The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS
Author: Dagmawi Woubshet His world view colored by growing up in 1980s Ethiopia, where death governed time and temperament, Dagmawi Woubshet offers a startlingly fresh interpretation of melancholy and mourning during the early years of the AIDS epidemic in The Calendar of Loss. When society denies a patients disease and then forbids survivors mourning rites, how does a child bear witness to a parents death or a lover grieve for his beloved? Looking at a range of high and popular works of griefincluding elegies, eulogies, epistles to the dead, funerals, and obituariesWoubshet identifies a unique expression of mourning that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s in direct response to the AIDS catastrophe. What Woubshet dubs a poetics of compounding loss expresses what it was like for queer mourners to grapple with the death of lovers and friends in rapid succession while also coming to terms with the fact of their own imminent mortality.The time, consolation, and closure that allow the bereaved to get through loss were for the mourners in this book painfully thwarted, since with each passing friend, and with mounting numbers of the dead, they were provided with yet more evidence of the certain fatality of the virus inside them. Ultimately, the book argues, these disprized mourners turned to their sorrow as a necessary vehicle of survival, placing open grief at the center of art and protest, insisting that lives could be saved through the very speech acts precipitated by death. An innovative and moving study, The Calendar of Loss illuminates how AIDS mourning confounds and traverses how we have come to think about loss and grief, insisting that the bereaved can confront death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that also imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice.
Author: Valentina Vitali
Popular cinema has mostly been discussed from a 'cult' perspective that celebrates uncritically its 'transgressive' qualities. Capital and popular cinema responds to the need for a more solid academic approach by situating 'low' film genres in their economic and culturally-specific contexts and by exploring the interconnections between those contexts, the immediate industrial-financial interests sustaining the films, and the films' aesthetics. Through the examination of three different cycles in film production - the Italian giallo of Mario Bava, the Mexican films of Fernando Mendez, and the Hindi horror cinema of the Ramsay Brothers - Capital and popular cinema proposes a comparative approach that accounts for the whole of a national film industry's production ('popular' and 'canonic'), and is applicable to the study of film genres globally. Based on new research, Capital and popular cinema will be of interest to undergraduate and post-graduate students, researchers and scholars of cult and exploitation cinema, genre cinema, national cinema, film and media theory, and area studies.
Author: Esther Rashkin
Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative is the first book to explore the implications of the psychoanalytic theory of the phantom for the study of narrative literature. A phantom is formed when a shameful, unspeakable secret is unwittingly transmitted, through cryptic language and behavior, transgenerationally from one family member to another. The haunted individual to whom the encrypted secret is communicated becomes the unwitting medium for someone else's voice--and the result is speech and conduct that appear incongruous or obsessive in a variety of ways. Through close readings of texts by Conrad, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Balzac, James, and Poe, Esther Rashkin reveals how shameful secrets, concealed within the unspoken family histories of fictive characters, can be reconstructed from their linguistic traces and can be shown not only to drive the characters' speech and behavior but also to generate their narratives. First articulated by the French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, the theory of the phantom here represents a radical departure from Freudian, Lacanian, and other psychoanalytic approaches to literary interpretation. In Rashkin's hands, it also provides a response to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of character analysis, an alternative to deconstructive strategies of reading, and a new vantage point from which to consider problems of intertextuality, authorship, and the formation and origins of narrative.Originally published in 1992.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Michael I. Niman
Since 1972 the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a loosely organized and anarchistic nomadic community, has been holding large gatherings in remote forests to pray for world peace and create a model of a functioning utopian society. Michael I. Nimans People of the Rainbow, originally published in 1997, was the first comprehensive study of this countercultural group and its eclectic philosophy of environmentalism, feminism, peace activism, group sharing, libertarianism, and consensus government. It is a book yet to be superseded. This second edition of Nimans compelling and insightful work brings the Rainbow story up to date with a new introduction and two extensive new epilogues. While the big annual Rainbow Gatherings have drawn fewer numbers in recent years, Niman notes, the Rainbow ethos has in many ways migrated to the mainstream, as Rainbow notions about alternative medicine and environmental sustainability, for example, have gathered wider acceptance and influenced the national dialogue. Meanwhile, Rainbow movements in other regions, from Eastern Europe and the Middle East to Asia and Australia, are thriving. In addition to addressing changes within the Rainbow Family and its complex relationship to Babylon (what Rainbows call mainstream culture), the books new material explores the growing harassment Rainbows now face from U.S. law enforcement agenciesespecially those associated with the National Forest Service. As Niman contends, this particular saga of a U.S. bureaucracy at war with its own citizens is a subplot in the largerand disturbingstory of how the relationship between Americans and their government has changed during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In its nuanced portrait of an intriguing subculture, its successes, and its limitations, People of the Rainbow remains a significant contribution to the study of utopian communities
Author: Francis William Kent
Professor Kent is concerned with one of the major questions posed by historical research on the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance: did these periods witness the nuclearization of the aristocratic family? Considering three celebrated and representative Florentine ottimati lineages, the author reconstructs the histories and activities of scores of their households for the period circa 1420-1550. The author describes the nuclear and extended households and the acknowledgement of kinship among the men and separate households of each patrilineage. His analysis indicates that the nuclear family and the clan cannot justifiably be regarded as opposing forms of family organization, each representative of a distinct historical era and social ambience. Professor Kent's study places Renaissance individualism in a wider, more corporate social context than that in which it has been traditionally viewed by historians.Originally published in 1977.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Nadia Kiwan
This book focuses on how Muslim intellectuals in contemporary France contribute to our understanding of the relationship between Islam, secularism and French society. Whilst most books about Islam in France tend to examine polemicized issues such as the veil or Islamist violence, this books focus on secular Muslim intellectuals challenges polarizing accounts of Islam and Muslims. Secularism, Islam and public intellectuals in contemporary France thus departs from the clash of civilisations approach and, more broadly challenges divisive claims that European multiculturalism must be abandoned in order to uphold democratic principles and values. The book entails a contextualised analysis of the published works and public interventions of Abdennour Bidar, Malek Chebel, Leila Babes, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Dounia Bouzar - intellectuals who have all received little, if any scholarly attention despite being well-known figures in France.
Author: Leanne McCormick
This is a groundbreaking examination of the attempts to regulate female sexuality in twentieth-century Northern Ireland, which opens up new and exciting areas of a previously neglected history. A wide-ranging study, it explores the sexual experiences of women in the context of the distinctive religious, political and social circumstances of Northern Ireland during the twentieth century. The commonality of attitudes of the Catholic Churches toward the control of female sexuality is revealed, along with the similarity of views concerning female behaviour. While the ways in which various authorities tried to control female behaviour are explored, it is also argued that women were not simply victims, but employed a variety of survival strategies and active agency, no matter how difficult their circumstances were. This work will appeal not only to an academic audience but also to non-academic readers interested in a new and exciting view of Northern Irelands past.
Author: edited by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler
The contributors to this volume see translation as an activity that takes place not in an ideal neutral site but in real social and political situations, with parties who have vested interests in the production and reception of texts across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Translation is not simply a process of faithful reproduction but invariably involves deliberate acts of selection, construction, and omission. It is inextricably linked to issues of cultural dominance, assertion, and resistancein short, to power. Although governments, churches, publishing firms, and other powerful institutions may influence the translation process, many translators have found ways to resist that influence and have used translation to introduce new ideas and modes of expression. Exploring the nexus of translation and power, the essays in this volume offer a wide variety of examples, across multiple languages and societies. They range from case studies of historical episodes in which translation has played a role in the assertion of political and military power, such as an 1840 treaty between the British and Maori that continues to be a source of conflict in present-day New Zealand, to analyses of the work of specific translators, such as Germaine de Stael and Gayatri Spivak. Along with examining how translation contributes to ideological negotiations and cultural struggles, the essays reveal the dimensions of power inherent in the translation process itselfin the relationship of translator to author, source text, and translated text. In addition to the editors, contributors include Rosemary Arrojo, Michael Cronin, Sabine Fenton, Camino Gutierrez Lanza, Christopher Larkosh, Alexandra Lianeri, Lin Kenan, Carol Maier, Paul Moon, Adriana S. Pagano, and Sherry Simon.
Author: edited by Elizabeth De Wolfe
In 1813, Joseph Dyer, his wife Mary, and their five children joined the Shaker community in Enfield, New Hampshire. Joseph quickly adapted to the Shaker way of life, but Mary chafed under its strictures and eventually left the community two years later. When the local elders and her husband refused to release the couples children to Mary, she embarked on what would become a fifty-year campaign against the Shakers, beginning with the publication in 1818 of A Brief Statement of the Sufferings of Mary Dyer. The following year the Shakers countered by publishing Josephs A Compendious Narrative, a scathing attack on what the title page called the character, disposition and conduct of Mary Dyer. Reproduced here for the first time since their original publication, the Dyers dueling accounts of the breakup of their marriage form the core of Domestic Broils. In Marys telling, the deceptions of a cruel husband, backed by an unyielding Shaker hierarchy, destroyed what had once been a happy, productive family. Josephs narrative counters these claims by alleging that Mary abused her children, neglected her husband, and engaged in extramarital affairs. In her introduction to the volume, Elizabeth De Wolfe places the Dyers marital dispute in a broader historical context, drawing on their personal testimony to examine connected but conflicting views of marriage, family life, and Shakerism in the early republic. She also shows how the growing world of print facilitated the transformation of a private family quarrel into a public debate. Salacious, riveting, and immensely popular throughout New England, the Dyers narratives not only captured imaginations but also reflected public anxieties over rapid cultural change in antebellum America.
Author: By Vickie Rutledge Shields. With Dawn Heinecken
The mute gestures of advertising images are frozen for posterity by photographers and illustrators, gestures that, for better or worse, perpetuate a certain aesthetic and eventually become emblematic of a period. The images of today display the values of a society that has more interest in the body than the mind. They are technoenhanced labyrinths of unattainable appearances that leave women and men feeling horrified, estranged, and restricted by unrealistic, silent mandates. Measuring Up looks at advertising as more than just a way to extract money from unsuspecting people but as a vehicle for conveying the larger views of a confining, body-obsessed culture. By weaving theoretical and textual insights from feminist and cultural studies with the voices of real women and men, Measuring Up offers a unique reception analysis of the effects of repetitious exposure to advertisements of perfect bodies in our everyday lives. Shields examines a particular, complex relationship between the idealized images of gender we see in advertising and our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior in relation to these images. The study is unique in presenting audience reception in terms of ethnographic data, not textual interpretations alone. Measuring Up engages with and informs current theoretical debates within these sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory literatures: feminist media studies, feminist film theory, critical social theory, cultural studies, and critical ethnography. This is an important work that explores the forms and channels of power used in one of the most insidious and overt means of mass influence in popular culture.