The writer brings to his reading audiences a bold new view on immigration struggles, survival, and endeavors. He unveils the light on footsteps of freedom in America, from an immigrant's perspective. This is a gripping tale of survival based on a series of real life happenings. This story reveals the anatomy of immigration is just as complex as the exploration of America centuries ago. Smuggling immigrants across the border becomes a hard-hitting tale of surviving the trip and the struggle for f
A work that bridges media archaeology and visual culture studies argues that the Internet has emerged as a mass medium by linking control with freedom and democracy. How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. The parallel (and paranoid) myths of the Internet as total freedom/total control, she says, stem from our reduction of political problems into technological ones. Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and analyzing such phenomena as Webcams and face-recognition technology, Chun argues that the relationship between control and freedom in networked contact is experienced and negotiated through sexuality and race. She traces the desire for cyberspace to cyberpunk fiction and maps the transformation of public/private into open/closed. Analyzing "pornocracy," she contends that it was through cyberporn and the government's attempts to regulate it that the Internet became a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Chun describes the way Internet promoters conflated technological empowerment with racial empowerment and, through close examinations of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, she analyzes the management of interactivity in narratives of cyberspace. The Internet's potential for democracy stems not from illusory promises of individual empowerment, Chun argues, but rather from the ways in which it exposes us to others (and to other machines) in ways we cannot control. Using fiber optic networks—light coursing through glass tubes—as metaphor and reality, Control and Freedom engages the rich philosophical tradition of light as a figure for knowledge, clarification, surveillance, and discipline, in order to argue that fiber-optic networks physically instantiate, and thus shatter, enlightenment.
Historically, the United States has been viewed by generations of immigrants as the land of opportunity, where through hard work one can prosper and make a better life. The American Dream is perhaps the United States’ most common export. For many Americans, though, questions remain about whether the American Dream can be achieved in the twenty-first century. Americans, faced with global competition and increased social complexity, wonder whether their dwindling natural resources, polarized national and local politics, and often unregulated capitalism can support the American Dream today. This book examines the ideas and experiences that have formed the American Dream, assesses its meaning for Americans, and evaluates its prospects for the future.
In this dark fantasy sequel to Winter Tide, siblings in Cold War America look to rebuild their New England community only to find mystery and danger. A finalist for the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and the Dragon Award for Best Fantasy Novel Ruthanna Emrys’s Innsmouth Legacy, which began with Winter Tide and continues with Deep Roots, confronts H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos head-on, boldly upturning his fear of the unknown with a heart-warming story of found family, acceptance, and perseverance in the face of human cruelty and the cosmic apathy of the universe. Emrys brings together a family of outsiders, bridging the gaps between the many people marginalized by the homogenizing pressure of 1940s America . . . Aphra Marsh, descendant of the People of the Water, has survived Deep One internment camps and made a grudging peace with the government that destroyed her home and exterminated her people on land. Deep Roots continues Aphra’s journey to rebuild her life and family on land, as she tracks down long-lost relatives. She must repopulate Innsmouth or risk seeing it torn down by greedy developers, but as she searches she discovers that people have been going missing. She will have to unravel the mystery, or risk seeing her way of life slip away. “Wicked for the Cthulhu Mythos.” —Seanan McGuire on the Innsmouth Legacy “Deep Roots is a marvel of a fantasy novel, with monsters fighting for their very existence and a place to call their own.” —Booklist “I really like this story and think fans of Lovecraft will enjoy it if they don’t mind switching genres. It’s not horror and it’s not a particularly “alien” version of the Mythos but it’s still a very good take on Lovecraft’s work which I enjoyed for its own sake.” —Grimdark Magazine
Postcolonial theory is one of the key issues of scholarly debates worldwide; debates, so the author argues, which are rather sterile and characterized by a repetitive reworking of old hackneyed issues, focussing on cultural questions of language and identity in particular. She explores the divergent responses to the debates on globalization.