Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England
Author: By Sujata Iyengar Was there such a thing as a modern notion of race in the English Renaissance, and, if so, was skin color its necessary marker? In fact, early modern texts described human beings of various national originsincluding Englishas turning white, brown, tawny, black, green, or red for any number of reasons, from the effects of the sun's rays or imbalance of the bodily humors to sexual desire or the application of makeup. It is in this cultural environment that the seventeenth-century London Gazette used the term black to describe both dark-skinned African runaways and dark-haired Britons, such as Scots, who are now unquestioningly conceived of as white.In Shades of Difference, Sujata Iyengar explores the cultural mythologies of skin color in a period during which colonial expansion and the slave trade introduced Britons to more dark-skinned persons than at any other time in their history. Looking to texts as divergent as sixteenth-century Elizabethan erotic verse, seventeenth-century lyrics, and Restoration prose romances, Iyengar considers the construction of race during the early modern period without oversimplifying the emergence of race as a color-coded classification or a black/white opposition. Rather, race, embodiment, and skin color are examined in their multiple contextshistorical, geographical, and literary. Iyengar engages works that have not previously been incorporated into discussions of the formation of race, such as Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. By rethinking the emerging early modern connections between the notions of race, skin color, and gender, Shades of Difference furthers an ongoing discussion with originality and impeccable scholarship.
Author: Andrew S. Crines
How do leading Labour figures strive to communicate with and influence the electorate? Why have some proven more successful than others in advancing their ideological arguments? How do orators seek to connect with different audiences in different settings such as parliament, party conference and through the media? This thoroughly researched and highly readable collection comprehensively evaluates these questions as well as providing an extensive interrogation of the political and intellectual significance of oratory and rhetoric in the post-war Labour Party. This collection evaluates the oratory and rhetoric of twelve leading figures from Labour politics: Aneurin Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Each chapter explores how its subject attempted to use oratory to advance their agenda within the party and beyond. Students of British politics, Labour history and communication studies will find this volume essential reading.
Author: Susan Sleeper-Smith
This interdisciplinary and international collection of essays illuminates the importance and effects of Indigenous perspectives for museums. The contributors challenge and complicate the traditionally close colonialist connections between museums and nation-states and urge more activist and energized roles for museums in the decades ahead.The essays in section 1 consider ethnographys influence on how Europeans represent colonized peoples. Section 2 essays analyze curatorial practices, emphasizing how exhibitions must serve diverse masters rather than solely the curators own creativity and judgment, a dramatic departure from past museum culture and practice. Section 3 essays consider tribal museums that focus on contesting and critiquing colonial views of American and Canadian history while serving the varied needs of the indigenous communities.The institutions examined in these pages range broadly from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC; the Oneida Nation Museum in Oneida, Wisconsin; tribal museums in the Klamath River region in California; the tribal museum in Zuni, New Mexico; the Museum of the American Indian in New York City; and the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa.
Author: Andrew David Irvine
Une bibliographie incontournable des Prix litteraires du Gouverneur general du Canada Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Antonine Maillet, Carol Shields, Marie-Claire Blais,
Author: Loring M. Danforth
If the Saint calls you, if you have an open road, then you don't feel the fire as if it were your enemy, says one of the participants in the Anastenaria. This compelling work evokes and contrasts two forms of firewalking and religious healing: first, the Anastenaria, a northern Greek ritual in which people who are possessed by Saint Constantine dance dramatically over red-hot coals, and, second, American firewalking, one of the more spectacular activities of New Age psychology. Loring Danforth not only analyzes these rituals in light of the most recent work in medical and symbolic anthropology but also describes in detail the lives of individual firewalkers, involving the reader personally in their experiences: he views ritual therapy as a process of transformation and empowerment through which people are metaphorically moved from a state of illness to a state of health. Danforth shows that the Anastenaria and the songs accompanying it allow people to express and resolve conflict-laden family relationships that may lead to certain kinds of illnesses. He also demonstrates how women use the ritual to gain a sense of power and control over their lives without actually challenging the ideology of male dominance that pervades Greek culture. Comparing the Anastenaria with American firewalking, Danforth includes a gripping account of his own participation in a firewalk in rural Maine. Finally he examines the place of anthropology in a postmodern world in which the boundaries between cultures are becoming increasingly blurred.
Author: Mauro Peressini
This book explores the experience of Canadians who chose to convert to Buddhism and to embrace its teachings and practices in their daily lives. It presents the life stories of eight Canadians who first encountered Buddhism between the late 1960s and the 1980s, and are now ordained or lay Buddhist teachers.
Author: Edited by Cecile Vidal
Located at the junction of North America and the Caribbean, the vast territory of colonial Louisiana provides a paradigmatic case study for an Atlantic studies approach. One of the largest North American colonies and one of the last to be founded, Louisiana was governed by a succession of sovereignties, with parts ruled at various times by France, Spain, Britain, and finally the United States. But just as these shifting imperial connections shaped the territory's culture, Louisiana's peculiar geography and history also yielded a distinctive colonization pattern that reflected a synthesis of continent and island societies.Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World offers an exceptional collaboration among American, Canadian, and European historians who explore colonial and antebellum Louisiana's relations with the rest of the Atlantic world. Studying the legacy of each period of Louisiana history over the longue duree, the essays create a larger picture of the ways early settlements influenced Louisiana society and how the changes of sovereignty and other circulations gave rise to a multiethnic society. Contributors examine the workings of empires through the examples of slave laws, administrative careers or on-the-ground political negotiations, cultural exchanges among masters, non-slave holders, and slaves, and the construction of race through sexuality, marriage and household formation. As a whole, the volume makes the compelling argument that one cannot write Louisiana history without adopting an Atlantic perspective, or Atlantic history without referring to Louisiana.Contributors: Guillaume Aubert, Emily Clark, Alexandre Dube, Sylvia R. Frey, Sylvia L. Hilton, Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, Cecile Vidal, Sophie White, Mary Williams.
Author: CHRIS HEFFELFINGER
The radicalization of Muslims and Islamic institutions in the United States, Europe, and across the Islamic world has fostered a new generation of Islamist activists, many of them willing to use violence to achieve their aims. In Radical Islam in America, Chris Heffelfinger describes the development of the Islamist movement, examines its efforts and influence in the West, and suggests strategies to reduce or eliminate the threat of Islamist terrorism. The book distinguishes Islamism (the fundamentalist political movement based on Islamic identity and values) from the Muslim faith and explores Islamists substantial inroads with Muslims and Muslim educational institutions in the West since the 1960s, as well as the larger relationship between Islamist political activism and militancy. Heffelfinger argues that the West has often mischaracterized jihadists as a nihilistic, irrational force desiring nothing but death and destruction. Instead, we need to recognize that Islamists are part of a much broader struggle over the political, social, economic, and legal direction of Muslims around the world. Our failure to understand the motives behind terrorist tactics has resulted not only in ineffective counterterrorism strategies but also in the proliferation of Islamist militants and sympathizers. Among the hundreds of terrorism-related arrests since 9/11, a large number were young, socially alienated Muslims who were moved by the jihadist message but not directed by jihadist networks overseas. That phenomenonand the ideology behind itis what Western society and governments must fully understand in order to construct a viable policy to confront it. This book will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in global politics, current affairs, Middle East terrorism, and counterterrorism.