Todays Global Flneuse offers a fresh analysis of the flneuse on the 21st-century global stage, drawn from the perspectives of art history, mobility studies, sociology, and urban geography. The essays and artwork in this volume offer histories of Eurocentric 19th-century flnerie that still resonate in 21st-century transnational terms. This special issue also reveals the decisive impact of the flneuses practices beyond the strictly urban, extending into rural environs via the mega- and ex-urban, thus contributing to the continuing debate regarding the ever-narrowing urban/rural divide.
Today's Global Flâneuse offers a fresh analysis of the flâneuse on the 21st-century global stage, drawn from the perspectives of art history, mobility studies, sociology, and urban geography. The essays and artwork in this volume offer histories of Eurocentric 19th-century flânerie that still resonate in 21st-century transnational terms. This special issue also reveals the decisive impact of the flâneuse's practices beyond the strictly urban, extending into rural environs via the mega- and ex-urban, thus contributing to the continuing debate regarding the ever-narrowing urban/rural divide.
Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.
Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.
Sex Tourism examines the issues which emerge from sex worker-client interactions and from tourists visiting 'sex destinations'. It is a comprehensive summary of past research by academics and original primary and secondary research by the authors and has examples from Asia, Australasia and the USA. The authors have generated new models to show different dimensions of sex tourism, which normalise at least some components of the sex industry, and represent a new way of looking at sex tourism by challenging the preconceived perceptions that some people have of sex tourism or confirm the impression of others. Sex Tourism looks at issues of importance to those working in tourism, women's studies, gender studies and social change.
Skyline is a vibrant novel set in contemporary times in a run-down block of flats in Long Street, central Cape Town. Through this novel, narrated by an adolescent girl, the book explores the lives of African refugees who come to South Africa seeking a new life and better place, having fled wars and poverty in their own countries. The narrator and her sister befriend a warm and caring refugee from Mozambique called Bernard. They help him battle the terrible sadness and loneliness his country's civil war has inflicted upon him. He in turn, along with others from Zimbabwe, Sudan and Congo, introduces the sisters to the music, wisdom and energy of Africa. There is sadness in this story, for it gives a hard look at the emotional carnage caused by war. But there is also hope and humour and friendship.
Can there be a flaneuse, and what form might she take? This is the central question of Streetwalking the Metropolis, an important contribution to ongoing debates on the city and modernity in which Deborah Parsons re-draws the gendered map of urban modernism. Assessing the cultural and literary history of the concept of the flaneur, the urban observer/writer traditionally gendered as masculine, the author advances critical space for the discussion of a female 'flaneuse', focused around a range of women writers from the 1880's to World War Two. Cutting across period boundaries, this wide-ranging study offers stimulating accounts of works by writers including Amy Levy, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, Elizabeth Bowen and Doris Lessing, highlighting women's changing relationship with the social and psychic spaces of the city, and drawing attention to the ways in which the perceptions and experiences of the street are translated into the dynamics of literary texts.
The first anthology to focus on the rich tradition of Canadian nature poetry in English, Open Wide a Wilderness is a survey of Canada’s regions, poetries, histories, and peoples as these relate to the natural world. The poetic responses included here range from the heights of the sublime to detailed naturalist observation, from the perspectives of pioneers and those who work in the woods and on the sea to the dismayed witnesses of ecological destruction, from a sense of terror in confrontation with the natural world to expressions of amazement and delight at the beauty and strangeness of nature, our home. Arranged chronologically, the poems include excerpts from late-eighteenth-century colonial pioneer epics and selections from both well-known and more obscure nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. A substantial section is devoted to contemporary writers who are working within and creating a new ecopoetic aesthetic in the early twenty-first century. Don McKay’s introductory essay, “Great Flint Singing,” explores in McKay’s inimitable way the thorny issues of Canadian poets’ representations of nature over the past 150 years. Focusing on key texts by Duncan Campbell Scott, Charles G.D. Roberts, Earle Birney, Dennis Lee, and others, the essay traces Wordsworthian influences in a New World context, celebrates Canadian poets’ love of natural history observation, and finds a way through a rich and contradictory tradition to current trends in ecopoetics.
