Download or read book Unfinished Gestures written by Davesh Soneji and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-01-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Download or read book Gestures of Concern written by Chris Ingraham and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gestures of Concern Chris Ingraham shows that while gestures such as sending a “Get Well” card may not be instrumentally effective, they do exert an intrinsically affective force on a field of social relations. From liking, sharing, posting, or swiping to watching a TED Talk or wearing an “I Voted” sticker, such gestures operate as much through affective registers as they do through overt symbolic action. Ingraham demonstrates that gestures of concern are central to establishing the necessary conditions for larger social or political change because they give the everyday aesthetic and rhetorical practices of public life the capacity to attain some socially legible momentum. Rather than supporting the notion that vociferous public communication is the best means for political and social change, Ingraham advances the idea that concerned gestures can help to build the affective communities that orient us to one another with an imaginable future in mind. Ultimately, he shows how acts that many may consider trivial or banal are integral to establishing those background conditions capable of fostering more inclusive social or political change.

Download or read book John Ashbery and American Poetry written by David Herd and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of the poetry of John Ashbery. Showing that a sense of occasion - the sense that the poem should be fit for its occasion - was a binding principle for the poets of the New York School, David Herd traces the development of Ashbery's poetry in the light of this idea. The book is a study of Ashbery's career and also a history of the period in which that career has taken shape. The development of Ashbery's poetic is set against such culturally defining issues as: the institutionalisation of literature; the rise and fall of the avant-garde; mass culture; Vietnam; the absence of a divine presence; the erosion of tradition; the growth of celebrity; and the emergence of AIDS. Ashbery's responses to such issues are set against the work of Lowell, Berryman, O'Hara, Koch, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Oppen and Larkin.

Download or read book pHealth 2020 written by B. Blobel and published by IOS Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smart mobile systems such as microsystems, smart textiles, smart implants, and sensor-controlled medical devices, together with their related networks, have become important enablers for telemedicine and ubiquitous pervasive health to become next-generation health services. This book presents the proceedings of pHealth 2020, held as a virtual conference from 14 – 16 September 2020. This is the 17th in a series of international conferences on wearable or implantable micro and nano technologies for personalized medicine, which bring together expertise from medical, technological, political, administrative, and social domains, and cover subjects including technological and biomedical facilities, legal, ethical, social, and organizational requirements and impacts, and the research necessary to enable future-proof care paradigms. The 2020 conference also covers AI and robots in healthcare; bio-data management and analytics for personalized health; security, privacy and safety challenges; integrated care; and the intelligent management of specific diseases including the Covid-19 pandemic. Communication and cooperation with national and regional health authorities and the challenges facing health systems in developing countries were also addressed. The book includes 1 keynote, 5 invited talks, 25 oral presentations, and 8 short poster presentations from 99 international authors. All submissions were carefully and critically reviewed by at least two independent experts and at least one member of the Scientific Program Committee; a highly selective review process resulting in a full-paper rejection rate of 36%. The book will be of interest to all those involved in the design and provision of healthcare and also to patients and citizen representatives.

Download or read book Anglo Saxon Gestures and the Roman Stage written by Charles Reginald Dodwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1999 book is concerned with the pictorial language of gesture revealed in Anglo-Saxon art, and its debt to classical Rome. Reginald Dodwell was an eminent art historian and former Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. In this, his last book, he notes a striking similarity of both form and meaning between Anglo-Saxon gestures and those in illustrated manuscripts of the plays of Terence. He presents evidence for dating the archetype of the Terence manuscripts to the mid-third century, and argues persuasively that their gestures reflect actual stage conventions. He identifies a repertory of eighteen Terentian gestures whose meaning can be ascertained from the dramatic contexts in which they occur, and conducts a detailed examination of the use of the gestures in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The book, which is extensively illustrated, illuminates our understanding of the vigour of late Anglo-Saxon art and its ability to absorb and transpose continental influence.

Download or read book Impersonations written by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.

Download or read book Contradictory Characters written by Albert Bermel and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an interpretation of the modern theatre, this is a new edition of a classic work of drama criticism.

Download or read book The Moon and Sixpence One Man s Journey Across the Field of Art and into Its Depths Based on Paul Gauguin s Life written by William Somerset Maugham and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W Somerset Maugham, told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, in a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist. It is based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin.

Download or read book Listening with a Feminist Ear written by Pavitra Sundar and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-08-14 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.

Download or read book Brown Skins White Coats written by Projit Bihari Mukharji and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-02-17 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique narrative structure brings the history of race science in mid-twentieth-century India to vivid life. There has been a recent explosion in studies of race science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but most have focused either on Europe or on North America and Australia. In this stirring history, Projit Bihari Mukharji illustrates how India appropriated and repurposed race science to its own ends and argues that these appropriations need to be understood within the national and regional contexts of postcolonial nation-making—not merely as footnotes to a Western history of “normal science.” The book comprises seven factual chapters operating at distinct levels—conceptual, practical, and cosmological—and eight fictive interchapters, a series of epistolary exchanges between the Bengali author Hemendrakumar Ray (1888–1963) and the protagonist of his dystopian science fiction novel about race, race science, racial improvement, and dehumanization. In this way, Mukharji fills out the historical moment in which the factual narrative unfolded, vividly revealing its moral, affective, political, and intellectual fissures.

Download or read book Ways of Being Free written by Adnan Mahmutović and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iconic migrant writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri use their fictional worlds to articulate the ways in which existential “nervous conditions,” caused by violent postcolonial history, drive individuals to rework the critical notions of freedom, authenticity and community. This existential thread in their works has been largely ignored or left undeveloped in criticism. Although Rushdie has argued that they primarily write back to the imperial centre(s), in their signature novels, The English Patient, Midnight’s Children and The Famished Road, they respond to their conflicting cultural and ethnic heritages by dramatizing characters in traumatic struggles with belonging and affiliation. As a way of coping with their identity crises, most characters succumb to the political rhetoric of communalism. The central characters, however, are driven by a powerful desire for self-sufficiency. Yet, since this individualism clashes with their need for communal sharing, they enact a form of creative destruction of their singular selfhood and communal identity. They experience a certain plurality of singular selfhood and participate in forms of “inoperative communities,” which elicit bonds without ties and coexistence without the necessity of a common work and essence.

Download or read book Attentive Minds A History of the Indian Performative Art of Avadh na from the Origin to Modern Times written by Hermina Cielas and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From tenth-century South India to twenty-first-century cultural events, from the court assemblies to the public space: Attentive Minds takes you on a journey through the fascinating world of avadhāna, a complex and long-living performative art of India whose practitioners showcase highly developed cognitive skills (like attention, ability to multitask, memory) and specialized knowledge. With the help of epigraphic and literary sources and field research, Hermina Cielas reconstructs avadhāna’s history in its socio-cultural context and provides a detailed systematization of the art. Her multifaceted study investigates the cultural phenomenon scarcely known outside of India. It explores avadhāna’s multiple forms, from games and puzzles, through a display of mnemonic or motor skills, to multilingual literary feasts.

Download or read book Brutal Beauty written by Jisha Menon and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life. Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‐class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.

Download or read book A Political Biography of the Indonesian Lesbian Bisexual and Trans Movement written by Saskia Wieringa and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, the history of the Indonesian LBT movement is charted, from invisibility, to visibility and now as it moves again into hiding. In the early 1980s, during the oppressive military dictatorship called the New Order in Indonesia, the first organizations of Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans persons were established. They were short-lived, but prepared the ground for a more comprehensive LBT rights movement after the democratic opening of society in 1998. From 2000 to 2015 the visibility of the movement grew, until a vicious state-sponsored backlash set in, driven by majoritarian, fundamentalist Islamist groups. Saskia Wieringa tracks the movement's progress and explores the persistence of the butch/femme model of relationships; the proliferations of identities; family violence and conversion therapy; religion; and the anti-LGBT campaign. In its insistence on the local dynamics of this movement, the book aims to debunk the idea that homosexuality is a Western import. Chapters deal with the many religious and secular phenomena that are linked with gender diversity and same-sex relations traditionally, and the erasure of many of these traditions is explained using the concept of postcolonial amnesia. A Political Biography of the Indonesian Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Movement is also a contribution to the growing literature on decolonization studies, pointing out that its dynamics, its historical course and its present condition, different as they are from the dominant Western view on a global LGBT movement, needs to be considered as valuable as accounts of Western LGBT histories are.

Download or read book Forfeit written by Dick Francis and published by Canelo. This book was released on 2019-09-02 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a New York Times bestseller, “a superb thriller . . . terrific” about a sportswriter who risks his own life investigating a suspicious death (San Francisco Chronicle). Dick Francis, Edgar-Award–winning master of mystery and suspense, takes you into the thrilling world of horse racing. When reporter Bert Chekov falls to his death, his colleague James Tyrone is suspicious. Chekov’s column had recently recommended some ‘can’t-lose’ horses, who then wound up out of the running on race day. Tyrone thinks he can prove it was murder, but he may not live to tell the tale. Because as the dead man has already made clear, there’s no such thing as a sure thing . . . Praise for the writing of Dick Francis: “Dick Francis is a wonder.” —The Plain Dealer “Few things are more convincing than Dick Francis at a full gallop.” —Chicago Tribune “Few match Francis for dangerous flights of fancy and pure inventive menace.” —Boston Herald “[The] master of crime fiction and equine thrills.” —Newsday “[Francis] has the uncanny ability to turn out simply plotted yet charmingly addictive mysteries.” —The Wall Street Journal “Francis is a genius.” —Los Angeles Times “Nobody executes the whodunit formula better.” —Chicago Sun-Times “A rare and magical talent . . . who never writes the same story twice.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

Download or read book Global Perspectives on Orchestras written by Tina K. Ramnarine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering innovative approaches to thinking about orchestras, Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency adopts ethnographic, historical and comparative perspectives on a variety of traditions, including symphony, Caribbean steel, Indonesian gamelan, Indian film and Vietnamese court examples. The volume presents compelling analyses of orchestras in their socio-historical, economic, intercultural and postcolonial contexts, while emphasizing the global and historical connections between musical traditions. By drawing on new ethnographic and historical data, the essays describe orchestral creative processes and the politics shaping performance practices. Each essay considers how musicians work together in ensembles, focusing on issues such as training, rehearsal, creative choices, compositional processes, and organizational infrastructures. Testimonies of orchestral musicians highlight practitioners' views into the diverse world of orchestras. As a whole, the volume discusses the creative roles of performers, arrangers, composers and arts agencies, as well as the social environments supporting musical collaborations. With contributions from an international team of researchers, Global Perspectives on Orchestras offers critical insights gained from the study of orchestras, collective creativity and social agency, and the connections between orchestral performances, colonial histories, postcolonial practices, ethnographic writings and comparative theorizations.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance written by Vida L. Midgelow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.