publicculture's latest books

Public Culture added "Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!"

Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! maps out the early culture of cinema stardom in India from its emergence in the silent era to the decade after Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century. Neepa Majumdar combines readings of specific films and stars with an analysis of the historical and cultural configurations that gave rise to distinctly Indian notions of celebrity. She argues that discussions of early cinematic stardom in India must be placed in the context of the general legitimizing discourse of colonial "improvement" that marked other civic and cultural spheres as well, and that "vernacular modernist" anxieties over the New Woman had limited resonance here. Rather, it was through emphatically nationalist discourses that Indian cinema found its model for modern female identities. Considering questions of spectatorship, gossip, popularity, and the dominance of a star-based production system, Majumdar details the rise of film stars such as Sulochana, Fearless Nadia, Lata Mangeshkar, and Nargis

Pages: 272
ISBN: 0252076281
EAN: 9780252076282
Dewey: 791.43028092291411
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
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Public Culture added "Translating Time"

Under modernity, time is regarded as linear and measurable by clocks and calendars. Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called "homogeneous, empty time" founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded. In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple "immiscible" temporalities that strain against homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study--encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang)--Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in modern secular terms, but also exposes an untranslatable remainder, undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception. Lim interweaves scholarship on visuality with postcolonial historiography. She draws on Henri Bergson's understanding of cinema as both implicated in homogeneous time and central to its critique, as well as on postcolonial thought linking the ideology of progress to imperialist expansion. At stake in this project are more ethical forms of understanding time that refuse to domesticate difference as anachronism. While supernaturalism is often disparaged as a vestige of primitive or superstitious thought, Lim suggests an alternative interpretation of the fantastic as a mode of resistance to the ascendancy of homogeneous time and a starting-point for more ethical temporal imaginings.

Pages: 360
ISBN: 0822345102
EAN: 9780822345107
Dewey: 791.43615
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
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Public Culture added "Ordinary Genomes"

Ordinary Genomes is an ethnography of genomics, a global scientific enterprise, as it is understood and practiced in the Netherlands. Karen-Sue Taussig's analysis of the Dutch case illustrates the broader phenomenon of the entwining of scientific knowledge and culture: genetics may transform society, but society also transforms genetics. Taussig argues that in the Netherlands, ideas about genetics are shaped by two highly valued and sometimes contradictory Dutch social ideals: a desire for ordinariness and a commitment to tolerance. They are also influenced by Dutch history and concerns about immigration and European unification. Taussig contends that the Dutch enable a social ideal of tolerance by demarcating and containing difference so as to minimize its social threat, and that it is within this particular ideal of tolerance that they construct and manage the meaning of genetic difference. Illuminating the connections between biology, citizenship, and identity, Taussig traces the everyday experiences of Dutch people as they encounter genetics in research labs, clinics, the media, and elsewhere. She explains the institutional framework--involving clinics, research and diagnostic laboratories, and counseling offices--within which human genetic knowledge and practices are produced in the Netherlands. Through her vivid descriptions of specific diagnostic processes, Taussig illuminates the open and evolving nature of genetic categories, the ways that abnormal genetic diagnoses are "normalized," and the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, and religion inform diagnoses. Addressing broader concerns about the interconnections among science, technology, bodies, and the nation, she examines how the Dutch people attempted to come to terms with a transgenic bull (a bull with a gene from another species incorporated into its genome). Taussig's analysis of how genomics is understood and practiced in the Netherlands challenges monolithic notions of Western modernity and of genetics.

Pages: 264
ISBN: 082234534X
EAN: 9780822345343
Dewey: 599.935
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
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Public Culture added "Garbage In, Garbage Out"

Your garbage is going places you'd never imagine. What used to be sent to the local dump now may move hundreds of miles by truck and barge to its final resting place. Virtually all forms of pollution migrate, subjected to natural forces such as wind and water currents. The movement of garbage, however, is under human control. Its patterns of migration reveal much about power sharing among state, local, and national institutions, about the Constitution's protection of trash transport as a commercial activity, and about competing notions of social fairness. In Garbage In, Garbage Out, Vivian Thomson looks at Virginia's status as the second-largest importer of trash in the United States and uses it as a touchstone for exploring the many controversies around trash generation and disposal.Political conflicts over waste management have been felt at all levels of government. Local governments who want to manage their own trash have fought other local governments hosting huge landfills that depend on trash generated hundreds of miles away. State governments have tried to avoid becoming the dumping grounds for cities hundreds of miles away. The constitutional questions raised in these battles have kept interstate trash transport on Congress's agenda since the early 1990s. Whether the resulting legislative proposals actually address our most critical garbage-related problems, however, remains in question.Thomson sheds much-needed light on these problems. Within the context of increased interstate trash transport and the trend toward privatization of waste management, she examines the garbage issue from a number of perspectives--including the links between environmental justice and trash management, a critical evaluation of the theoretical and empirical relationship between economic growth and environmental improvement, and highlighting the ways in which waste management practices in the US differ from those in the European Union and Japan. Thomson then provides specific, substantive recommendations for our own policymakers. Everything eventually becomes trash. As we explore the long, often surprising, routes our garbage takes, we begin to understand that it is something more than a mere nuisance that regularly "disappears" from our curbside. Rather, trash generation and management reflect patterns of consumption, political choices over whether garbage is primarily pollution or commerce, the social distribution of environmental risk, and how our daily lives compare with those of our counterparts in other industrialized nations.

Pages: 192
ISBN: 0813928257
EAN: 9780813928258
Dewey: 363.7285560973
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
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Public Culture added "Gun Crusaders"

Nothing conjures up images of the American frontier and a pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps view of freedom and independence quite like guns. Gun Crusaders is a fascinating inside look at how the four-million member National Rifle Association and its committed members come to see each and every gun control threat as a step down the path towards gun confiscation, and eventually socialism. Enlivened by a rich analysis of NRA materials, meetings, leader speeches, and unique in-depth interviews with NRA members, Gun Crusaders focuses on how the NRA constructs and perceives threats to gun rights as one more attack in a broad liberal cultural war. Scott Melzer shows that the NRA promotes a nostalgic vision of frontier masculinity, whereby gun rights defenders are seen as patriots and freedom fighters, defending not the freedom of religion, but the religion of individual rights and freedoms.

Pages: 336
ISBN: 0814795501
EAN: 9780814795507
Dewey: 323.43
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: NYU Press
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