Author: Sarah Strauss File Type: pdf Last year, more than seven million Americans participated in yoga or tai chi classes.Yet despite its popularity the real nature of yoga remains shrouded in mystery. A diverse range of practitioners range from white-bearded Indian mystics to celebrities like Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow. Positioning Yoga provides an overview of the development of yoga, from its introduction to Western audiences by the Indian Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Parliament of the Worlds Religions in Chicago to forms of modern practice. What makes yoga practitioners affiliated with Swami Sivanandas Divine Life Society of Rishikesh, India unique--whether they hail from Indian, North America, or Europe? What values around the world have supported the surging popularity of yoga over the past century? This absorbing book considers how lifestyle values have made yoga a global industry and shows how this popular lifestyle is produced and disseminated across boundaries.**

Author: Alfred Sohn-Rethel File Type: pdf

Author: David Wallace File Type: pdf This is the first full-scale history of medieval English literature in nearly a century. Thirty-three contributors provide information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception. The volume also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers the most extensive account available of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, and for historians as well as literary specialists. Review[T]heatre researchers are likely to find many of the...essays very useful and illuminating because the cultural history they depict has obvious implications for the study of theatre and performance. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, City University of New York, Theatre JournalThe Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature provides a formidable set of tools for the critic of medieval literature....The unobtrusive editorial presence that allows chapters with widely diverging approaches is a useful and mature reflection of the accomodation of plurality for an intelligent reading of medieval literature....This is a scholarly and erudite publication. Times Literary SupplementThe Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature is an excellent and long overdue reassessment, which completes a paradigm shift in the study of English medieval literature. It synthesises and responds to developments in the field over the last twenty years, and forges them into a coherent whole. A pioneering work in the field of medieval studies, it is also a fascinating and highly rewarding reading experience, that should be shared by everyone in the discipline. Prof. Joerg Fichte, TUbingen UniversityRecommended for all collections supporting medieval studies at the upper-division undergraduate level and above. Choice Book DescriptionThis is the first fullscale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors provide information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception, and the volume also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers the most extensive and vibrant account available of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will thus prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, for historians as well as literary specialists.

Author: Bénédicte Boisseron File Type: pdf The animal-rights organization PETA asked Are Animals the New Slaves? in a controversial 2005 fundraising campaign that same year, after the Humane Society rescued pets in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina while black residents were neglected, some declared that white America cares more about pets than black people. These are but two recent examples of a centuries-long history in which black life has been pitted against animal life. Does comparing human and animal suffering trivialize black pain, or might the intersections of racialization and animalization shed light on interlinked forms of oppression?In Afro-Dog, Benedicte Boisseron investigates the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the black Atlantic, exposing a hegemonic system that compulsively links and opposes blackness and animality to measure the value of life. She analyzes the association between black civil disobedience and canine repression, a history that spans the era of slavery through the use of police dogs against protesters during the civil rights movement of the 1960s to today in places like Ferguson, Missouri. She also traces the lineage of blackness and the animal in Caribbean literature and struggles over minorities right to pet ownership alongside nuanced readings of Derrida and other French theorists. Drawing on recent debates on black lives and animal welfare, Afro-Dog reframes the fast-growing interest in humananimal relationships by positioning blackness as a focus of animal inquiry, opening new possibilities for animal studies and black studies to think side by side.**ReviewDazzling in its reach and groundbreaking in its methodology, Afro-Dog redraws the contours of intellectual inquiry with dogs at the lead. Boisseron aims to rethink the hyper-legality of racism and the practice of inequality in ways that are radical and far-reaching. (Colin Dayan, author of With Dogs at the Edge of Life) Benedicte Boisserons Afro-Dog hones in, acutely and in detail, on the often-unhappy convergence of animal and black in current and historical thought, deftly dismantling their rhetorical obfuscations while sacrificing neither the animal nor the black. Instead, she calls for attending to human-animal encounters through the lens of black and animal defiance, a kind of subversive interspecies alliance that could empower both. Brilliantly enlisting theoretical and critical voices in critical race studies, animal studies, Afropessimism, ecofeminism, and more, Boisseron brings a crucial Black Alantic and diasporic perspective to bear on blackness and the question of the animal to show, not that blackness and animality are comparable, but that black people and animals have been and are historically and concretely connectedmost often in the form of man and dog. (Carla Freccero, University of California, Santa Cruz) In Afro-Dog, Boisseron brilliantly demonstrates how the relationship between race and personhood has been missing entirely from the current humananimal rights debate, resulting in the argument that animals constitute the new slaves. In doing so she offers a long overdue exploration of the larger and more extended links in American and French culture where blackness and animality have become almost interchangeable in popular discourse. (Sandra Gunning, University of Michigan) Afro-Dog is a timely effort to tackle the fraught relations between posthumanism and postcolonialism and between animal studies and African American studies. Inflected by continental philosophy, Boisserons readings follow a historical trail of dogs from the Middle Passage to the Ferguson unrest in order to theorize a legacy of connections between racism and speciesism, but without posing a false analogy between the two. Especially insightful and important are her arguments about the potential dangers of intersectional analyses which risk reproducing what they mean to reject. (Kari Weil, author of Thinking Animals Why Animal Studies Now?) Afro-Dog is an amazing book! The animal is not the new black animals are not the new slaves and animal studies is not heir to the postcolonial turn. Instead, racialization, specifically New World blackness, is now present in all things animal. Whether as large dogs imported to the Americas to attack indigenous and African rebels or their repressive use in Standing Rock and Ferguson, Benedicte Boisseron** brilliantly explores dogs as instrumental accessories in defining human essence as white, impelling readers to consider the fundamental relationship between challenging speciesism and transcending colonialism. A must-read for anyone interested in the study of animals, enslavement, and race. (Jane Gordon, University of Connecticut) About the Author Benedicte Boisseron is associate professor of Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Creole Renegades Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (2014).