Travelling Goods, Travelling Moods
Travelling Goods, Travelling Moods

Author: Christian Huck

Publisher: Campus Verlag

Published: 2012-09

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 3593397625

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Looking at cultural appropriation from around the world, this volume uses the field of cultural studies--heavily influenced by both economics and sociology--as a lens through which to view the paradigm of transcultural consumption. The editors present a variety of consumptive phenomena including: the introduction of Chinese foods to the United States, Ford cars in Germany, and American schoolbooks in the Philippines. Rejecting the idea that these interactions were simply forms of "Americanization," Travelling Goods, Travelling Moods fills a gap in consumer studies and enriches the debate about cultural transfer.

Postcoloniality - Decoloniality - Black Critique
Postcoloniality - Decoloniality - Black Critique

Author: Sabine Broeck

Publisher: Campus Verlag

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 3593501929

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How can Western Modernity be analyzed and critiqued through the lens of enslavement and colonial history? The volume maps out answers to this question from the fields of Postcolonial, Decolonial, and Black Studies, delineating converging and diverging positions, approaches, and trajectories. It assembles contributions by renowned scholars of the respective fields, intervening in History, Sociology, Political Sciences, Gender Studies, Cultural and Literary Studies, and Philosophy."

Rereading the Machine in the Garden
Rereading the Machine in the Garden

Author: Eric Erbacher

Publisher: Campus Verlag

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 3593501910

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The volume reexamines the trope of the intrusive machine and the regenerative pastoral garden, laid out fifty years ago by Leo Marx in "The Machine in the Garden," one of the founding texts of American Studies. Contributions explore the lasting influence of the trope in American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectics where nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. They trace this dialectic trope in filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; they explore its function in the aftermath of the civil war, the rural electrification during the New Deal, in landscape art, and in ethnic literatures; and they discuss the historical premises and lasting influence of Leo Marx's seminal study.

(K)information
(K)information

Author: Maren Klotz

Publisher: Campus Verlag

Published: 2014-05-15

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 3593500671

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Openness about gamete (i.e. sperm or egg) donation and the regulation of donor-anonymity or non-anonymity are new phenomena. How do affected families, clinics, and regulators deal with information about the donors and the donation in Germany and Britain? And how does this ‘knowledge-management’ contribute to the making and doing of kinship? Addressing these questions through an ethnographic exploration, this book makes a comparative contribution to the empirical and theoretical analysis of kin-formation and social change in plural late-modern societies in Europe. The research demonstrates a contemporary re-negotiation of the values of privacy, information-sharing, and connectedness – with transparency as moral imperative, not genetics. Instead of an unambiguously discernible ‘geneticisation’ the findings on donor-non-anonymity and parental openness display a pattern of ‘transparentization’. In ensemble a shift of authority becomes evident, more minute in Germany than in Britain, towards concerned groups, parents-by-donation, and policy-makers, away from a sometimes high handed reproductive medical profession.

Revisiting the Sixties
Revisiting the Sixties

Author: Laura Bieger

Publisher: Campus Verlag

Published: 2013-11

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 3593399903

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The Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Summer of Love--the 1960s were one of the most turbulent decades in US history. These years launched an unprecedented public debate over the meaning of "America," dividing US society in deep and troubling ways. Yet despite the passage of time, the contemporary crises in the "American way of life" and the political system that sustain it might well make one wonder: to what degree are we still living on the outskirts of the '60s? By examining crucial events, trends, and individuals from the civic, social, political, intellectual, cultural, and economic spheres across a range of disciplines, this volume offers a nuanced and pluralist account of the longest decade in America.

The Literary Life of Things
The Literary Life of Things

Author: Babette Bärbel Tischleder

Publisher: Campus Verlag

Published: 2014-02-13

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 359350006X

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Whether in the street or the microcosm of the home, the life of things conjoins human subjects and inanimate objects. This material culture has long played a vital role in the American literary imagination, yet scholars in literary and cultural studies have only recently (re)discovered the object world as a subject of critical inquiry. Engaging a great range of American literature--from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton to Vladimir Nabokov and Jonathan Franzen--The Literary Life of Things illuminates scenes of animation that disclose the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of our entanglement with the material world.

The evolution of automotive technology
The evolution of automotive technology

Author: Gijs Mom

Publisher: SAE International

Published: 2023-05-17

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1468605976

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The idea of "understanding the present through its history" is based on two insights. First, it helps to know where a technology comes from: what were its predecessors, how did they evolve as a result of the continuous efforts to solve theoretical and practical problems, who were crucial in their emergence, and which cultural differences made them develop into divergent families of artifacts? Second, and closely related to the first insight, how does a certain technology or system fit into its societal context, its culture of mobility, its engineering culture, its culture of car driving, its alternatives, its opponents? Only thus, by studying its prehistory and its socio-cultural context, can we acquire a true 'grasp' of a technology. The Evolution of Automotive Technology: A Handbook, Second Edition covers one and a quarter century of the automobile, conceived as a cultural history of its technology, aimed at engineering students and all those who wish to have a concise introduction into the basics of automotive technology and its long-term development. (ISBN:9781468605976 ISBN:9781468605969 ISBN:9781468605983 DOI:10.4271/9781468605976) 2nd Edition.

Perspectives on Mobility
Perspectives on Mobility

Author: Ingo Berensmeyer

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2013-08-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9401209642

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Literature as cultural discourse has always courted mobility. From the nomadic wanderings of the heroes of Homer and Virgil through the adventures of the medieval knight-errants to the travellers of modern times, movement and mobility have been constitutive elements of story-telling. Since writers have begun to explore the experiential dimension of movement their texts have embraced the essential changeability and instability of ‘mobile worlds’. In this sense literature reflects and processes the transformative force of movement on the perception of the world and is part of the broader cultural discourses of mobility. From the 1936 film Night Mail to the rapid movements of the dime novel detective and the metaphorical coding of automobility in Futurist poetry the essays in this volume offer new perspectives on the phenomenon of mobility at the intersection between the literary imagination and cultural experience. They explore movement as a decisive force of change in the story of modernity and show how literature in its representation of mobility simultaneously aims both to mirror and to grasp the phenomenon.

Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers
Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers

Author: Mark Edward

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-03-19

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1350082953

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In recent years drag performance has moved from the fringes to emerge as a mainstream phenomenon, showcased on TV shows in the US and the UK. This collection offers a diverse range of critical engagements by drag performers, makers, scholars and writers reflecting on work from the UK, USA, Israel, Germany and Australia. Moving beyond discussions of gender theory, the essays consider contemporary drag performance practices, connecting them to the histories, communities and politics that produced them. Chapters range across discussions of drag kings in the US, UK and drag and activism; the influence of RuPaul on the generation of new forms of work in New York; transfeminist critiques of drag; 'bio'/faux queens; engagements with race and ethnicity through drag performance; drag andragogy; audience concerns; drag intersections with animal personas, and how drag performance relates to personal narratives of history and identity. Collectively the contributions focus on drag as a mode of performance that is diverse and that uncorsets the easy thought that drag is simply a cross dressing man in a dress or a woman in a suit.

Kakaamotobe
Kakaamotobe

Author: Courtnay Micots

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1793643105

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Kakaamotobe, meaning to scare, is known across southern Ghana, West Africa, as Fancy Dress performance. Masqueraders dress in colorful costumes and wear fancy and fierce masks; they dance energetically to drums or brass band music through the main streets of town during holidays, especially during Christmastime. Competitions held in two towns are intense annual events. This lively secular masquerade is a carnival form that has been practiced for well over a century primarily by coastal Fante people, and many additional ethnicities participate today. Kakaamotobe: Fancy Dress Carnival in Ghana explores the fascinating history, aesthetics, performance, and underlying messages of this masquerade with ties to other carnivalesque practices in the Black Atlantic. While Fancy Dress may engage with global cultures through some of its aesthetics, the practice is profoundly African. The utilization of elaborate costumes, masks, and brass bands expresses not a desire to imitate outside cultures, but rather the impulse of youth to adapt traditional culture to the contemporary environment. Courtnay Micots argues that the outward impression of folly belies the more serious refashioning of power, identity, and modernity in the community.