First anthology of Villa's essays written from the 1920s to the 1950s, which created a canon of Philippine fiction and poetry--essays counting as among the most significant in Philippine literary criticism in English. Includes the famed annual Villa selection of best short stories and poems, occasional critical essays and letters to the editor, and unpublished pieces. With extensive explanatory and bibliographic notes.
Jose Garcia Villa was an elusive figure in American literary circles. At the height of his career in the 1940s and 1950s, Villa was part of an elite literary circle that included Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, and W.H. Auden. His first book of poetry, Have Come, Am Here, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1942, the first of many other awards. Yet, despite numerous accolades, he has been largely dismissed in the United States where his reputation was built and has been criticized in Asian American studies for not being "ethnic" enough. The Anchored Angel rediscovers the work of this fierce: conoclast by reprinting a selection of his writing and providing rich secondary materials, including a complete bibliography.
Essays about the Filipino American artist and educator Carlos Villa by Bill Berkson, Theodore S. Gonzalves, David A.M. Goldberg, Mark Dean Johnson, Margo Machida, and Moira Roth. Features a gallery of images that spans 50 years of the artist's international and critically acclaimed career.
Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics introduces and makes available, for the first time in English, an incandescent corpus of experimental leftist writing from North Africa. Founded in 1966 by Abdellatif Laâbi and a small group of avant-garde Moroccan poets and artists and banned in 1972, Souffles-Anfas was one of the most influential literary, cultural, and political reviews to emerge in postcolonial North Africa. An early forum for tricontinental postcolonial thought and writing, the journal published texts ranging from experimental poems, literary manifestos, and abstract art to political tracts, open letters, and interviews by contributors from the Maghreb, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The essays, poems, and artwork included in this anthology—by the likes of Abdelkebir Khatibi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albert Memmi, Etel Adnan, Sembene Ousmane, René Depestre, and Mohamed Melehi—offer a unique window into the political and artistic imaginaries of writers and intellectuals from the Global South, and resonate with particular acuity in the wake of the Arab Spring. A critical introduction and section headnotes make this collection the perfect companion for courses in postcolonial theory, world literature, and poetry in translation.
The freedom to take part in civic life--whether in the exercise of one's right to vote or congregate and protest--has become increasingly less important to Americans than individual rights and liberties. In Public Freedom, renowned political theorist Dana Villa argues that political freedom is essential to both the preservation of constitutional government and the very substance of American democracy itself. Through intense close readings of theorists such as Hegel, Tocqueville, Mill, Adorno, Arendt, and Foucault, Villa diagnoses the key causes of our democratic discontent and offers solutions to preserve at least some of our democratic hopes. He demonstrates how Americans' preoccupation with a market-based conception of freedom--that is, the personal freedom to choose among different material, moral, and vocational goods--has led to the gradual erosion of meaningful public participation in politics as well as diminished interest in the health of the public realm itself. Villa critically examines, among other topics, the promise and limits of civil society and associational life as sources of democratic renewal; the effects of mass media on the public arena; and the problematic but still necessary ideas of civic competence and democratic maturity. Public Freedom is a passionate and insightful defense of political liberties at a moment in America's history when such freedoms are very much at risk.
Like its palatial contemporaries Biltmore and San Simeon, Vizcaya represents an achievement of the Gilded Age, when country houses and their gardens were a conspicuous measure of personal wealth and power. In Vizcaya, the authors use illustrations, historic photographs, and narrative to document this extraordinary house and landscape.
Here at last, insofar as possible for the meticulous and indefatigable scholar, an amazing collection of the entire corpus of Jose Garcia Villa's short stories! Through all the stories in light of that assessment, we see how Villa as fictionist gained his critical acumen in the art of fiction whereby as its critic he cleared the ground for its maturity in the development of Philippine fiction; likewise, Villa's agon with the medium of expression for substance and form led him to poetry as Doveglion: the stories are the sea, says Villa, the poems the horizon, for the sea designed the horizon.
A new version of capitalism, grounded in technology and science, is spawning new forms of corporate power and organization that will have major implications for the twenty-first century. Technological creativity is thereby turned into a commodity in new corporate regimes that are primarily oriented toward research and intellectual appropriation. This phenomenon is likely to have major social, economic, and political consequences, as the new corporatism becomes ever more intrusive and rapacious through its control over technology and innovation. In his provocative book Technocapitalism, Luis Suarez-Villa addresses this phenomenon from the perspective of radical political economy and social criticism. Grounded in the premise that relations of power influence how human creativity and technology are exploited by the new corporatism, the author argues that new forms of democratic participation and resistance are needed, if the social pathologies created by this new version of capitalism are to be checked. Considering the new sectors affected by technocapitalism, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, and genomics, Suarez-Villa deciphers the common threads of power and organization that drive their corporatization. These new sectors, and the corporate apparatus set up to extract profit and power through them, are imposing standards, creating business models, molding social governance, and influencing social relations at all levels. The new reality they create is likely to affect most every aspect of human existence, including work, health, life, and nature itself.
Many critics bemoan the lack of civic engagement in America. Tocqueville's ''nation of joiners'' seems to have become a nation of alienated individuals, disinclined to fulfill the obligations of citizenship or the responsibilities of self-government. In response, the critics urge community involvement and renewed education in the civic virtues. But what kind of civic engagement do we want, and what sort of citizenship should we encourage? In Socratic Citizenship, Dana Villa takes issue with those who would reduce citizenship to community involvement or to political participation for its own sake. He argues that we need to place more value on a form of conscientious, moderately alienated citizenship invented by Socrates, one that is critical in orientation and dissident in practice. Taking Plato's Apology of Socrates as his starting point, Villa argues that Socrates was the first to show, in his words and deeds, how moral and intellectual integrity can go hand in hand, and how they can constitute importantly civic--and not just philosophical or moral--virtues. More specifically, Socrates urged that good citizens should value this sort of integrity more highly than such apparent virtues as patriotism, political participation, piety, and unwavering obedience to the law. Yet Socrates' radical redefinition of citizenship has had relatively little influence on Western political thought. Villa considers how the Socratic idea of the thinking citizen is treated by five of the most influential political thinkers of the past two centuries--John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. In doing so, he not only deepens our understanding of these thinkers' work and of modern ideas of citizenship, he also shows how the fragile Socratic idea of citizenship has been lost through a persistent devaluation of independent thought and action in public life. Engaging current debates among political and social theorists, this insightful book shows how we must reconceive the idea of good citizenship if we are to begin to address the shaky fundamentals of civic culture in America today.
