The Banana Tree at the Gate

The Banana Tree at the Gate

Author: Michael Dove

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 030015321X

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The "Hikayat Banjar," a seventeenth-century native court chronicle from Southeast Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as "the banana tree at the gate." Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system, standing on its head the prevailing view of resource-poor and economically marginal tropical forest dwellers. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvement of Borneo's native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful. This success is based on the development of a "dual" household economy, with distinct subsistence- and market-oriented sectors, which has historically made these "smallholders" extremely competitive with the large-scale, heavily capitalized, state-supported plantation sector. Dove sheds new light on the nature of smallholders and in particular their relationship with the global economic system. He demonstrates that processes of globalization began millennia ago and that they have been more diverse and less teleological than often thought. His analysis replaces the image of the isolated tropical forest community that needs to be helped into the global system with the reality of communities that have been so successful and competitive that they have had to fight political elites to keep from being forced out. The ubiquitous but historically inaccurate emphasis on isolation and resource-poverty disguises that the overweening characteristic of these communities is their political marginality and that their greatest want is not to be uplifted economically but to be empowered politically.


The Banana Tree at the Gate

The Banana Tree at the Gate

Author: Michael Dove

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2011-03-08

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0300153228

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The “Hikayat Banjar,” a native court chronicle from Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as “the banana tree at the gate.” Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvement of Borneo’s native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful and that processes of globalization began millennia ago. Dove’s analysis replaces the image of the isolated tropical forest community that needs to be helped into the global system with the reality of communities that have been so successful and competitive that they have had to fight political elites to keep from being forced out.


The Gate of the Burnt One

The Gate of the Burnt One

Author: Philip G Cohen

Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers

Published: 2024-05-24

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 1035819406

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Based on an intriguing alternative history hypothesis, this novel imagines a world where the Moors never left Southern Spain after their 800-year reign but instead expanded their empire across Europe. This fascinating premise is explored through the chaotic lens of a bumbling film crew in the Sahara desert. The director, lost in a haze of Moroccan kif, has embraced the local culture a little too enthusiastically. With the scriptwriters gone and the leading actor in a perpetual sulk inside his Airstream, the production is at a standstill. Enter Tinctorio Indigolin, a bitcoin billionaire on the run from a Shakespeare-quoting Irish assassin. In a bid to leverage a tax loss, Indigolin acquires the film rights, injecting a new lease of life into the project. Mysteriously, a captivating screenplay begins to appear on set, page by page, night after night. Penned by an enigmatic writer, the script proposes a world where the Moors didn’t just resist expulsion in 1492 but went on to dominate Spain, France, and Italy, creating an Islamic State of Europe. As the screenplay unfolds, it transforms the lives of everyone involved in the film. The narrative weaves through a labyrinth of twists, assassinations, and narrow escapes, employing the most unexpected methods, only to culminate in the most uplifting conclusion you’ll encounter this year.


From Under the Banana Tree

From Under the Banana Tree

Author: Dr. Kim Pensinger

Publisher: FriesenPress

Published: 2022-08-30

Total Pages: 746

ISBN-13: 1039151922

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Quiet your spirit and settle in each day for some intimate, healing, and reviving time with the Lord. Along with your Bible and prayer journal, bring Dr. Kim Pensinger’s latest offering, From Under the Banana Tree, a collection of 365 daily inspirations gleaned from personal experience and a passionate searching of God’s Word. From the hills of Vermont to the streets of Argentina, Dr. Kim shares on the faithfulness, love, and sovereignty of our great God. Not your average devotional, From Under the Banana Tree also contains moments of humour and succulent recipes that will delight family and friends. These readings will inspire you to step out in faith, try something new, and rest in God’s care and compassion for you. Each topic is developed in detail, with lessons and tips to help you apply the truth of scripture to your life on a daily basis. Although Dr. Kim speaks directly to church leaders at times, this devotional will be a blessing to pastors, missionaries, and laity alike. As your spirit is renewed, you will develop the strength and the vision to share God’s love, truth, and Good News with those around you.


Gate of the Sun

Gate of the Sun

Author: Elias Khoury

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 0982624689

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A New York Times Notable Book This “imposingly rich . . . a genuine masterwork” vividly captures the Palestinian experience following the creation of the Israeli state (New York Times Book Review). After Palestine is torn apart in 1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut—entering a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many: stories of the people expelled from their villages in Galilee; of the massacres that followed; of the extraordinary inner strength of those who survived; and of love. Khalil—like Elias Khoury—is a truth collector, trying to make sense of the fragments and various versions of stories that have been told to him. His voice is intimate and direct, his memories are vivid, his humanity radiates from every page. Khalil lets his mind wander through time, from village to village, from one astonishing soul to another, and takes us with him. Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey and the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people.


Technology in Southeast Asian History

Technology in Southeast Asian History

Author: Suzanne Moon

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2023-07-25

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1421446928

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Explores the role of technology in the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asia. In Technology in Southeast Asian History, Suzanne Moon explores the profound entanglement of technology with Southeast Asian politics, social life, economics, and culture over its long history. Moon offers a unique framework for understanding the place of technology in this region and its pivotal role in the emergence of the modern technological world. Synthesizing scholarship from the fields of history, archaeology, and anthropology, Moon examines and links technological stories from prehistory to the mid-twentieth century. She uses analytics in the history of technology—such as circulation, coproduction, and assemblage—to highlight the processes and evolving patterns of technological dynamism that characterize the region. Drawing on research focused on specific technologies, including temple construction, rice agriculture, weaving, and shipbuilding, Moon investigates the interconnectedness of these technologies within the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asian history. In contrast with portrayals of Southeast Asia as technologically deficient, Moon demonstrates the richness of this region's technological cultures. She rejects polarizing binaries such as traditional and modern or indigenous and foreign, instead underscoring Southeast Asia's role as a dynamic cocreator of the modern technological world. Technology has contributed to the creation and disruption of social and political orders; shaped engagements across barriers of distance, culture, and language; and produced and reproduced diverse cultures in this region. This narrative of technological change offers students, scholars, and readers critical new perspectives on both technological history and Southeast Asian history.


Bashō's Journey

Bashō's Journey

Author: Matsuo Bashō

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2010-03-29

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0791483436

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In Bashō's Journey, David Landis Barnhill provides the definitive translation of Matsuo Bashō's literary prose, as well as a companion piece to his previous translation, Bashō's Haiku. One of the world's greatest nature writers, Bashō (1644–1694) is well known for his subtle sensitivity to the natural world, and his writings have influenced contemporary American environmental writers such as Gretel Ehrlich, John Elder, and Gary Snyder. This volume concentrates on Bashō's travel journal, literary diary (Saga Diary), and haibun. The premiere form of literary prose in medieval Japan, the travel journal described the uncertainty and occasional humor of traveling, appreciations of nature, and encounters with areas rich in cultural history. Haiku poetry often accompanied the prose. The literary diary also had a long history, with a format similar to the travel journal but with a focus on the place where the poet was living. Bashō was the first master of haibun, short poetic prose sketches that usually included haiku. As he did in Bashō's Haiku, Barnhill arranges the work chronologically in order to show Bashō's development as a writer. These accessible translations capture the spirit of the original Japanese prose, permitting the nature images to hint at the deeper meaning in the work. Barnhill's introduction presents an overview of Bashō's prose and discusses the significance of nature in this literary form, while also noting Bashō's significance to contemporary American literature and environmental thought. Excellent notes clearly annotate the translations.


Alluring Monsters

Alluring Monsters

Author: Rosalind Galt

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0231554044

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The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre. In Alluring Monsters, Rosalind Galt explores how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society. She argues that the figure speaks to a series of intersecting anxieties: about femininity and modernity, globalization and indigeneity, racial and national identities, the relationship of Islam to animism, and heritage and environmental destruction. The pontianak offers abundant feminist potential, but her disruptive gender politics also unsettle queer and feminist film theories by putting them in dialogue with Malay epistemologies. Reading the pontianak as a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization. From the horror films made by Cathay Keris and Shaw Studios in the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary film, television, art, and fiction in Malaysia and Singapore, the pontianak in all her media forms sheds light on how postcolonial identities are both developed and contested. In tracing the entanglements of Malay feminist animisms with postcolonial visual cultures, Alluring Monsters reveals how a “pontianak theory” can reshape understandings of anticolonial aesthetics and world cinema.


Gender Madness

Gender Madness

Author: Oli London

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-08-15

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1510778152

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How one man's struggles with self-Identity and detransition lays challenge to the very foundation of the "gender ideology" movement. While documenting his own personal identity struggles with gender and self-identity, British K-Pop singer Oli London explores the root cause of the issue of trans ideology and gender identity, tackling the pressures of social media, the education system, media, and other factors that are pushing a growing number of young people into transitioning. He takes a close look at real world examples and examines laws, research, and data to help lift the lid on the multibillion-dollar gender affirming care industry. Gender Madness gives an intimate look into what led Oli London to want to become a "Korean woman" and how he overcame his battle to become an advocate for the millions of young people who question their own identity. He recently publicly announced he had detransitioned and is living as a male again and has since become an outspoken activist for children and women's rights, appearing regularly on numerous news networks including Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, EWTN, Piers Morgan Uncensored, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Talk TV to campaign against gender affirming surgery in teenagers. This book shares his deeply personal life journey and his important message to others, all while encouraging readers to question the current societal trends and challenge their own way of thinking.


Congressional Record

Congressional Record

Author: United States. Congress

Publisher:

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 1456

ISBN-13:

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The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)