Download or read book Partitions and Their Afterlives written by Radhika Mohanram and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we theorise partitions differently? How are new identities, moralities, polities and life constructed post-partition? How are gender and sexuality recalibrated after partition? How can violence be theorised? What is the relationship between identity in the diaspora and identity after partition? What is the relationship between the movement of capital and national borders that is the mark of partition? Partitions and their Afterlives engages with political partitions and how their aftermath affects the contemporary life of nations and their citizens. Using a comparative perspective, the essays seek to stretch our understanding of these conflicts and to show how elements of our day-to-day lives have been shaped by them. In juxtaposing the various partitions in a single volume the book contributes to debates on citizenship, collective memory, nation-building, and borders and boundaries. Such a focus also reveals how local communities as well as nations use their knowledge of the past and history. This ground-breaking multi-disciplinary and multi-region volume will analyse the various convergences and departures between the different partitions and draw out lessons for the present. In so doing, this work will also examine methodological challenges and the imperatives for scholars working on individual countries.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Literature and Politics written by Christos Hadjiyiannis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many twentieth-century literary writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This book explores literature's direct relationship to politics, offering new ways of thinking about the troubled relationship between literature and politics.
Download or read book Arts of Healing written by Arleen Ionescu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-06-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book occurs at the intersection of philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis and the visual arts. Each chapter looks at art produced in various traumatogenic cultures: detention centres, post-Holocaust film, autobiography and many more.Other chapters look at the Juarez femicides, the production of collective memory, of makeshift memorials, acts of forgiveness and contemporary forms of trauma. The book proposes new ways of 'thinking trauma', foregrounding the possibility of healing and the task that the critical humanities has to play in this healing. Where is its place in an increasingly terror-haunted world, where personal and collective trauma is as much of an everyday occurrence as it is incomprehensible? What has become known as the 'classical model of trauma' has foregrounded the unrepresentability of the traumatic event. New, revisionist approaches seek to move beyond an aporetic understanding of trauma, investigating both intersubjective and intrasubjective psychic processes of healing. Traumatic memory is not always verbal and 'iconic' forms of communication are part of the arts of healing.
Download or read book Later Life Sex and Intimacy in the Majority World written by Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2024-07-22 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature on sex, intimacy and sexuality in later life has been heavily influenced by perspectives from more affluent regions, perpetuating the belief that the West is more sexually progressive and liberal than other cultures. This book challenges this belief by exploring diverse cultures and perspectives from the majority world, which are often overlooked. It highlights the importance of learning from cultures in the global South and East, dismantling stereotypes that frame them as sexually conservative or inferior. Variously drawing on structuralist, postcolonial and decolonial theory as well as social anthropology, the book critically examines binaries related to culture, age, sex and intimacy, highlighting the need to decentre Western perspectives as the benchmark while other cultures and practices are misunderstood.
Download or read book Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic written by Chris Weedon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-08-28 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than thirty years after German reunification, Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic addresses how life in the GDR is remembered, thereby enriching and complexifying the narratives of East German life found in public history, museums, tourist venues, film, media and popular fiction. The frequent stress on material lack, social restrictions and the repressive state is expanded and reconfigured by interviewees who variously both challenge and confirm widespread assumptions about what it meant to live in the GDR. Aimed at a wide readership, this book gives English-speaking readers access to varied and detailed accounts of everyday life, individual engagement with state institutions and different views of GDR politics, society and culture.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands written by Zalfa Feghali and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-23 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands maps the relationship between gender and borderlands at a global scale and sets the agenda for developing a global composite field of gender and borderlands studies. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to understand the complex nexus at which gender and the borderlands intersect, modelling radical relationality at epistemological, ontological, and activist levels. Going beyond border studies’ frequent site at the U.S.–Mexico Border, this book examines the power relations of borderlands as they play out in, influence, and reflect gender dynamics. Contributors draw on case studies from around the world, and their chapters span diverse fields from anthropology, literature, and history, to political science, religious studies, sociology, and the arts. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands is an indispensable resource for scholars and students engaged in border studies, gender studies, and the wide range of interlocking disciplines that inform and enrich these fields. Chapters 1, 15 and 20.of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Multicultural Commonwealth written by Stanley Bill and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) was once the largest country in Europe—a multicultural republic that was home to Belarusians, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Ruthenians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and other ethnic and religious groups. Although long since dissolved, the Commonwealth remains a rich resource for mythmakingin its descendent modern-day states, but also a source of contention between those with different understandings of its history.Multicultural Commonwealth brings together the expertise of world-renowned scholars in a range of disciplines to present perspectives on both the Commonwealth’s historical diversity and the memory of this diversity. With cutting-edge research on the intermeshed histories and memories of different ethnic and religious groups of the Commonwealth, this volume asks how various contemporary conceptions of multiculturalism can be applied to the region through a critical lens that also seeks to understand the past on its own terms.
Download or read book Homemaking written by Anindya Raychaudhuri and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it possible to think of a counter-hegemonic, progressive nostalgia that celebrates and helps sustain the marginalised? What might such a nostalgia look like, and what political importance might it have? Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora examines diasporic life in south Asian communities in Europe, North America and Australia, to map the ways in which members of these communities use nostalgia to construct distinctive identities. Using a series of examples from literature, cinema, visual art, music, computer games, mainstream media, physical and virtual spaces and many other cultural objects, this book argues that it is possible, and necessary, to read this nostalgia as helping to create a powerful notion of home that can help to transcend international relations of empire and capital, and create instead a pan-national space of belonging. This homemaking represents the persistent search for somewhere to belong on one’s own terms. Constructed through word, image and music, preserved through dreams and imagination, the home provides sustenance in the continuing struggle to change the present and the future for the better.
Download or read book Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution written by Jolan Bogdan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-03-29 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romanian Revolution of 1989 ended 42 years of Communist rule. It was the bloodiest revolution in a Warsaw Pact country, culminating in the overthrow and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu. However, there was no major democratic reform and power remained in the hands of key figures from the old regime. This has led many theorists to question the authenticity of the entire revolution. Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution focuses-in on the circumstances which led to these accusations. It argues that the notion of an authentic revolution, as a conceptual paradigm, is neither a sufficient, appropriate, nor useful tool for an analysis of the events in Romania. Engaging with the work of theorists including Stieglar, Agamben, Baudrillard, Badiou, Spinoza and Derrida it argues that performative contradiction is a more useful theoretical model for exploring this event. Applying the concept to specific cases within the revolution, the book demonstrates the power of performative contradiction as an analytic tool.
Download or read book Creole in the Archive written by Roshini Kempadoo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of the Caribbean figure has been reconfigured by photography from the mid-19th century onwards. Initial images associated with the slave and indentured worker from the locations and legacies associated with plantation economies have been usurped by visual representations emerging from struggles for social, political and cultural autonomy. Contemporary visual artists engaging with the Caribbean as a 21st century globalised space have focused on visually re-imagining historical material and events as memories, histories and dreamscapes. Creole in the Archive uses photographic analysis to explore portraits, postcards and social documentation of the colonial worker between 1850 and 1960 and contemporary, often digital, visual art by post-independent, postcolonial Caribbean artists. Drawing on Derridean ideas of the archive, the book reconceptualises the Caribbean visual archive as contiguous and relational. It argues that using a creolising archive practice, the conjuncture of contemporary artworks, historical imagery and associated locations can develop insightful new multimodal representations of Caribbean subjectivities.
Download or read book Contested Borders written by William J. Spurlin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-06-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through examining new representations of same-sex desire emerging in recent francophone autofictional writing from the Maghreb, where long-established traditions pertaining to gender and sexuality are brought into contact with new forms of gender and sexual dissidence, resulting from the inflection of globally circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness in North Africa, and from the experience of emigration and settlement by the writers concerned in France. The book analyses specifically how Franco-Maghrebi writers Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa, Eyet-Chékib Djaziri, and Nina Bouraoui foreground translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their crossings and negotiations of multiple languages, histories and cultures. By writing in French, Spurlin demonstrates that the writers are not merely mimicking the language of their former coloniser but inflecting a European language with discursive turns of phrase indigenous to North Africa, thus creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experiences of gender and sexual alterity—a form of (queer) translational praxis that destabilises received gender/sexual categories both within the Maghreb and in Europe.
Download or read book From Shared Life to Co Resistance in Historic Palestine written by Marcelo Svirsky and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we contribute to the decolonisation of Palestine? In what ways can we divest from settler arrangements in the present-day? Exploring the Zionist takeover of Palestine as a settler colonial case, this book argues that in studying the elimination of native life in Palestine, the loss of Arab-Jewish shared life cannot be ignored. Muslims, Christians, and Jews, shared a life in Ottoman Palestine and in a different way during British rule. The attempt to eliminate native life involved the destruction of Arab society – its cultural hegemony and demographic superiority – but also the racial rejection of Arab-Jewish sociabilities, of shared life. Thus the settlerist process of dispossession of the Arabs was complemented with the destruction of the social and cultural infrastructure that made Arab-Jewish life a historical reality. Both operations formed Israeli polity. Can this understanding contribute to present-day Palestinian resistance and a politics of decolonisation? In this book, the authors address this question by exploring how the study of elimination of shared life can inform Arab-Jewish co-resistance as a way of defying Israel’s Zionist regime. Above and beyond opposing an unacceptable state of affairs, this book engages with past and present to discuss possible futures.
Download or read book The Attention Economy written by Claudio Celis Bueno and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The attention economy is a notion that explains the growing value of human attention in societies characterised by post-industrial modes of production. In a world in which information and knowledge become central to the valorisation process of capital, human attention becomes a scarce and hence increasingly valuable commodity. To what degree is the attention economy a specific form of capitalist production? How does the attention economy differ from the industrial mode of production in which Marx developed his critique of capitalism? How can Marx’s theory be used today despite the historical differences that separate industrial from post-industrial capitalism? The Attention Economy argues that human attention is a new form of labour that can only be understood through a systematic reinterpretation of Marx. It argues that the attention economy belongs to a general shift in capitalism in which subjectivity itself becomes the territory of production and exploitation of value as well as the territory of the reproduction of capitalist power relations.
Download or read book Prometheanism written by Christopher John Müller and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Günther Anders’s prolific philosophy of technology is undergoing a major revival but has never been translated into English. Prometheanism mobilises Anders’s pragmatic thought and current trends in critical theory to rethink the constellations of power that are configuring themselves around our increasingly “smart” machines. The book offers a comprehensive introduction to Anders’s philosophy of technology with an annotated translation of his visionary essay ‘On Promethean Shame’, part of The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1 published in 1956.The essay analyses feelings of curtailment, obsolescence and solitude that become manifest whilst we interact with machines. When technological solutions begin to make humans look embarrassingly limited and flawed, new emotional vulnerabilities are exposed. These need to be thought, because our wavering confidence leaves us unprotected in an ever more (un)transparent, connected yet fractured world.
Download or read book The Extreme in Contemporary Culture written by Pramod K. Nayar and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-02-08 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of vulnerability as a dominant cultural discourse today, especially as it manifests in ‘extreme cultures’. These are cultural practices and representations of humans in risky, painful or life-threatening conditions where the limits of their humanity are tested, and producing heightened sensations of pain and pleasure. Extreme cultures in this book signal the social ontology of humans where, in specific conditions, vulnerability becomes helplessness. We see in these cultures the exploitation of the body’s immanent vulnerability in involuntary conditions of torture or deprivation, the encounter with extreme situations where the body is rendered incapacitated from performing routine functions due to structural conditions or in a voluntary embracing of risk in sporting events wherein the body pits itself against enormous forces and conditions. The Extreme in Contemporary Culture studies vulnerability across various conditions: torture, disease, accident. It studies spaces of vulnerability and helplessness, the aesthetics and representations of vulnerability, the extreme in the everyday and, finally, the witnessing of (in)human extremes. Extreme cultures suggest shared precarity as a foundational condition of humanity. A witness culture emerges through the cultural discourse of vulnerability, the representations of the victim and/or survivor, and the accounts of witnesses. They offer, in short, an entire new way of speaking about and classifying the human.
Download or read book Hypermodernity and Visuality written by Peter R. Sedgwick and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages with the question of making sense of seeing in today’s technologically dominated world. It does so by exploring the notion of the ‘hypermodern’, a term which is used to capture the drive in contemporary culture to achieve ever greater speed and efficiency. The volume draws principally on the thought of Paul Virilio and Friedrich Nietzsche. The text’s key argument is that destabilizing tendencies, which become increasingly evident in hypermodern culture, spring from its having a dual character. This duality turns on hypermodernity’s uncomfortable, unstable and possibly unsustainable relation to its own past. The volume engages with this dual character in a unique way. Its discussions are prefaced by poems and photographic images which together frame and permeate the text’s arguments and analyses. Part One offers linked engagements with Virilio’s articulation of the hypermodernized cultural-visual environment, Nietzsche’s accounts of history, power and archaic visuality, and briefer discussions of various other writers. Part Two presents a creative elaboration of these engagements through a combination of poetry, image and aphorism. Through this combination the digital image, a quintessentially hypermodern form of representation, is turned against itself to allow for reflection on the ethics and politics of seeing today. The volume concludes with an open-ended dialogue on visual culture, the archaic and the hypermodern.
Download or read book Back Issues written by Gary Genosko and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-12 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using independent critical and cultural theory journals that cross the Canada/US border as key examples, this book shows how to interpret the original practices of periodicals by tracing editorial diasporas and transitions to electronic publishing. Back Issues explains the role of independent theory journals in the institutional formation of critical theory and cultural studies in Canada and the US by focusing on two seminal publications, Paul Piccone’s Telos and Arthur Kroker’s Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. Editorial transits across the international border figure largely, as do founding conferences, interpersonal flare-ups, and the conviviality of academic communities and pre-gentrified urban bohemias. Both commensurable and incommensurable relationships between journal projects are analysed, and a hitherto unwritten history of critical and cultural theory in Canada is broached.
