Pulling together the interrogative forces of a raft of thinkers at the forefront of tech theory and media dissection, this collection of essays paves a way to articulating the semiotic fabric of the early 21st century's most prevalent means of content posting, and aims at the very seizing of the memes of production for the imagining and creation of new political horizons. With contributions from Scott and McKenzie Wark, Patricia Reed, Jay Owens, Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi, Dominic Pettman, Bogna M. Konior, and Eric Wilson, among others, this essay volume offers the freshest approaches available in the field of memes studies and inaugurates a new kind of writing about the newest manifestations of the written online. The book aims to become the go-to resource for all students and scholars of memes, and will be of the utmost interest to anyone interested in the internet's most viral phenomenon. ABOUT THE EDITORS ALFIE BOWN is the author of several books including "The Playstation Dreamworld" (Polity, 2017) and "In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy" (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is also a journalist for the Guardian, the Paris Review, and other outlets. DAN BRISTOW is a recovering academic, a bookseller, and author of "Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis" (Routledge, 2016) and "2001: A Space Odyssey and Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory" (Palgrave, 2017). He is also the co-creator with Alfie Bown of Everyday Analysis, now based at New Socialist magazine.
