Rebel Imaginaries
Rebel Imaginaries

Author: Elizabeth E. Sine

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-11-23

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1478012900

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During the Great Depression, California became a wellspring for some of the era's most inventive and imaginative political movements. In response to the global catastrophe, the multiracial laboring populations who formed the basis of California's economy gave rise to an oppositional culture that challenged the modes of racialism, nationalism, and rationalism that had guided modernization during preceding decades. In Rebel Imaginaries Elizabeth E. Sine tells the story of that oppositional culture's emergence, revealing how aggrieved Californians asserted political visions that embraced difference, fostered a sense of shared vulnerability, and underscored the interconnectedness and interdependence of global struggles for human dignity. From the Imperial Valley's agricultural fields to Hollywood, seemingly disparate communities of African American, Native American, Mexican, Filipinx, Asian, and White working-class people were linked by their myriad struggles against Depression-era capitalism and patterns of inequality and marginalization. In tracing the diverse coalition of those involved in labor strikes, citizenship and immigration reform, and articulating and imagining freedom through artistic practice, Sine demonstrates that the era's social movements were far more heterogeneous, multivalent, and contested than previously understood.

Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries
Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries

Author: Joseph Natoli

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2016-11-17

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1438463510

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A story of self, braided to a story of American culture. Uniting personal history with cultural history, Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries tells a story of a mind, a time, and a culture. The vehicle or medium of this excursion is an overview and sampling of the author’s work, and what is revealed are cautionary tales of a once-aspiring egalitarian democracy confronted with plutocracy’s gentrification; of analog history and off-line life superseded by a rush toward virtualized, robotic, AI transformation of the human life-world; of everything social and public giving way to everything personal and opinionated. The vagaries of a lifetime of paths taken are woven together by a narrative that reveals in every piece a significance that was only partially present at its initial writing. Thus, the reader becomes involved in a developing story of a certain personal psyche working toward understanding its own development within a changing American culture. Sometimes angry, sometimes joyful, but always curious and wry, Joseph Natoli crosses the boundary lines of psychology, politics, literature, philosophy, education, and economics to show how we bring ourselves and our cultural imaginaries simultaneously into being through the processes and pleasures of thinking beyond the confines of the personal. “Reading Dark Affinities is a welcome break from the neoliberal buzzword-speak of politicians and university administrators. It reminds me why I entered academia, when it was a profession and not a business, and when modeling thinking actually mattered.” — Alison Lee, University of Western Ontario “Natoli’s Dark Affinities reads as a culminating work of scholarship, marshaling evidence from autobiography, literary analysis, critical theory, and everyday culture in support of its claims. Natoli presents his personal history in the same spirit that Raymond Williams did: as evidence for the ways that cultural forces shape individuals, and as grounds for the shaping of his intellectual and political practice.” — Jeff Karnicky, author of Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture

Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War
Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War

Author: Cynthia Gabbay

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-09-08

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1501379437

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Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War inaugurates a new field of research in literary and Jewish studies at the intersection of Jewish history and the internationalist cultural phenomenon emerging from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Republican exile, and the Shoah. With the Spanish Civil War as a point of departure, this volume proposes a definition of Jewish textualities based on the entanglement of multiple poetic modes. Through the examination of a variety of narrative fiction and non-fiction, memoir, poetry, epistles, journalism, and music in Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, and English, these essays unveil non-canonic authors across the West and explore these works in the context of antisemitism, orientalism, and philo-Sephardism, among other cultural phenomena. Jewish writings from the war have much to tell about the encounter between old traditions and new experimentations, framed by urgency, migration, and messianic hope. They offer perspectives on memorial and post-memorial literatures triggered by transhistorical imagination, and many were written against the grain of canonic literature, where subtle forms of dissidence, manifested through language, structure, sound, and thought, sought to tune with the anti-fascist fight. This book revindicates the polyglossia of Jewish cultures and literatures in the context of genocide and epistemicide and proposes to remember the cultural phenomena produced by the Spanish Civil War, demanding a new understanding of the cosmopolitan imaginaries in Jewish literature.

Emerging Urban Spaces
Emerging Urban Spaces

Author: Philipp Horn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-02-27

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 3319578162

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This edited collection critically discusses the relevance of, and the potential for identifying conceptual common ground between dominant urban theory projects – namely Neo-Marxian accounts on planetary urbanization and alternative ‘Southern’ post-colonial and post-structuralist projects. Its main objective is to combine different urban knowledge to support and inspire an integrative research approach and a conceptual vocabulary which allows understanding the complex characteristics of diverse emerging urban spaces. Drawing on in-depth case study material from across the world, the different chapters in this volume disentangle planetary urbanization and apply it as a research framework to the context-specific challenges faced by many `ordinary' urban settings. In addition, through their focus on both Northern- and Southern urban spaces, this edited collection creates a truly global perspective on crucial practice-relevant topics such as the co-production of urban spaces, the ‘right to diversity’ and the ‘right to the urban’ in particular local settings.

Monstrous Imaginaries
Monstrous Imaginaries

Author: Maaheen Ahmed

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2019-11-29

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1496825306

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Monsters seem inevitably linked to humans and not always as mere opposites. Maaheen Ahmed examines good monsters in comics to show how Romantic themes from the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries persist in today’s popular culture. Comics monsters, questioning the distinction between human and monster, self and other, are valuable conduits of Romantic inclinations. Engaging with Romanticism and the many monsters created by Romantic writers and artists such as Mary Shelley, Victor Hugo, and Goya, Ahmed maps the heritage, functions, and effects of monsters in contemporary comics and graphic novels. She highlights the persistence of recurrent Romantic features through monstrous protagonists in English- and French-language comics and draws out their implications. Aspects covered include the dark Romantic predilection for ruins and the sordid, the solitary protagonist and his quest, nostalgia, the prominence of the spectacle as well as excessive emotions, and above all, the monster’s ambiguity and rebelliousness. Ahmed highlights each Romantic theme through close readings of well-known but often overlooked comics, including Enki Bilal's Monstre tetralogy, Jim O'Barr's The Crow, and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, as well as the iconic comics series Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Mike Mignola's Hellboy. In blurring the otherness of the monster, these protagonists retain the exaggeration and uncontrollability of all monsters while incorporating Romantic characteristics.

Postgrowth Imaginaries
Postgrowth Imaginaries

Author: Luis I. Pradanos

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1786941341

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Postgrowth Imaginaries brings together environmental cultural studies and postgrowth economics to examine radical cultural shifts sparked by the global financial crisis. The globalization of an economic culture addicted to constant growth destroys the ecological planetary systems while failing to fulfil its social promises. A transition toward what Prádanos calls 'postgrowth imaginaries'--the counterhegemonic cultural sensibilities that are challenging the growth paradigm--is well underway in the Iberian Peninsula today.

Indians and Mestizos in the "Lettered City"
Indians and Mestizos in the

Author: Alcira Duenas

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2011-05-18

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1457109700

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Through newly unearthed texts virtually unknown in Andean studies, Indians and Mestizos in the "Lettered City" highlights the Andean intellectual tradition of writing in their long-term struggle for social empowerment and questions the previous understanding of the "lettered city" as a privileged space populated solely by colonial elites. Rarely acknowledged in studies of resistance to colonial rule, these writings challenged colonial hierarchies and ethnic discrimination in attempts to redefine the Andean role in colonial society. Scholars have long assumed that Spanish rule remained largely undisputed in Peru between the 1570s and 1780s, but educated elite Indians and mestizos challenged the legitimacy of Spanish rule, criticized colonial injustice and exclusion, and articulated the ideas that would later be embraced in the Great Rebellion in 1781. Their movement extended across the Atlantic as the scholars visited the seat of the Spanish empire to negotiate with the king and his advisors for social reform, lobbied diverse networks of supporters in Madrid and Peru, and struggled for admission to religious orders, schools and universities, and positions in ecclesiastic and civil administration. Indians and Mestizos in the "Lettered City" explores how scholars contributed to social change and transformation of colonial culture through legal, cultural, and political activism, and how, ultimately, their significant colonial critiques and campaigns redefined colonial public life and discourse. It will be of interest to scholars and students of colonial history, colonial literature, Hispanic studies, and Latin American studies.

Concentrationary Imaginaries
Concentrationary Imaginaries

Author: Griselda Pollock

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-11-30

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0857725440

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In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase 'the concentrationary universe' to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and the analyses of violence by Agamben, Virilio, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it also offers close readings of films by Cavani and Haneke that identify and critically expose such an imaginary and, hence, contest its lingering force.

The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries
The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries

Author: Christoph Lindner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-28

Total Pages: 581

ISBN-13: 1351672681

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The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries delves into examples of urban imaginaries across multiple media and geographies: from new visions of smart, eco, and resilient cities to urban dystopias in popular culture; from architectural renderings of starchitecture and luxury living to performative activism for new spatial justice; and from speculative experiments in urban planning, fiction, and photography to augmented urban realities in crowd-mapping and mobile apps. The volume brings various global perspectives together and into close dialogue to offer a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical overview of the current state of research on urban imaginaries. Questioning the politics of urban imagination, the companion gives particular attention to the role that urban imaginaries play in shaping the future of urban societies, communities, and built environments. Throughout the companion, issues of power, resistance, and uneven geographical development remain central. Adopting a transnational perspective, the volume challenges research on urban imaginaries from the perspective of globalization and postcolonial studies, inviting critical reconsiderations of urbanism in its diverse current forms and definitions. In the process, the companion explores issues of Western-centrism in urban research and design, and accommodates current attempts to radically rethink urban form and experience. This is an essential resource for scholars and graduate researchers in the fields of urban planning and architecture; art, media, and cultural studies; film, visual, and literary studies; sociology and political science; geography; and anthropology.

Religious Imaginaries
Religious Imaginaries

Author: Karen Dieleman

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0821444344

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Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics. This new study rethinks several assumptions in the field: that Victorian women’s faith commitments tended to limit creativity; that the contours of church experiences matter little for understanding religious poetry; and that gender is more significant than liturgy in shaping women’s religious poetry. Exploring the import of bodily experience for spiritual, emotional, and cognitive forms of knowing, Karen Dieleman explains and clarifies the deep orientations of different strands of nineteenth-century Christianity, such as Congregationalism’s high regard for verbal proclamation, Anglicanism’s and Anglo-Catholicism’s valuation of manifestation, and revivalist Roman Catholicism’s recuperation of an affective aesthetic. Looking specifically at Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter as astute participants in their chosen strands of Christianity, Dieleman reveals the subtle textures of these women’s religious poetry: the different voices, genres, and aesthetics they create in response to their worship experiences. Part recuperation, part reinterpretation, Dieleman’s readings highlight each poet’s innovative religious poetics. Dieleman devotes two chapters to each of the three poets: the first chapter in each pair delineates the poet’s denominational practices and commitments; the second reads the corresponding poetry. Religious Imaginaries has appeal for scholars of Victorian literary criticism and scholars of Victorian religion, supporting its theoretical paradigm by digging deeply into primary sources associated with the actual churches in which the poets worshipped, detailing not only the liturgical practices but also the architectural environments that influenced the worshipper’s formation. By going far beyond descriptions of various doctrinal positions, this research significantly deepens our critical understanding of Victorian Christianity and the culture it influenced.