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30069 books about History and 2018
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30069 books about History and 2018
30069 books about History
2018 start with P start with P
2018 start with P start with P
The Portable Radio in American Life
Michael Brian Schiffer
University of Arizona Press, 1991
In this fascinating history of the portable radio, Michael Schiffer shows how this invention is as American as apple pie. Along the way, he tells how technology has responded to consumer preference, how corporate "cryptohistory" has made us believe the Japanese invented the radio, and how the spread of the portable radio mirrors that of other technologies. More than 400 photographs make this book both a definitive resource and a delightful browse.
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Portage Lake
Memories of an Ojibwe Childhood
Maude Kegg
University of Minnesota Press, 1993
A Portal to Paradise
Alden C. Hayes
University of Arizona Press, 1999
Arizona's rugged Chiricahua Mountains have a special place in frontier history. They were the haven of many well-known personalities, from Cochise to Johnny Ringo, as well as the home of prospectors, cattlemen, and hardscrabble farmers eking out a tough living in an unforgiving landscape. In this delightful and well-researched book, Alden Hayes shares his love for the area, gained over fifty years.
From his vantage point near the tiny twin communities of Portal and Paradise on the eastern slopes of the Chiricahuas, Hayes brings the famous and the not-so-famous together in a profile of this striking landscape, showing how place can be a powerful formative influence on people's lives. When Hayes first arrived in 1941 to manage his new father-in-law's apple orchard, he met folks who had been born in Arizona before it became a state. Even if most had never personally worried about Indian attacks, they had known people who had. Over the years, Hayes heard the handed-down stories about the area's early days of Anglo settlement. He also researched census records, newspaper archives, and the files of the Arizona Historical Society to uncover the area's natural history, prehistory, Spanish and Mexican regimes, and particularly its Anglo history from the mid nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II. His book is a rich account of the region and more, a celebration of rural life, brimming with tales of people whose stories were shaped by the landscape.
Today the Chiricahuas are a magnet for outdoor enthusiasts and the site of the American Museum of Natural History's Southwestern Research Station—and still a rugged area that remains off the beaten track. Hayes brings his straightforward and articulate style to this captivating account of earlier days in southeastern Arizona and opens up a portal to paradise for readers everywhere.
From his vantage point near the tiny twin communities of Portal and Paradise on the eastern slopes of the Chiricahuas, Hayes brings the famous and the not-so-famous together in a profile of this striking landscape, showing how place can be a powerful formative influence on people's lives. When Hayes first arrived in 1941 to manage his new father-in-law's apple orchard, he met folks who had been born in Arizona before it became a state. Even if most had never personally worried about Indian attacks, they had known people who had. Over the years, Hayes heard the handed-down stories about the area's early days of Anglo settlement. He also researched census records, newspaper archives, and the files of the Arizona Historical Society to uncover the area's natural history, prehistory, Spanish and Mexican regimes, and particularly its Anglo history from the mid nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II. His book is a rich account of the region and more, a celebration of rural life, brimming with tales of people whose stories were shaped by the landscape.
Today the Chiricahuas are a magnet for outdoor enthusiasts and the site of the American Museum of Natural History's Southwestern Research Station—and still a rugged area that remains off the beaten track. Hayes brings his straightforward and articulate style to this captivating account of earlier days in southeastern Arizona and opens up a portal to paradise for readers everywhere.
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Portland in Three Centuries
The Place and the People
Carl Abbott
Oregon State University Press, 2022
A compact and comprehensive history of Portland from first European contact to the twenty-first century, Portland in Three Centuries introduces the women and men who have shaped Oregon’s largest city. The expected politicians and business leaders appear, but Carl Abbott also highlights workers and immigrants, union members and dissenters, women at work and in the public realm, artists and activists, and other movers and shakers.
Incorporating social history and contemporary scholarship in his narrative, Abbott examines current metropolitan character and issues, giving close attention to historical background. He explores the context of opportunities and problems that have helped to shape the rich mosaic that is Portland.
This revised and updated second edition includes greater attention to the Indigenous peoples of the Portland region, Portland’s communities of color, and the challenges of recent years that have thrust Portland into the national spotlight.
A highly readable character study of a city, and enhanced by more than sixty historic and contemporary images, Portland in Three Centuries will appeal to readers interested in Portland, in Oregon, and in Pacific Northwest history.
Incorporating social history and contemporary scholarship in his narrative, Abbott examines current metropolitan character and issues, giving close attention to historical background. He explores the context of opportunities and problems that have helped to shape the rich mosaic that is Portland.
This revised and updated second edition includes greater attention to the Indigenous peoples of the Portland region, Portland’s communities of color, and the challenges of recent years that have thrust Portland into the national spotlight.
A highly readable character study of a city, and enhanced by more than sixty historic and contemporary images, Portland in Three Centuries will appeal to readers interested in Portland, in Oregon, and in Pacific Northwest history.
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Portland in Three Centuries
The Place and the People
Carl Abbott
Oregon State University Press, 2011
The Portrait and the Book
Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America
Megan Walsh
University of Iowa Press, 2017
In the nineteenth century, new image-making methods like steel engraving and lithography caused a surge in the publication of illustrated books in the United States. Yet even before the widespread use of these technologies, Americans had already established the illustrated book format as central to the nation’s literary culture. In The Portrait and the Book, Megan Walsh argues that colonial-era author portraits, such as Benjamin Franklin’s and Phillis Wheatley’s frontispieces; political portraits that circulated during the debates over the Constitution, such as those of the Founders by Charles Willson Peale; and portraits of beloved fictional characters in the 1790s, such as those of Samuel Richardson’s heroine Pamela, shaped readers’ conceptions of American literature.
Illustrations played a key role in American literary culture despite the fact there was little demand for books by American writers. Indeed, most of the illustrated books bought, sold, and shared by Americans were either imported British works or reprinted versions of those imported editions. As a result, in addition to embellishing books, illustrations provided readers with crucial information about the country’s status as a former colony.
Through an examination of readers’ portrait-collecting habits, writers’ employment of ekphrasis, printers’ efforts to secure American-made illustrations for periodicals, and engravers’ reproductions of British book illustrations, Walsh uncovers in late eighteenth-century America a dynamic but forgotten visual culture that was inextricably tied to the printing industry and to the early US literary imagination.
Illustrations played a key role in American literary culture despite the fact there was little demand for books by American writers. Indeed, most of the illustrated books bought, sold, and shared by Americans were either imported British works or reprinted versions of those imported editions. As a result, in addition to embellishing books, illustrations provided readers with crucial information about the country’s status as a former colony.
Through an examination of readers’ portrait-collecting habits, writers’ employment of ekphrasis, printers’ efforts to secure American-made illustrations for periodicals, and engravers’ reproductions of British book illustrations, Walsh uncovers in late eighteenth-century America a dynamic but forgotten visual culture that was inextricably tied to the printing industry and to the early US literary imagination.
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Portrait Cultures of the Early Modern Cardinal
Piers Baker-Bates
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The visual legacy of early modern cardinals constitutes a vast and extremely rich body of artworks, many of superb quality, in a variety of media, often by well-known artists and skilled craftsmen. Yet cardinal portraits have primarily been analysed within biographical studies of the represented individual, in relation to the artists who created them, or within the broader genre of portraiture. No more profound investigation of these as a specific category of object has ever been attempted. This volume addresses questions surrounding the production, collection, and status of the cardinal portrait, covering diverse geographies and varied media. Examining the development of cardinals’ imagery in terms of their multi-layered identities, this volume considers portraits of 'princes of the Church' as a specific cultural phenomenon reflecting cardinals’ unique social and political position.
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A Portrait in Four Movements
The Chicago Symphony under Barenboim, Boulez, Haitink, and Muti
Andrew Patner
University of Chicago Press, 2019
“Playing in an orchestra in an intelligent way is the best school for democracy.”—Daniel Barenboim
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been led by a storied group of conductors. And from 1994 to 2015, through the best work of Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, and Riccardo Muti, Andrew Patner was right there. As a classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and WFMT radio, Patner was able to trace the arc of the CSO’s changing repertories, all while cultivating a deep rapport with its four principal conductors.
This book assembles Patner’s reviews of the concerts given by the CSO during this time, as well as transcripts of his remarkable radio interviews with these colossal figures. These pages hold tidbits for the curious, such as Patner’s “driving survey” that playfully ranks the Maestri he knew on a scale of “total comfort” to “fright level five,” and the observation that Muti appears to be a southpaw on the baseball field. Moving easily between registers, they also open revealing windows onto the sometimes difficult pasts that brought these conductors to music in the first place, including Boulez’s and Haitink’s heartbreaking experiences of Nazi occupation in their native countries as children. Throughout, these reviews and interviews are threaded together with insights about the power of music and the techniques behind it—from the conductors’ varied approaches to research, preparing scores, and interacting with other musicians, to how the sound and personality of the orchestra evolved over time, to the ways that we can all learn to listen better and hear more in the music we love. Featuring a foreword by fellow critic Alex Ross on the ethos and humor that informed Patner’s writing, as well as an introduction and extensive historical commentary by musicologist Douglas W. Shadle, this book offers a rich portrait of the musical life of Chicago through the eyes and ears of one of its most beloved critics.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been led by a storied group of conductors. And from 1994 to 2015, through the best work of Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, and Riccardo Muti, Andrew Patner was right there. As a classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and WFMT radio, Patner was able to trace the arc of the CSO’s changing repertories, all while cultivating a deep rapport with its four principal conductors.
This book assembles Patner’s reviews of the concerts given by the CSO during this time, as well as transcripts of his remarkable radio interviews with these colossal figures. These pages hold tidbits for the curious, such as Patner’s “driving survey” that playfully ranks the Maestri he knew on a scale of “total comfort” to “fright level five,” and the observation that Muti appears to be a southpaw on the baseball field. Moving easily between registers, they also open revealing windows onto the sometimes difficult pasts that brought these conductors to music in the first place, including Boulez’s and Haitink’s heartbreaking experiences of Nazi occupation in their native countries as children. Throughout, these reviews and interviews are threaded together with insights about the power of music and the techniques behind it—from the conductors’ varied approaches to research, preparing scores, and interacting with other musicians, to how the sound and personality of the orchestra evolved over time, to the ways that we can all learn to listen better and hear more in the music we love. Featuring a foreword by fellow critic Alex Ross on the ethos and humor that informed Patner’s writing, as well as an introduction and extensive historical commentary by musicologist Douglas W. Shadle, this book offers a rich portrait of the musical life of Chicago through the eyes and ears of one of its most beloved critics.
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Portrait In Photography
Graham Clarke
Reaktion Books, 1992
The photographic portrait is discussed in a wide context, from general subjects such as the family photograph album and American portrait photography to the work of individual artists like Sander and Stieglitz.
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Portrait of a Port
Boston, 1852–1914
W. H. Bunting
Harvard University Press
Two hundred and thirty-four striking photographs of the port of Boston combine with interpretive commentary to recapture the flavor, buoyancy, and excitement of the city’s years as one of the two or three great American ports. After the Civil War Boston underwent a radical and successful transformation from a declining mercantile home port to an important and competitive modern seaport. At the same time the transition from sail to steam was taking place. Photographic studies of deep water sail and steam vessels, naval ships, fishing boats, catboats, tugs, schooners, and sloops, and of the picturesque wharves—all create a kaleidoscopic visual history of these years of change.
The volume offers, as well, some of the most distinguished early work in photography, including the widest selection ever published of photographs by pioneer marine photographer Nathaniel Stebbins.
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Portrait of a Russian Province
Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod
Catherine Evtuhov
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011
Several stark premises have long prevailed in our approach to Russian history. It was commonly assumed that Russia had always labored under a highly centralized and autocratic imperial state. The responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs was ultimately assigned to the profoundly agrarian character of Russian society. The countryside, home to the overwhelming majority of the nation’s population, was considered a harsh world of cruel landowners and ignorant peasants, and a strong hand was required for such a crude society.
A number of significant conclusions flowed from this understanding. Deep and abiding social divisions obstructed the evolution of modernity, as experienced “naturally” in other parts of Europe, so there was no Renaissance or Reformation; merely a derivative Enlightenment; and only a distorted capitalism. And since only despotism could contain these volatile social forces, it followed that the 1917 Revolution was an inevitable explosion resulting from these intolerable contradictions—and so too were the blood-soaked realities of the Soviet regime that came after. In short, the sheer immensity of its provincial backwardness could explain almost everything negative about the course of Russian history.
This book undermines these preconceptions. Through her close study of the province of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century, Catherine Evtuhov demonstrates how nearly everything we thought we knew about the dynamics of Russian
society was wrong. Instead of peasants ground down by poverty and ignorance, we find skilled farmers, talented artisans and craftsmen, and enterprising tradespeople. Instead of an exclusively centrally administered state, we discover effective and participatory local government. Instead of pervasive ignorance, we are shown a lively cultural scene and an active middle class. Instead of a defining Russian exceptionalism, we find a world recognizable to any historian of nineteenth-century Europe.
Drawing on a wide range of Russian social, environmental, economic, cultural, and intellectual history, and synthesizing it with deep archival research of the Nizhnii Novgorod province, Evtuhov overturns a simplistic view of the Russian past. Rooted in, but going well beyond, provincial affairs, her book challenges us with an entirely new perspective on Russia’s historical trajectory.
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Portrait of a Young Painter
Pepe Zuniga and Mexico City's Rebel Generation
Mary Kay Vaughan
Duke University Press, 2015
In Portrait of a Young Painter, the distinguished historian Mary Kay Vaughan adopts a biographical approach to understanding the culture surrounding the Mexico City youth rebellion of the 1960s. Her chronicle of the life of painter Pepe Zúñiga counters a literature that portrays post-1940 Mexican history as a series of uprisings against state repression, injustice, and social neglect that culminated in the student protests of 1968. Rendering Zúñiga's coming of age on the margins of formal politics, Vaughan depicts midcentury Mexico City as a culture of growing prosperity, state largesse, and a vibrant, transnationally-informed public life that produced a multifaceted youth movement brimming with creativity and criticism of convention. In an analysis encompassing the mass media, schools, politics, family, sexuality, neighborhoods, and friendships, she subtly invokes theories of discourse, phenomenology, and affect to examine the formation of Zúñiga's persona in the decades leading up to 1968. By discussing the influences that shaped his worldview, she historicizes the process of subject formation and shows how doing so offers new perspectives on the events of 1968.
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The Portraitist
Frans Hals and His World
Steven Nadler
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age.
Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like.
Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter’s animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.
Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals’s life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.
Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like.
Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter’s animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.
Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals’s life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.
[more]
Portraits
A Gallery of Intellectuals
Edward Shils
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In these vivid portraits of prominent twentieth-century intellectuals, Edward Shils couples the sensitivity of a biographer with the profound knowledge of a highly respected scholar. Ranging as widely across various disciplines as Shils himself did, the essays gathered here share a distaste for faddists who "run with the intellectual mob" and a deep respect for intellectuals who maintain their integrity under great pressure.
Highlights include an affectionate treatment of Leo Szilard, the physicist whose involvement with the development of the atomic bomb led him to work ceaselessly to address its social consequences; a discussion of the educational philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University of Chicago's fifth and most controversial president; an appreciative account of the Polish emigré Leopold Labedz's well-informed and outspoken resistance to Communism; and an essay about the extraordinary Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri.
Many of these essays have appeared in The American Scholar, edited by Joseph Epstein, who introduces this volume with his own portrait of Edward Shils.
"Though professionally a sociologist, Edward Shils was a man of wide cosmopolitan culture and experience, greatly concerned with the public problems of his time: in particular with those created by the rise of new and dangerous ideologies, the frightening possibilities of science, and the apparent abrogation of public responsibility by many Western intellectuals."—Hugh Trevor-Roper
The late Edward Shils was a member of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought for forty-five years and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge University. His many books include The Calling of Sociology and The Intellectuals and the Powers, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Highlights include an affectionate treatment of Leo Szilard, the physicist whose involvement with the development of the atomic bomb led him to work ceaselessly to address its social consequences; a discussion of the educational philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University of Chicago's fifth and most controversial president; an appreciative account of the Polish emigré Leopold Labedz's well-informed and outspoken resistance to Communism; and an essay about the extraordinary Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri.
Many of these essays have appeared in The American Scholar, edited by Joseph Epstein, who introduces this volume with his own portrait of Edward Shils.
"Though professionally a sociologist, Edward Shils was a man of wide cosmopolitan culture and experience, greatly concerned with the public problems of his time: in particular with those created by the rise of new and dangerous ideologies, the frightening possibilities of science, and the apparent abrogation of public responsibility by many Western intellectuals."—Hugh Trevor-Roper
The late Edward Shils was a member of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought for forty-five years and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge University. His many books include The Calling of Sociology and The Intellectuals and the Powers, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
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Portraits in the Andes
Photography and Agency, 1900-1950
Jorge Coronado
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Portraits in the Andes examines indigenous and mestizo self-representation through the medium of photography from the early to mid twentieth century. As Jorge Coronado reveals, these images offer a powerful counterpoint to the often-slanted, predominant view of indigenismo produced by the intellectual elite.
Photography offered an inexpensive and readily available technology for producing portraits and other images that allowed lower- and middle-class racialized subjects to create their own distinct rhetoric and vision of their culture. The powerful identity-marking vehicle that photography provided to the masses has been overlooked in much of Latin American cultural studies—which have focused primarily on the elite’s visual arts. Coronado's study offers close readings of Andean photographic archives from the early- to mid-twentieth century, to show the development of a consumer culture and the agency of marginalized groups in creating a visual document of their personal interpretations of modernity.
Photography offered an inexpensive and readily available technology for producing portraits and other images that allowed lower- and middle-class racialized subjects to create their own distinct rhetoric and vision of their culture. The powerful identity-marking vehicle that photography provided to the masses has been overlooked in much of Latin American cultural studies—which have focused primarily on the elite’s visual arts. Coronado's study offers close readings of Andean photographic archives from the early- to mid-twentieth century, to show the development of a consumer culture and the agency of marginalized groups in creating a visual document of their personal interpretations of modernity.
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Portraits of a Generation
Early Pentecostal Leaders
James Goff
University of Arkansas Press, 2002
A spirit of religious revival blazed across the United States just after 1900. With a focus on Holy Spirit power, early adherents stirred an enthusiastic response, first at a Bible school in Topeka and then in a small mission on Asuza Street in Los Angeles. Almost immediately, the movement spread to Houston, Chicago, and then northeastern urban centers. By the early 1910s the fervor had reached most parts of the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico, and eventually the converts called themselves pentecostals. Today there are pentecostals all over the world. From the beginning the movement was unusually diverse: women and African Americans were active in many of the early fellowships, and although some groups were segregated, some were interracial. Everytwhere, ordinary people passionately devoted themselves to salvation, Holy Ghost baptism evidenced by speaking in tongues, divine healing, and anticipation of the Lord’s imminent return.
This movement saw itself as leaderless, depending on individual conversion and a radical equality of souls — or, as early devotees would say, on the Holy Spirit. But a closer look reveals a host of forceful, clear-eyed leaders. This volume offers twenty biographical portraits of the first-generation pioneers who wove the different strands of Holy Spirit revivalism into a coherent and dramatically successful movement.
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Portraits of Basques in the New World
Richard W. Etulain
University of Nevada Press, 1999
A collection of new essays on notable historic and contemporary Basques of America's Far West that offers a perceptive and lively examination of the lives of one of the West's most resilient and successful ethnic minorities. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the Basque people or those interested in the process of immigration and assimilation: these profiles illustrate how America's Basque immigrants have achieved success in mainstream society while retaining strong ties to their ancient Old World culture.
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Portraits of Conflict
A Photographic History of Alabama in the Civil War
Ben H. Severance
University of Arkansas Press, 2012
Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Alabama in the Civil War is the tenth volume in this acclaimed series showing the human side of the country's great national conflict. Over 230 photographs of soldiers and civilians from Alabama, many never seen before, are accompanied by their personal stories and woven into the larger narrative of the war both on the battlefield and the home front. Alabama is unusual among the Rebel states in that, while its people saw little fighting inside its boundaries, nearly one hundred thousand Alabamians served with Confederate units throughout the South. This volume chronicles their experiences in almost every battle east of the Mississippi River--especially at Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg under the legendary Robert E. Lee; at Murfreesboro and Chickamauga as part of the ill-fated Army of Tennessee; and at the famous siege of Vicksburg. Ultimately Union soldiers did invade the state, and Alabamians defended their homeland against enemy cavalry raiders at Selma and against Federal warships in the fight for Mobile Bay. The volume also includes accounts of some of Alabama's leading politicians as well as several of its more ordinary citizens. This new volume contains the same quality of photography and storytelling that has attracted Civil War enthusiasts since the first volume was published in 1987, making it another welcome addition to the series Civil War History called "a sensibly priced, beautifully produced photographic history."
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Portraits of Conflict
A Photographic History of Louisiana in the Civil War
Carl H. Moneyhon
University of Arkansas Press, 1990
Portraits of Conflict
A Photographic History of Missouri in the Civil War
William Garrett Piston
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
A deeply divided border state, heir to the “Bleeding Kansas” era, Missouri became the third most fought-over state in the war, following Virginia and Tennessee. Rich in resources and manpower, critical politically to both the Union and the Confederacy, it was the scene of conventional battles, river warfare, and cavalry raids. It saw the first combat by organized units of Native Americans and African Americans. It was also marked by guerrilla warfare of unparalleled viciousness. This volume, the ninth in the series, includes hundreds of photographs, many of them never before published. The authors provide text and commentary, organizing the photographs into chapters covering the origins of the war, its conventional and guerrilla phases, the war on the rivers, medicine (Sweeny’s medical knowledge adds a great deal to this chapter and expands our knowledge of its practice in the west), the experiences of Missourians who served out of state, and the process of reunion in the postwar years.
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Portraits of Conflict
Tennessee: A Photographic History of Tennessee in the Civil War
Richard B. McCaslin
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
It’s one thing to understand that over twenty-thousand Confederate and Union soldiers died at the Battle of Murfreesboro. It’s quite another to study an ambrotype portrait of twenty-year-old private Frank B. Crosthwait, dressed in his Sunday best, looking somberly at the camera. In a tragically short time, he’ll be found on the battlefield, mortally wounded, still clutching the knotted pieces of handkerchief he used in a hopeless attempt to stop the bleeding from his injuries. Private Crosthwait’s image is one of more than 250 portraits—many never before published—to be found in the much anticipated Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Tennessee in the Civil War. The eighth in the distinguished Portraits of Conflict series, this volume joins the personal and the public to provide a uniquely rich portrayal of Tennesseans—in uniforms both blue and gray—who fought and lost their lives in the Civil War. Here is the story of a widow working as a Union spy to support herself and her children. Of a father emerging from his house to find his Confederate soldier son dying at his feet. Of a nine-year-old boy who attached himself to a Union regiment after his mother died. Their stories and faces, joined with personal remembrances from recovered letters and diaries and ample historical information on secession, famous battles, surrender, and Reconstruction, make this new Portraits of Conflict a Civil War treasure.
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Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife
John Quincy Adams
Harvard University Press, 1970
The publication of Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife makes available a record which both affords unique visual documentation of the most varied political career in American history and exemplifies the work of the principal American portraitists from the days of Copley and Stuart to the dawn of the Daguerrean era. Included in the volume's 159 illustrations are all the known life portraits, busts, and silhouettes of John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams, along with important replicas, copies, engravings, and representative likenesses of their siblings.
The book is organized into seven chapters which generally coincide with the major divisions of John Quincy Adams' political career. Within each chapter are discussed the artists, their relationships with the Adams's, and the provenance of each of their works. A comprehensive chronology of John Quincy Adams' life for each period accompanies the chapter to which it pertains. All important information about the size of each likeness, the inscriptions if any, the date executed, and present ownership where known is summarized in the List of Illustrations.
The Adams's, as they watched themselves age over the years in the marble, ink, or oil of the artists who portrayed them, recorded much by way of commentary on the artistic talent and process at hand. Andrew Oliver, in his detailed and lively discussions of each likeness, makes full use of the diaries and correspondence preserved in the Adams Papers, thus combining a learned appreciation with an intimate glimpse of Adams's as they saw themselves. The volume continues the record of Adams family portraiture begun with Portraits of John and Abigail Adams. The two volumes together constitute Series IV of the distinguished Adams Papers publications.
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Portraits of Justice
The Wisconsin Supreme Court's First 150 Years
Trina E. Gray
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003
First published in 1998 to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Wisconsin statehood, this book has been updated to mark the Wisconsin Supreme Court's 150th anniversary and the 125th anniversary of the State Bar of Wisconsin, both celebrated in 2003. It contains profiles of all those who have served as Wisconsin Supreme Court justices and a new introduction by Chief Justice Abrahamson summarizing the court's history and its vision for the future.
This book is an excellent reference for students, attorneys, and all interested in the state's legal history.
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Portraits of Learned Men
Paolo Giovio
Harvard University Press, 2023
The most complete translation available of these brief biographies of great European figures, written by one of the leading historians of the sixteenth century.
Portraits of Learned Men provides a fascinating synopsis of the contours, mentality, and trajectory of humanistic culture in Italy and Europe by one of the leading historians of the sixteenth century, Paolo Giovio (1483–1552). These brief biographies of 146 men of learning—from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Luis Vives in the sixteenth—were meant to accompany accurate portrait paintings commemorating great figures in modern history. Presented together with the literary portraits in this volume, these paintings would be located in a purpose-built villa on Lake Como that would be open to the public. Giovio called this his musaeum, or home of the Muses, one of the first such institutions in European history. His museum would not only serve the traditional function of inspiring virtuous emulation but also provide a comprehensive, candid, and personal overview of the Republic of Letters as it had taken shape and flourished in Italy and Europe during the Renaissance.
This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin text and a new, more complete translation than any now available in English.
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Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living
Essays in Memory of David Herlihy
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. and Steven A. Epstein, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1996
This volume--a collection of essays dedicated to one of this century's most distinguished medieval historians, David Herlihy--introduces the general reader to the new social history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The essays address three themes: sex and the family, power and patronage in local history, and society in town and countryside. The authors use current research to illustrate how Herlihy's ideas continue to shape work about the lives of powerful and ordinary people in this long and important period of Western history.
Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living opens with Herlihy's final summary of his views on family history, followed by a reminiscence by his most important collaborator, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. The first group of essays takes us inside specific familial settings, using recent methods in anthropological, legal, and women's studies to uncover new dimensions of medieval and Renaissance family life. A second group of studies focuses on the question of authority in medieval society and advances new theses about politics and society in Florence and other local settings. The final group of authors considers the special circumstances of town and countryside in Italy, England, and Spain and draws insightful generalizations across territorial and national boundaries.
Like Herlihy's own work, these essays present innovative and challenging hypotheses about significant problems in the history of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Important new material on Florence, family history, religion, the Inquisition, and taxation is presented for the first time, but the essays are not simply technical exercises focused on small or isolated pieces of research. Thus the volume will go beyond the interest of specialists in medieval and Renaissance social history and will attract a wide audience of students and scholars.
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., is Professor of History, Brandeis University. Steven Epstein is Professor of History, University of Colorado.
Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living opens with Herlihy's final summary of his views on family history, followed by a reminiscence by his most important collaborator, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. The first group of essays takes us inside specific familial settings, using recent methods in anthropological, legal, and women's studies to uncover new dimensions of medieval and Renaissance family life. A second group of studies focuses on the question of authority in medieval society and advances new theses about politics and society in Florence and other local settings. The final group of authors considers the special circumstances of town and countryside in Italy, England, and Spain and draws insightful generalizations across territorial and national boundaries.
Like Herlihy's own work, these essays present innovative and challenging hypotheses about significant problems in the history of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Important new material on Florence, family history, religion, the Inquisition, and taxation is presented for the first time, but the essays are not simply technical exercises focused on small or isolated pieces of research. Thus the volume will go beyond the interest of specialists in medieval and Renaissance social history and will attract a wide audience of students and scholars.
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., is Professor of History, Brandeis University. Steven Epstein is Professor of History, University of Colorado.
[more]
Portraits of Remembrance
Painting, Memory, and the First World War
Edited by Margaret Hutchison and Steven Trout
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Interdisciplinary collection of essays on fine art painting as it relates to the First World War and commemoration of the conflict
Although photography and moving pictures achieved ubiquity during the First World War as technological means of recording history, the far more traditional medium of painting played a vital role in the visual culture of combatant nations. The public’s appetite for the kind of up-close frontline action that snapshots and film footage could not yet provide resulted in a robust market for drawn or painted battle scenes.
Painting also figured significantly in the formation of collective war memory after the armistice. Paintings became sites of memory in two ways: first, many governments and communities invested in freestanding panoramas or cycloramas that depicted the war or featured murals as components of even larger commemorative projects, and second, certain paintings, whether created by official artists or simply by those moved to do so, emerged over time as visual touchstones in the public’s understanding of the war.
Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War examines the relationship between war painting and collective memory in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the United States. The paintings discussed vary tremendously, ranging from public murals and panoramas to works on a far more intimate scale, including modernist masterpieces and crowd-pleasing expressions of sentimentality or spiritualism. Contributors raise a host of topics in connection with the volume’s overarching focus on memory, including national identity, constructions of gender, historical accuracy, issues of aesthetic taste, and connections between painting and literature, as well as other cultural forms.
Although photography and moving pictures achieved ubiquity during the First World War as technological means of recording history, the far more traditional medium of painting played a vital role in the visual culture of combatant nations. The public’s appetite for the kind of up-close frontline action that snapshots and film footage could not yet provide resulted in a robust market for drawn or painted battle scenes.
Painting also figured significantly in the formation of collective war memory after the armistice. Paintings became sites of memory in two ways: first, many governments and communities invested in freestanding panoramas or cycloramas that depicted the war or featured murals as components of even larger commemorative projects, and second, certain paintings, whether created by official artists or simply by those moved to do so, emerged over time as visual touchstones in the public’s understanding of the war.
Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War examines the relationship between war painting and collective memory in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the United States. The paintings discussed vary tremendously, ranging from public murals and panoramas to works on a far more intimate scale, including modernist masterpieces and crowd-pleasing expressions of sentimentality or spiritualism. Contributors raise a host of topics in connection with the volume’s overarching focus on memory, including national identity, constructions of gender, historical accuracy, issues of aesthetic taste, and connections between painting and literature, as well as other cultural forms.
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Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman
Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860
Alexandra K. Wettlaufer
The Ohio State University Press, 2011
As women entered the field of cultural production in unprecedented numbers in nineteenth-century France and Britain, they gradually forged a place for themselves, however tenuous, in artistic movements and exhibitions, in academies and salons, and finally in the public imagination. Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 focuses on a decisive period in that process of professional self-invention and maps out the concrete and symbolic roles played by women painters, real and fictional, in the construction of female artistic identity in the aesthetic and the public spheres. Alexandra K. Wettlaufer examines the diverse and complex ways canonical and non-canonical women painters and novelists—including Anne Brontë, Sydney Owenson, Margaret Gillies, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, George Sand, and Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot—figured and brought forth the radical image of a female subject representing the world.
Wettlaufer brings to light a rich and nearly forgotten culture of women’s artistic production, allowing us to understand the nineteenth-century in more complex and nuanced ways across the borders of gender, genre, and nation. In her close readings of paintings by women and novels about women painting, she charts the political and cultural resonances of this artistic self-representation, tracing its evolution through themes of “The Studio” (Part I), “Cosmopolitan Visions” (Part II), and “The Portrait” (Part III). By pairing painting and literature in a single study that also considers works from two distinct but closely related cultures, Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman locates the interpretation of these works in the dialogic context in which they were created and consumed, highlighting aesthetic and political intersections between nineteenth-century British and French art, literature, and feminism that are too often elided by the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship.
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Portraits of the New Negro Woman
Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance
Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene
Rutgers University Press, 2007
Of all the images to arise from the Harlem Renaissance, the most thought-provoking were those of the mulatta. For some writers, artists, and filmmakers, these images provided an alternative to the stereotypes of black womanhood and a challenge to the color line. For others, they represented key aspects of modernity and race coding central to the New Negro Movement. Due to the mulatta’s frequent ability to pass for white, she represented a variety of contradictory meanings that often transcended racial, class, and gender boundaries.
In this engaging narrative, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson uses the writings of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset as well as the work of artists like Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson to illuminate the centrality of the mulatta by examining a variety of competing arguments about race in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.
[more]
Portraits of the Ptolemies
Greek Kings as Egyptian Pharaohs
By Paul Edmund Stanwick
University of Texas Press, 2003
As archaeologists recover the lost treasures of Alexandria, the modern world is marveling at the latter-day glory of ancient Egypt and the Greeks who ruled it from the ascension of Ptolemy I in 306 B.C. to the death of Cleopatra the Great in 30 B.C. The abundance and magnificence of royal sculptures from this period testify to the power of the Ptolemaic dynasty and its influence on Egyptian artistic traditions that even then were more than two thousand years old.
In this book, Paul Edmund Stanwick undertakes the first complete study of Egyptian-style portraits of the Ptolemies. Examining one hundred and fifty sculptures from the vantage points of literary evidence, archaeology, history, religion, and stylistic development, he fully explores how they meld Egyptian and Greek cultural traditions and evoke surrounding social developments and political events. To do this, he develops a "visual vocabulary" for reading royal portraiture and discusses how the portraits helped legitimate the Ptolemies and advance their ideology. Stanwick also sheds new light on the chronology of the sculptures, giving dates to many previously undated ones and showing that others belong outside the Ptolemaic period.
[more]
Portraits of the Vestal Virgins, Priestesses of Ancient Rome
Molly M. Lindner
University of Michigan Press, 2015
For more than eleven hundred years, the Vestal Virgins dedicated their lives to the goddess Vesta, protector of the Roman state. Though supervised by a male priest, the Pontifex Maximus, they had privileges beyond those of most women; like Roman men, they dispensed favors and influence on behalf of their clients and relatives. In 1883, Rodolfo Lanciani, Director of Antiquities for Rome, discovered the first Vestal statues. The recovery of the Vestals’ house, and the objects contained therein, was an exciting moment in Roman archaeology. Newspapers were filled with details about the huge numbers of sculptures, inscriptions, jewelry, coins, and terracotta figures.
Molly M. Lindner examines the sculptural presentation of the Vestal Virgins and investigates what images of long-dead women tell us about their lives. She addresses why these portraits were created, and why they only began to appear in the late first or second century CE—much later than portraits of other Roman priestesses and nonimperial women. Lindner sheds light on the distinctions between a Vestal portrait and portraits of other priestesses, and considers why Vestal portraits do not copy each other’s headdresses and hairstyles. In addition to the extensive illustrations that complement the text, a catalog of all known Vestal portraits displays historical clues embedded in the hairstyles and facial features of the Vestals and other women of their day. In Portraits of the Vestal Virgins, Priestesses of Ancient Rome, Lindner has given a voice to the long-silent women of these extraordinary marble portraits.
[more]
Portraits of Violence
War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement
Suzannah Biernoff
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Portraits of Violence explores the image and idea of facial disfigurement in one of its most troubling modern formations, as a symbol and consequence of war. It opens with Nina Berman’s iconic photograph Marine Wedding, which provoked a debate about the medical, military, and psychological response to serious combat injuries. While these issues remain urgent, it is equally crucial to interrogate the representation of war and injury. The concepts of valor, heroism, patriotism, and courage assume visible form and do their cultural work when they are personified and embodied. The mutilated or disabled veteran’s body can connote the brutalizing, dehumanizing potential of modern combat.
Suzannah Biernoff draws on a wide variety of sources mainly from WWI but also contemporary photography and computer games. Each chapter revolves around particular images: Marine Wedding is discussed alongside Stuart Griffiths’ portraits of British veterans; Henry Tonks’ drawings of WWI facial casualties are compared to the medical photographs in the Gillies Archives; the production of portrait masks for the severely disfigured is approached through the lens of documentary film and photography; and finally the haunting image of one of Tonks’s patients reappears in BioShock, a highly successful computer game. The book simultaneously addresses a neglected area in disability studies; puts disfigurement on the agenda for art history and visual studies; and makes a timely and provocative contribution to the literature on the First World War.
Suzannah Biernoff draws on a wide variety of sources mainly from WWI but also contemporary photography and computer games. Each chapter revolves around particular images: Marine Wedding is discussed alongside Stuart Griffiths’ portraits of British veterans; Henry Tonks’ drawings of WWI facial casualties are compared to the medical photographs in the Gillies Archives; the production of portrait masks for the severely disfigured is approached through the lens of documentary film and photography; and finally the haunting image of one of Tonks’s patients reappears in BioShock, a highly successful computer game. The book simultaneously addresses a neglected area in disability studies; puts disfigurement on the agenda for art history and visual studies; and makes a timely and provocative contribution to the literature on the First World War.
[more]
Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France
Jessica Fripp
University of Delaware Press, 2011
Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France examines how new and often contradictory ideas about friendship were enacted in the lives of artists in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that portraits resulted from and generated new ideas about friendship by analyzing the creation, exchange, and display of portraits alongside discussions of friendship in philosophical and academic discourse, exhibition criticism, personal diaries, and correspondence. This study provides a deeper understanding of how artists took advantage of changing conceptions of social relationships and used portraiture to make visible new ideas about friendship that were driven by Enlightenment thought.
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Portraying the Aztec Past
The Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin
By Angela Herren Rajagopalan
University of Texas Press, 2019
During the period of Aztec expansion and empire (ca. 1325–1525), scribes of high social standing used a pictographic writing system to paint hundreds of manuscripts detailing myriad aspects of life, including historical, calendric, and religious information. Following the Spanish conquest, native and mestizo tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) of the sixteenth century continued to use pre-Hispanic pictorial writing systems to record information about native culture. Three of these manuscripts—Codex Boturini, Codex Azcatitlan, and Codex Aubin—document the origin and migration of the Mexica people, one of several indigenous groups often collectively referred to as “Aztec.”
In Portraying the Aztec Past, Angela Herren Rajagopalan offers a thorough study of these closely linked manuscripts, articulating their narrative and formal connections and examining differences in format, style, and communicative strategies. Through analyses that focus on the materials, stylistic traits, facture, and narrative qualities of the codices, she places these annals in their historical and social contexts. Her work adds to our understanding of the production and function of these manuscripts and explores how Mexica identity is presented and framed after the conquest.
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Portugal & Africa
Ris Af#81
David Birmingham
Ohio University Press, 2004
Portugal was the first European nation to assert itself aggressively in African affairs. David Birmingham's Portugal and Africa, a collection of uniquely accessible historical essays, surveys this colonial encounter from its earliest roots. The Portuguese established sugar plantations on Africa's offshore islands and built factories on the beaches in the fifteenth century, but Professor Birmingham explains that their focus shifted to regions where medieval African miners had discovered deep seams of gold ore. Later, when even richer mines and more fertile lands were captured from the native peoples of the Americas, Portuguese ships became the great “slave bridge” that spanned the Atlantic and ferried captive black workers to the colonies of the New World.
Portugal lost its major mining claims in Africa to the British, but it left a legacy of a new pattern of white settler colonization based on American-style plantations. The blending of European and African cultures and races led to the emergence of elite communities, from the Kongo princes of the seventeenth century to the creolized generals of today.
Portugal and Africa focuses extensively on Angola to cast new light on the final years of the colonial experience and its traumatic legacies. After 1950, Portuguese Angola became one of the most dynamic of Africa's colonies and the largest white colony outside of Algeria or South Africa. Angola's eventual collapse in a series of wars had devastating results. Birmingham brings the terror and devastation to life in a series of powerful chapters that are a model of disciplined scholarship and informed passion.
Portugal lost its major mining claims in Africa to the British, but it left a legacy of a new pattern of white settler colonization based on American-style plantations. The blending of European and African cultures and races led to the emergence of elite communities, from the Kongo princes of the seventeenth century to the creolized generals of today.
Portugal and Africa focuses extensively on Angola to cast new light on the final years of the colonial experience and its traumatic legacies. After 1950, Portuguese Angola became one of the most dynamic of Africa's colonies and the largest white colony outside of Algeria or South Africa. Angola's eventual collapse in a series of wars had devastating results. Birmingham brings the terror and devastation to life in a series of powerful chapters that are a model of disciplined scholarship and informed passion.
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Portugal in European and World History
Malyn Newitt
Reaktion Books, 2009
Despite its modest size, Portugal has played a major part in the development of Europe and the modern world. In Portugal in European and World History Malyn Newitt offers a fresh appraisal of Portuguese history and its role in the world—from early Moorish times to the English Alliance of 1650–1900 and through the country’s liberal revolution in 1974.
Newitt specifically examines episodes where Portugal was a key player or innovator in history. Chapters focus on such topics as Moorish Portugal, describing the cultural impact of contact with the Moors—one of the oldest points of contact between Western Europe and Islam; the opening up of trade with western Africa; and the explorations of Vasco de Gama and the evolution of Portugal as the first commercial empire of modern times. Newitt also examines Portugal’s role in the Counter-reformation, in Spain’s wars in Europe, and in the Anglo-Portuguese alliance. Finally, Newitt analyzes the fall of fascism and the Portuguese decolonization within the context of larger global empires and movements.
This new account of a country with a rich historyshows how Portugal has moved from being the last colonial power to one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the modern European ideal.
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Portugal's Other Kingdom
The Algarve
By Dan Stanislawski
University of Texas Press, 1963
A land of long ago on the brink of tomorrow. That is the Algarve, the southernmost province of Portugal, a land that knew the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moslems—and yet retained its own distinctive personality. In the 1950s it first felt the impact of industrialization, and from that situation the author developed this book. In presenting this descriptive geography of the Algarve, Dan Stanislawski offers no thesis, except that geographers, economists, politicians, humanists—all those interested in the way the world is developing—should watch the small, culturally disparate areas of the world, to learn what they have of value to teach, to enjoy the qualities of their independent ways of living, and to observe and evaluate their reaction to modern change. This book, the result of detailed observation of one such region, is a valuable contribution to the knowledge necessary to form sound value judgments on the future development of these areas. From this account the charm of the Algarve emerges in all of its picturesqueness. With the aid of Stanislawski's vivid descriptions, his eighteen helpful maps and graphs, and his more than ninety photographs, the reader moves leisurely through this appealing, but unpublicized, region: along roadways bordered by rock walls and blooming almonds, traveled by sturdy burros bearing their loads of produce; through colorful landscapes of the Lower Algarve, with their pastel-calcimined dwellings and their intensively cultivated plots of olives, figs, carobs, grain, and vegetables; along the rugged cliff coast near Portimão, and the boat-filled port of Faro; past the canyon gardens of the Caldeirão; along the Arade River with its cork barges; northward past Cape S. Vicente to the area of wind-sheared trees. Guided by Stanislawski, the reader comes to understand Algarvian problems inherent in soils, topography, climate, location, and history. He sees the Algarvians following the occupational practices that have produced for them, in the midst of difficult conditions, a stable culture: fishing, netmaking, shipbuilding, farming, herding, and so on. He realizes that these people, with their unique cultural background and environment, desire to live, and to change, in their own way. Finally, he learns how it is possible to communicate effectively with the Algarvians and with millions of other people whose peculiar problems tend to isolate them from the rest of the world.
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The Portuguese Restoration of 1640 and Its Global Visualization
Political Iconography and Transcultural Negotiation
Urte Krass
Amsterdam University Press
The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora
Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts
By Darlene J. Sadlier
University of Texas Press, 2016
Long before the concept of “globalization,” the Portuguese constructed a vast empire that extended into Africa, India, Brazil, and mid-Atlantic territories, as well as parts of China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Using this empire as its starting point and spanning seven centuries and four continents, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora examines literary and artistic works about the ensuing diaspora, or the dispersion of people within the Portuguese-speaking world, resulting from colonization, the slave trade, adventure seeking, religious conversion, political exile, forced labor, war, economic migration, and tourism.
Based on a broad array of written and visual materials, including historiography, letters, memoirs, plays, poetry, fiction, cartographic imagery, paintings, photographs, and films, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora is the first detailed analysis of the different and sometimes conflicting cultural productions of the imperial diaspora in its heyday and an important context for understanding the more complex and broader-based culture of population travel and displacement from the former colonies to present-day “homelands.” The topics that Darlene J. Sadlier discusses include exploration and settlement by the Portuguese in different parts of the empire; the Black Atlantic slave trade; nineteenth-century travel and Orientalist imaginings; the colonial wars; and the return of populations to Portugal following African independence. A wide-ranging study of the art and literature of these and other diasporic movements, this book is a major contribution to the growing field of Lusophone studies.
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Positively Main Street
Bob Dylan’s Minnesota
Toby Thompson
University of Minnesota Press, 2008
“That boy . . . this fellow, Toby . . . has got some lessons to learn.” —Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone, November 29, 1969
"Toby Thompson was there first." —Greil Marcus
“A first-rate novelistic account of Thompson’s own psyche as he uncovers the Dylan few people know . . . A new look at young Dylan done with kindness, enthusiasm and superb language.” —William Kennedy, Look Magazine
“Essential reading. Thompson, unprecedentedly, managed to interview not only Echo Helstrom, almost certainly the ‘Girl of the North Country,’ but Dylan’s mother and brother, his uncle, his friends.” —Michael Gray, Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
“Dylan fans will not want to miss this book.” —Sioux City Journal
“Enough to satisfy any Dylan fan with all the gossip he’ll ever need.” —Huntsville Times
“Well worth the attention of anyone who has fallen under the spell of the boy from the North Country.” —Los Angeles Times
“It’s a must.” —Ft. Worth Press
"Thompson tracked down anybody who knew 'Die-lan' (as the Hibbingites called him), including the guy at the local music store, the guy at the motorcycle shop, his English and music teachers, his uncles, his brother David and even his reluctant but ultimately charmingly chatty mother. Of course, Thompson traveled into a few dead ends. But the stuff with Dylan's mom and his high school girlfriend, Echo Helstrom, is priceless. Positively Main Street is a free-wheelin', fun and quick read that is surprisingly informative." —Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Hundreds of books have been written about Minnesota's most famous songwriter; Bob Dylan's life and music has been analyzed by fans, scholars, and even himself. So, why do we need Toby Thompson's Positively Main Street: Bob Dylan's Minnesota? Because it's a forgotten milestone. Published in 1971, it was the first biography on Dylan. Although it's been out of print since 1977, the book is, with the exception of Dylan's autobiography, perhaps the most readable and necessary volume on the folk icon." —City Pages
"The new Positively Main Street is a lovely little book, even better than the original, a cherished addition to the Dylan bookshelf. Thompson and the University of Minnesota Press have enhanced what was already a classic and made it available to a whole new audience. Dylan fans owe them a debt of gratitude." —The Dylan Daily
"[Thompson] ends up not only interviewing 'the Girl from the North Country,' Echo Haelstrom, and 'Bob’s' mother and brother and teachers etc., but also filling in for Dylan among his old friends and acquaintances, playing Dylan’s songs on the guitar and harmonica and singing them, in a way that may have seemed stratingly revolutionary at the time for a journalist to do, he actually recreates a bit of Dylan’s existence as his own." —Michael Lally, Lally's Alley
[more]
Positively No Filipinos Allowed
Building Communities and Discourse
edited by Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr., Edgardo V. Gutierrez and Ricardo V. Gutierrez, foreword by Lisa Lowe
Temple University Press, 2006
From the perspectives of ethnic studies, history, literary criticism, and legal studies, the original essays in this volume examine the ways in which the colonial history of the Philippines has shaped Filipino American identity, culture, and community formation. The contributors address the dearth of scholarship in the field as well as show how an understanding of this complex history provides a foundation for new theoretical frameworks for Filipino American studies.
[more]
Positivism in Mexico
By Leopoldo Zea; Translated by Josephine H. Schulte
University of Texas Press, 1974
Positivism, not just an “ivory tower” philosophy, was a major force in the social, political, and educational life of Mexico during the last half of the nineteenth century. Once colonial conservatism had been conquered, the French Intervention ended, and Maximilian of Hapsburg executed, reformers wanted to create a new national order to replace the Spanish colonial one. The victorious liberals strove to achieve “mental emancipation,” a kind of second independence, which would abolish the habits and customs imposed on Mexicans by three centuries of colonialism. At this singular moment in Mexican history, positivism was offered as an extraordinary means and pathway to a new order. The next stage was the education of the Mexican people in this liberal philosophy and their incorporation into the process of development achieved by modern nations. Leopoldo Zea traces the forerunners of liberal thought and their influence during Juárez’s time and shows how this ideology degenerated into an “order and progress” philosophy that served merely to maintain colonial forms of exploitation and, at the same time, to create new ones that were peculiar to the neocolonialism that the great nations of the world imposed on other peoples. Zea examines the regime of Porfirio Díaz and its justification by the positivist philosophers of the period. He concludes that the conflict between exploited social groups, on the one hand, and foreign interests and a middle class on the margin of an oligarchy, on the other, brought about the movement known as the Mexican Revolution.
[more]
Possessing Polynesians
The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania
Maile Arvin
Duke University Press, 2019
From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans asserted an identification with the racial origins of Polynesians, declaring them to be racially almost white and speculating that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing Polynesians Maile Arvin analyzes this racializing history within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially in Hawai‘i. Arvin argues that a logic of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism, by which both Polynesia (the place) and Polynesians (the people) become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness. Seeing whiteness as indigenous to Polynesia provided white settlers with the justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources. Understood as possessions, Polynesians were and continue to be denied the privileges of whiteness. Yet Polynesians have long contested these classifications, claims, and cultural representations, and Arvin shows how their resistance to and refusal of white settler logic have regenerated Indigenous forms of recognition.
[more]
Possessing the Pacific
Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska
Stuart Banner
Harvard University Press, 2007
During the nineteenth century, British and American settlers acquired a vast amount of land from indigenous people throughout the Pacific, but in no two places did they acquire it the same way. Stuart Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Today, indigenous people own much more land in some of these places than in others. And certain indigenous peoples benefit from treaty rights, while others do not. These variations are traceable to choices made more than a century ago--choices about whether indigenous people were the owners of their land and how that land was to be transferred to whites.
Banner argues that these differences were not due to any deliberate land policy created in London or Washington. Rather, the decisions were made locally by settlers and colonial officials and were based on factors peculiar to each colony, such as whether the local indigenous people were agriculturalists and what level of political organization they had attained. These differences loom very large now, perhaps even larger than they did in the nineteenth century, because they continue to influence the course of litigation and political struggle between indigenous people and whites over claims to land and other resources.
Possessing the Pacific is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.
[more]
The Possession at Loudun
Michel de Certeau
University of Chicago Press, 2000
It is August 18, 1634. Father Urbain Grandier, convicted of sorcery that led to the demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns of provincial Loudun in France, confesses his sins on the porch of the church of Saint-Pierre, then perishes in flames lit by his own exorcists. A dramatic tale that has inspired many artistic retellings, including a novel by Aldous Huxley and an incendiary film by Ken Russell, the story of the possession at Loudun here receives a compelling analysis from the renowned Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau.
Interweaving substantial excerpts from primary historical documents with fascinating commentary, de Certeau shows how the plague of sorceries and possessions in France that climaxed in the events at Loudun both revealed the deepest fears of a society in traumatic flux and accelerated its transformation. In this tour de force of psychological history, de Certeau brings to vivid life a people torn between the decline of centralized religious authority and the rise of science and reason, wracked by violent anxiety over what or whom to believe.
At the time of his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau was a director of studies at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He was author of eighteen books in French, three of which have appeared in English translation as The Practice of Everyday Life,The Writing of History, and The Mystic Fable, Volume 1, the last of which is published by The University of Chicago Press.
"Brilliant and innovative. . . . The Possession at Loudun is [de Certeau's] most accessible book and one of his most wonderful."—Stephen Greenblatt (from the Foreword)
Interweaving substantial excerpts from primary historical documents with fascinating commentary, de Certeau shows how the plague of sorceries and possessions in France that climaxed in the events at Loudun both revealed the deepest fears of a society in traumatic flux and accelerated its transformation. In this tour de force of psychological history, de Certeau brings to vivid life a people torn between the decline of centralized religious authority and the rise of science and reason, wracked by violent anxiety over what or whom to believe.
At the time of his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau was a director of studies at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He was author of eighteen books in French, three of which have appeared in English translation as The Practice of Everyday Life,The Writing of History, and The Mystic Fable, Volume 1, the last of which is published by The University of Chicago Press.
"Brilliant and innovative. . . . The Possession at Loudun is [de Certeau's] most accessible book and one of his most wonderful."—Stephen Greenblatt (from the Foreword)
[more]
Possessions
The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley
Judith Richardson
Harvard University Press, 2003
The cultural landscape of the Hudson River Valley is crowded with ghosts--the ghosts of Native Americans and Dutch colonists, of Revolutionary War soldiers and spies, of presidents, slaves, priests, and laborers. Possessions asks why this region just outside New York City became the locus for so many ghostly tales, and shows how these hauntings came to operate as a peculiar type of social memory whereby things lost, forgotten, or marginalized returned to claim possession of imaginations and territories. Reading Washington Irving's stories along with a diverse array of narratives from local folklore and regional writings, Judith Richardson explores the causes and consequences of Hudson Valley hauntings to reveal how ghosts both evolve from specific historical contexts and are conjured to serve the present needs of those they haunt. These tales of haunting, Richardson argues, are no mere echoes of the past but function in an ongoing, contentious politics of place. Through its tight geographical focus, Possessions illuminates problems of belonging and possessing that haunt the nation as a whole.
[more]
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
How White People Profit from Identity Politics
George Lipsitz
Temple University Press, 2018
George Lipsitz’s classic book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness argues that public policy and private prejudice work together to create a possessive investment in whiteness that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educational opportunities available to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the friends and relatives of those who have profited most from past and present discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. White Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with structured advantages.
In this twentieth anniversary edition, Lipsitz provides a new introduction and updated statistics; as well as analyses of the enduring importance of Hurricane Katrina; the nature of anti-immigrant mobilizations; police assaults on Black women, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray; the legacy of Obama and the emergence of Trump; the Charleston Massacre and other hate crimes; and the ways in which white fear, white fragility, and white failure have become drivers of a new ethno-nationalism.
As vital as it was upon its original publication, the twentieth anniversary edition of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is an unflinching but necessary look at white supremacy.
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The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition
George Lipsitz
Temple University Press, 2006
In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary, Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and perhaps most importantly, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city's image as a tourist party town.
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Possible Paradises
Basque Emigration to Latin America
Azcona Pastor
University of Nevada Press, 2003
From Columbus's first voyage to "the Indies" in 1492, Basques participated in Spain's American enterprise. Supported by centuries of experience as mariners, shipbuilders, traders, miners, and ironworkers; encouraged toward emigration by restrictive inheritance laws and a land-poor territory; and conditioned by a culture that prized hard work and social solidarity, the Basques were poised to play a significant role in the exploration and development of the New World. The first Basques arrived with Columbus, and well into the twentieth century they continued to arrive seeking livelihood and refuge.
Possible Paradises, José Manuel Azcona Pastor's engaging and meticulously researched study of Basque emigration to the Americas, is a path breaking work of monumental importance. Ranging over the entire former Spanish American empire from Tierra del Fuego to the U.S. Southwest and covering over five centuries of history, Azcona examines the roles and fates of the Basques who came to the New World. He also studies the impact of the New World on the Basque Country, from the importance in the modern Basque diet of such American foodstuffs as corn and beans to the encouragement given to traditional Basque industries by the colonizers' demand for ships and iron tools. He considers the role of Basques in the Spanish imperial expeditions of exploration and conquest; their participation in transatlantic commerce and communication.
The Basque diaspora, although worldwide in dimension, has had its greatest presence and importance in the Americas. Azcona's pioneering study views the Basque presence in the New World through the broadest possible lens, linking Basque communities and activities from Argentina to the North American West.
Foreword by William A. Douglass. Translation by Roland Vazquez.
Possible Paradises, José Manuel Azcona Pastor's engaging and meticulously researched study of Basque emigration to the Americas, is a path breaking work of monumental importance. Ranging over the entire former Spanish American empire from Tierra del Fuego to the U.S. Southwest and covering over five centuries of history, Azcona examines the roles and fates of the Basques who came to the New World. He also studies the impact of the New World on the Basque Country, from the importance in the modern Basque diet of such American foodstuffs as corn and beans to the encouragement given to traditional Basque industries by the colonizers' demand for ships and iron tools. He considers the role of Basques in the Spanish imperial expeditions of exploration and conquest; their participation in transatlantic commerce and communication.
The Basque diaspora, although worldwide in dimension, has had its greatest presence and importance in the Americas. Azcona's pioneering study views the Basque presence in the New World through the broadest possible lens, linking Basque communities and activities from Argentina to the North American West.
Foreword by William A. Douglass. Translation by Roland Vazquez.
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The Postal Age
The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America
David M. Henkin
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Americans commonly recognize television, e-mail, and instant messaging as agents of pervasive cultural change. But many of us may not realize that what we now call snail mail was once just as revolutionary. As David M. Henkin argues in The Postal Age, a burgeoning postal network initiated major cultural shifts during the nineteenth century, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications.
This fascinating history traces these shifts from their beginnings in the mid-1800s, when cheaper postage, mass literacy, and migration combined to make the long-established postal service a more integral and viable part of everyday life. With such dramatic events as the Civil War and the gold rush underscoring the importance and necessity of the post, a surprisingly broad range of Americans—male and female, black and white, native-born and immigrant—joined this postal network, regularly interacting with distant locales before the existence of telephones or even the widespread use of telegraphy. Drawing on original letters and diaries from the period, as well as public discussions of the expanding postal system, Henkin tells the story of how these Americans adjusted to a new world of long-distance correspondence, crowded post offices, junk mail, valentines, and dead letters.
The Postal Age paints a vibrant picture of a society where possibilities proliferated for the kinds of personal and impersonal communications that we often associate with more recent historical periods. In doing so, it significantly increases our understanding of both antebellum America and our own chapter in the history of communications.
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Post-Anarchism
A Reader
Edited by Duane Rousselle and Sureyyya Evren
Pluto Press, 2011
Post-anarchism has been of considerable importance in the discussions of radical intellectuals across the globe in the last decade. In its most popular form, it demonstrates a desire to blend the most promising aspects of traditional anarchist theory with developments in post-structuralist and post-modernist thought. Post-Anarchism: A Reader includes the most comprehensive collection of essays about this emergent body of thought, making it an essential and accessible resource for academics, intellectuals, activists and anarchists interested in radical philosophy.
Many of the chapters have been formative to the development of a distinctly 'post-anarchist' approach to politics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Others respond to the so-called 'post-anarchist turn' with caution and scepticism. The book also includes original contributions from several of today's 'post-anarchists', inviting further debate and new ways of conceiving post-anarchism across a number of disciplines.
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Post-capitalist Futures
Political Economy Beyond Crisis and Hope
Adam Fishwick
Pluto Press, 2021
This book critically engages with the proliferation of literature on postcapitalism, which is rapidly becoming an urgent area of inquiry, both in academic scholarship and in public life. It collects the insights from scholars working across the field of Critical International Political Economy to interrogate how we might begin to envisage a political economy of postcapitalism. The authors foreground the agency of workers and other capitalist subjects, and their desire to engage in a range of radical experiments in decommodification and democratization both in the workplace and in their daily lives. It includes a broad range of ideas including the future of social reproduction, human capital circulation, political Islam, the political economy of exclusion and eco-communities. Rather than focusing on the ending of capitalism as an implosion of the value-money form, this book focuses on the dream of equal participation in the determination of people's shared collective destiny.
[more]
Postcard America
Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931-1950
By Jeffrey L. Meikle
University of Texas Press, 2016
Extensively illustrated with representative images, this unique book illuminates the cultural significance of the highly colorized “linen” postcards that depicted a glowing America in the 1930s and 1940s and that fascinate collectors today.
From the Great Depression through the early postwar years, any postcard sent in America was more than likely a “linen” card. Colorized in vivid, often exaggerated hues and printed on card stock embossed with a linen-like texture, linen postcards celebrated the American scene with views of majestic landscapes, modern cityscapes, roadside attractions, and other notable features. These colorful images portrayed the United States as shimmering with promise, quite unlike the black-and-white worlds of documentary photography or Life magazine. Linen postcards were enormously popular, with close to a billion printed and sold.
Postcard America offers the first comprehensive study of these cards and their cultural significance. Drawing on the production files of Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago, the originator of linen postcards, Jeffrey L. Meikle reveals how photographic views were transformed into colorized postcard images, often by means of manipulation—adding and deleting details or collaging bits and pieces from several photos. He presents two extensive portfolios of postcards—landscapes and cityscapes—that comprise a representative iconography of linen postcard views. For each image, Meikle explains the postcard’s subject, describes aspects of its production, and places it in social and cultural contexts. In the concluding chapter, he shifts from historical interpretation to a contemporary viewpoint, considering nostalgia as a motive for collectors and others who are fascinated today by these striking images.
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Postcards from Checkpoint Charlie
Images of the Berlin Wall
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2009
Between 1945 and 1961, an estimated 2.5 million people fled East Germany in search of the political and economic freedom offered by West Germany. To thwart this tide of defections, on the morning of August 13, 1961, hundreds of East German troops began erecting the Berlin wall—a barrier that would take nearly twenty years to complete and would eventually span 166 kilometers. In Postcards from Checkpoint Charlie, the Bodleian Library assembles a stunning collection of images to document the wall’s impact worldwide.
The postcards in this fascinating volume trace the development of the wall—from its beginnings as a simple stretch of barbed wire to the daunting final structure made of concrete and containing over 300 watchtowers. The images capture scenes of tension and urgency, such as those at Checkpoint Charlie, where we see Allied and East German soldiers coldly observing one another through binoculars. Others document the wall’s ties with American history, including pictures of John F. Kennedy in 1963 when he declared his solidarity with all Berliners and a picture of Ronald Regan when he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall. Also included are images from the toppling of the wall, when thousands of joyful East Germans realized the fulfillment of their personal dreams and marked the conclusion of the cold war.
An intimate look at one of the most visible manifestations of the postwar divide, Portraits from Checkpoint Charlie presents a key location in twentieth-century history through the eyes of those on the scene.
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Postcards from the Baja California Border
Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900s–1950s
Daniel D. Arreola
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Postcards have a magical pull. They allow us to see the past through charming relics that allow us to travel back in time. Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, the border communities explored in Postcards from the Baja California Border used to be filled with revelers, cabarets, curio shops, and more. The postcards in this book show the bright and dynamic past of California’s borderlands while diving deep into the historic and geographic significance of the imagery found on the postcards.
This form of place study calls attention to how we can see a past through a serial view of places, by the nature of repetition, and the photographing of the same place over and over again. Arreola draws our focus to townscapes, or built landscapes, of four border towns—Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, and Algodones—during the first half of the twentieth century. With an emphasis on the tourist’s view of these places, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century. Postcards from the Baja California Border is a rich and fascinating experience, one that takes you on a time-travel journey through border town histories and geographies while celebrating the visual intrigue of postcards.
This form of place study calls attention to how we can see a past through a serial view of places, by the nature of repetition, and the photographing of the same place over and over again. Arreola draws our focus to townscapes, or built landscapes, of four border towns—Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, and Algodones—during the first half of the twentieth century. With an emphasis on the tourist’s view of these places, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century. Postcards from the Baja California Border is a rich and fascinating experience, one that takes you on a time-travel journey through border town histories and geographies while celebrating the visual intrigue of postcards.
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Postcards from the Chihuahua Border
Revisiting a Pictorial Past, 1900s–1950s
Daniel D. Arreola
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Just a trolley ride from El Paso, Ciudad Juárez was a popular destination in the early 1900s. Enticing and exciting, tourists descended on this and other Mexican border towns to browse curio shops, dine and dance, attend bullfights, and perhaps escape Prohibition America.
In Postcards from the Chihuahua Border Daniel D. Arreola captures the exhilaration of places in time, taking us back to Mexico’s northern border towns of Cuidad Juárez, Ojinaga, and Palomas in the early twentieth century. Drawing on more than three decades of archival work, Arreola uses postcards and maps to unveil the history of these towns along west Texas’s and New Mexico’s southern borders.
Postcards offer a special kind of visual evidence. Arreola’s collection of imagery and commentary about them shows us singular places, enriching our understandings of history and the history of change in Chihuahua. No one postcard tells the entire story. But image after image offers a collected view and insight into changing perceptions. Arreola’s geography of place looks both inward and outward. We see what tourists see, while at the same time gaining insight about what postcard photographers and postcard publishers wanted to be seen and perceived about these border communities.
Postcards from the Chihuahua Border is a colorful and dynamic visual history. It invites the reader to time travel, to revisit another era—the first half of the last century—when these border towns were framed and made popular through picture postcards.
In Postcards from the Chihuahua Border Daniel D. Arreola captures the exhilaration of places in time, taking us back to Mexico’s northern border towns of Cuidad Juárez, Ojinaga, and Palomas in the early twentieth century. Drawing on more than three decades of archival work, Arreola uses postcards and maps to unveil the history of these towns along west Texas’s and New Mexico’s southern borders.
Postcards offer a special kind of visual evidence. Arreola’s collection of imagery and commentary about them shows us singular places, enriching our understandings of history and the history of change in Chihuahua. No one postcard tells the entire story. But image after image offers a collected view and insight into changing perceptions. Arreola’s geography of place looks both inward and outward. We see what tourists see, while at the same time gaining insight about what postcard photographers and postcard publishers wanted to be seen and perceived about these border communities.
Postcards from the Chihuahua Border is a colorful and dynamic visual history. It invites the reader to time travel, to revisit another era—the first half of the last century—when these border towns were framed and made popular through picture postcards.
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Postcards from the Road
Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’
Jonathan Day
Intellect Books, 2014
Walker Evans said in his 1958 introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans, “For the thousandth time, it must be said that pictures speak for themselves, wordlessly, visually, or they fail.” The images revolutionized postwar American photography. With their candid images of men and women from all classes and walks of life, the photographs presented a very different story than that portrayed by the wholesome caricature of midcentury prosperity pervading American photography at the time. Although initially dismissed by his peers for his pioneering work, Frank was ultimately credited with changing the course of the art form, and his photography holds a secure status in the history of twentieth-century art. And he did all this without words. It seems appropriate then – and not a little overdue – that Jonathan Day has created a book that expounds, explores, and examines Frank’s work pictorially.
Taking Frank’s iconic images as his point of reference, Day shot new photographs that commented on the road and contemporary America. Here, these images are paired with critical commentary that details the aspects of the work that are visually expounded and explained in Day’s complementary images. A visual entryway to the photographs and themes of this iconic book in the history of photography, Postcards from the Road represents an innovative, carefully considered departure from standard photographic textbooks.
Taking Frank’s iconic images as his point of reference, Day shot new photographs that commented on the road and contemporary America. Here, these images are paired with critical commentary that details the aspects of the work that are visually expounded and explained in Day’s complementary images. A visual entryway to the photographs and themes of this iconic book in the history of photography, Postcards from the Road represents an innovative, carefully considered departure from standard photographic textbooks.
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Postcards from the Russian Revolution
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008
The tumultuous political events that swept Russia in the early twentieth century sent powerful ripples around the world. The Bolshevik revolutionaries and activists had sympathizers among Americans and Europeans alike, and one notable way they exercised their support was through artfully created postcards. This remarkable volumepresents for the first time a newly unearthed collection of those cards that recount the 1917 Russian Revolution in a novel way.
The postcards originated not only from Russia, but also from Germany, the United States, Belgium, and France, and they reflect their diverse origins in the rich array of artistic styles employed to create them. Whether simply drawn, hand-painted, or mass-printed, the cards present compelling and complex images of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the people who were enmeshed in it. The cards serve as concise yet powerful artistic documents of Russian history and culture, as they display bloody and graphic street scenes, rare pictures of lesser-known revolutionary leaders, satirical sketches of Russian rulers, portraits of the royal family, illustrations of palaces and institutional buildings, and depictions of pivotal events leading up to the Revolution such as the 1905 assassination of Grand Duke Alexander. Also included in this fascinating visual narrative are cards depicting crucial events from the aftermath of the Revolution, including the great famine of 1921 and public celebrations of the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
An unprecedented and arresting exploration of the Russian Empire in its death throes, Postcards from the Russian Revolution reveals a wholly new and vibrant perspective on one of the most important political movements of the twentieth century.
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Postcards from the Río Bravo Border
Picturing the Place, Placing the Picture, 1900s–1950s
By Daniel D. Arreola
University of Texas Press, 2013
Between 1900 and the late 1950s, Mexican border towns came of age both as tourist destinations and as emerging cities. Commercial photographers produced thousands of images of their streets, plazas, historic architecture, and tourist attractions, which were reproduced as photo postcards. Daniel Arreola has amassed one of the largest collections of these border town postcards, and in this book, he uses this amazing visual archive to offer a new way of understanding how the border towns grew and transformed themselves in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as how they were pictured to attract American tourists.
Postcards from the Río Bravo Border presents nearly two hundred images of five significant towns on the lower Río Bravo—Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, and Villa Acuña. Using multiple images of sites within each city, Arreola tracks changes both within the cities as places and in the ways in which the cities have been pictured for tourist consumption. He makes a strong case that visual imagery has a shaping influence on how we negotiate and think about places, creating a serial scripting or narrating of the place. Arreola also shows how postcard images, when systematically and chronologically arranged, can tell us a great deal about how Mexican border towns have been viewed over time. This innovative visual approach demonstrates that historical imagery, no less than text or maps, can be assembled to tell a compelling geographical story about place and time.
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Postcards from the Sonora Border
Visualizing Place Through a Popular Lens, 1900s–1950s
Daniel D. Arreola
University of Arizona Press, 2017
Young men ride horses on a dusty main road through town. Cars and gas stations gradually intrude on the land, and, years later, curiosity shops and cantinas change the face of Mexican border towns south of Arizona. Between 1900 and the late 1950s, Mexican border towns came of age both as centers of commerce and as tourist destinations. Postcards from the Sonora Border reveals how images—in this case the iconic postcard—shape the way we experience and think about place.
Making use of his personal collection of historic images, Daniel D. Arreola captures the evolution of Sonoran border towns, creating a sense of visual “time travel” for the reader. Supported by maps and visual imagery, the author shares the geographical and historical story of five unique border towns—Agua Prieta, Naco, Nogales, Sonoyta, and San Luis Río Colorado.
Postcards from the Sonora Border introduces us to these important towns and provides individual stories about each, using the postcards as markers. No one postcard view tells the complete story—rather, the sense of place emerges image by image as the author pulls readers through the collection as an assembled view. Arreola reveals how often the same locations and landmarks of a town were photographed as postcard images generation after generation, giving a long and dynamic view of the inhabitants through time. Arranged chronologically, Arreola’s postcards allow us to discover the changing perceptions of place in the borderlands of Sonora, Mexico.
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Postcards from the Trenches
Images from the First World War
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008
World War I has come down to us in indelible images—those of airplane bombers, bleak-eyed soldiers, stern-faced commanders, and the ruins of countless villages. But soldiers themselves also took photographs on the battlefield, and many of their striking images were transformed into postcards that were sent home to family and friends or collected as war mementos. Postcards from the Trenches gathers a number of these postcards to create a striking visual history of World War I.
The cards in this compelling volume were created not only by soldiers, but also by embedded journalists from France, Belgium, Austria, Germany, and Britain. The images capture scenes both humorous and poignant, including soldiers having a mock party with little food to eat, wounded soldiers smiling for the camera, a makeshift trench hospital, the bloody aftermath of a battle, and a huddle of men taking what they know could be their last communion before marching onto the battlefield. Other cards document the mundane duties that dominated wartime life, including men digging trenches, troops marching to new trenches and battlefields, and or soldiers nearly comatose with boredom while waiting for the fight to begin. This stunning visual narrative opens a new window into one of the most analyzed events in history, as the postcards’ images testify to the resilience and bravery of soldiers in the most trying circumstances.
A fascinating and unprecedented historical document, Postcards from the Trenches draws back the curtain to unflinchingly show the daily horror and humanity that define life in war.
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Postcards from Utopia
The Art of Political Propaganda
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2009
Politicians are famous for making extravagant campaign promises. But there are few promises as powerful—or as idealistically utopian—as those put forth by state-sponsored propaganda. Collected here are colorful images of political ideology created and disseminated by the political regimes of Europe, the Soviet Union, and China from the 1920s through the ‘70s.
State leaders of the twentieth century were highly conscious of the need to present a unified national image during a time of serious political transition in Europe, and state-sanctioned art performed a key function in an attempt to consolidate a country behind an idea. These spectacular images provide a rare opportunity to witness how abstract political ideas were rendered as visual picture for a mass audience. Fifty compelling postcards, held in the collection of the Bodleian Library, from the former Soviet Union, China, Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Albania, reveal that despite national differences there are surprising similarities in political expression and the idealized images presented by each government. An introduction that contextualizes the images within a broader understanding of the ideologies and political powers of the time is provided by European historian, Andrew Roberts.
Taken together, the images in Postcards from Utopia offer a striking look at the art of power and its mythical representation at a time of great political upheaval and experiment.
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Postcards of Lost Royals
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2009
This enchanting, unique collection of postcards recovers an old world swept away and forgotten over the decades. The lost royals captured here have not been misplaced or gone missing—what has been lost is the very foundation of their royalty. Collected here are royal figures from around the world who lost their titles and were displaced as a result of World War I and other early twentieth-century political movements.
The royal houses of Europe, Africa, and Asia once ruled a continent and held dominions beyond the seas. Today, just ten monarchs still reign in Europe, and those with only limited powers. Captured in these distinctive postcards held in the collection of the Bodleian Library are these lost emperors, kings and queens, czars and czarinas, princes and princess, and grand dukes and duchesses, who were left behind by the sweep of history. Featuring monarchs from the Balkans to the Iberian Peninsula, from Ethiopia to Korea, these portraits include members of the Russian imperial family, and royals from Romania, Bulgaria, and Germany, among others. But this is more than just a picture book; it provides a narrative snapshot of world history—alongside each postcard is an intriguing mini-biography of the pictured royal that provides a gripping account of his or her story.
Reminiscent of a forgotten era of glamour, grace, and regal power, Postcards of Lost Royals brings history to life and distills the essence of a long-vanished world of royalty.
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Postcards of Political Icons
Leaders of the Twentieth Century
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2009
More than any preceding era, the twentieth century was defined by images. The widespread adoption of photography, the advent of film, and the increasing speed and ease of communications enabled people worldwide for the first time to know the faces of world leaders as intimately as those of their friends and family. The jutting jaw and jaunty cigarette holder of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fidel Castro’s raised fist and bearded countenance, Tony Blair’s toothy smile, and Stalin’s bristly frown—these and other iconographic images immediately conjure up unforgettable, dramatic moments in history.
Opening with the end of Queen Victoria’s reign and continuing through the end of the cold war, Postcards of Political Icons tells the story of the twentieth century through images of its most recognizable leaders. The politicians who presided over the demise of colonialism, led the communist revolution, and fought two world wars are presented on these postcards in unusual–and often surprisingly personal—moments. Nelson Mandela is captured in a moment of privacy, looking dreamily into the distance; Yasser Arafat wrestles with chopsticks; while Benito Mussolini, known for his public performances, masters a new curious posture.
Reproducing many rare and little-seen images, Postcards of Political Icons offers a fascinating glimpse at the iconography of political power—and the reality of the people behind it.
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Postcards
The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network
Lydia Pyne
Reaktion Books, 2021
A global exploration of postcards as artifacts at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture.
Postcards are usually associated with banal holiday pleasantries, but they are made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. When they were invented, postcards established what is now taken for granted in modern times: the ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively. Fundamentally they are about creating personal connections—links between people, places, and beliefs. Lydia Pyne examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. In doing so, she shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct.
Postcards are usually associated with banal holiday pleasantries, but they are made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. When they were invented, postcards established what is now taken for granted in modern times: the ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively. Fundamentally they are about creating personal connections—links between people, places, and beliefs. Lydia Pyne examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. In doing so, she shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct.
[more]
Postclassicisms
The Postclassicisms Collective
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Made up of nine prominent scholars, The Postclassicisms Collective aims to map a space for theorizing and reflecting on the values attributed to antiquity. The product of these reflections, Postclassicisms takes up a set of questions about what it means to know and care about Greco-Roman antiquity in our turbulent world and offers suggestions for a discipline in transformation, as new communities are being built around the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world.
Structured around three primary concepts—value, time, and responsibility—and nine additional concepts, Postclassicisms asks scholars to reflect upon why they choose to work in classics, to examine how proximity to and distance from antiquity has been—and continues to be—figured, and to consider what they seek to accomplish within their own scholarly practices. Together, the authors argue that a stronger critical self-awareness, an enhanced sense of the intellectual history of the methods of classics, and a greater understanding of the ethical and political implications of the decisions that the discipline makes will lead to a more engaged intellectual life, both for classicists and, ultimately, for society. A timely intervention into the present and future of the discipline, Postclassicisms will be required reading for professional classicists and students alike and a model for collaborative disciplinary intervention by scholars in other fields.
Structured around three primary concepts—value, time, and responsibility—and nine additional concepts, Postclassicisms asks scholars to reflect upon why they choose to work in classics, to examine how proximity to and distance from antiquity has been—and continues to be—figured, and to consider what they seek to accomplish within their own scholarly practices. Together, the authors argue that a stronger critical self-awareness, an enhanced sense of the intellectual history of the methods of classics, and a greater understanding of the ethical and political implications of the decisions that the discipline makes will lead to a more engaged intellectual life, both for classicists and, ultimately, for society. A timely intervention into the present and future of the discipline, Postclassicisms will be required reading for professional classicists and students alike and a model for collaborative disciplinary intervention by scholars in other fields.
[more]
Postcolonial America
Edited by C. Richard King
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Scholars from a wide array of disciplines describe and debate postcolonialism as it applies to America in this authoritative and timely collection. Investigating topics such as law and public policy, immigration and tourism, narratives and discourses, race relations, and virtual communities, Postcolonial America clarifies and challenges prevailing conceptualizations of postcolonialism and accepted understandings of American culture.
Advancing multiple, even conflicted visions of postcolonial America, this important volume interrogates postcolonial theory and traces the emergence and significance of postcolonial practices and precepts in the United States. Contributors discuss how the unique status of the United States as the colony that became a superpower has shaped its sense of itself. They assess the global networks of inequality that have displaced neocolonial systems of conquest, exploitation, and occupation. They also examine how individuals and groups use music, the Internet, and other media to reconfigure, reinvent, and resist postcoloniality in American culture.
Candidly facing the inherent contradictions of "the American experience," this collection demonstrates the patterns, connections, and histories characteristic of postcoloniality in America and initiates important discussions about how these conditions might be changed.
Advancing multiple, even conflicted visions of postcolonial America, this important volume interrogates postcolonial theory and traces the emergence and significance of postcolonial practices and precepts in the United States. Contributors discuss how the unique status of the United States as the colony that became a superpower has shaped its sense of itself. They assess the global networks of inequality that have displaced neocolonial systems of conquest, exploitation, and occupation. They also examine how individuals and groups use music, the Internet, and other media to reconfigure, reinvent, and resist postcoloniality in American culture.
Candidly facing the inherent contradictions of "the American experience," this collection demonstrates the patterns, connections, and histories characteristic of postcoloniality in America and initiates important discussions about how these conditions might be changed.
[more]
The Postcolonial Animal
African Literature and Posthuman Ethics
Evan Maina Mwangi
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing—including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements—has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others—both human and nonhuman—in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.
[more]
(Post-)colonial Archipelagos
Comparing the Legacies of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines
Hans-Jürgen Burchardt and Johanna Leinius, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2022
The Puerto Rican debt crisis, the challenges of social, political, and economic transition in Cuba, and the populist politics of Duterte in the Philippines—these topics are typically seen as disparate experiences of social reality. Though these island territories were colonized by the same two colonial powers—by the Spanish Empire and, after 1898, by the United States—research in the fields of history and the social sciences rarely draws links between these three contexts.
Located at the intersection of Postcolonial Studies, Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, and History, this interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from the US, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines to examine the colonial legacies of the three island nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Instead of focusing on the legacies of US colonialism, the continuing legacies of Spanish colonialism are put center-stage. The analyses offered in the volume yield new and surprising insights into the study of colonial and postcolonial constellations that are of interest not only for experts, but also for readers interested in the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during Spanish colonization and in the present. The empirical material profits from a rigorous and systematic analytical framework and is thus easily accessible for students, researchers, and the interested public alike.
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Postcolonial Automobility
Car Culture in West Africa
Lindsey B. Green-Simms
University of Minnesota Press, 2015
For more than a century cars have symbolized autonomous, unfettered mobility and an increasingly global experience. And yet, they are often used differently outside the centers of global capitalism. This pioneering book considers how, through the lens of the automobile, we can assess the pleasures, dangers, and limits of global modernity in West Africa. Through new and provocative readings of famous plays, novels, and films, as well as recent popular videos, Postcolonial Automobility reveals the surprising ways in which automobility in the region is, at once, an everyday practice, an ethos, a fantasy of autonomy, and an affective activity intimately tied to modern social life.
Lindsey B. Green-Simms begins with the history of motorization in West Africa from the colonial era to the decolonizing decades after World War II, and addresses the tragedy of car accidents through a close reading of Wole Soyinka’s 1965 postindependence play The Road. Shifting to screen media, she discusses Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart and reviews popular, low-budget Nollywood films. Finally, Green-Simms considers how feminist texts rewrite and work in dialogue with the male-centered films and novels where the car stands in for patriarchal power and capitalist achievement.
Providing a unique perspective on technology in Africa—one refusing to be confined to narratives of either underdevelopment or inevitable progress—and covering a broad range of interdisciplinary material, Postcolonial Automobility will appeal not only to scholars and students of African literature and cinema but also to those in postcolonial and globalization studies.
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Postcolonial Configurations
Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America
Josen Masangkay Diaz
Duke University Press, 2023
In Postcolonial Configurations Josen Masangkay Diaz examines the making of Filipino America through the dynamics of dictatorship, coloniality, and subjectivity. Diaz explores how the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and US policies during the Cold War that supported the regime defined the relationship between “Filipino” and “America” in ways that influenced the creation of a gendered and racialized Filipino American subject. By analyzing Philippine-US state programs for military operations, labor and immigration reform, and development and modernization plans, she shows how anticommunist liberalism and authoritarianism shaped the visibility and recognition of new forms of Filipino subjectivity. Tracing the rise of various social formations that emerged under the Marcos regime and US programs for liberal reform, from transnational Filipino and US culture and the immigrant returnee to the New Filipina woman and the humanitarian English teacher, Diaz positions literature, film, periodicals, and other cultural texts against official state records in ways that reconceptualize the meanings of Filipino America in the Cold War.
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Postcolonial Developments
Agriculture in the Making of Modern India
Akhil Gupta
Duke University Press, 1998
This definitive study brings together recent critiques of development and work in postcolonial studies to explore what the postcolonial condition has meant to rural people in the Third World. Focusing on local-level agricultural practices in India since the “green revolution” of the 1960s, Akhil Gupta challenges the dichotomy of “developed” and “underdeveloped,” as well as the notion of a monolithic postcolonial condition. In so doing, he advances discussions of modernity in the Third World and offers a new model for future ethnographic scholarship.
Based on fieldwork done in the village of Alipur in rural north India from the early 1980s through the 1990s, Postcolonial Developments examines development itself as a post–World War II sociopolitical ideological formation, critiques related policies, and explores the various uses of the concept of the “indigenous” in several discursive contexts. Gupta begins with an analysis of the connections and conflicts between the world food economy, transnational capital, and technological innovations in wheat production. He then examines narratives of village politics in Alipur to show how certain discourses influenced governmental policies on the green revolution. Drawing links between village life, national trends, and global forces, Gupta concludes with a discussion of the implications of environmentalism as exemplified by the Rio Earth Summit and an examination of how global environmental treaties may detrimentally affect the lives of subaltern peoples.
With a series of subtle observations on rural politics, nationalism, gender, modernization, and difference, this innovative study capitalizes on many different disciplines: anthropology, sociology, comparative politics, cultural geography, ecology, political science, agricultural economics, and history.
Based on fieldwork done in the village of Alipur in rural north India from the early 1980s through the 1990s, Postcolonial Developments examines development itself as a post–World War II sociopolitical ideological formation, critiques related policies, and explores the various uses of the concept of the “indigenous” in several discursive contexts. Gupta begins with an analysis of the connections and conflicts between the world food economy, transnational capital, and technological innovations in wheat production. He then examines narratives of village politics in Alipur to show how certain discourses influenced governmental policies on the green revolution. Drawing links between village life, national trends, and global forces, Gupta concludes with a discussion of the implications of environmentalism as exemplified by the Rio Earth Summit and an examination of how global environmental treaties may detrimentally affect the lives of subaltern peoples.
With a series of subtle observations on rural politics, nationalism, gender, modernization, and difference, this innovative study capitalizes on many different disciplines: anthropology, sociology, comparative politics, cultural geography, ecology, political science, agricultural economics, and history.
[more]
Postcolonial Dublin
Imperial Legacies And The Built Environment
Andrew Kincaid
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
For hundreds of years, Ireland has been a testing ground for colonizing techniques. Postcolonial Dublin shows how perpetrators of colonialism have made use of urban planning and architecture to underscore and legitimate ideologies. From suburban development to building facades, the conflict between nationalists and colonialists has inscribed itself on Dublin’s landscape. Andrew Kincaid illustrates how the architecture and urban planning of Dublin have been integral to debates about nationalism, modernism, and Ireland’s relationship to the rest of the world. Looking at objects such as Londonderry’s Market House, Patrick Abercrombie’s Dublin of the Future, and the urban renewal project of today’s Temple Bar, Kincaid highlights Ireland’s colonial history and the significance of architecture in the evolution of national identity. In doing so, he demonstrates how ideology “spatializes” itself. Postcolonial Dublin engages the prevailing historical representations of Irish nationalism, arguing that the evolving city reflected a debate over who would hold the reins of power. Bringing the tools of literary criticism and postcolonial theory to bear on the field of urban studies, Kincaid places Dublin at the forefront of debates over modernism, modernity, and globalization.Andrew Kincaid is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
[more]
Postcolonial Grief
The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas
Jinah Kim
Duke University Press, 2019
In Postcolonial Grief Jinah Kim explores the relationship of mourning to transpacific subjectivities, aesthetics, and decolonial politics since World War II. Kim argues that Asian diasporic subjectivity exists in relation to afterlives because the deaths of those killed by U.S. imperialism and militarism in the Pacific remain unresolved and unaddressed. Kim shows how primarily U.S.-based Korean and Japanese diasporic writers, artists, and filmmakers negotiate the necropolitics of Asia and how their creative refusal to heal from imperial violence may generate transformative antiracist and decolonial politics. She contests prevalent interpretations of melancholia by engaging with Frantz Fanon's and Hisaye Yamamoto's decolonial writings; uncovering the noir genre's relationship to the U.S. war in Korea; discussing the emergence of silenced colonial histories during the 1992 Los Angeles riots; and analyzing the 1996 hostage takeover of the Japanese ambassador's home in Peru. Kim highlights how the aesthetic and creative work of the Japanese and Korean diasporas offers new insights into twenty-first-century concerns surrounding the state's erasure of military violence and colonialism and the difficult work of remembering histories of war across the transpacific.
[more]
Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema
Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability
Gerald Sim
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability explores a geopolitically situated set of cultures negotiating unique relationships to colonial history. Singaporean, Malaysian, and Indonesian identities are discussed through a variety of commercial films, art cinema, and experimental work. The book discovers instances of postcoloniality that manifest stylistically through Singapore’s preoccupations with space, the importance of sound to Malay culture, and the Indonesian investment in genre.
[more]
Post-colonial Immigrants and Identity Formations in the Netherlands
Edited by Ulbe Bosma
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
In this book Ulbe Bosma explores the experience of immigrants in the Netherlands over sixty years and three generations. Looking at migrants from all countries, Bosma teases out how their ethnic identities are informed by Dutch culture, and how these immigrant identities evolve over time.
“Fascinating, comprehensive, and historically grounded, this essential volume reveals how the colonial past continues to shape multicultural Dutch society. . . . It is an important counterpart to work on France, Britain, and Portugal.”—Andrea Smith, Lafayette College
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Postcolonial Memory in the Netherlands
Meaningful Voices, Meaningful Silences
Gerlov van Engelenhoven
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This book is about postcolonial memory in the Netherlands. This term refers to conflicts in contemporary society about how the colonial past should be remembered. The question is often: who has the right or ability to tell their stories and who do not? In other words: who has a voice, and who is silenced? As such, these conflicts represent a wider tendency in cultural theory and activism to use voice as a metaphor for empowerment and silence as voice’s negative counterpart, signifying powerlessness. And yet, there are voices that do not liberate us from, but rather subject us to power. Meanwhile, silence can be powerful: it can protect, disrupt and reconfigure. Throughout this book, it will become clear how voice and silence function not as each other’s opposites, but as each other’s continuation, and that postcolonial memory is articulated through the interplay of meaningful voices and meaningful silences.
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Postcolonial Modernism
Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Duke University Press, 2015
Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.
[more]
The Postcolonial State in Africa
Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010
Crawford Young
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
In The Postcolonial State in Africa, Crawford Young offers an informed and authoritative comparative overview of fifty years of African independence, drawing on his decades of research and first-hand experience on the African continent.
Young identifies three cycles of hope and disappointment common to many of the African states (including those in North Africa) over the last half-century: initial euphoria at independence in the 1960s followed by disillusionment with a lapse into single-party autocracies and military rule; a period of renewed confidence, radicalization, and ambitious state expansion in the 1970s preceding state crisis and even failure in the disastrous 1980s; and a phase of reborn optimism during the continental wave of democratization beginning around 1990. He explores in depth the many African civil wars—especially those since 1990—and three key tracks of identity: Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnicity.
Only more recently, Young argues, have the paths of the fifty-three African states begun to diverge more dramatically, with some leading to liberalization and others to political, social, and economic collapse—outcomes impossible to predict at the outset of independence.
“This book is the best volume to date on the politics of the last 50 years of African independence.”—International Affairs
“The book shares Young’s encyclopedic knowledge of African politics, providing in a single volume a comprehensive rendering of the first 50 years of independence. The book is sprinkled with anecdotes from his vast experience in Africa and that of his many students, and quotations from all of the relevant literature published over the past five decades. Students and scholars of African politics alike will benefit immensely from and enjoy reading The Postcolonial State in Africa.”—Political Science Quarterly
“The study of African politics will continue to be enriched if practitioners pay homage to the erudition and the nobility of spirit that has anchored the engagement of this most esteemed doyen of Africanists with the continent.”—African History Review
“The book’s strongest attribute is the careful way that comparative political theory is woven into historical storytelling throughout the text. . . . Written with great clarity even for all its detail, and its interwoven use of theory makes it a great choice for new students of African studies.”—Australasian Review of African Studies
Young identifies three cycles of hope and disappointment common to many of the African states (including those in North Africa) over the last half-century: initial euphoria at independence in the 1960s followed by disillusionment with a lapse into single-party autocracies and military rule; a period of renewed confidence, radicalization, and ambitious state expansion in the 1970s preceding state crisis and even failure in the disastrous 1980s; and a phase of reborn optimism during the continental wave of democratization beginning around 1990. He explores in depth the many African civil wars—especially those since 1990—and three key tracks of identity: Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnicity.
Only more recently, Young argues, have the paths of the fifty-three African states begun to diverge more dramatically, with some leading to liberalization and others to political, social, and economic collapse—outcomes impossible to predict at the outset of independence.
“This book is the best volume to date on the politics of the last 50 years of African independence.”—International Affairs
“The book shares Young’s encyclopedic knowledge of African politics, providing in a single volume a comprehensive rendering of the first 50 years of independence. The book is sprinkled with anecdotes from his vast experience in Africa and that of his many students, and quotations from all of the relevant literature published over the past five decades. Students and scholars of African politics alike will benefit immensely from and enjoy reading The Postcolonial State in Africa.”—Political Science Quarterly
“The study of African politics will continue to be enriched if practitioners pay homage to the erudition and the nobility of spirit that has anchored the engagement of this most esteemed doyen of Africanists with the continent.”—African History Review
“The book’s strongest attribute is the careful way that comparative political theory is woven into historical storytelling throughout the text. . . . Written with great clarity even for all its detail, and its interwoven use of theory makes it a great choice for new students of African studies.”—Australasian Review of African Studies
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Postcolonial Studies and Beyond
Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
An interdisciplinary collection of essays designed to map out a wide-ranging and productive future for postcolonial studies, this volume assesses the current state of the field and points toward its most promising new developments. In addressing questions about the definition and relevance of postcolonial scholarship, many of the essays consider its relation to the study of globalization. While some contributors offer broad reflections on the existing two-way influence between postcolonial theory and established university disciplines such as literary criticism and history, others forge ahead into some vital, if nascent, areas for postcolonial research such as media studies, environmental studies, religious studies, and linguistic and semantic analysis.
The contributors represent many of the fields altered by postcolonial studies over the past two decades, including literary studies, history, anthropology, Asian and African studies, and political science. They model diverse applications of postcolonial theory to Latin America, East Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond propels the field forward. It showcases scholars coming from intellectual precincts usually considered outside the purview of the postcolonial finding new ways to deploy classic techniques of postcolonial analysis, and scholars strongly associated with postcolonial studies offering substantial critiques designed to challenge the field’s most fundamental assumptions.
Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Ali Behdad, Daniel Boyarin, Timothy Brennan, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, Laura Chrisman, Jean Comaroff, Frederick Cooper, Vilashini Cooppan, Jed Esty, James Ferguson, Peter Hulme, Suvir Kaul, Neil Lazarus, Ania Loomba, Florencia E. Mallon, Nivedita Menon, Rob Nixon, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, David Scott, Ella Shohat, Kelwyn Sole, Robert Stam, Rebecca L. Stein
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Postcolonial Vietnam
New Histories of the National Past
Patricia M. Pelley
Duke University Press, 2002
New nations require new histories of their struggles for nationhood. Postcolonial Vietnam takes us back to the 1950s to see how official Vietnamese historians and others rethought what counted as history, what producing history entailed, and who should be included as participants and agents in the story. Beginning with government-appointed historians’ first publications in 1954 and following their efforts over the next thirty years, Patricia M. Pelley surveys this daunting process and, in doing so, opens a wide window on the historical forces and tensions that have gone into shaping the new nation of Vietnam.
Although she considers a variety of sources—government directives, census reports, statistics, poetry, civic festivities, ethnographies, and museum displays—Pelley focuses primarily on the work of official historians in Hanoi who argued about and tried to stabilize the meaning of topics ranging from prehistory to the Vietnam War. She looks at their strained and idiosyncratic attempts to plot the Vietnamese past according to Marxist and Stalinist paradigms and their ultimate abandonment of such models. She explores their struggle to redefine Vietnam in multiethnic terms and to normalize the idea of the family-state. Centering on the conversation that began in 1954 among historians in North Vietnam, her work identifies a threefold process of creating the new history: constituting historiographical issues, resolving problems of interpretation and narration, and conventionalizing various elements of the national narrative. As she tracks the processes that shaped the history of postcolonial Vietnam, Pelley dismantles numerous clichés of contemporary Vietnamese history and helps us to understand why and how its history-writing evolved.
Although she considers a variety of sources—government directives, census reports, statistics, poetry, civic festivities, ethnographies, and museum displays—Pelley focuses primarily on the work of official historians in Hanoi who argued about and tried to stabilize the meaning of topics ranging from prehistory to the Vietnam War. She looks at their strained and idiosyncratic attempts to plot the Vietnamese past according to Marxist and Stalinist paradigms and their ultimate abandonment of such models. She explores their struggle to redefine Vietnam in multiethnic terms and to normalize the idea of the family-state. Centering on the conversation that began in 1954 among historians in North Vietnam, her work identifies a threefold process of creating the new history: constituting historiographical issues, resolving problems of interpretation and narration, and conventionalizing various elements of the national narrative. As she tracks the processes that shaped the history of postcolonial Vietnam, Pelley dismantles numerous clichés of contemporary Vietnamese history and helps us to understand why and how its history-writing evolved.
[more]
Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique
Joints and Fissures
Edited by Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker
Campus Verlag, 2014
Can Western modernity be analyzed and critiqued through the lens of enslavement and colonial history? As this volume reveals, such analysis is not only possible, it is essential to our understanding of contemporary race relations and society generally. Drawing from the fields of postcolonial, decolonial, and black studies, this book assembles contributions from renowned scholars that offer timely and critical perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, gender studies, cultural and literary studies, and philosophy.
[more]
Post-Communism
An Introduction
Leslie Holmes
Duke University Press, 1997
Post-Communism
An Introduction
Leslie Holmes
Duke University Press
Post-Communist Malaise
Cinematic Responses to European Integration
Zoran Samardzija
Rutgers University Press, 2020
The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was supposed to bring about the “end of history” with capitalism and liberal democracy achieving decisive victories. Europe would now integrate and reconcile with its past. However, the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008—the rise in right-wing populism, austerity politics, and mass migration—have shown that the ideological divisions which haunted Europe in the twentieth century still remain. It is within this context that Post-Communist Malaise revives discourses of political modernism and revisits debates from Marxism and seventies film theory. Analyzing work of Theo Angelopoulos, Věra Chytilová, Srdjan Dragojević, Jean-Luc Godard, Miklós Jancsó, Emir Kusturica, Dušan Makavejev, Cristi Puiu, Jan Švankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr, the book focuses on how select cinemas from Eastern Europe and the Balkans critique the neoliberal integration of Europe whose failures fuel the rise of nationalism and right-wing politics. By politicizing art cinema from the regions, Post-Communist Malaise asks fundamental questions about film, aesthetics, and ideology. It argues for the utopian potential of the materiality of cinematic time to imagine a new political and cultural organization for Europe.
[more]
The Poster
Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s
Ruth E. Iskin
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s is a cultural history that situates the poster at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. Though international in scope, the book focuses especially on France and England. Ruth E. Iskin argues that the avant-garde poster and the original art print played an important role in the development of a modernist language of art in the 1890s, as well as in the adaptation of art to an era of mass media. She moreover contends that this new form of visual communication fundamentally redefined relations between word and image: poster designers embedded words within the graphic, rather than using images to illustrate a text. Posters had to function as effective advertising in the hectic environment of the urban street. Even though initially commissioned as advertisements, they were soon coveted by collectors. Iskin introduces readers to the late nineteenth-century “iconophile”—a new type of collector/curator/archivist who discovered in poster collecting an ephemeral archaeology of modernity. Bridging the separation between the fields of art, design, advertising, and collecting, Iskin’s insightful study proposes that the poster played a constitutive role in the modern culture of spectacle. This stunningly illustrated book will appeal to art historians and students of visual culture, as well as social and cultural history, media, design, and advertising.
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Post-Fascist Fantasies
Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany
Julia Hell
Duke University Press, 1997
Post-Fascist Fantasies examines the cultural function of the novels of communist authors in East Germany from a psychoanalytic angle. Various critics have argued that these socialist realist fictions were monolithic attempts to translate Communist dogma into the realm of aesthetics. Julia Hell argues to the contrary that they were in fact complex fictions sharing the theme of antifascism, the founding discourse of the German Democratic Republic. Employing an approach informed by Slavoj Zizek’s work on the Communist’s sublime body and by British psychoanalytic feminism’s concern with feminine subjectivity, Hell first examines the antifascist works by exiled authors and authors tied to the resistance movement. She then strives to understand the role of Christa Wolf, the GDR’s most prominent author, in the GDR’s effort to reconstruct symbolic power after the Nazi period.
By focusing on the unconscious fantasies about post-fascist body and post-fascist voice that suffuse the texts of Wolf and others, Hell radically reconceptualizes the notion of the author’s subjective authenticity. Since this notion occupies a key position in previous literary-historical accounts of East German culture, Hell’s psychoanalytic approach problematizes the established literary model of an "authentic feminine voice" that gradually liberates itself from the GDR’s dominant ideological narrative. Far from operating solely on a narrowly political level, the novels of Wolf and others were intricate family sagas portraying psychic structures linked in complex ways to the GDR’s social dynamics. Hell traces this link through East German literatrure’s dominant narrative, a paternal narrative organized around the figure of the Communist father as antifascist hero.
By focusing on the unconscious fantasies about post-fascist body and post-fascist voice that suffuse the texts of Wolf and others, Hell radically reconceptualizes the notion of the author’s subjective authenticity. Since this notion occupies a key position in previous literary-historical accounts of East German culture, Hell’s psychoanalytic approach problematizes the established literary model of an "authentic feminine voice" that gradually liberates itself from the GDR’s dominant ideological narrative. Far from operating solely on a narrowly political level, the novels of Wolf and others were intricate family sagas portraying psychic structures linked in complex ways to the GDR’s social dynamics. Hell traces this link through East German literatrure’s dominant narrative, a paternal narrative organized around the figure of the Communist father as antifascist hero.
[more]
Postfeminist War
Women in the Media-Military-Industrial Complex
Mary Douglas Vavrus
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Media representations and practices that have emerged out of contemporary wars have been well documented by a wide array of books and articles. These treatments, however, have been less attentive to how cultural constructions of military personnel and war itself figure in the depiction of the incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Post-Feminist War, Mary Douglas Vavrus argues that all of these identity categories are integral to our understanding of those fighting, saved, or victimized by war. She considers two important questions: how the construction of gender, race, and class in media are productive of régimes of truth regarding war and military life, and how such constructions may also intensify militarism. By examining news and documentary media produced since September 11, 2001, Vavrus demonstrates that news narratives that include women use feminism selectively in gender equality narratives, which tend to reinforce historically resonant gender, race, and class identity constructions. She ultimately asserts that such reporting advances post-feminism, which, in tandem with banal militarism, subtly pushes military solutions for an array of problems women and girls face.
[more]
The Postgenomic Condition
Ethics, Justice, and Knowledge after the Genome
Jenny Reardon
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Now that we have sequenced the human genome, what does it mean? In The Postgenomic Condition, Jenny Reardon critically examines the decade after the Human Genome Project, and the fundamental questions about meaning, value and justice this landmark achievement left in its wake.
Drawing on more than a decade of research—in molecular biology labs, commercial startups, governmental agencies, and civic spaces—Reardon demonstrates how the extensive efforts to transform genomics from high tech informatics practiced by a few to meaningful knowledge beneficial to all exposed the limits of long-cherished liberal modes of knowing and governing life. Those in the American South challenged the value of being included in genomics when no hospital served their community. Ethicists and lawyers charged with overseeing Scottish DNA and data questioned how to develop a system of ownership for these resources when their capacity to create things of value—new personalized treatments—remained largely unrealized. Molecular biologists who pioneered genomics asked whether their practices of thinking could survive the deluge of data produced by the growing power of sequencing machines. While the media is filled with grand visions of precision medicine, The Postgenomic Condition shares these actual challenges of the scientists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, bioethicists, lawyers, and patient advocates who sought to leverage liberal democratic practices to render genomic data a new source of meaning and value for interpreting and caring for life. It brings into rich empirical focus the resulting hard on-the-ground questions about how to know and live on a depleted but data-rich, interconnected yet fractured planet, where technoscience garners significant resources, but deeper questions of knowledge and justice urgently demand attention.
Drawing on more than a decade of research—in molecular biology labs, commercial startups, governmental agencies, and civic spaces—Reardon demonstrates how the extensive efforts to transform genomics from high tech informatics practiced by a few to meaningful knowledge beneficial to all exposed the limits of long-cherished liberal modes of knowing and governing life. Those in the American South challenged the value of being included in genomics when no hospital served their community. Ethicists and lawyers charged with overseeing Scottish DNA and data questioned how to develop a system of ownership for these resources when their capacity to create things of value—new personalized treatments—remained largely unrealized. Molecular biologists who pioneered genomics asked whether their practices of thinking could survive the deluge of data produced by the growing power of sequencing machines. While the media is filled with grand visions of precision medicine, The Postgenomic Condition shares these actual challenges of the scientists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, bioethicists, lawyers, and patient advocates who sought to leverage liberal democratic practices to render genomic data a new source of meaning and value for interpreting and caring for life. It brings into rich empirical focus the resulting hard on-the-ground questions about how to know and live on a depleted but data-rich, interconnected yet fractured planet, where technoscience garners significant resources, but deeper questions of knowledge and justice urgently demand attention.
[more]
Posthegemony
Political Theory and Latin America
Jon Beasley-Murray
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Posthegemony is an investigation into the origins, limits, and possibilities for contemporary politics and political analysis. Jon Beasley-Murray grounds his theoretical discussion with accounts of historical movements in Latin America, from Columbus to Chávez, and from Argentine Peronism to Peru's Sendero Luminoso.
Challenging dominant strains in social theory, Beasley-Murray contends that cultural studies simply replicates the populism that conditions it, and that civil society theory merely nourishes the neoliberalism that it sets out to oppose. Both end up entrenching the fiction of a social contract. In place of hegemony or civil society, Beasley-Murray presents a theory of posthegemony, focusing on affect, habit, and the multitude. This approach addresses an era of biopolitics and bare life, tedium and terror, in which state control is ever more pervasive but something always escapes.
In his thorough examination, Beasley-Murray undoes the dominant narrative of hegemonic projects and counterhegemonic resistance, of civilization and subalternity, to reveal instead a history of failed contracts and unpredicted insurgencies.
[more]
Posthomerica
Quintus Smyrnaeus
Harvard University Press, 2018
Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica, the only long mythological epic to survive in Greek from the period between Apollonius’ Argonautica (3rd century BC) and Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (5th century AD), fills in the whole story of the Trojan expedition between the end of Homer’s Iliad and the beginning of the Odyssey, which had been treated only episodically by earlier epic and dramatic poets. Composing sometime between the late second and mid-fourth centuries AD, Quintus boldly adapts Homeric diction and style to suit the literary, moral, religious, rhetorical, and philosophical culture of the high Roman Empire, and does not hesitate to diverge from the usual versions of the story in order to craft his own narrative vision.
This edition of the Posthomerica replaces the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition by A. S. Way (1913) with an updated text based on that of F. Vian, and fresh translation, introduction, and bibliography that take account of more than a century of intervening scholarship.
[more]
The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata
Myth, Memory, and Mexico's Twentieth Century
By Samuel Brunk
University of Texas Press, 2008
Before there was Che Guevara, there was Emiliano Zapata, the charismatic revolutionary who left indelible marks on Mexican politics and society. The sequel to Samuel Brunk's 1995 biography of Zapata, The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata traces the power and impact of this ubiquitous, immortalized figure.
Mining the massive extant literature on Zapata, supplemented by archival documents and historical newspaper accounts, Brunk explores frameworks of myth and commemoration while responding to key questions regarding the regime that emerged from the Zapatista movement, including whether it was spawned by a genuinely "popular" revolution.
Blending a sophisticated analysis of hegemonic systems and nationalism with lively, accessible accounts of ways in which the rebel is continually resurrected decades after his death in a 1919 ambush, Brunk delves into a rich realm of artistic, geographical, militaristic, and ultimately all-encompassing applications of this charismatic icon.
Examining all perspectives, from politicized commemorations of Zapata's death to popular stories and corridos, The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata is an eloquent, engaging portrait of a legend incarnate.
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Posthumous Images
Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post–Civil War Lebanon
Chad Elias
Duke University Press, 2018
For almost two decades of its history (1975-90), Lebanon was besieged by sectarian fighting, foreign invasions, and complicated proxy wars. In Posthumous Images, Chad Elias analyzes a generation of contemporary artists who have sought, in different ways, to interrogate the contested memory of those years of civil strife and political upheaval. In their films, photography, architectural projects, and multimedia performances, these artists appropriate existing images to challenge divisive and violent political discourses. They also create new images that make visible individuals and communities that have been effectively silenced, rendered invisible, or denied political representation. As Elias demonstrates, these practices serve to productively unsettle the distinctions between past and present, the dead and the living, official history and popular memory. In Lebanon, the field of contemporary art is shown to be critical to remembering the past and reimagining the future in a nation haunted by a violent and unresolved war.
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Post-Military Society
Militarism, Demilitarization and War at the End of the Twentieth Century
Martin Shaw
Temple University Press, 1991
With the collapse of the Cold War following the Eastern European revolutions and the ongoing democratization of the Soviet republics, optimism about peace has transformed the international political climate. Incidents such as the Gulf War, however, have tempered this optimism and cast doubts on the prospects for demilitarization. In this book, Martin Shaw examines some of the developments that lie behind the recent momentous changes and argues that, despite the Gulf War and other regional wars, militarism is in decisive retreat.
Writing from a broadly sociological perspective, Shaw examines the roles of war and military institutions in human society and the ways in which preoccupation with war has affected domestic, regional, and international politics in the twentieth century. In doing so, he asks: When does the post-war era end? How have nuclear weapons altered the perception of war by society? What is the relationship between industrialism and militarism?
The author contends that, despite the militarism of some Third World countries, societies in the advanced industrial world (especially in Europe) have been undergoing a profound demilitarization. These societies have become politically insulated from war preparation, have recognized the effect of social movements on inter-state relations, and are experiencing a "revolution of rising expectations."
Offering evidence of "post-military citizenship," Shaw describes the increasing resistance to military conscription throughout the Western world, the replacement of blind obedience with demand for accountability in Eastern bloc countries, and the simultaneous rise of nationalism and communitarianism among common market members. And, in light of the collapse of Stalinist militarism in Europe and the USSR, Shaw suggests some of the changes that face Soviet society.
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Postmodern Advertising in Japan
Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club
Ory Bartal
Dartmouth College Press, 2015
In a study driven by stunning images of Japanese advertisements and the artworks they quote from, Ory Bartal offers a first-of-its-kind interpretation of the “postmodern” genre of advertising in Japan, which both shaped and reflected the new consumer-driven culture that arose during the bubble era of the 1980s and 1990s. Through a fascinating tale of art directors and their works and influences, Bartal shows how this postmodern visual language, like postmodernism in other streams, is distinguished by its mélange of styles, blurring of boundaries between art and design, and reliance on visual and textual quotations from sources past and present, domestic and foreign. Although this advertising culture partakes of global trends, Bartal draws attention to the varied local artistic sensibilities, structures of thought, and underlying practices, challenging the often-simplistic characterization of “Japaneseness” as being rooted in a Zen tradition of aesthetic indirectness and ambiguity. Combining multilingual scholarship with a wealth of information gleaned through years of personal interviews with the principals involved, this is a truly original contribution to the discussion of Japanese art and advertising as well as an insightful reading of more general issues in the study of visual culture and media.
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Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays
Gandhi in the World and at Home
Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Gandhi, with his loincloth and walking stick, seems an unlikely advocate of postmodernism. But in Postmodern Gandhi, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph portray him as just that in eight thought-provoking essays that aim to correct the common association of Gandhi with traditionalism.
Combining core sections of their influential book Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma with substantial new material, the Rudolphs reveal here that Gandhi was able to revitalize tradition while simultaneously breaking with some of its entrenched values and practices. Exploring his influence both in India and abroad, they tell the story of how in London the young activist was shaped by the antimodern “other West” of Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau and how, a generation later, a mature Gandhi’s thought and action challenged modernity’s hegemony. Moreover, the Rudolphs argue that Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization in his 1909 book Hind Swaraj was an opening salvo of the postmodern era and that his theory and practice of nonviolent collective action (satyagraha) articulate and exemplify a postmodern understanding of situational truth.
This radical interpretation of Gandhi's life will appeal to anyone who wants to understand Gandhi’s relevance in this century, as well as students and scholars of politics, history, charismatic leadership, and postcolonialism.
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Postmodernism and China
Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang, eds.
Duke University Press, 2000
Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernization. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of periodization and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of westernization as modernity, this volume’s diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism.
Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock music, and film, in a postsocialist society. Some essays address China’s complicity in—as well as its resistance to—the culture of global capitalism. Others evaluate the impact of efforts to redefine national culture in terms of enhanced freedoms and expressions of the imagination in everyday life. Still others discuss the general relaxation of political society in post-Mao China, the emergence of the market and its consumer mass culture, and the fashion and discourse of nostalgia. The contributors make a clear case for both the historical uniqueness of Chinese postmodernism and the need to understand its specificity in order to fully grasp the condition of postmodernity worldwide. Although the focus is on mainland China, the volume also includes important observations on social and cultural realities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose postmodernity has so far been confined—in both Chinese and English-speaking worlds—to their economic and consumer activities instead of their political and cultural dynamism.
First published as a special issue of boundary 2, Postmodernism and China includes seven new essays. By juxtaposing postmodernism with postsocialism and by analyzing China as a producer and not merely a consumer of the culture of the postmodern, it will contribute to critical discourses on globalism, modernity, and political economics, as well as to cultural and Asian studies.
Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock music, and film, in a postsocialist society. Some essays address China’s complicity in—as well as its resistance to—the culture of global capitalism. Others evaluate the impact of efforts to redefine national culture in terms of enhanced freedoms and expressions of the imagination in everyday life. Still others discuss the general relaxation of political society in post-Mao China, the emergence of the market and its consumer mass culture, and the fashion and discourse of nostalgia. The contributors make a clear case for both the historical uniqueness of Chinese postmodernism and the need to understand its specificity in order to fully grasp the condition of postmodernity worldwide. Although the focus is on mainland China, the volume also includes important observations on social and cultural realities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose postmodernity has so far been confined—in both Chinese and English-speaking worlds—to their economic and consumer activities instead of their political and cultural dynamism.
First published as a special issue of boundary 2, Postmodernism and China includes seven new essays. By juxtaposing postmodernism with postsocialism and by analyzing China as a producer and not merely a consumer of the culture of the postmodern, it will contribute to critical discourses on globalism, modernity, and political economics, as well as to cultural and Asian studies.
Contributors. Evans Chan, Arif Dirlik, Dai Jinhua, Liu Kang, Anthony D. King, Jeroen de Kloet, Abidin Kusno, Wendy Larson, Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Wang Ning, Xiaobing Tang, Xiaoying Wang, Chen Xiaoming, Xiaobin Yang, Zhang Yiwu, Xudong Zhang
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Postmodernism and Japan
Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds.
Duke University Press, 1989
Postmodernism and Japan is a coherent yet diverse study of the dynamics of postmodernism, as described by Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Guatarri, from the often startling perspective of a society bent on transforming itself into the image of Western “enlightenment” wealth and power. This work provides a unique view of a society in transition and confronting, like its models in the West, the problems induced by the introduction of new forms of knowledge, modes of production, and social relationships.
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The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America
John Beverley, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna, eds.
Duke University Press, 1995
Postmodernism may seem a particularly inappropriate term when used in conjunction with a region that is usually thought of as having only recently, and then unevenly, acceded to modernity. Yet in the last several years the concept has risen to the top of the agenda of cultural and political debate in Latin America.
This collection explores the Latin American engagement with postmodernism, less to present a regional variant of the concept than to situate it in a transnational framework. Recognizing that postmodernism in Latin America can only inaccurately be thought of as having traveled from an advanced capitalist "center" to arrive at a still dependent neocolonial "periphery," the contributors share the assumption that postmodernism is itself about the dynamics of interaction between local and metropolitan cultures in a global system in which the center-periphery model has begun to break down. These essays examine the ways in which postmodernism not only designates the effects of this transnationalism in Latin America, but also registers the cultural and political impact on an increasingly simultaneous global culture of a Latin America struggling with its own set of postcolonial contingencies, particularly the crisis of its political left, the dominance of neoliberal economic models, and the new challenges and possibilities opened by democratization.
With new essays on the dynamics of Brazilian culture, the relationship between postmodernism and Latin American feminism, postmodernism and imperialism, and the implications of postmodernist theory for social policy, as well as the text of the Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle of the Zapatatista National Liberation Army, this expanded edition of boundary 2 will interest not only Latin Americanists, but scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern.
This collection explores the Latin American engagement with postmodernism, less to present a regional variant of the concept than to situate it in a transnational framework. Recognizing that postmodernism in Latin America can only inaccurately be thought of as having traveled from an advanced capitalist "center" to arrive at a still dependent neocolonial "periphery," the contributors share the assumption that postmodernism is itself about the dynamics of interaction between local and metropolitan cultures in a global system in which the center-periphery model has begun to break down. These essays examine the ways in which postmodernism not only designates the effects of this transnationalism in Latin America, but also registers the cultural and political impact on an increasingly simultaneous global culture of a Latin America struggling with its own set of postcolonial contingencies, particularly the crisis of its political left, the dominance of neoliberal economic models, and the new challenges and possibilities opened by democratization.
With new essays on the dynamics of Brazilian culture, the relationship between postmodernism and Latin American feminism, postmodernism and imperialism, and the implications of postmodernist theory for social policy, as well as the text of the Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle of the Zapatatista National Liberation Army, this expanded edition of boundary 2 will interest not only Latin Americanists, but scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern.
Contributors. Xavier Albó, José Joaquín Brunner, Fernando Calderón, Enrique Dussel, Néstor García Canclini, Martín Hopenhayn, Neil Larsen, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, Norbert Lechner, María Milagros López, Raquel Olea, Aníbal Quijano, Nelly Richard, Carlos Rincón, Silviano Santiago, Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto Schwarz, and Hernán Vidal
[more]
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Fredric Jameson
Duke University Press, 1992
Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.
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Post-Post-Soviet?
Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade
Edited by Marta Dziewanska, Ekaterina Degot, and Ilya Budratskis
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2013
By placing emerging artists in their political and social contexts, this collection attempts to confront the new activist scene that has arisen in the Russian art world during the past years. The recent explosion of protests in Russia—often with their very purpose being to decry the lack of artistic freedom—is a symptom of a fundamental change in culture heralded by Vladimir Putin’s first election. This shift was precipitated by the change to a highly commercial, isolated world, financed and informed by oligarchs. In response, the Russian contemporary art scene has faced shrinking freedom yet an even more urgent need for expression. While much of what is emerging from the Moscow art scene is too new to be completely understood, the editors of this volume seek to bring to light the important work of Russian artists today and to explicate the political environment that has given rise to such work. Post-Post-Soviet? will feature both criticism by writers and scholars, as well as dialogues with artists. Contributors include Boris Kagarlitsky, Ekaterina Degot, Keti Chukhrov, Boris Buden, Artur Zmijewski, and others.
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