Showing papers on "Cultural history published in 2006"

Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship

Abstract: Acknowledgements ix 1. Introduction: Affective Communities 1 2. Manifesto: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship 13 3. Sex: The Story of Late Victorian Homosexual Exceptionalism 34 4. Meat: A Short Cultural History of Animal Welfare at the Fin-de-Siecle 67 5. God: Mysticism and Radicalism at the End of the Nineteenth Century 115 6. Art: Aestheticism and the Politics of Postcolonial Difference 142 7. Conclusion: An Immature Politics 177 Notes 191 Index 237

Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century

Abstract: This is a masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century. Jay Winter locates the fascination with the subject of memory within a long-term trajectory that focuses on the Great War. Images, languages, and practices that appeared during and after the two world wars focused on the need to acknowledge the victims of war and shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. At the core of the "memory boom" is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war, Winter says. The book begins by tracing the origins of contemporary interest in memory, then describes practices of remembrance that have linked history and memory, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The author also considers "theaters of memory"--film, television, museums, and war crimes trials in which the past is seen through public representations of memories. The book concludes with reflections on the significance of these practices for the cultural history of the twentieth century as a whole.

Interculturalism as a paradigm for thinking about diversity

Abstract: The author will attempt to demonstrate that the concept of culture is no longer appropriate for describing present‐day cultural diversity. Indeed, cultures can no longer be understood as independent entities, but need to be contextualized in terms of social, political and communication‐based realities. When contemplating cultural pluralism, it is the variety of cultural fragments that are significant rather than the cultures in their entirety. It is the complexity of interethnic/interracial relations and cross‐cultural exchange that have made the concept of culture less relevant. The author replaces this concept with that of culturality. This concept does a better job of grasping the flexible and constantly changing nature of cultures. It also recognizes that cultural traces are more important than cultural structures. Individuals select cultural information according to their interests and the vicissitudes of the situation. Culture, like language, is a place of expression and interaction between oneself ...

The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

Abstract: Sexuality is power' - so says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer extraordinaire. His virtuous Justine keeps to the rules laid down by men, her reward rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality. In a world where all tenderness is false, all beds are minefields. But now Sade has met his match. With invention and genius, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of his extreme imagination, and transforms them into symbols of our time - the Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes. Angela Carter delves into the viscera of our distorted sexuality and reveals a dazzling vision of love which admits neither of conqueror nor of conquered.

Nationalism and the cultivation of culture

Abstract: On the basis of an extensive sample of European source material, the article investigates the meaning and importance of 'culture' in cultural nationalism. The author argues that European cultural nationalism in the nineteenth century followed a separate dynamic and chronology from political nationalism. Cultural nationalism involved an intense cross-border traffic of ideas and intellectual initiatives, and its participating actors often operated extraterritorially and in multi-national intellectual networks. This means that cultural nationalism needs to be studied on a supranational comparative basis rather than country-by-country, concentrating on the exchange and transfer of ideas and activities. A working model is proposed which may serve to bring these ideas and activities into focus. In the following pages, I want to present what I consider a useful program- matic approach in the study of nineteenth-century European nationalism, aiming to bring into focus the culturally oriented initiatives and concerns of nationalist movements. This topic has hitherto often been dealt with piece- meal (in the context of nationally framed studies) or marginally (as an adjunct to socio-politically oriented analyses). I propose a different, transnationally comparative approach from a cultural historical perspective, by briefly discussing five tenets. These are: 1. All nationalism is cultural nationalism; 2. Cultural nationalism is a topic for cultural history; 3. Cultural nationalism requires a cross-national comparative approach; 4. Nationalism begins as a 'cultivation of culture'; 5. The 'cultivation of culture' can be mapped as a specific array of concerns. The context taken here is specifically European. The obervations in the following pages can claim little or no applicability to nation-building processes in the Americas, Asia or Africa; the focus is on nationalism as it develops in Europe in the long nineteenth century. To compound that development, hugely complex as it is in itself, with other phenomena including anticolonial movements and modernisation processes elsewhere in the world would add an unworkable overload of variables. Even so, the framework presented here is already enormously broad in scope: to account for trends and patterns that would embrace Catalonia and Finland, France and Estonia,

The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars

Abstract: The book traces the evolution of Armenia and Armenian collective identity, in the homeland and in the diaspora, from its beginnings to the eve of the Armenian nationalist movement over Gharabagh in 1988. The emphasis is on the modern era - the seventeenth century onwards, including the Soviet period. Panossian's overall approach is that of interpretive political and cultural history, centred around theories of national identity formation and nationalism. The cultural identity of the Armenian people - expressed in their art, literature, religious practice and even commerce - played a vital role in preserving national memory, and forms an important component of this study, as does the author's analysis of the Armenian Genocide in 1915.

Between legitimacy and violence

Abstract: Between Legitimacy and Violence is an authoritative, sweeping history of Colombia’s “long twentieth century,” from the tumultuous civil wars of the late nineteenth century to the drug wars of the late twentieth. Marco Palacios, a leading Latin American historian, skillfully blends political, economic, social, and cultural history. In an expansive chronological narrative full of vivid detail, he explains Colombia’s political history, discussing key leaders, laws, parties, and ideologies; corruption and inefficiency; and the paradoxical nature of government institutions, which, while stable and enduring, are unable to prevent frequent and extreme outbursts of violence. Palacios traces the trajectory of the economy, addressing agriculture (particularly the economic significance of coffee), the development of a communication and transportation infrastructure, industrialization, and labor struggles. Palacios also gives extensive attention to persistent social inequalities, the role of the Catholic Church, demographic shifts such as urbanization and emigration, and Colombia’s relationship with the United States. Offering a comparative perspective, he frequently contrasts Colombia with other Latin American nations. Throughout, Palacios offers a helpful interpretive framework, connecting developments with their causes and consequences. By thoroughly illuminating Colombia’s past, Between Legitimacy and Violence sheds much-needed light on the country’s violent present.

Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left

Abstract: Soul Power is a cultural history of those whom Cynthia A. Young calls “U.S. Third World Leftists,” activists of color who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anticolonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the “long 1960s.” Nearly thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence in the 1960s alone. Arguing that the significance of this wave of decolonization to U.S. activists has been vastly underestimated, Young describes how literature, films, ideologies, and political movements that originated in the Third World were absorbed by U.S. activists of color. She shows how these transnational influences were then used to forge alliances, create new vocabularies and aesthetic forms, and describe race, class, and gender oppression in the United States in compelling terms. Young analyzes a range of U.S. figures and organizations, examining how each deployed Third World discourse toward various cultural and political ends. She considers a trip that LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams made to Cuba in 1960; traces key intellectual influences on Angela Y. Davis’s writing; and reveals the early history of the hospital workers’ 1199 union as a model of U.S. Third World activism. She investigates Newsreel, a late 1960s activist documentary film movement, and its successor, Third World Newsreel, which produced a seminal 1972 film on the Attica prison rebellion. She also considers the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American artists who made films about conditions in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. By demonstrating the breadth, vitality, and legacy of the work of U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power firmly establishes their crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American struggles for social change.

Memory Pieces and Footprints: Multivocality and the Meanings of Ancient Times and Ancestral Places among the Zuni and Hopi

Abstract: The notion of the "contested past" has grown to be an important topic in anthropological research in recent decades, linking such themes as nationalism, identity, museology, tourism, and war. In North America, these discussions have largely centered on archaeology's shifting relationship with native peoples. As scholars give new attention to how research methodologies and representation of cultural histories affect indigenous peoples, it is critical to understand the unique ways in which Native Americans view their past. Contemporary Zuni and Hopi interpretations of ancestral landscapes in the San Pedro Valley of Arizona are used to explore how indigenous worldviews imbue ancient places with deep cultural and individual meanings. This research, based on a three-year collaborative ethnohistory project, argues for resolution to the "contested past" by incorporating a perspective of multivocality, which will enable the creation of alternative histories that do not eschew scientific principles while respecting native values of history.

The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary

Abstract: Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Americo Paredes (1915–1999) was a pioneering figure in Mexican American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. Paredes taught literature and anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for decades, and his ethnographic and literary critical work laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the folktales, legends, and riddles of Mexican Americans. In this beautifully written literary history, the distinguished scholar Ramon Saldivar establishes Paredes’s preeminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the south Texas borderlands. At the same time, Saldivar reveals Paredes as a precursor to the “new” American cultural studies by showing how he perceptively negotiated the contradictions between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas in the nascent era of globalization. Saldivar demonstrates how Paredes’s poetry, prose, and journalism prefigured his later work as a folklorist and ethnographer. In song, story, and poetry, Paredes first developed the themes and issues that would be central to his celebrated later work on the “border studies” or “anthropology of the borderlands.” Saldivar describes how Paredes’s experiences as an American soldier, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker in Asia shaped his understanding of the relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the borderlands of south Texas and of national and ethnic identities more broadly. Saldivar was a friend of Paredes, and part of The Borderlands of Culture is told in Paredes’s own words. By explaining how Paredes’s work engaged with issues central to contemporary scholarship, Saldivar extends Paredes’s intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a transnational perspective.

The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950-2000 and Beyond

Abstract: In the middle years of the twentieth century, the history of ideas rose like a new sign of the zodiac over large areas of American culture and education. In those happy days, Dwight Robbins, the president of a fashionable progressive college, kept "copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine-a little magazine-that had no name" on the table in his waiting room. True, Robbins did not exist: he was the fictional president of Randall Jarrell's equally fictional Benton, a liberal arts dystopia where "[h]alf of the college was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe."1 But Jarrell's notation of the Journal's status was accurate nonetheless.2The Journal, in the twenty years or so after its foundation, attracted attention from many quarters, some of them unexpected. And it occupied a unique position, between the technical journals of history and philology, each firmly identified with a discipline, in which professional humanists normally published their results, and the quarterlies, often based not in disciplines but in liberal arts colleges and universities, which cultivated a mixed readership to which they offered fiction and poetry as well as essays. By contrast with both, the JHI fifty years ago ran on a rich mix of technical articles and wide-ranging essays that could easily have attracted the attention of a sophisticated administrator-or at least made a good impression on his coffee table. Bliss was it to be a subscriber in that happy day when the JHI glowed with something of the luster that haloed Representations in the 1980s and Critical Inquiry more recently.3The main reason for the Journal's prominence was that it represented a new field, appealingly located between disciplines as the Journal was between other sorts of periodical. In its postwar heyday, the history of ideas was not a dim subdivision of history, itself a discipline whose luster has worn off with time, but an intellectual seismic zone where the tectonic plates of disciplines converged and rubbed against one another, producing noises of all sorts. In recent years, it has sometimes seemed impossible, even to the best informed observers, that intellectual history, or the history of ideas, ever enjoyed this sort of prestige. A quarter century ago, Robert Darnton surveyed the state of intellectual and cultural history in the United States in an informative and influential essay. Using a language more resonant of the historical President Carter than the fictional President Robbins, Darnton detected "malaise" everywhere he looked. In the fifties, he noted, intellectual historians had seen "their discipline as the queen of the historical sciences. Today she seems humbled." True, desperate cries for help were not yet called for. Historians continued to write histories of ideas, and even to cast them in the technical languages of A.O. Lovejoy or Perry Miller: "one still finds 'unit-ideas' and 'mind' among the trendier terms." The justpublished Dictionary of the History of Ideas, moreover, offered a vast selection of Lovejoyan formal analyses, systematically organized, to the reading public.4But for the last ten years, Darnton argued, younger scholars, especially graduate students, had been scrambling over the gunwales of the good ship History of Ideas, abandoning the effort to converse abstractly with the mighty dead, and clambering in hordes over the side of a newer vessel, Social History, which boasted a Hogarthian passenger list of heretics, misfits, and military women. At the level of the dissertations written in history departments, social history was outpacing intellectual, by a proportion of three to one. At the level of the scholarly journal, too, social history had forged ahead, though by a smaller margin. In the murkier, but no less significant, world of opinion, finally, the decline of intellectual history appeared clearest. History of ideas no longer occupied the cutting edge in young scholars' mental vision of their discipline. …

The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship

Abstract: In the West, monastic ideals and scholastic pursuits are complementary; monks are popularly imagined copying classics, preserving learning through the Middle Ages, and establishing the first universities. But this dual identity is not without its contradictions. While monasticism emphasizes the virtues of poverty, chastity, and humility, the scholar, by contrast, requires expensive infrastructure a library, a workplace, and the means of disseminating his work. In "The Monk and the Book, "Megan Hale Williams argues that Saint Jerome was the first to represent biblical study as a mode of asceticism appropriate for an inhabitant of a Christian monastery, thus pioneering the enduring linkage of monastic identities and institutions with scholarship. Revisiting Jerome with the analytical tools of recent cultural history including the work of Bourdieu, Foucault, and Roger Chartier Williams proposes new interpretations that remove obstacles to understanding the life and legacy of the saint. Examining issues such as the construction of Jerome s literary persona, the form and contents of his library, and the intellectual framework of his commentaries, Williams shows that Jerome s textual and exegetical work on the Hebrew scriptures helped to construct a new culture of learning. This fusion of the identities of scholar and monk, Williams shows, continues to reverberate in the culture of the modern university."[Williams] has written a fascinating study, which provides a series of striking insights into the career of one of the most colorful and influential figures in Christian antiquity. Jerome's Latin Bible would become the foundational text for the intellectual development of the West, providing words for the deepest aspirations and most intensely held convictions of an entire civilization. Williams's book does much to illumine the circumstances in which that fundamental text was produced, and reminds us that great ideas, like great people, have particular origins, and their own complex settings." Eamon Duffy, "New York"" Review of Books""

Locating memory : photographic acts

Abstract: "...[this volume makes a] strong contribution...to rethinking the limitations and failures of photographic representation and to challenging our own interpretive assumptions driven by desires to see and read photographs in certain ways. Rather, as the volume makes clear in unique and varied sites of research, photographic meaning and memory, unstable and in constant flux, are marked as much by forgetfulness and absence as remembrance and presence." * H-Net "...the discursive style of each of the chapters highlights the value of attention to oral histories...There are many chapters worth investigating in this volume, delivering as it does a specific methodological clout for the study of memory and its mutations over time which result in national deliriums, amnesia and all types of cultural disorders." * Cultural Studies Review "The successful combination of varied insights, from work on cultural memory and visual culture to analysis of photographic acts, makes this a unique collection of essays, an exemplary model of interdisciplinary scholarship, and a valuable asset to Berghahn Books' 'Remapping Cultural History' series." * Canadian Journal of Communication As a visual medium, the photograph has many culturally resonant properties that it shares with no other medium. These essays develop innovative cultural strategies for reading, re-reading and re-using photographs, as well as for (re)creating photographs and other artworks and evoke varied sites of memory in contemporary landscapes: from sites of war and other violence through the lost places of indigenous peoples to the once-familiar everyday places of home, family, neighborhood and community. Paying close attention to the settings in which such photographs are made and used--family collections, public archives, museums, newspapers, art galleries--the contributors consider how meanings in photographs may be shifted, challenged and renewed over time and for different purposes--from historical inquiry to quests for personal, familial, ethnic and national identity. Annette Kuhn is Professor of Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and an editor of the journal Screen. She has written about photographs in The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (1985) and Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995). Her most recent book is An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002). Kirsten Emiko McAllister is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She has written about photographs, visual culture and museum artifacts in West Coast Line, CineAction and Cultural Values, and is currently writing a book on a memorial that marks the site of a World War II Japanese-Canadian internment camp.

Love in South Asia: a cultural history

Abstract: Love may be a universal feeling, but culture and language play a crucial role in defining it. Idioms of love have a long history, and within every society there is always more than one discourse, be it prescriptive, religious, or gender-specific, available at any given time. This book explores the idioms of love that have developed in South Asia, those words, conceptual clusters, images and stories which have interlocked and grown into repertoires. Including essays by literary scholars, historians, anthropologists, film historians and political theorists, the collection unravels the interconnecting strands in the history of the concept (shringara, 'ishq, prem and "love") and maps their significance in literary, oral and visual traditions. Each essay examines a particular configuration and meaning of love on the basis of genre, tellers and audiences, and the substantial introduction sets out the main repertoires, presenting the student of South Asia with an important cultural history. • First book-length study of how the concept of love in South Asia was informed and defined by its cultural context • Draws on material from the worlds of literature, music and film • Written by leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines

Pin-up grrrls

Abstract: Subverting stereotypical images of women, a new generation of feminist artists is remaking the pin-up, much as Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, and others did in the 1970s and 1980s. As shocking as contemporary feminist pin-ups are intended to be, perhaps more surprising is that the pin-up has been appropriated by women for their own empowerment since its inception more than a century ago. Pin-Up Grrrls tells the history of the pin-up from its birth, revealing how its development is intimately connected to the history of feminism. Maria Elena Buszek documents the genre’s 150-year history with more than 100 illustrations, many never before published. Beginning with the pin-up’s origins in mid-nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographs of burlesque performers, Buszek explores how female sex symbols, including Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson, fought to exert control over their own images. Buszek analyzes the evolution of the pin-up through the advent of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, fanzine photographs of early film stars, the Varga Girl illustrations that appeared in Esquire during World War II, the early years of Playboy magazine, and the recent revival of the genre in appropriations by third-wave feminist artists. A fascinating combination of art history and cultural history, Pin-Up Grrrls is the story of how women have publicly defined and represented their sexuality since the 1860s.

The origins of the French Revolution

Abstract: List of Tables Introduction: The Origins of the French Revolution PRCampbell The Financial Origins of the French Revolution JFelix Decision-Making JHardman The Paris Parlement in the 1780s PRCampbell From Social to Cultural History WScott The Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution MLinton The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1560-1791 Dvan Kley The Contested Image: Stage, Canvas and the Origins of the French Revolution MLedbury The Pamphlet Debate Over the Organization of the Estates General KMargerison Peasants and their Grievances JMarkoff From The Estates-General to the National Assembly, May 5 - August 4, 1789 MPFitzsimmons Glossary Chronology List of Abbreviations Notes Further Reading Notes on Contributors Index

Northern English: A Social and Cultural History

Abstract: English as spoken in the north of England has a rich social and cultural history; however it has often been neglected by historical linguists, whose research has focused largely on the development of 'Standard English'. In this groundbreaking, alternative account of the history of English, Northern English takes centre stage for the first time. Emphasising its richness and variety, the book places northern speech and culture in the context of identity, iconography, mental maps, boundaries and marginalisation. It reassesses the role of Northern English in the development of Modern Standard English, draws some pioneering conclusions about the future of Northern English, and considers the origins of the many images and stereotypes surrounding northerners and their speech. Numerous maps, and a useful index of northern English words and pronunciations, are included. Innovative and original, Northern English will be welcomed by all those interested in the history and regional diversity of English.

Text and Ritual in Early China

Abstract: In Text and Ritual in Early China, leading scholars of ancient Chinese history, literature, religion, and archaeology consider the presence and use of texts in religious and political ritual. Through balanced attention to both the received literary tradition and the wide range of recently excavated artefacts, manuscripts, and inscriptions, their combined efforts reveal the rich and multilayered interplay of textual composition and ritual performance. Drawn across disciplinary boundaries, the resulting picture illuminates two of the defining features of early Chinese culture and advances new insights into their sumptuous complexity. Beginning with a substantial introduction to the conceptual and thematic issues explored in succeeding chapters, Text and Ritual in Early China is anchored by essays on early Chinese cultural history and ritual display (Michael Nylan) and the nature of its textuality (William G. Boltz). This twofold approach sets the stage for studies of the E Jun Qi metal tallies (Lothar von Falkenhausen), the Gongyang commentary to The Spring and Autumn Annals (Joachim Gentz), the early history of The Book of Odes (Martin Kern), moral remonstration in historiography (David Schaberg), the "Liming" manuscript text unearthed at Mawangdui (Mark Csikszentmihalyi), and Eastern Han commemorative stele inscriptions (K. E. Brashier). The scholarly originality of these essays rests firmly on their authors' control over ancient sources, newly excavated materials, and modern scholarship across all major Sinological languages. The extensive bibliography is in itself a valuable and reliable reference resource. This important work will be required reading for scholars of Chinese history, language, literature, philosophy, religion, art history, and archaeology.

Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873-1898

Abstract: There was once a time in the not too recent past when scholarly discussion and debate over periodization was central to the task of writing and thinking about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Robert Wiebe, and Samuel P. Hays applied versions of modernization theory to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce what came to be known as the “organizational synthesis.” A competing periodization centered on the rise of the large business corporation appeared in works by Martin Sklar, James Weinstein, and James Livingston. Since the 1970s, however, the new social and cultural history has introduced a multitude of new fields and perspectives. By the 1980s, the perceived fragmentation of history had generated an appeal for “synthesis.” In 1986 Thomas Bender called for new and intelligible narrative plots that would transcend “recent scholarship with its intensive specialization, fragmentation, and preoccupation with groups.” Yet, since then, occasional attempts to synthesize have been stillborn, and for the Gilded Age as well as for the Progressive Era the search for synthesis seems to have reached a cul-de-sac with no exit in sight.

Biography as Cultural History of Science

Abstract: Taking off from reflections about the relation of biographical writing to fiction, this essay considers the ways in which scientific biography can explore the cultural dynamics of science. The author examines her own experience in using biography to write history of science and refers to several other examples of biographies of eighteenth‐century figures that raise issues specific to the persona of the man of science and his audiences in this period.

The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television

Abstract: In "The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television", Beat studies scholar Katie Mills examines how road stories, which have offered declarations of independence to generations of rebellious Americans, have been transformed by media, technology, and social movements. The genre, which includes literature, films, television shows, and several types of digital media, has evolved, says Mills, as each new generation questions its own identity and embraces the thrill of "automobility" (autonomy and mobility) thus providing audiences a means to consider radically altered notions of independence, even as the genre cycles between innovation and commodification. This cultural history reveals the unique qualities of road stories and follows the evolution from the Beats' postwar literary adventures to today's postmodern reality television shows. Tracing the road story as it moves to both LeRoi Jones's critique of the Beats' romanticization of blacks as well as to the mainstream in the 1960s with CBS's "Route 66", Mills also documents the rebel subcultures of novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who used film and LSD as inspiration on a cross-country bus trip - and she examines the sexualization of male mobility and biker mythology in the films "Scorpio Rising", "The Wild Angels", and "Easy Rider". Mills addresses how the filmmakers of the 1970s - Coppola, Scorsese, and Bogdanovich - flourished in New Hollywood with road films that reflected mainstream audiences and how feminists Joan Didion and Betty Friedan subsequently critiqued them. A new generation of women and minority storytellers gain clout and bring genre remapping to the national consciousness, Mills explains, as the road story evolves from such novels as "Song of Solomon" to films like "Thelma and Louise" and television's "Road Rules 2". "The Road Story and the Rebel", which includes twenty illustrations, effectively explores the cultural significance of sixty years of rebellion in film, literature, television, and digital media. Spanning media platforms and marginalized communities, the text offers new interpretations of canonical works and reintroduces forgotten works, revealing the genre to be more political and philosophical than previously understood.

Cultural studies' affective voices

Abstract: In a series of encounters with key figures in the field of cultural studies, this book draws together interest in affect theory and contemporary politics to describe the mobilising effects of individual scholarly voices in cultural studies’ history, emphasising the ongoing importance of engaged, public intellectualism throughout.

Book Review: The History of Probation: Politics, Power and Cultural Change 1876–2005:

Abstract: Preface Introduction Acknowledgements Dedication Note on Authors Part 1 BEGINNINGS AND DEVELOPMENT OF PROBATION 1876-1979 1. Introduction: Some Themes and Influences 2. Reforming Liberals to Radical Conservatives: 1907 to 1979 Part 2 POLITICS, MANAGEMENT AND CENTRAL CONTROL 1979-2001 3. Law, Order and Efficiency: May 1979 to the Statement of National Objectives and Priorities 1984 4. Probation Moves Centre Stage: 1985 to the Criminal Justice Act 1991 5. The Centre Cannot Hold: Difficult Years from 1992 to 1997 6. New Labour and Probation: 1997 to the National Probation Service 2001 Part 3 DECLINE AND FUTURE OF PROBATION 7. From the National Probation Service to the National Offender Management Service 2001 to 2004 8. Conclusion: Summary, Explanations and the Future APPENDICES 1. Chronological Summary of Probation History 2. Criminal Justice Act 2003: Sentencing Framework References Index.

Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women's Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Sarah Robbins's new book accomplishes two monumental tasks. It identifies and defines a previously unstudied genre, the domestic literacy narrative, and provides a pioneering cultural history of this genre from the early days of the United States through the turn of the twentieth century. Domestic literacy narratives often feature scenes that depict women - mostly middle-class mothers - teaching those in their care to read, write, and discuss literature, with the goal of promoting civic participation. These narratives characterize literature as a source of shared knowledge and social improvement. Authors of these works, which were circulated in a broad range of publication venues, imagined their readers as contributing to the ongoing formation of an idealized American community. At the center of the genre's history are authors such as Lydia Sigourney, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Frances Harper, who viewed their writing as a form of teaching for the public good. But in her wide-ranging and interdisciplinary investigation, Robbins demonstrates that a long line of women writers created domestic literacy narratives, which proved to be highly responsive to shifts in educational agendas and political issues throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Robbins offers close readings of texts ranging from the 1790s to the 1920s. These include influential British precursors to the genre and early twentieth-century narratives by women missionaries that have been previously undervalued by cultural historians. She examines texts by prominent authors that have received little critical attention to date - such as Lydio Maria Child's Good Wives - and provides fresh context when discussing the well-known works of the period. For example, she reads Uncle Tom's Cabin in relation to Harriet Beecher Stowe's education and experience as a teacher. Managing Literacy, Mothering America is a groundbreaking exploration of nineteenth-century U.S. culture, viewed through the lens of a literary practice that promoted women's public influence on social issues and agendas.

Dead Man's Town: "Born in the U.S.A.," Social History, and Working-Class Identity

Abstract: This essay analyzes Bruce Springsteen's 1984 hit song "Born in the U.S.A." as a history and commentary on working-class identity. The article discusses the song's narrative elements and its oppositional chorus as they each relate to the social, economic, political, and cultural history of post-Vietnam America. Beginning with an overview of white, male working-class political identity since the 1930s, the essay then turns to the era covered by the song itself—the 1970s and early 1980s. Three main themes are then explored through an intertextual analysis. First is the unique musical structure of song—the anthemic chorus contrasted with the verses' desperate narrative. The tension between the two is foundational for any understanding of the song's poetics. Next is the Vietnam/hometown metonymy, in which it is argued that the Vietnam War serves as a collection of symbols relating not simply to the war itself but to the social and economic siege of American blue-collar communities. Finally, the essay turns directly to the song's theme of economic devastation, which uproots the material basis of working-class identity only to replant it in the acidic soil of nationalism. A close reading of these themes—and the cultural and political forces that gave rise to them—points toward an understanding of both working-class identity and community under siege in what can best be understood as a guerrilla war at home and abroad. Springsteen reveals blue-collar America separated from an economic identity, sheltered only by the empty shell of a failed social patriotism, contained in a hometown under attack, and fighting in little but isolation and silence. The economic foundations of the industrial working class were disappearing, the politics that once offered some protection had all but disappeared, and what remained was a deafening but hollow national pride—"Born in the USA." The essay concludes with a brief exploration of the ways in which the themes of the song reverberate well into twenty-first century.