Two leading authors on the alien abduction and the religious anomalous experience present an intellectual analysis of why paranormal phenomena are a real, however fantastical, part of the natural world that can be authenticated through key changes in perspective. --Publisher's description.
“Plunges the reader into a tour de force across radically divergent artistic responses to Mediterranean migration.” —Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies Ex-Centric Migrations examines cinematic, literary, and musical representations of migrants and migratory trends in the western Mediterranean. Focusing primarily on clandestine sea-crossings, Hakim Abderrezak shows that despite labor and linguistic ties with the colonizer, migrants from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) no longer systematically target France as a destination, but instead aspire toward other European countries, notably Spain and Italy. In addition, the author investigates other migratory patterns that entail the repatriation of émigrés. His analysis reveals that the films, novels, and songs of Mediterranean artists run contrary to mass media coverage and conservative political discourse, bringing a nuanced vision and expert analysis to the sensationalism and biased reportage of such events as the Mediterranean maritime tragedies. “Ex-Centric Migrations is crucial reading for scholars and students of contemporary Maghrebi, French, and Spanish literatures and cultures. It breaks new ground by encompassing the literature, film, and music of ‘return migration’ and examining the trajectories of Maghrebi migration outside France.” —H-France “Hakim Abderrezak convincingly illustrates how politically committed artistic practices serve to humanize the challenges of human migration, and in the process dramatically improves our understanding of the complex cultural, economic, political, and social realities that shape 21st-century existence.” —Dominic Thomas, author of Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism
Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. Under Modi, it has promoted yoga tourism and staged mass yoga sessions, and Indian officials have proposed yoga as a national solution to a range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer. But as yoga has gone global, its cultural meanings have spiraled far and wide. In Flexible India, Shameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power. Drawing on her own experience and her readings of political spectacles, yoga murder mysteries, court cases, art installations, and digital media, Black shows how yoga’s imaginative power supports diverse political and cultural ends. Although many cultural practices in today’s India exemplify “culture wars” between liberal and conservative agendas, Flexible India argues that visions of yoga offer a “culture peace” that conceals, without resolving, such tensions. This flexibility allows states, corporations, and individuals to think of themselves as welcoming and tolerant while still, in many cases, supporting practices that make minority populations increasingly vulnerable. However, as Black shows, yoga can also be imagined in ways that offer new tools for critiquing hierarchical structures of power and race, Hindu nationalism, cultural appropriation, and self-help capitalism.
The novel begins as Arella prepares for 2000 and the fresh start it represents. More at home in cyberspace than anywhere she has actually lived, she reinvents herself and her life story for readers of a multimedia web diary she calls *Arella's Repertoire,* a blend of memoir, travelogue, and blog. Characters who star in this virtual drama recapture worlds Arella has known and weave together the memories, dreams, and imaginings that have contributed to her development as a woman and a writer in postmodern America. Framed as an online text that she posts incrementally throughout the month of December 1999, the narrative explores personal and cultural memory. *Arella's Repertoire* forms part of a quartet that also includes two works of nonfiction, *Video-Graphic Alchemy: Transforming "Dear Diary"* and *VirtualDayz: Remediated Visions & Digital Memories,* and another fictional text, *Vagabond Scribe (Leah's Backstory).*
Part non-fiction, part short fiction; part memoir, part essay, "Trance-migrations" is both an entertaining and informative read and a thoroughly original and creative experiment in metafiction. Combining great erudition with sophisticated word play and bawdy humor, it alternates sections containing stories-- both fictional and non-fictional--to be read by the reader to her or himself with sections of stories to be read aloud to a listener. In the latter cases Siegel intends that the listener actually go into a hypnotic trance out of which the reader will eventually awaken her or him. In this way the narrative form of the book performs a hypnotic induction script out of which the listener awakens to find that it is impossible to tell what really happened, just as in hypnosis the line between fact and fiction is irremediably blurred. Siegel uses hypnosis and the dynamic between hypnotist and hypnosand as a way of exploring other power dynamics -- between lovers, between writer and reader (or listener), between masculine colonial culture and the feminized East, between God (or gods) and mortals, and ultimately between memory historical and personal and constantly shifting meaning. The book is above all about reading as a hypnotic experience. Through stories based on motifs and characters from both Indian mythology and from real life (notably Abbe Faria, a Goan Catholic monk who gained notoriety in the early nineteenth century with demonstrations of magnetism in Paris, and James Esdaile, a Scottish surgeon for the East India Company who experimented with mesmerism as a surgical anesthetic in Calcutta), Siegel epitomizes and elucidates the psychological and political dynamics of a fascination with a mysterious Orient, and reveals the anxieties embedded in such fascination. "
Why has a tiny old mining town straight out of Gunsmoke or Deadwood — Crestone, Colorado — become home to twenty-five spiritual centers representing nearly all the brand-name faiths of the world? With the keen eye of a storyteller, the insights of a scholar, and the heart of a seeker, Jeffery Paine narrates a truly unique adventure. He explores Crestone’s wintry, oxygen-thin mountain geography and introduces a cast of spiritual mavericks and unlikely visionaries. Paine finds in Crestone a remarkable dedication to coexistence. Paradoxically, the town’s amazing spiritual diversity highlights fundamental commonalities in a way that will strike and even inspire believers, agnostics, and searchers of every stripe.
The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal contains the lost dream diary of the Nobel Prize-winning "father of modern neuroscience" translated into English for the first time. The book explores the complex attitudes of Cajal towards his contemporary Sigmund Freud, whose theories he dismissed.
Io Anthology celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of this formative journal and commemorates its role in opening a path to decades of innovative publishing. Bringing together in one volume the quirky blend of artistic and scholarly writing that characterized the literary journal, this book is a “greatest hits” collection of the major pieces published from 1965 to 1993. It features very early work from Stephen King, Gary Snyder, Jayne Anne Phillips, and many others, with forewords by writer and filmmaker Miranda July and historical ecologist Robin Grossinger, the daughter and son of the editors, who grew up with Io and were in part initiated in their careers by its household presence. Io forged an eclectic path through the upheaveals of the 1960s in art, literature, science, and the life of the spirit with writing that embraced astrophysics, science fiction, parapsychology, topology, poetry from Black Mountain, Beat, and New American traditions, wisdom from Hopi and Iglulik elders, homeopathy, hermetics, alchemy and the occult, astrology, Tibetan Buddhism, and Sufism. Portraying the roots and spirit which impelled Io to evolve into a publishing company, this volume shows the seriousness and depth of content which continues to enliven North Atlantic Books.
This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance and reception of 'opera' in varying social and historical contexts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Each essay addresses migrations between genres, cultures, literary and musical works, modes of expression, media of presentation and aesthetics. Although the directions the contributions take are diverse, they converge in significant ways, particularly with the rebuttal of the notion of the singular nature of the operatic work. The volume strongly asserts that works are meaningfully transformed by the manifold circumstances of their creation and reception, and that these circumstances have an impact on the life of those works in their many transformations and on a given audience's experience of them. Topics covered include transformations of literary sources and their migration into the operatic genre; works that move across geographical and social boundaries into different cultural contexts; movements between media and/or genre as well as alterations through interpretation and performance of the composer's creation; the translation of spoken theatre to lyric theatre; the theoretical issues contingent on the rendering of 'speech' into 'song'; and the transforming effects of aesthetic considerations as they bear on opera. Crossing over disciplinary boundaries between music, literary studies, history, cultural studies and art history, the volume enriches our knowledge and understanding of the operatic experience and the works. The book will therefore appeal to those working in the field of music, literary and cultural studies, and to those with a particular interest in opera and musical theatre.
This book explores the agency of Jinn, the so-called “demons of Islam”. They are regarded as mostly invisible and highly mobile creatures. In a globalized world with manifold forms of forced and voluntary migrations, Jinn are likewise on the move, interfering in the human world and affecting the mental and physical health of Muslims. This continuous challenge has so far been mainly addressed by traditional Muslim health management and by the so-called spiritual medicine or medicine of the Prophet. This book shifts perspective. Its interdisciplinary chapters deal with the transformation of manifold cultural resources by first analyzing the doctrinal and cultural history of Jinn and the treatment of Jinn affliction in Arabic texts and other sources. It then discusses case studies of Muslims and current health management approaches in the Middle East, namely in Egypt and Syria. Finally, it turns to the role of Jinn in a number of migratory settings such as Spain, Denmark, Great Britain and Guantanamo.