Erotic Defiance considers the sacred and transformative power of the flesh, investigating the ethical and theological dimensions of the erotic experiences of Black women and performances of Black womanhood. Bryant approaches the erotic as a divine energy that manifests love through the flesh and makes healing, resistance, and self-making possible.
Discussing the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image, this book includes coverage of the history of the relationship between art and law, and the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law.
Indian cinema is the only body of world cinema that depicts courtesans as important characters. In early films courtesan characters transmitted Indian classical dance, music and aesthetics to large audiences. They represent the nation's past, tracing their heritage to the fourth-century Kamasutra and to nineteenth-century courtly cultures, but they are also the first group of modern women in Hindi films. They are working professionals living on their own or in matrilineal families. Like male protagonists, they travel widely and develop networks of friends and chosen kin. They have relations with men outside marriage and become single mothers. Courtesan films are heroine-oriented and almost every major female actor has played this role. Challenging received wisdom, Vanita demonstrates that a larger number of courtesans in Bombay cinema are Hindu and indeterminate than are Muslim, and that films depict their culture as hybrid Hindu-Muslim, not Islamicate. Courtesans speak in the ambiguous voice of the modern nation, inviting spectators to seize pleasure here and now but also to search for the meaning of life. Vanita's groundbreaking study of courtesans and courtesan imagery in 235 films brings fresh evidence to show that the courtesan figure shapes the modern Indian erotic, political and religious imagination.
This book offers an analysis of erotic love in the Bible, patristic theology, mystical writings, philosophy, and literature. Eschewing hyper-conservative shaming of lust and overly optimistic views of eros as sacred and liberating, the book demonstrates how eros illuminates core Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ, the afterlife, and the Trinity.
In Attachment, Sexuality, Power, Jerome C. Wakefield challenges established views of Freudian psychoanalysis by applying Foucault’s concept of ‘power/knowledge’ to Freud’s case of Little Hans, illuminating the role that Oedipal theory has played in reorganizing intimate family relationships. Combining close examination of the Hans case with accounts of the history of marriage and psychology of co-sleeping, this book argues that the Oedipal theory achieved prominence because its implications for family dynamics supported changing social values. Wakefield identifies a previously overlooked reason for Hans’s anxiety—his father attempted to protect Hans from his supposed Oedipal desires by separating Hans from his mother. Thus, Wakefield argues, the father’s exercise of power based on his belief in Oedipal theory, not an actual Oedipus complex, caused Hans’s vulnerability to anxiety—revealing the theory’s potential to cause harm by distancing children from their parents, even as such distancing made the theory socially appealing. This book’s novel and carefully documented articulation of the mechanisms of power by which Oedipal theory exerts its influence on family life will be of interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists alike, and essential for scholars in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy of science and the history of psychiatry.
Fictions of Conversion investigates the anxieties produced by the rapid and erratic religious, political, and cultural transformations in early modern England, which were often given shape in poetry, plays, and translations by the figure of the Jewish converso.
For the Sake of Peace examines racism and injustice in the United States through the eyes of those of African descent. Historically America has promoted itself as the moral police promoting democracy across the globe, offering her perspectives and ideas to combat poverty and racial and ethnic violence. The rise of overt political racism and intolerance has made visible, for a global audience for the first time since the Civil Rights Movement, the deeply rooted systems of discrimination and identity-based conflicts in the United States, that gives rise to structural and direct violence. African Americans, like other minorities, find themselves in a unique position in this age as new forms of race lynching continue to go unchecked; voting rights continue to be suppressed; prisons continue to serve as a mechanism for disenfranchising minorities and the poor. This volume centers around an understanding of peace that is concerned with justice and racial equality. Highlighting the prevailing impact of anti-black racism and injustice, authors offer prescriptive and descriptive insight that will aid in understanding and overcoming these historical and contemporary obstacles to peace focusing on specific themes including civil rights, education, white supremacy, structural violence, ritual, reparations, and human rights. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the essays are written by leading and emerging scholars, activists, and practitioners from the viewpoints of history, conflict analysis and resolution, anthropology, ethics, theology, and philosophy. A foreword by The Rev. Canon Nontombi Naomi Tutu, daughter of Nobel Peace Prize–winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Cathedral Missioner for Racial and Economic Equity at The Cathedral of All Souls in Ashville, NC, highlights the importance of Africana perspectives in the global pursuit of peace and equality.
‘Mirza’s theorization of resistance is a substantive addition to feminist and postcolonial scholarship, and her rich readings of different literary texts make a valuable contribution to feminist literary studies.’ Nalini Iyer, Professor of English, Seattle University 'Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women’s fiction is a rigorous and impassioned exploration of the concept of resistance in postcolonial literature. It is an essential contribution to the field of postcolonial studies and a compelling excavation of resistance in South Asian women’s writing.' Claire Chambers, Professor of Global Literature, University of York 'Mirza’s comprehensive take on what counts as “resistance” in Anglophone fiction by women writers from South Asia and its diaspora—not just its heroic manifestations but also its limits, its contradictions, its marginality and even its absence in the reality of women’s lives—makes this a provocative theoretical inquiry into female agency. Resistance and its Discontents in South Asian Women’s Fiction makes a major contribution to postcolonial criticism as well as feminist theory.' Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Formerly Global Distinguished Professor, New York University ‘Maryam Mirza’s new book is sure to become a major work of reference in the field of South Asian literary studies and of literature by (and on) women. Its breadth, depth, and level of detail are astonishing, and it offers a thoroughly new reboot of the genre of “resistance literature”, by enlarging and complexifying the semantic reach of the term “resistance” beyond its current remit within contemporary fictional narratives.’ Neelam Srivastava, Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature, Newcastle University This book is an examination of how English-language fiction by women writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka has grappled with the idea and practice of resistance. A valuable, original and timely contribution to the field of South Asian literary and cultural studies, this book extends and complicates existing debates about the meanings of resistance. It brings to the fore not only the emancipatory potential of resistance, but also the contradictions that it can encompass as well as the anxieties that it can generate, particularly for women. Focusing on novels and short fiction, the book explores fiction by Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manju Kapur and Ru Freeman, amongst others.
Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror. Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancire, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it. Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms "abject," "archival," "mimetic," and "precarious."
